Work Text:
“Somewhere near a man has just taken his last breath. His eyes are still open!”
I.
His boots are sopping and his coat is soaked, and the box with his equipment rattles in his hands even as he blinks away to the safety of a ledge. Below him, Campbell starts, looks around, lurches off. Corvo can hear him wretching by a pillar. The man’s coat is red, startlingly bright in contrast to the dim light of Rudshore; and the vial of elixir that Corvo pulls out of the box is the same bright and vibrant red.
He has gotten in the habit of taking double doses on the hour, triple if he has to trek through sewers. He’s not sure how many hours it’s been since Daud’s men stripped his gear and threw him in the pit. He has no time to worry, so he doesn’t.
The elixir tastes thin, paltry and strangely burnt, like water mixed with pepper and ash. There’s something sour on the lip of the vial and Corvo doesn’t have the time to think about what all his gear has been lying in. He downs it all. Blinks up and away, steadily. Away from the stink of the Weepers, the greenish fog in the air, the whimpers and moans. The iron girders are freezing on his half-numb hands, and he’s still shivering when he hits the sunlight.
II.
The adrenaline leaves him all in one heady rush and he slips on blood. Half-sits, half-falls to the floor next to Daud’s desk, as the office tilts disturbingly to the right and spots bloom in and out of his vision. Black and blue as bruises or a god’s eyes. He shakes his head, and they’re gone, and he’s still shivering; his coat has long-since dried and the afternoon sunlight is warm but he looks as his hands and his hands are shaking.
Corvo closes his eyes and thinks of Coldridge, of the single point of light that was a lamp outside his cell. He had not given Burrows anything, even after the man had taken so much of his skin; he’d just asked after Emily. Where is she, can I see her, is she safe, what are you telling her, please keep her safe. Questions and pleas and chaos all circling around the little point of white that was all the world.
He pulls himself to his feet, and the world slowly rights itself.
Corvo lets Daud go. He watches the man vanish, off to bleed and die or not die in some corner of his small kingdom, and he stares at the pool of red where he’d lain. Flies are already gathering around it. It doesn’t really matter; Daud is not the only one who is dying.
III.
The rats don’t run from him.
Piero suspects. Sokolov knows. The Royal Physician keeps a careful distance as he explains the device to him, and even after the roar of lightning and death has died down Corvo’s ears are still ringing. He hears things as if they are underwater. It is too much like the Void and he finds himself touching the walls as he walks, afraid that the floor will tilt or fall away beneath his feet.
The flare is a red wound in the sky. Corvo turns away, keeps his head down, stalks the courtyard and tries not to cough. Or cough too much. It’s a losing battle and he can feel Piero and Sokolov and Callista watching him from behind the safety of barred windows. He paces, counting; the steps are familiar and the counting is familiar, counting the width of a cell, counting forward – months or hours until execution, things he will say to Emily, breaths. The rattle of air in his lungs. Corpses on the ground. The chop chop of a motor stuttering to shore. The rats that swarm over his feet. Only one of them bites him through his boot, but he doesn’t notice. It doesn’t hurt.
IV.
The white beacon of the lighthouse pulses in and out. Constant as a ticking clock. Corvo stares at it as the boat slices its way through the waves toward shore. The light is brilliant and burns his eyes. The rain is cold and stings them. Seawater sprays on his face and when he licks his lips they taste like salt; but when he touches his face he finds that it is not the salt of the sea.
Samuel’s it’s been an honor echoes in his ears like something heard down the length of a hall. Corvo doesn’t answer. He puts on his mask, blinks through the red and watches the world resolve itself through gears and lenses, watches the pure light at the top of the lighthouse swim into focus again. Reaches up and adjusts the mask. Just to be sure. The skull fits tightly to his face.
He never takes it off again.
V.
He is not sure how he reaches the top of the lighthouse; but then, he is not sure how he has done any of this, become any of this.
Emily hugs him, clinging, and Corvo’s chest seizes and the seize almost turns into a cough; and there’s red on her clothes, and some of it is from Havelock and the other men he’s (somehow) killed, and some of it isn’t. It takes all of his will not to shatter apart like a jigsaw puzzle and to remember words, to tell her to run ahead. He watches that flash of white recede down the hall before him, reach the top of the stairs, turn, smile – gone.
Safe.
Havelock tried with poison, Daud with sword, Burrows with an accusation and so many people with blade and bolt and bullet and fire, Campbell with the rats andrevenge and the fever that burns under his skin – but it’s that little thought that does it, the patter of feet running down toward the solid ground away from him, the vanishing light.
Two people came to the island by boat. Two people will leave it. This is all he can manage to think before he stumbles sideways back into the room. Locks and bolts the door behind him with clumsy, feverish hands. The room is the size of a cell, and he can’t remember why that is supposed to frighten him, he can’t –
He looks through the red and the skull and the window.
He can see the Tower from here.