Chapter Text
She's learning his hands in a whole new way now.
She thought she knew them so well. She does possess memories of when this heart that is all of her was merely a part of her, a resident in her chest, and her body was so much more, and she remembers how his hands felt on that body, how strong, how gentle, how careful when she wanted him to be and how rough when she wanted that too. She recalls with piercing clarity how it felt the first time she slipped her hand into his, the slight shock in him relayed by the sudden stiffness in his fingers, the way that stiffness melted into a kind of softness she'd never suspected he might be capable of.
She was young. So was he. She wasn't the Empress, not even seventeen, and she didn't know what was to come, didn't yet love him the way she would, but she did know how fundamentally right it felt, her hand in his, the way he made her feel small without feeling weak, the way that one touch seemed to spread through the rest of her and she felt completely safe from all harm.
He was her Protector. She never doubted it. But that was the first moment she truly believed.
She doesn't remember why she held his hand. She doesn't remember the exact day, whether they were inside Dunwall Tower or out on the grounds or elsewhere, whether it was sunny or overcast or raining, morning or afternoon or slow evening. What she remembers is his hand.
Oh, it didn't take long after that for her to replace her hand with her heart, but even then she never could have guessed. She never could have imagined.
This. This ending that refuses to end.
He's still gentle with her. Nestled in a fold of his coat, pressed against his chest, and she listens to the thud of his own heart and imagines it reaching for her through the cage of his ribs. It's horrible. He carries her through the night, through the soot and the smoke, the stench of rotting flesh and blood, of disease, death, open sewers, oil and gunpowder—screams and moans have a smell. She never knew. She has no nose, so how can she smell anything? But she does. Every sense, she retains.
He retrieves her and his gentle hand turns rough as he squeezes the secrets out of her, and she licks the cracked lips she no longer has.
That roughness. The squeeze. His hand on her breast that first night, the storm outside—not raging but relentless, the endless downpour, the streets gone to rivers, the rats and stray cats drowning. She was wet from the rain, hair come loose and plastered to her face. His bare skin was slick against hers. She hissed yes in his ear and arched and he touched her everywhere and muffled her cries with his mouth.
His teasing fingers. The friction of his callouses. Tangling in her hair and tugging until her nerves sparkled. He was good to her with those hands. He was so good then and every night after.
Other things. The almost delicate way he held his cigars, then casual on crystal tumblers honey-gold with whiskey. Attentively maneuvering a pen. Gripping his sword, his pistol, fighting with both at the same time, practicing in the yard with the latter unloaded. That delicacy was there too. More than that. Affection. He held his weapons like he loved them, and watching him test himself against volunteers from among the guards, whirling and parrying and feinting with all the easy grace of a dancer, her heart—her heart, her heart—raced and heat flooded into her lower belly.
How many times after one of those sessions she summoned him to her bedroom and at her laughing command his hands played her like an instrument, made her sing.
He sucked her taste from his fingers. She whispered secrets to him. Now and then she had dreams, dreams that seemed too vivid to be only her mind’s idle babbling, dreams that felt like oncoming and inevitable truths, and though these alarmed her she never told him about them, but he soothed her with his low voice and even more with his hands when she broke the surface of sleep and jolted awake, and that he saw her that way felt like a secret in and of itself. She let him see.
Opening to him. Letting go.
His hand covering his mouth when he was finally allowed into her room after her hours of labor were over, stood in the doorway and stared at her and at the baby tucked against her breast and sleepily nursing; it was as if he was trying to muffle a cry and she didn't miss the tears shining in his eyes and then on his cheeks. The way he trembled when he reached out to touch Emily’s tiny head, fingertips feather-light over the softness of fontanelle.
When she was older, when he was, when all of them were, walking with Emily between them, her holding onto them and swinging back and forth, her musical giggles.
When the plague first began to ravage the city, when things first began to get truly bad: pulling his lover into his arms and stroking her hair, murmuring to her that everything would be all right in the end. That she was smart and capable. That her heart was true. That she would find a way.
When you are near, my heart is at peace.
A brilliant flash of pain. The marble paving rising up to meet her with both astonishing speed and bizarre, dreamlike slowness. The feeling of everything flowing out of her, draining through her chest and gut. The world fading. His face, fading. His stricken, horrified eyes—sinking away from them. The way he clutched her as if he could keep her in her body by sheer force of will.
Darkness. Then more than darkness. Black eyes. Grinding gears. A glass window, round like a ship’s portal. Beating frantically against the walls of her own mutilated flesh. Wanting to scream with a voice strangled into a harsh whisper. Bones, singing.
And his hands again, when she was placed there.
She has other memories—the tight gray bun that her first governess styled her hair into; the thin sunlight through her childhood bedroom window; Delilah’s weeping; her father’s cool, stern eyes; the spicy fullness of cigar smoke in her nose; the rigid angle of her throne against her spine; the barely concealed contempt on the face of Waverly Boyle; the glimmer of chandeliers over the spinning forms at a royal ball; her terror at her coronation and her even greater terror that someone would spot it—but they're broken, the scattered, chaotic fragments of a shattered mirror. Her world is him now.
It's a such an awful struggle.
Because she sees. She sees so much more than he does. She senses the world beyond him, so far away but there nonetheless, and she feels it teetering on the brink. She feels his hands tipping it first one way and then the other. She’s filled with the hot thrum of his bloodlust, his rage. She's shaken by the quiver in him as over and over he wrestles it back, and she’s frozen by his fear of failure. She's dizzy with his own memories. She doesn't know how one can bear to know someone so well. She never could have believed there was so much darkness in him. She wants to cry over it. She has no tears. There is no blood inside her. She's twisted metal and glass and dry, rubbery muscle.
She tried all her life to be good. She knows she wasn't always successful but she did try, so hard. She never thought much of the Strictures but she tried to do well as far as her own understanding went, or at the very least she tried to keep from doing harm, and she's consumed with the certainty that she's being punished for something, and she doesn't know what.
Maybe for loving him. Maybe that was a curse. Because now he's condemned to this and she doesn't see any way he ever escapes it, even if this doesn't end in ruin; he’ll never heal from it. He’ll never get back what he lost. He’ll never be who he was.
But what about her? What about what she lost? What about her suffering? What about her curse? She’ll never see her own daughter grow up, she can't see past this pain, and for what? What did either of them know? By the Void, by the Outsider who damned her, we were only children, we did the best we could.
I did the best I could, I DON’T DESERVE THIS.
Sometimes she hates him. Sometimes she hates them both.
End it. End it and let me go.
But he holds her with those tortuous hands. Sitting on the riverbank, perched on a pile of crumbled brick like a brooding crow, the death’s head mask discarded beside him, he holds her close to him and shivers. The sun is going down over the water, gray and utterly devoid of warmth. He used to sit with her in the evenings and watch the twilight creep over the city, whiskey a hot little coal in both their chests, fingers woven together. They never needed to speak in those moments. She had very few secrets left to tell him, though she kept some for herself and she’ll keep them even now. This is all wrong, nothing about it can ever be right, but he cradles her in his palms and she surrenders to it.
She wanted more. She had more. This is paltry.
It's all she has left.