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subcorax · 6 years

Text

fic: you can follow

Fandom: Dishonored Rating: T Pairing(s): Corvo Attano/The Outsider Characters: The Outsider, Billie Lurk, Corvo Attano Tags: post-doto, second person pov Word Count: 1378

Summary: from a boy to a god to a man with too many memories, the outsider learns to live.

Read on Ao3

you breathe.

it hurts.

together the two of you begin to stumble down the mountain and you are silent.

where, then, lies the human soul? a natural philosopher had written once, his fingernails stained with a dead man’s blood, his heart neatly dissected on a tray in search of his very being.

it was of no matter; you know, now. a soul lies in a name and yours echoes in your ears, speaks with every beat of a pulse against your neck, your wrist, your chest.

billie says she hopes she won’t have to teach you how to piss. you hope so as well. it has been four thousand years and you have forgotten so very much but the difference between humility and humiliation that you once thought so insignificant has been shown into sharp relief once more, and you do not want this woman to have to teach you that which most children manage by four.

eventually, on shaking colt’s legs, you relieve yourself against a low brick wall.

as you are so often wont to do, you think of corvo.

you had watched him in the days after coldridge with some interest – watched as he retched and threw up miniscule mouthfuls of food, watched as small creaks and wooden groans kept him up long nights, watched him stalk the grounds of the hound pits, bewildered, like he couldn’t believe there was so much space in the world.

it was like, you had thought at the time, he had forgotten how to be human.

perhaps you have been… arrogant. you have been accused of as much before, but now you put some weight to the argument. perhaps corvo, all scars and bruises and deep-set loss, was far more human than most the day he left coldridge prison.

you have been freed in the most extravagant jailbreak in an eon and a half and you’ve got nothing to show for it but the razor thin scars to show where your shackles were, long since faded to slivers of white against the pink of your skin.

you barely know how to sleep.

huddled over a fire in the batista district you tell billie you want to go to dunwall. she laughs humourlessly, calls him a crazy bastard, says daud was right, but she’s got the keys to a ship the next afternoon, which startles you. you had thought she would jump at the chance to part ways with you, to relieve herself of the burden you are posing.

billie lurk has vowed once, twice, thrice, over and over across the years to never return to dunwall, and when the two of you leave karnaca’s docks she is smiling at the sun dipping below the horizon.

she has given you food and clothes and vowed to help you reach dunwall tower, and you find yourself thinking of corvo yet again, of the odd little parallels. perhaps, you think sardonically, you should be watching billie for ulterior motives, hidden plots. but there is no future in which billie will stab you in the back to watch you bleed out like any other man, send you floating up the river, and–

and you remember that you cannot see much of anyone’s future, anymore, and yet you are certain of this nonetheless. trust, you think, with some measure of surprise, you trust her and isn’t that another small piece of irony when you had faulted corvo for this exact thing, his thoughtless, easy belief in the men who had saved him.

you wonder if billie will teach you how to apologise, in the weeks to come.

you are watching the waves roll from the deck when she wraps the coat around your shoulders, the long, heavy one she’s been wearing more days than not, and you are assaulted by the harsh smell of tobacco and stale smoke.

you remember watching her rifle through her belongings on the dreadful wale, deciding what parts of daud to keep, what she could afford to keep and carry with her, travelling on foot. a few journals, letters, his sword, and the coat, and you had thought, idly, she has a warmer coat, why keep wearing– and only now does sentiment invade you like weeds through cracks in a stone slab because billie lurk grew up tugging at the sleeves of a man who smelled like old smoke and whiskey and you have, as of late, found yourself unerringly, wretchedly attached to anything you can remember of being alive.

you keep the coat on long after the residual heat of billie’s body has faded from it, held captive by a deep longing for memories that are not your own.

strange – how many thousands of men have begged you for power, screams clamouring to be heard above the void’s rushing winds, and to corvo it is a gift you will give not once, but twice.

thrice, if you count emily, though corvo does not, still rankles at the danger it poses her when the abbey has long been sniffing at their heels.

still, still, he had run fingers across the bare skin where the mark had been and when you had offered it to him again he had received it like a benediction.

you had warned him against rooftop escapades at his age, knowing full well that he would retire in one short year to cullero, and you would not live to see it.

billie’s face is painted across every street in karnaca, but most of the posters were stripped down in dunwall, and they dock at the wrenhaven port without much trouble, despite the long look billie gives you when you introduce yourself to the inspector as aramis.

you both rent a room at a pub to sleep off your sealegs, eat breakfast downstairs the next morning. billie catches you staring across the room to where a sharp-dressed girl is whispering in a busboy’s ear and you find yourself explaining, that those two have whispered like this since they were children, that you have heard every piece of love and loss and intrigue to pass between them, and your voice is half a semblance of the gravity it once held but twice as wistful and you mourn, now i cannot hear anything at all.

billie has been in an odd mood this morning, on-edge and eager like she was when she was a girl, perched precariously on a rooftop and waiting for a signal, for a scream. she smiles, wryly, says, tell me something else you know, and you pause, think, before lamenting that you’d been watching a girl in morley, a bastard child of the king cast out into the streets by his queen.

interesting enough to mark? and there are hooks and barbs in that question that you are unsure how to avoid, so you just shrug, say, no, but if she reaches twenty she will make a bid for her father’s throne. a smile, and, it will cause lady emily no end of problems.

billie is smiling as well when she reminds you that you will still live to see it happen, if you don’t do something stupid.

you wonder what it will be like to be a spectator from here, looking at one corner of a painting and unable to see the whole picture. interesting, you hope.

corvo presses two fingers to the pulse on your neck, eyes wide and searching and he is, for a moment, young and desperate, filled with fear and awe and questions and looking to you for answers.

a trick, an illusion? he asks, and you reach up for the hand that has come to cup your cheek. your finger traces your name into dark fabric where you know new scar tissue lies underneath.

you have watched him train since he was a boy, the little crow from the batista district who would love an empress, who would come to love somuch, you have watched every blister and callus form on his hands and it is another thing entirely to feel them moving on the soft skin of your face, down your jaw, to rest across your neck and–

the scar.

you breathe, and he breathes with you.

it hurts, and that is what makes a human soul.

#dishonored #death of the outsider #doto #corvosider #jack writes #anyways if you couldnt guess i finished doto yesterday................................#💣

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