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When The Outsider thought of himself, it was midday. Middle of the day seemed appropriate for a God who was never anything normal; even then, newly formed and blinking into the Void, he’d had a sense of humour.
Now, he’s drowning.
Water fills his lungs and for once it doesn’t help, just makes him splutter and flounder, gasping huge bubbles of air up towards the surface. It’s just there, so close, so close but he’d never learned to swim. Never had to.
Corvo’s drowning in his sleep beside him, dreaming of the water closing over his head. Struggling to wake. He gasps, hand at his throat and The Outsider feels it too, fingers monster thick and so, so fragile. Half a second later and he breathes in air, Corvo gasping awake and staring, bewildered, at the puddle of water seeping out from under the bed.
Air tastes like smog, whale oil and detritus. It hurts his lungs. He hadn’t thought dying would taste like this.
Corvo is awake and The Outsider-
No. The outsider. No longer Outside, no longer unknown. Choking on the bedroom floor where Corvo sometimes still sleeps cramped into a corner because Prison felt like home, felt like a capital P and he’ll never admit to that. He heaves in a breath, feels his lungs expand. Shadows slide across his face, the morning sun peeking through heavily curtained windows. Corvo’s hand is on his sword.
No, on his mask. Not his sword. He reaches for it first like it affords him some sort of protection but the outsider can’t laugh with lungs half-full of water so he vomits it up instead. It’s a disgusting feeling, aches right through to his bones. Shakes him, shatters him and remakes him in the wake of oxygen sliding straight through his blood to his heart.
His heart doesn’t speak to him yet.
---
The Tower is just as uninviting as it was the first time he stepped foot in it. Tower is a misleading term but castle sounds too uppity, too much like they’re hiding something. That’s the reasoning Jessamine had given him when he’d looked at her awkwardly from across the table and felt like the stone itself was rejecting him, the cold seeping through his boots, chasing away the sand. It’s not easy for Corvo to feel at home. He didn’t then and doesn’t now, a dead god wrapped in his blanket and staring at his own hands like he can’t believe they exist.
“This was a variable I hadn’t considered.” He’d been staring at his hands for an hour, Corvo waiting patiently. If there’s something he’s good at, it’s waiting. Another half hour between one thought and the next. Time works differently. He doesn’t have as much time to think. Watching the old god’s face move is interesting, Corvo thinks to himself. The glacially slow move of one emotion to the next.
“You didn’t plan this?”
Something slides along the slant of his mouth, through the deep, dark pits of his eyes. Contempt. Frustration. Exhaustion, maybe.
“There is very little I am required to plan for. Mostly, I watch.”
And wait. But he’d planned something, Corvo’s sure of it. The way his hands shake, the clutch of the blanket against his shoulders, the utter disbelief when he bends his finger too far the wrong way and it hurts; it’s all new to him, all something unexplored.
The Tower starts to flow with life early in the morning, servants and guards and people, just the sheer mass of them now Emily’s back and the plague is under control thrumming through the hallways like blood towards the heart, the centre of the city.
“No,” The Outsider mutters, massaging the aching base of a finger. “This was not in the plan.”
---
“You place too much stock in names.”
“I can’t call you The Outsider in public. You’ll get us both executed.”
Corvo’s taking this surprisingly well. Not that the currently nameless ex god who still has trouble standing on his own because he’d never bothered to learn to walk thinks this is anything odd. He died, much in the way most gods die (being he’d planned it and taken the blade through the heart and oh, won’t Daud be surprised), but this?
Walking was a pain in the ass. Is a pain in the ass. Present tense, not past. Singular, not plural. Things are difficult to remember.
Instead, he blinks until his eyes hurt. Corvo’s shirt is heavy around his shoulders, the pants wide at the waist. He’s small, strangely. Especially next to the man he’d ordered around like yesterday’s lunch; Corvo’s not so much tall as he is broader, his hands large and capable, his shoulders wide. He ties his hair back now. Shaves. It makes him look strange.
Everything looks strange. Corvo catches him staring, looks at him with his head tilted and a strange smile on his face.
“Your eyes are still black.”
The first emotion he feels is something akin to amusement. That seems appropriate.
“There are some things even gods can’t change.” Couldn’t change. Wouldn’t change. He’s supposed to be dead. He’s not. He needs a name. “If you must call me something, Leviathan will do. It’s what I was, after all.” Past tense feels strange in his mouth.
His legs shake as he starts to stand and he manages a step, maybe two. Figuring out where all the muscles go is harder than it looks. There’s nothing physically wrong with him, at least not that Corvo can find but aligning knees, ankles, feet and hips and somehow figuring out the correct configuration of movements? That’s awkward.
“Can you think of something less....ostentatious?”
Amusement, again. That’s what he’ll label it. He remembers how to smile, at least. Amusement isn’t the same as fascination. That he’s familiar with.
“No.”
Corvo calls him Levi. So does Emily.
Emily is-
The dead god labels this feeling jealousy.
---
She calls him Uncle, before she calls him Levi. Uncle Levi. It’s as good a name as any. She adjusts the blanket across his knees as she reads, her hands catching at the fraying ends of the cloth. It’s an old blanket, something her mother had kept her warm and safe in as a child. She’s still a child, hair piled up because she wants to look like her mother, her teeth grinding in her sleep. He smooths her hair down with a hand, shaking with the cold. He’s not used to temperature, yet. Not used to feeling it. Corvo’s jacket is warm and she shies away from his touch at first.
He remembers her in snatches. She was never that interesting. Cowering at the Cat, standing strong backed and barely trembling against an assassin. Her fingers shaking as she drew, more confident at writing than the curve of a jaw. She’s fragile in the strangest ways and he knows it, a word could break her already spider cracked ego and oh, it’s tempting. She orders Corvo around like she owns him and in a way she does; the concept of Love (capital) never made much sense, irrational to the extreme but Corvo Loves Emily. He’d loved Jessamine, of course he had, but Emily is a special case.
She calls him Uncle and he contemplates shattering her insides with a word.
He was never a kind god.
---
The first victory is walking. Eating is still difficult, seems nonsensical. Corvo loses his patience once or twice and the outsider feels something then, something irritable. An itch, right behind his spine. It’s all just so unreasonable, easily managed but equally complicated. There’s an order to things, a procedure to everything that escapes him. It should make logical sense; put food in mouth, masticate, swallow. Put more food in mouth, so on, so forth, ad infinitum.
“This would be easier if I could do everything at once.”
Corvo laughs. It’s a soft, almost awkward sound, all the more fragile for its rarity. Learning to laugh again has been a process, one Emily has been far too happy to help with. She counts each smile a victory, each laugh a parade. He’s laughed more in the last hour than he has in the last year, and Th-. Levi feels a strange pleasure at that.
“You’re not the first one to think that.”
“I was the first to think a great many things.” He doesn’t like the way that comes out. A little petulant. Feelings are difficult, irritation is difficult. It’s different when the effects are more immediate; humans feel things instantly, go from one thing to the next with an immediacy that’s both exhausting and terrifying and he’s not sure he likes it.
“The term you’re looking for is multitasking. Doing more than one thing at a time. Expediency.” Corvo’s patience only stretches so far and the ou-
Names are just as difficult.
Levi is bouncing on Corvo’s patience with both feet. He’s a man who takes well to action, not introspection. He doesn’t like to think too much about what he’s done because it pains him, doesn’t delve too deep into himself because he doesn’t like what he finds. Everybody carries a little of the Void.
Even him.
Even now.
It’s been keeping him awake at night.
---
Emily sleeps in Corvo’s bed some nights. She crawls in with him, too old for it but so, so scared. He always lets her, a father to the bone and she’s grateful. She sleeps better on the nights she has her back pressed to his, curled away and towards the door. He wakes her in the morning with a gentle, awkward smile and lets her braid the ends of his hair with hers so they’re the same monster underneath. She presses her pale little hands against his and watches as his broad, scarred palms and broad fingers cover hers. He could, if he wanted, hurt her. He could, if he wanted, push her away.
He treats every gentle touch like a blessing.
The dead god labels this feeling envy.
---
The plan was deceptively simple. Corvo, he’d never break the rules, he’s too...good for that. Daud, now he’s the one to take a blade and drive it into the face of a god so he’d pushed, just a little. One mad witch, another job gone wrong, too many ways to lose face, lose favour. Too many betrayals and Daud had sought him out, runecarved blade in hand like he was the first one to ever think of it.
Unexpectedly, it had hurt. A blade to the face was supposed to hurt, he’s sure, but he’d never felt pain. Not in the same way a mortal did, immediate and biting. He can still feel it when he closes his eyes, a twinge between his cheekbone and his mouth. Biting, sharp pain. Something to remember the man by.
He’d left Daud behind in the void. A new god was needed.
Daud will be good at it. Less emotional. A protective, awkwardly antagonistic god. Parental in his affections, destructive in his hatred.
The feelings will leave but the sentiment will be the same. An Outsider. Not the original, but nearly as good.
When the pain comes, Levi screws his eyes shut and hauls his hands over his face, presses his palm to his skin and breathes. Something else he’ll have to get used to.
---
The irritating thing is, Levi doesn’t feel like he has to conform to the normal restrictions of peopledom. He walks on ledges that are far too narrow, drags Emily up to dance (in a strangely formal manner) down the hallways. He eats like its a chore, interrupts conversations, blinks his dark, void splattered eyes very deliberately at anyone who stares too long and the worst thing is? Corvo’s getting used to it.
Some days, his cheeks hurt from smiling. Some days, he feels like pushing the man out a window.
Today, Levi slides a hand over his mouth as he hauls him behind a curtain, eyes wild and hair askew. “SHHHHH.”
“Mrph?” He doesn’t bother fighting, beyond the first unerring slam of Levi’s shoulders into the glass of the window. Not strong enough to go through, but a natural reaction, he thinks. He’ll feel guilty about the bruises later. He looks harried. Frantic, almost. Like he’s not sure how he got into this predicament in the first place.
“Sokolov,” he hisses, and Corvo’s laughter is loud, startled and nearly gives their position away.
“You do realise he has no idea who you are, right?”
“You think that, but he’s been following me around the tower all day.” There’s a pause while they look at each other, Corvo amused and Levi less so. “You don’t believe me.”
“I believe you think he’s been following you around.”
“Ah.”
Landing unceremoniously on his ass, Corvo can’t do much but blink in surprise as the drapes swing back into place. He’s torn halfway between shocked and annoyed when Sokolov spots him.
“Corvo! I’m looking for a remarkable young man, have you seen him?” The curtain rustles. A silent warning, perhaps. There are a myriad of ways the man can make his life difficult. Stealing all his blankets in the morning is probably one of them.
“Uh-”
“Dark hair, dark eyes? Taller than some, but -- I simply must paint him, Corvo.” To be honest, he has to weigh up Sokolov in a snit versus an old god stuck in a human body in a snit and figure out which one is more likely to poison his lunch.
“Ah, he’s just been looking out this window here, Anton. Come on out, Levi.”
The curtain moves gain. There’s a rattle- the windows up on this level don’t open. Jessamine had them all replaced when they’d found a young Emily on a ledge one day, curious about the birds. The hallway echoes with a quiet, frustrated sigh before Levi peeks his head around the drapes and scowls, hair askew and hands white at the knuckles.
“Go away, little man.” He looks like he expects it to work immediately and when it doesn’t, he’s put out.
“Just a moment, I’ve been hit with insp-”
The edge of the curtain hits Sokolov in the face as Corvo pushes himself up, brushes himself off and watches the old god leg it down the hallway. He runs awkwardly, every part of his body technically in the right place but his movements are too short, too precise. He won’t get far. Corvo almost pities him.
---
He was right about the blanket stealing. The Outsider is huddled in his bed in the early hours of the morning, shoes kicked off against the wall, a tuft of hair rising from the edge of the blankets like a beacon. Heaving a heavy sigh, Corvo hauls his jacket off his shoulders, leaving it draped over the back of the chair. It’s been hard, getting personality back in his quarters. Another process, Emily would say. He just doesn’t need much, the bed and chest Serkonan, the carpet the most extravagant thing in the room. He’s got the detritus of a life scattered about, half the things recognisable and memorable but disconnected, belonging to a Corvo who had an Empress and a daughter who weren’t the same person.
“You abandoned me,” the lump on his bed hisses, and Corvo huffs a quiet laugh. Pulling the tie out of his hair is too much effort right now, so he toes off his boots and hauls his shirt over his head. He’d spent the rest of the day with Emily in the throne room, listening to petitions and ignoring the steadily growing ache in his legs. Standing still was always harder than moving.
“You’re a grown man. You can handle it.” The bed jolts when he flops into it, back hitting the mattress and making the ex-god bundled in the blankets jump and haul the edges down to glower at him. His hair’s sticking up at the sides, somewhat ruining the effect.
“Nothing goes how I want it to.” There’s an elbow somewhere in his gut in short order, the blanket thrown over the both of them as The Outsider, all capitals, huffs an annoyed breath into the crook of Corvo’s neck. Personal space is something that happens to other people. Resigned, Corvo just reaches a scarred hand over to move the offending elbow, hit right in the lungs with how fragile he feels. Breakable.
Human.
“Welcome to mortality.”
“I don’t like it.” Wriggling down until he’s comfortable, the shorter man wedges his nose against Corvo’s skin, throws a leg over his own and settles in.
“You have your own bed, you know.”
The lack of reply speaks volumes. And when Emily crawls into his bed early in the morning she doesn’t think twice about wedging between them both, her arm curled against his side, her face mashed against Levi’s bony, awkwardly sloped shoulder.
---
“He loves us, you know.” Emily’s head is heavy against his chest, his chin resting in the space where her crown should go. She’s getting too big for this but neither of them care, the old god’s arms cradling her gently against his chest, blanket pulled tight around their shoulders. It’s too early in the morning for this, the stars still splattered across the sky. A whale sings, out in the ocean, and he allows himself to feel a moment of loss.
“It’s not like the kind of love he had for mother,” she continues, her fingers tapping out a soft beat against his skin. She’s getting better at her artwork, spends more time on it than she probably should. She’s a little girl, and Corvo still battles to give her a childhood. It’s a fight he’s losing. “That was special. She said he didn’t talk much when he first came to the Tower. That he was shy and kind of weird. Sort of like you.”
“I’m not shy,” he grumbles and she laughs, curls a little closer.
“No, but you’re a little weird.”
The whale sings again. Lonely. Missing something. If there’s one thing he regrets, its that he couldn’t save them all. Daud had tried, with one. It was a short reprieve. “Granted.”
“Why is everything so difficult? Whales and people and so many issues to solve. I want to have a party. I want to dance.” She wants a lot of things she’s not going to get anytime soon. She’s a gentle child. Kind. The world will kill her eventually, he knows that now but she’s stronger than he’d thought. He’d done her a disservice, thinking she wasn’t interesting enough to matter.
“Well, you can have a dance.”
She slides her fingers against his, hauls his hand down to her throat and breathes out warm against his skin. She’s a child, still. Growing, but still a child. He’s never understood children.
---
“A ball?”
Corvo looks dubious, but Levi stands firm. Or sits firm, at least, crosslegged on the desk Corvo refuses to use. The Lord Protector (and isn’t that a joke given everything he protects is so easy to lose) stares at him for a long, solid moment.
“She said something about boosting morale or whatever drivel small children come up with sounds like but she wants to dance, Corvo. You know what that’s like.”
Swallowing heavily, Corvo looks away. He hasn’t danced in years, not with his partner gone. And she’d been too busy for years, worried and worn down. Levi’s hand wavers, just for a moment, before he grabs the back of Corvo’s jacket and hauls him down to sit, propping his chin upon his shoulder. “Give the girl this. I’m bored.”
This emotion, the one that has the corners of Corvo’s mouth turning up, has him leaning back just a little? He labels that affection.
---
Emily dances like a young lady and Corvo isn’t prepared for it in the slightest. She dances with an old, tired god stuck in a human body like a little girl stepping out of her shell and he watches them, breathes in air laced with perfume. Can’t look away. She’s so much like her mother, hair piled on her head and black, severe dress making her seem taller. Older. She hasn’t worn white in weeks.
She stumbles, just a little and L-. The Outsider shores her up. He’s clumsy as well, in a way. Not sure where this dance will go and how it will end and it devolves into giggling and loud, brash laughter that has no place in the ballroom.
“Corvo! Come and dance!” She grabs his hand and hauls him in, the three of them standing awkward for a moment before the god, his God, pulls back and steps away.
“Dance with your daughter, Corvo.”
He takes her hand and smiles, neither of them mentioning the way her hand shakes and his dips in response.
“You look beautiful, Emily.”
She does. Not quite like her mother, not as graceful but definitely as kind. Emily the Kind. Emily the Just. Emily the breaker of hearts, judging by some of the young men and women in the audience who look like they’re aching to interrupt but can’t, quite.
Overseers patrolling the hallways and The Outsider makes sure he’s blinking when he looks by them, takes Corvo’s hand when it’s offered and laughs, a strange, brash and low sound as he’s pulled into a dance, Emily skittering away to break the hearts of her entourage.
A night of little worry and Corvo dances with many people, keeps an eye on Emily and watches the Outsider figure out a way to pull himself together in a human body.
---
“She’s asleep.” In her own bed. She’ll stay there from now on, Corvo thinks. He allows himself a moment to mourn the loss of a little girl who held his hand and believed him capable of hanging the moon. Lanterns litter the hallways, remnants of an old Serkonan ritual. Staving off the desert.
There’s a lantern on his door, high and blue and gold.
“An invitation, Corvo?”
He sounds hesitant. He sounds awkward and amused all at once and Corvo, well. He’s always been good at being brave. The kiss is awkward, a little off centre and it takes a moment for Levi to get the hang of it, to slide his hands up and pull the tie out of his hair. The back of the door scrapes a gentle hole in the shoulder of his jacket, the material worn thin. Corvo’s hands go to his waist, kisses pressed against the line of his jaw until he seeks out his mouth.
It’s like kissing stardust, a field of flowers swallowed by the ocean. Warm, wet, a little inexperienced and he drowns in it, gasps it in and loses himself, loses everything but the warm press of hands against his jaw, fingers tangled in his hair and the swinging of the lantern as he pushes back on the door and hauls Levi into the room by his lapel.
There’s more laughter in these kisses and that’s okay, too. Welcome, even, with the grim reality of the world trapped in the doorway, closed off with precisely applied force.
“You’re always interesting. You fascinate me, Corvo.”
“Don’t get full of yourself, Levi.”
The bed gets in the way so he hauls the man onto it, presses him down and kisses the line of his mouth, the bridge of his nose. He has a soft face full of sharp lines a contradiction walking and Corvo breathes him in, laughs at the insistent press of his hands, the way he takes control even when he’s trying not to. It’s almost frantic, the way he tries to hold on. The way he lets him go so he can move them up the bed, kiss his throat, his shoulders, haul his jacket open, move his shirt. He kisses like a thunderstorm at the end of the rain, sharp and full of ozone, warm and heavy in the air.
“I would’ve thought I’d have to teach you this too,” he murmurs, one broad hand sliding under his shirt, scarred fingers skittering against smooth skin.
“Humans are so-” a gasp, a shuddering breath drawn in afterwards “arrogant, thinking you came up with everything on your own.” Breathing is difficult so he kisses instead, tearing at clothes, the both of them frantic and awkward in their need to get them off. His pants catch around his knees, laughter ringing in his ears as he swears and fights out of them, kicking them (and his shoes) as far away as he can. Levi-The Outsider-
Names are difficult so he settles on none, just pushes him into the bed and kisses him, laughing against his mouth when he gets an elbow to the gut and rolled over for his efforts.
“You’re human, you know. Show a little respect.”
He gets another elbow for that, but it’s followed by a kiss that draws him down and pulls him out, hauls him out of his own head.
Too far out, too far with- squeezing his eyes closed, Corvo rides the vertigo out until he can look again.
Daud walks, in the Void. He doesn’t bother with the floating bullshit, doesn’t see it as necessary and when he needs to go somewhere he just keeps walking. Corvo’s almost startled out of his own body by the pressure of a shoulder near his, Levi half-floating in his old realm. Home.
Something.
He looks like he’s going to cry. An emotion he’s not comfortable with, something he shoves back and down until he can’t feel it underneath his ribs. Corvo slides a hand against his neck and he-
“Weren’t we just-”
“I thought it’d be funnier this way.” Daud’ smirking at them. Laughing, even, a sound that echoes for years. His eyes are gold, not black, glowing softly with red around the edges.
“You look like shit,” Corvo says, and he gets another laugh for his efforts.
“Do you know what it’s like, realising this shithead was nowhere near omniscient? He couldn’t see anything. He was making it up as he went along.” The void groans, a metallic noise. Too many secrets being given away. Daud doesn’t care, and neither does Corvo. The purple is nearly gone, all shades of gold, back red echoing around them into some strange, almost pink colour that makes his eyes hurt. Maybe he should join the void eyeballs club. It’d make life easier. The scars on Daud’s face are golden cracks, shadowed underneath by a black so dark it makes him look hollow.
“You’ve settled in well, Daud.” Levi’s amused. “For someone who could barely see past his own nose.”
“And you-” Two steps forward and Daud’s hand is on Corvo’s chest, around Levi’s throat. It sears, it hurts and there’s no time to scream before the hands are gone and they’re being shoved awake, back into the world constrained by time-
Are going to help me fix things around here.
Levi chokes, once. Hands at his throat, and Corvo peels them away in the dim light from the lanterns, swears under his breath. A blade, branded into the space just under his jawline. It’s a strange, muted gold. “Knife of Dunwall-” Corvo starts, before he looks down at his own chest and swears.
Laughter, muted and husky, as Levi pulls his hands down from his own throat and reaches for the mark on Corvo’s chest, the knife branded over his heart.
“I really hope that doesn’t happen every time we kiss.”
He'll label this feeling amusementandaffection because he doesn't like that words don't fit right.