The Queen's Champion

Chapter 18

“I think it’s more of a matter of decorum,” Lydia says carefully, swallowing another mouthful of rice.

Joan snorts. “That’s just how s**t is in the Navy. If we can throw down like men, we can take jokes about our snatches.”

“Well, maybe we should ask another lady. Rose?”

“Hmm?” Rose opens her eyes and stares blearily over the table, resting her teacup atop her belly.

“You guys look like s**t, what the f**k were you three up to last night?”

“Hey, I wasn’t up to anything,” Vasco protests, taking a drink of his water. Indeed, Vasco is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. He’s probably sleeping better now than he has in months, even if he does spend his nights in a chair he refuses to sit in properly.

Rose sighs and slouches down further in her seat. “We weren’t doing anything, I just couldn’t sleep well.” She tilts her head in Anthony ’s direction. “Him and David are the ones being quiet for no reason.”

“Shut up,” Anthony  says without looking up from his bowl.

“You are more ridiculously moody than usual.” Joan leans forward and kicks him in the shins. “What’s wrong, David?”

“Nothing.”

“Yeah, I’m calling bullshit.”

“Did something happen?” Lydia asks in a hushed tone. “Or is it a private matter?”

“It’s nothing of that sort, Lady Lydia, there’s just nothing to talk about.” Anthony  waves her away.

“Nothing my d**k,” Joan snorts. “You’re both sour as all gets out. Come on, what’s got you down?”

Just then, the loudspeaker switches on automatically.

“Attention Dunwall citizens. Tomorrow marks the birthday of our beloved fallen Empress, Sabrina Stark the First. Due to plague conditions and safety concerns, there are no public ceremonies planned, but loyal subjects are encouraged to take their own time to reflect and honor her memory. May her spirit fade and become one with the cosmos.”

There’s a ding, and the loudspeaker goes dead.

Everyone around the table is silent for a long minute.

Joan is the first one to straighten up. “So, uh.” She coughs. “There’s that. Your girl’s birthday tomorrow.”

“Yeah.”

“It would be her birthday,” Anthony  mumbles, not looking up from the table.

This was easier to ignore when it was still the Month of Ice. Pretend the looming date didn’t exist. But David’s associated Hearths with Sabrina now for over a decade, and now he will think of her every time he sees a calendar.

“She’d be twenty-four,” David says, committing the design on the ceramic of his plate to memory.

She should be. She should be turning twenty-four tomorrow and twenty-five the year after that, and so on. But she won’t. Sabrina will always be twenty-three. Never a day older.

‘She plans to celebrate with a box of chocolates in bed,’ Sabrina remarks with a sad sort of amusement in her voice. ‘But it will not quench the uneasiness that swells inside of her, and she will throw them against the wall in frustration.’

The thought of Delilah lounging in Sabrina’s bed and eating sweets, getting her sheets dirty makes his fists curl. Sabrina disliked eating in bed. He’d bet she told Delilah not to do it at some point.

Joan fidgets. “Did you want to, like, do something for it?”

“What the hell would I want to do?”

She shrugs. “I dunno, just...something.”

It was probably best her birthday was smack at the beginning of the month. Get this over with quickly.

“Perhaps we should suspend lessons for the day?” Lydia raises her eyebrows thoughtfully. Anthony , however, just shakes his head.

“No, there’s no point in that. I’d rather be too busy to think about it anyway.”

“If you insist.”

“You two weren’t able to go to her funeral, right?” Rose asks, her eyes darting between him and Anthony . “We could hold our own service. Just a little one, say some prayers for her. Would be the perfect time.”

The idea of having a funeral here, without her body, seems ludicrously inadequate. Some flowers and a few kind words from people who didn’t even know her, no. That wasn’t a send-off worthy of his Empress. And it was pointless anyway, as her spirit is still trapped with him.

David shakes his head. “No, Anthony  and I will do something for her. Back at the Tower. Alone.”

The rest of the table nods, like they could possibly understand. Anthony  sets his drink back on the table.

“I don’t want to think about Sabrina right now. How’s tutoring Reed going?”

“Oh.” Lydia’s eyes widen for a moment. “Fine. Wonderful, actually.”

“You’re teaching the sprout too?” Joan asks through a mouthful of rice.

“In the afternoons, yes. It would be a crime not to. He’s brilliant, just...you know, in an unconventional way.”

“It’s called savant syndrome,” Vasco smirks. “Reed’s a dead ringer for it.”

“He’s not, and I don’t think you’re using ‘dead ringer’ correctly.” Rose rolls her eyes. “Savants are really only good at one thing and pretty dysfunctional at the rest. Reed’s smart across the board. And I know he talks weird, but it’s a social thing. He’s not very comfortable with people who aren’t me or our other brother.”

“Your brother’s more than just smart, Rose,” Lydia says intently. Rose nods.

“I know.”

“I mean it. He’s a literal genius.”

“I said I know! I’m actually the dumb sibling!”

“Somehow I doubt that,” Vasco says through bites of rice. Rose just shrugs.

“I know a lot because I read a lot. We’ve lived in a lot of houses with big libraries.”

“You did very well, with what was available to you.” Lydia shakes her head. “He’s outpacing me in mathematics. I was tutored in that until I was twenty and soon he’ll be onto areas of the subject I never learned.”

“He’s good at math.”

David pushes his chair back and gets to his feet. He tries not to make a commotion, but conversation does pause as he walks away, and only resumes after Joan says to ignore his dramatic ass.

He doesn’t care. He can’t care, can’t get into whatever they’re talking about, can’t think of anything other than blase acknowledgement. And he can’t shake the anger he feels when he listens to them discussing such mundane topics with ease. And it was better for him to leave, because he knows it’s not their fault. They’ve done nothing to deserve his anger.

It’s just...she should be here. Sabrina should be next to him, rolling her eyes and already complaining about whatever event her advisors had planned for tomorrow, asking him when they could sneak out and have that boat picnic they do every year for her birthday, just them two. David never had much appetite on boats, felt sick with the constant bobbing, but he always looked forward to doing it anyway.

Instead, she’s in a box of stone. Cold and alone. She will never walk in the sun again, never feel its warmth on her skin. She’s a rotting corpse and he’s angry about it. He’s angry that she’s in there, he’s angry that it isn’t him, and he’s angry that all these people have the nerve to be alive when Sabrina isn’t.

When the people who murdered her, who penned her execution order and who held David back and made him watch, who stuck a sword through her and killed her in the worst way possible, still walk the world.

It wasn’t right. Wasn’t fair. It’s been a long time since David expected anything to be fair and he doesn’t expect it to be now, but he wishes it was.

He stomps up the stairs, into his attic bedroom with the intent of changing into his workboots and finding something to do. Instead he sits down on his bed, rubs his face and he breathes deeply. He knows there’s no point in being mad at the kids. They shouldn’t have to tiptoe around him, and he’d be angry no matter what they did.

He just doesn’t want to deal with them. He wants to be alone. He shouldn’t, should be spending time with people, distracting himself, but David wants nothing more than to sit down and wallow. Maybe that’s fitting. He’s the reason Sabrina isn’t here. Sitting here and suffering in loneliness, he deserves that much for allowing Sabrina to die. He shouldn’t deserve comfort when Sabrina herself is all alone.

‘Even in the Void, I’m with you.’

She forms in his hands, inches from his face. David stares and allows her energy to radiate through him in waves.

“You’re not going to let me suffer in silence, are you?”

She pulses, and David allows his thumb to rub over the face of the Talisman. There’s a pleasant warmth underneath his fingertips.

“I’m really not in the mood, Sabrina.”

‘I see the death in your eyes, and the love that’s taken root in your heart. The pain in your hands as you try to weigh them. I only ask that you remember all that we are, when it comes time to choose.’

David sighs. He brushes his lips over the Talisman, then allows it to dissipate as he gets to his feet.

Speaking with Sabrina never makes him feel better. It just makes him hurt more, hurt longer, and adds on an extra layer of guilt. But the thought of going forever without hearing her voice again somehow hurts even more.

Regardless, he knows she’d protest if he just sat around being miserable for the next two days. He needs to find something to occupy himself with. Anthony  had the right idea-a distraction is needed.

He descends the stairs more quietly than he ascended. Passing the hallway between the attic and the ground floor, David’s eyes are drawn to a shadow and he has to pause on the landing to take it in.

There, in front of the mill’s single shitty bathroom, is Edgar Wakefield. Down on one knee, face pressed up against the door, almost like he’s…”

“Hey.”

Edgar jumps about three feet in the air, scrambling away from the door. “David! Uh...hey.”

David stalks forward, staring at Edgar’s face intently. “What are you doing?”

Edgar scratches the back of his head. “Just, uh...learning how to pick locks. You know, assassin skills.” He says it all in a whisper, with quick, darting glances towards the bathroom door.

“Really,” David says at full volume. “Because it looked suspiciously like you were trying to spy through the keyhole.” He steps forward, rapping his knuckles against the door twice. “Who’s in there?!”

“It’s Galia, f**k off!” There’s a splash, and the sound of squeaking.

David turns around and glares, folding his arms. Edgar tries to smile half-heartedly.

“Come on, we’re both men here. You know how it is.”

“Mind explaining it?”

Edgar motions to the door. “You probably did it hundreds of times, when you were a young stud like me.”

“Can’t say I did.”

“I mean, well…” He shrugs. “You saw the Empress naked, right? Guess you wouldn’t need to look at other women, with that hot piece of ass...around…”

He seems to figure David is actively trying to dismember him with his eyes, and Edgar tapers off.

David waits. He’s already in a bad mood. He has enough honor not to unleash it on the first person to get on his unbelievably short nerves, but if Edgar wants to goad him, David will gladly take his anger out on him.

Edgar looks down to the floor. Shifts on his feet, shrinks away from the heat of David’s glare. He’s already dug his own grave. David’s just waiting to see if he’ll bury himself. Finally, he speaks very quietly to the floor.

“Don’t tell Lizzy.”

“Lizzy,” David says slowly. “Is not the only person here you should be afraid of.”

At that, Edgar jerks his head up. “You’re like, a foot shorter than me.” He puffs his chest out. “You don’t scare me.”

His eyes say differently. But David doesn’t point that out. Instead, he just steps close enough to Edgar that the toes of their boots meet and David’s chest brushes against his beer belly.

“I should.”

Edgar just shakes. Beads of sweat are forming at his brow, and his eyes are so wide he looks like he’s been snorting cocaine.

“You don’t need both your eyes, Wakefield,” David finally says, after a long minute of letting him sweat. He steps away. “If I ever catch you spying on any of the girls here again, I’ll remember that. You’d do best to remember it too.”

Then he whirls away, leaving Edgar alone in the hallway and smelling faintly like urine.

‘Finding something to do’ proves harder than he thought. He tries to help with the dishes after breakfast is over, but he snaps two dishes clean in half from sheer force while scrubbing and shatters a third when he gets frustrated at a particularly resistant stain. Gerald subsequently bans him from the kitchen. Then he goes to help with the laundry effort, which works out great at first as Ricardo can only carry one bucket of water at a time and Rose is no longer allowed to lift them. Then the tub is filled and he has to sit and try and remember how doing laundry was even supposed to work while listening to the two chatter away in weird half-Serkonan jargon. After one off-brand comment from Rose about his scrubbing technique, David throws a bar of soap at her head, and Ricardo sends him away with a few colorful parting words. David just counts himself lucky the man didn’t try to beat him to death with his washboard.

He tries to read and ends up angrily reading the same paragraph five times over before he calls it quits and gets up again. Then he gets sidetracked by Granny, who asks him to do an ‘art project’ with her, and he entertains her bullshit for about five minutes before he realizes his soul just can’t take it and walks away.

Spending time with Jerome usually helps clear his mind, so David goes there next. He gets to spend two hours rearranging machinery, picking up and slamming down furniture for whatever device Jerome is constructing that will likely blow out their power at least twice. Jerome himself gives him a wide berth, only addressing him to point out where he wants things. Paul wanders in after awhile, his eyes popping out of his head when he sees David with his undershirt drenched in sweat, asks him if he isn’t hot and comments that he should take his shirt off. (David is hot, but he’s never taking off his shirt or wearing short sleeves ever again) After watching him for several minutes while sipping a pear soda, David snaps that he should either get a life or pick something up and help. Paul rolls his eyes and asks if he wants to spar instead.

Fighting, fighting is something David’s body will never forget how to do. Something he’s extraordinarily good at, where he won’t feel like a goddamn i***t in a room full of geniuses. On most days, it clears his mind.

Today is not one of those days.

“Ow!” Paul grabs for his elbow. “I thought we were just going for the disarm!”

“We’re not even using real swords.”

Paul rubs the reddened skin. “Yeah, but it still hurt,” he mumbles.

David huffs. His old mantra kicks in-assume all fights will be played dirty, honor doesn’t matter when you’re fighting for your life, a real assassin won’t pause just because you’re wounded-but he doesn’t voice any of it.

Paul cracks his neck, raising the wooden sword. “Okay. Let’s go again, but actually play by the rules this time?”

“Fine.” Then David lashes out and strikes. Paul catches it this time and deflects.

The thing David likes about fighting is that it takes over his attention. He has to think about everything in the moment-his stance, his blade, his opponent, their surroundings, and all the other factors that could impact the outcome. He has to think about so many things that there isn’t room to think about anything else. He has to concentrate, and it’s easy to do so when there are so many things competing for his attention.

Today, however, there’s just that slightest edge of his mind that refuses to be absorbed in the activity. That little space that reminds him with every step of how he used to do this in the Dunwall Tower gardens. How he taught this same footwork to his Empress, how he watched her go from a skinny girl who needed both hands on her sword in order to have enough power to deflect his blow to a young woman who could not be bested in any dueling tournament and could probably kill him with her pinkie finger if she were so inclined.

But with every swing, the face that appears over the edge is not Sabrina’s. That part of his brain lingers on that, reminds him she’s gone and why she’s not here, and David can only be mad about it. Then he steps out once more and it starts all over again.

A particularly hard hit sends Paul hopping backwards, holding up his free hand.

“Okay, I can’t tell if you’re actually trying to kill me or not.” He drops his sword, shaking out his arm and rotating his wrist around. “Can you use something that would hurt a little less?”

“Sorry.” David blows out a breath. He does actually mean it, despite internally thinking Paul is being a wuss.

Paul just picks up his sword and shakes his head. “Maybe we should take a break. Almost dinnertime anyway.”

“Yeah.” David’s mouth feels like sawdust. He didn’t bother to eat lunch, barely ate anything at breakfast, but he’s not even the slightest bit hungry.

He grabs his jacket and shrugs it on as they walk, Paul rambling on idly. David’s undershirt clings to his body with sweat. A bath would be in order later. A cold one.

Galia spots them as they enter the main hall, waving them over. David shoves his hands in his pockets as he approaches the table. “Is something wrong?”

“No.” Galia shakes her head, then glances around the table. Joan and Edgar are present at the other end, standing and talking in low whispers. Galia leans in and lowers her voice. “I just needed to tell Paul about something I found doing my rounds. I-”

“What rounds?” David asks, trying and failing to keep his voice down.

Galia stares at him with her mouth still open, while Paul just shrugged. “Galia and I have been sweeping the area every other night or so. Nothing much, just checking around the sewers, making sure no witches have come back.”

“And I’ve been checking the district from the rooftops,” Galia whispers. “In case someone’s been poking around.”

David presses his lips together and breathes out through his nose. “And you didn’t tell me?”

“I didn’t...think we had to tell you, we were just walking around.” Galia blinks.

“What if you did run into a witch?!” he hisses.

“You gave us the Bond, so we could-”

“Yes, so I’m responsible if you get hurt!”

“We aren’t going to get hurt!” She scoffs. “We know what we’re doing.”

“And if we did find a witch, we’d totally come get you and Joan before doing anything,” Paul says, folding his arms. Galia scoffs at that too.

“So what other secrets are you two keeping from me?”

“Oh my f*****g god, David, we’re not-”

“What are you guys arguing about?” Edgar asks, turning away from Lizzy.

Just the sight of him makes David’s stomach roil with disgust. “None of your business, f**k off.”

Joan rolls her eyes dramatically. “Ignore him. He’s needed a good d**k in his ass, like, all day.”

“You f**k off too, Catspaw.”

She throws him the finger. Out of the corner of his eye, David sees Lydia tiptoe to her seat, sitting down and reinserting herself in her novel as quickly as possible.

“What’s your problem?” Galia holds her hands out, speaking at normal volume again.

David raises his hands to his temples. “My problem is that everyone here seems to think they’re experts when none of you know what the f**k you’re doing!”

Paul laughs awkwardly. “Well, he’s got us there.”

Galia gives him a dirty look. “No, we know exactly what we’re doing.”

“No.” David points. “You are a child. If there was a problem with security, it should have been brought straight to me-”

“Oh, for the Outsider’s ass, I didn’t want to bother you!”

“Why would I be bothered about keeping us all safe?” David points to his chest. “That’s my job!”

“Your job,” Thalia Timsh’s cool voice comes from behind. “Is to follow our orders, David.”

David whirls around. “Ex cuse me?”

Thalia blinks, staring from her seat at the head of the table. “You’re not the Royal Protector anymore. We brought you here to kill certain people. Barring that, you have no obligation and no authority to order around other members of our group.”

“This is none of your damn business.”

“I’m in charge-”

“You are a teenager!” David jabs his finger in her direction. “You’d be on your knees scrubbing floors with Rose if your last name wasn’t Timsh!”

You’d think David had tried to kill her, from the look of indignation she gives. “How dare you! I may have been born to wealth, but I have still worked-”

“No, your money does all the working! You are a little girl playing pretend, wanting to think you’re more important than you are!”

“I have given everything for this cause-”

“You don’t know anything about this cause! You don’t understand the work I do, you don’t understand what’s at stake-”

“Okay.” There’s a hand gripping his bicep, an arm sliding under us and locking elbows. Joan keeps walking without falter, dragging him away. “Let’s go, old man.”

“No, let me go-”

“I said,” She holds tight, turning her head just enough to fix him with her glare. “We’re going.”

“Where are you taking me?” he asks for the fifteenth time. As expected, Joan doesn’t answer him. David rolls his eyes, but he walks along, if only because he knows Joan would literally drag him if he refused to move his feet.

They exit the mill, and David glances up to the orange-colored sky. “If you’re trying to find a place to hide my body, we passed several prime candidates.”

“I’m not going to kill you, as tempting as it is.”

“I’m so relieved.”

“Shut the f**k up, David.”

They come to a pause outside Joan and Edgar’s bunkhouse. Joan releases his arm, and David places it on his hip as she fiddles with her keys. “I’m not having s*x with you, Catspaw.”

“Good, because I wouldn’t touch your d**k if you paid me.” She pops the door open. “I’m just grabbing something. You can wait here.”

David huffs, and he taps his foot as he waits. He could just walk away, sure. Joan might be fifteen years younger than him, but it gives her little edge. He could beat her in a struggle. Maybe not easily, but he could.

Joan exists after a minute, holding a long, tan whiskey bottle by the neck. David’s eyes flicker to it for only a moment before shaking his head.

“No.”

“Too bad, old man.”

“I’m not drinking that! And I’m sure as f**k not talking about my feelings.”

“We’re hashing something out tonight,” Joan says with an exaggerated eyeroll. “You’re about to rip someone’s face off. And if Thalia doesn’t have you killed for it, I might just do it myself.”

David folds his arms. “I. Don’t. Drink.”

“Then swallow your spit or something, come on.” She turns away. “If you don’t come now, I swear on the Outsider’s frilly underpants that I will roofie your goddamn coffee, tie you up and make you talk to me. Now let’s find someplace to sit.”

David continues his bitching, but he follows. They only Blink to get on top of the mall-then they wander, walking on the edges and looking over the district. Joan allows David to grumble to himself until he’s grumbled himself out. Then she plops down on the edge of the roof, lets her legs dangle over the side and watches the canal.

David sits down next to her, peering down the side of the building. “I don’t think heights and alcohol mix very well, Catspaw.”

Joan doesn’t answer. She just stares. So David kicks his legs, lets the back of his boots bounce off the brick. He watches the streets, the canal. Watches their world bathed in the orange of dying light.

Finally, Joan reaches for the bottle of whiskey. Uncaps it, takes a long drink, then places it between them again without tearing her eyes from the scenery.

“I killed my father.”

David blinks. He examines her face for any sign of joking, of anything, but she’s just blank.

“Uh, Old Hat?”

“Of course.” She looks down at her own feet. “I’m not like the Empress. I didn’t have other weird men willing to step in and be my dad. I only had one.”

David is quiet for a long moment, though he really feels he shouldn’t be.

Finally, he swallows and clears his throat. “On purpose?”

“Sort of.”

She doesn’t provide an explanation, and David doesn’t feel like it’s his place to ask for one. After a minute, she reaches for the whiskey again.

“I used to think my dad was a player,” she starts up again after a sip. “Figured, you know, he was a travelling merchant, sailed all around Tyvia and Morley and then back down here to Dunwall. Figured he must have a kid in every port from Meya to Wynnedown. That one of those ports just happened to be Fraeport. And one of those kids just happened to be me.”

David’s read intel reports on Hat. If he had a dozen bastard babies floating around the Isles, someone would have found out about it. Used it. Nobody knew he had a daughter in Morley, true...but it was a lot easier to hide one baby than a dozen.

“I take it that’s not the truth,” he says quietly.

Joan shakes her head. “It’s what my ma told me. Should of known better, to take her word for it. Dad was a very...hands-off parent.” She sips thoughtfully. “Never came to visit after I turned six. Sent us money every month, most of which got poured down my ma’s throat, if you get my meaning. But he paid for the apartment we lived in. Paid for the fancy school he demanded I go to.”

He always assumed Joan was uneducated. But when David thinks about it, what reasons does he have to think that? Because she speaks in a rough manner? Because she has tattoos? Because she looks like an uneducated lower-class woman? All just playing into the same prejudices he railed against when Sabrina was alive. The thought makes him want to duck into his collar like a turtle.

“Ma never told me any of that.” Lizzy’s fingers find a pebble, and she examines it in displeasure. “She’d give me his letters after she’d fished out all the gold and other crap and never mention it. I mean, he wrote nice letters. Just talked about regular s**t, ‘bout school. Called me his ‘little river pearl’. It was dumb, you know, but it was nice dumb. But I was still pissed with him. And even after I met him, even when I knew the whole story, I’d been mad at him so long I really didn’t know how not to be.”

She tosses the pebble out over the street.

“Anyway. We hashed s**t out, man-to-man, years went by and we had our own drama-I’m not going to get into all that. I will tell you we had a fight when I left the Navy. We were not on good terms when I started up the Dead Eels.”

“Was he one of Delilah’s supporters or something?” David’s lip curls.

Joan actually laughs. “No, no, he had no idea how bad it was about to get. He was upset I threw away my career. He was always real proud of that, having a Navy daughter. He didn’t want me taking over his business, getting involved in the whole ‘being a criminal’ thing. I kinda...fucked that, I know.” She drinks again. “You know there was a turf war. I kinda just...let it happen. I was mad, about old s**t that happened twenty years ago and new s**t that happened then. A lot of people on both sides got killed because I was too prideful to pull my own head out of my ass.”

She’s quiet for a long moment, and she sets the bottle aside when she does start talking again. “The Eels were already on its last legs when I got pneumonia. I thought I was a tougher b***h than it and ignored it until I collapsed one day. We couldn’t get a doctor because everyone heard ‘cough’ and thought ‘plague’, so nobody wanted to get close to me. Finally, Edgar decided to cut our losses and jump ship. I mean that literally. He flung me across his shoulder and f*****g swam to the dock because he couldn’t figure out how the pulleys worked to get the skiff down. It’s a miracle he didn’t drown me.”

David has to suppress a smile at the mental image. Not the ‘Joan unconscious’ bit, just Edgar being a dumbass.

“So he comes up to the mall here,” Joan straightens herself up. “You know, sopping wet, holding me in his arms like I’m his f*****g bride. Yells that he has Elizabeth Hat. So, of course, they let us through.” She rolls her eyes. “He makes up this baked story about how evil Joan Catspaw kidnapped Hat’s daughter and was holding her hostage. Edgar was the subordinate who grew a heart when he saw my plight or whatever, and became a turncoat. Said he killed Joan and brought Elizabeth home to her daddy.”

“And the Hatters...believed that?”

“Yuuup. They all knew he had a daughter he was sneaking away to meet, but no one ever saw me. Dad didn’t want anybody knowing my face, ‘specially from the other gangs. But, you know, I still can’t believe they bought it so easily. Dumbasses.”

David’s dealt with a lot of gangs in his life, and sadly, he’s not surprised. “Didn’t they recognize you as Joan Catspaw?”

“Apparently I looked like such s**t that they didn’t. Anyway.” Joan shrugs. “I don’t remember any of this. I had a fever of eleventy fuckbillion degrees and was flopping around, rambling on about purple bunnies cooking crack or some such s**t. I didn’t come to for a few more days, after Trimble got my fever down and pumped some fluids in me. Woke up in one of Trimble’s hospital rooms. ‘Course, Dad was sitting in a chair right next to me.”

Of course he was. He must have been out of his mind with worry. David doesn’t remember Anthony  ever being that sick, but he likely would have been glued to his side if he was. Sabrina was rarely sick at all-aside from the fever she got when he first met her. He doesn’t know if it was pneumonia or anything-not like he could take her to a doctor. Didn’t have the coin for it, and there was no way to say ‘I found this small girl on the side of the road and she’s not wearing pants because she can’t get up to piss, fix her please’ without someone making assumptions. Possibly calling the Watch. He just kept her covered to help with the chills, tried to bring her fever down with a rag on her forehead. He’d known nothing about her then. Known her for one day. But he could barely sleep, couldn’t bring himself to leave for anything other than getting her elixir. He was desperately terrified that she would die. Could think of nothing else until her fever broke, until she sat up and asked if he was the same creepy old guy from before. Then he could breathe.

Joan sips, the orange of the sun reflected in her eyes. “Dad was already old as f**k, but he was actually doing okay at that point. Could get up, move, got winded when he walked more than a few feet so he got pushed around in a wheelchair for the most part, but he was still rocking it. Was sound of mind up ‘till the end.”

David’s surprised Hat would even allow himself to be seen in a wheelchair. Especially in the gangs, projecting an image of strength was a necessity. Even the Emperor had pulled out all the stops to conceal his illness. On the occasions he needed to use a cane to walk, he blamed a knee injury or something similar. He hid the handkerchief he coughed into so no one saw the red. Everywhere they went, their security had to section off a room to take him if his blood pressure suddenly dipped and he passed out, and it left Sabrina to make excuses for his sudden absence more than once. Towards the end, they even started padding his clothes to cover up his rapid weight loss. He was bed-bound for three weeks precluding his death, and the general public had no idea he was even sick until the last few days.

That was how you did things. A leader showing their weakness instigates panic. For a man like Hat, it would mean he needed replacing.

“I was stuck in bed for a few weeks,” Joan continues. “Could hardly stand up without getting winded. My f*****g nails stopped growing, my hair started falling out-I mean, this haircut is tight as hell, but I only got it shaved because you could see my bald spots. Told you before, I cracked a rib because I managed to f**k up coughing. Through it all, Dad visited me every day. Trimble told him not to. But he did. I got better. Dad...didn’t.”

She stares out at the canal for a long time before knocking back a good portion of the whiskey, swiping the back of her hand over her mouth as she sets the bottle back down.

“I didn’t see Dad for a few days, so when I was allowed out of bed I went to him. He was set up in the room Lydia’s in now-you know, the one by the bathroom. But Trimble had Hatter f***s guarding the door. Wouldn’t let me through to talk to him. Said I was contagious, that he was too weak to handle getting whatever I had. But, you know, I knew. I knew I already gave it to him.

“After a bit, think he got tired of hearing him ask for me, Trimble did let me in, but he wouldn’t let me get close to Dad. He was...hooked up to this machine, a tube right through his chest. Dad couldn’t talk real loud, couldn’t get enough air, so he’d whisper in Trimble’s ear and he’d talk. f**k if I know if any of it was Dad’s actual words. I finally just told him he should get out, let me spend some time with my father, because clearly he was already dying. Trimble just laughed at me. Said Dad wasn’t going to die on his watch.”

Joan drinks some more. David pushes down the discomfort that bubbles in his chest. He knows Trimble is a weasel-knows he’s probably never spoken a truthful word in his life. But this just seems...evil.

The Emperor had asked for Sabrina the night before he died. David waited outside his room. Everyone waited, his advisors and doctors and Royal Protector. Sabrina and her father talked for over an hour, and no one dared interrupt them. When she emerged, her eyes were red and she smelled like the antiseptic the nurses all but scrubbed the floor with. She never told David about what was said in there. He never asked. Some things were private-sacred. He couldn’t dream of depriving her-either of them-of that.

He never got that with her. Never got to say goodbye, to say all the things he was never able to say before. He’ll never get that back.

Joan takes a swipe at her eyes, sniffs before continuing. “Then...one day, Trimble had to leave for a few hours. I snuck in to see Dad. It was...fuck, it was awful. Just skin and bones. Didn’t even sound like himself when he talked, and every time he coughed it was like someone punched him and knocked all the wind out of his chest.”

She runs her finger around the rim of the whiskey bottle, staring at one particular streetlamp intently.

“We sat, talked for a bit. Told him not to feel like he’s leaving s**t unfinished, that I forgave him for all his bullshit. He laughed and asked if I was forgiving him because he’d earned it or because he was dying, and I said a little of both. He said he was sorry again, for leaving me with my ma. Told me I was the only thing he’d ever created in his life that he didn’t regret. That he was proud of me. Then he…” She pauses, sucks in a deep breath. “He asked me to turn off the machine that kept him breathing.”

David is absolutely silent. Joan takes a long, shuddering breath of air.

“Of course I couldn’t say no,” she says, as if answering a question David never posed. “But how can anybody say yes to that?”

They sit in silence for another minute. Joan takes another swig of whiskey.

“I, you know, asked if he was sure. He said he’d never been so sure of anything in his life. He understood if I didn’t want to be the one to do it, but to run and get Edgar or somebody quick before Trimble came back. He just asked that I stay with him.” She shakes her head. “But f**k if I was...ugh. No, I don’t make it a habit to paw my dirty work off on other people. And nobody f*****g sees me cry.”

Apparently David factors into ‘nobody’ now, as there’s water visible in Lizzy’s eyes. She wipes one with her sleeve, and a single tear falls from her other eye, leaving a trail of wetness down her cheek.

“So I...did it. The machine was powered by whale oil, like everything else in this f*****g city, so I just had to take out the tank and wait a few minutes. I went back. Held Dad’s hand. And we just waited.” She closes her eyes and swallows, slowly. “Right before he died, he looked me in the eye and told me he loved me. We didn’t say that s**t to each other. He never said it until it was his last words. And you know what I said back? ‘I know.’ That’s what I said. That’s all I said.”

“He knew,” David says quietly. “You wouldn’t have stayed if you didn’t.”

“I could have said it for a dying man,” Joan says angrily, more tears falling down her cheeks and lingering on the curve of her jaw. “For one minute, I could have swallowed my f*****g pride and told him so. I didn’t have to be Joan Catspaw, you know. I could have just been Lizzy.” She shakes her head. “But I guess you’re right. Maybe he did know. Dad died with a smile on his face.”

David keeps his eyes focuses on his hands, folded neatly into his lap. Joan sets the bottle aside again. They sit. They watch the shadows creep steadily up the sides of the building. They don’t talk. They just sit.

Then Joan turns to him, rubbing her finger under her nose. “Now,” she says through a sniff. “Your turn.”

David raises his eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“I’ve never told anyone about all that. Not even Edgar. Nobody but you, now.” She pokes him in the side. “So now you owe me.”

“I never asked you to share any of that.”

“No, I wanted to tell you.” She jabs him harder. “Because we’re like that. We get each other. And neither of us are gonna run off and tell everybody else how we blubbered like little babies. So you don’t have to be scared to tell me s**t, because I get it.”

David shakes his head. “I’ve never been ‘scared’ of you, Catspaw. I just don’t like talking-”

“Oh, David, f**k off.” Joan rolls her eyes. “You want to talk about her. I can tell, okay, you like to think your all mysterious and s**t but I can read your face like an open book. I know because I do the same f*****g s**t. You can’t fool me.”

“No offense, but none of my bullshit is any of your business. It’s private stuff-stuff I talk about with Anthony .”

“I talk to Anthony  too. So I know you don’t talk about the s**t you need to talk about.”

“Lizzy…” David tips his head back and groans. “Why can’t you people just let me do my job and leave me alone?”

“Because we care about you too, old man. Not just the job you do.”

David presses his lips together. Joan shoves the bottle of whiskey into his hands.

“Tell me something about her I wouldn’t know,” she presses. “Just something small-something stupid.”

“Something stupid.”

“Nothing scandalous, just something from the dumb side of life. You know, the s**t she didn’t show off to the public. Just tell me one thing.”

David raises the bottle to his lips and takes a sip. It tastes just like he remembers it. Like rancid piss that burns in his mouth and leaves a smarting sourness in his mouth. Not at all thirst-quenching. He’ll never understand how anyone found this refreshing.

“When she found out she was going to be Empress,” he says carefully, the corners of his mouth twitching up despite himself. “She fainted.”

“When her dad died?” Joan c***s her head. “Wait, are we talking actual fainting, or just the swooning rich ladies do when their bras are too tight?”

“Corsets, that’s when they can’t breathe right.” Sabrina let herself be laced up in one of those rib-crushing devices exactly once, nearly running herself out of breath with every three steps she took. Afterwards, she’d hold in all her breath while getting laced up to give her ample room to breathe, until an attendant bitched to the Emperor about it. Then she flat-out refused to wear one. David shakes his head. “No, actually fainted. I had to catch her. She was out cold for about a minute. This was the day we met the Emperor-he was kind of freaking out that she did that. They sprung a lot on her with no warning.”

“I always wondered, how did that even go? Did they just walk up to her on the street and go ‘you’re the Emperor’s daughter and you’re coming with us’? Because no matter which way you spin it, it sounds fishy.”

“If they had approached her like that,” David says sourly. “She would have yelled for me. I wouldn’t have let them take her.”

“Good, because that screams of a scam. One that ends with her bones going up for sale on the black market.”

David shakes his head. “They weren’t that much more tactful.” He tips his head back. “I first knew something was up when some people we knew took me aside and said that a group of uniformed men had been asking after her.”

Some people actually liked him back then. Or really, they liked his streetrats. While Sabrina could be a brat, she was very cute in a mischievous way-people loved the snaggletooth. Anthony  wasn’t well-behaved by a long shot, but he was charming and a generally pretty child. The people who gave them the time of day also eased up around David, enough to make small talk. Enough to approach him and tell him their worries.

Keep that little girl safe, they said. Keep her safe.

“Oh yeah, that’s not ominous as fuck.” Joan snorts. “You were probably shitting your pants.”

Oh, he was. He had no idea the men were Spymaster agents at the time-though the revelation that they were didn’t make him feel any better. David thought they from a gang. And that greatly unnerved him. The illicit of Dunwall had plenty of uses for children, sure. Sabrina was a talented pickpocket and good with a knife, both things that would attract some unsavory characters. She was a girl, which started mattering more when it came to s*x work at her age. There were definitely people interested in using her. f**k, some guy had offered David a purse full of coin to ‘take her off his hands’, heavily implying he was going to sell her to a brothel. He knew there were always people with eyes on her.

But they all f****d off when David inserted himself next to her, showed off his sword and the side of his face. ‘Owning’ Sabrina might have been lucrative, but she wasn’t worth tangling with a guy like him. There were always other little girls. Ones that didn’t have David standing behind them. So the fact that these men were expending this much time and energy seeking out one girl, a girl who had a big, dangerous man ready to draw blood in order to protect her, had chilling implications.

Really, David thought it was about him. He’d pissed off tons of people in his life-made plenty of enemies across the gangs of Dunwall. He moved around enough that he wasn’t easily tracked, but he wondered if one of them saw her with David. If she was being targeted in some sort of revenge plot against him. There was no other reason for anyone to want to get their hands on her that bad. He didn’t show it at the time, pretended he was just annoyed, but David was terrified.

“I just moved us to another district at first,” he continues carefully. “But then it started happening again, and I knew it wasn’t going to just go away. I decided we had to leave Dunwall.”

“Where to? Back home to Serkonos?”

“Maybe.” His mother wouldn’t still be there. It wasn’t home. But the cost of living was lower. Cheap schools to send Anthony  to, and Sabrina could have gotten an apprenticeship at the docks when she got a bit older. They could have made it. “It would have come down to where I could secure passage for three people cheaply and...discreetly.”

“That wouldn’t of, you know, stopped the freaking Spymaster. They’d of tracked you guys to Pandyssia if they needed to.”

“I know. Didn’t end up mattering. Planned to be out of the city by the end of the week-I hadn’t even told the kids we were moving, didn’t want Anthony  blabbing about it. Literally two days before we were going to leave, we got woken up at five in the morning to some assholes trying to pound down the front door.”

“...This is really sounding like one of those horror stories where you guys’s organs get harvested for auction.”

David takes another swig of whiskey, grimacing. “They tried to leave with her. Didn’t tell us what was going on or what they wanted with her, just said she was coming with them. I said over my dead body.”

“Tempting fate there, buddy.”

“Decided I wasn’t worth the bullet, I guess. They-” He swallows. “We got put up in this fancy-ass hotel. Kept us fed, one of the maids went out and bought some toys to keep Anthony  entertained. He thought it was all a damn vacation, at least, but Sabrina and I knew better. They had armed guards stationed out in the hallway.”

“See, I woulda just jumped out the window.”

“We were high up. And Anthony  and I could leave whenever we wanted-it was just Sabrina they wouldn’t let go.” He glares at a streetlamp. “They brought in these i***t nerds to talk to Sabrina a few times. Weird stuff, about her birth mother and her childhood. Drew her blood. She-” David pauses to suppress the smile that wells up on his lip. “I think she made it a game to see how fast she could annoy them. She was a goddamn brat.”

“What in the f**k did you make of all of this?”

“Not the truth.”

“Well, obviously, nobody would of guessed the truth. But what did you think?”

He shrugs. “I really didn’t know what to think. I kind of...tried not to think about any of it.”

Helpless. He was utterly helpless and he knew it. Couldn’t leave with Sabrina, wouldn’t leave without Sabrina. No choice but to hand her over, watch them prod at her and hope to the f*****g Outsider they wouldn’t hurt her, because David talked big and acted tough but he was powerless against a team of Spymaster agents. Oh, he could fight them, even kill a few before his life ended in a hail of bullets, and he’d do it for her but Anthony  was with him and he could not let Anthony  get hurt too. They had him by the balls, completely at their mercy and David felt as helpless as he was when the Actor first took control of him.

He couldn’t protect her. And he hated it. He hated everything and he didn’t want to think about what was going on at all, but there was nothing to do in that hotel room but dwell and think and worry.

“I guess…” David taps his lip.“I don’t know, I guess the best I came up with was that this was some weird underground s*x ring we were getting suckered into.”

“That’s...specific.”

“Everything has a s*x ring component to it, Catspaw.”

“If you say so.”

“No, really. All organized crime dips into the s*x trade. Drug trafficking? Somebody’s getting paid in whores, and another somebody is probably murdering them. Tax fraud? Nine times out of ten, covering up an illegal s*x ring. Embezzlement? Child s*x ring. I don’t-” He raises his hands to his temples. “I don’t get it. I’m a criminal. I never f****d kids. Why does every crime have to have a s*x aspect? Why are people so obsessed-why are you laughing at me?”

Joan attempts to stop her giggles. “Sorry, I’m not...it’s not funny, I know, just, the way you said…” She covers her mouth with her hand. “Sorry. Go on.”

“See, that’s why I never told anyone about that.” David says sourly. “But Sabrina would probably laugh too. She thought her mother got arrested or something. I don’t know why anyone would have involved Sabrina in that.”

“Makes more sense than your explanation.”

“It does not, and you know it.”

“Anyway. So what’d they finally say to you?”

“That’s the thing. They didn’t tell us anything.” David gripes the neck of the whiskey bottle as he stares into the distance. “I’d been asking what we were doing there for six days at this point, and nobody answered me. I was just told I wasn’t allowed to know, that nobody had clearance to divulge that information. The Emperor showed up in his carriage that morning and I honestly thought it was a coincidence.

“Then one of the agents came up and told us we had to go. His Majesty was waiting for us. Sabrina-I don’t know how she got it in her head, but she thought they were going to kill her. She started freaking out.”

“Well, what else do you think?” Joan muses. “Was she supposed to guess she was the Emperor’s daughter all by herself?”

Maybe they did expect her to think that. David thought himself an i***t for a long time, for not guessing, when it seemed so very clear in retrospect. At the time, he thought she was being sold off to him for some reason. It was the only explanation he could come up with. It was the only thing that fit within the grand theme of their lives.

“The guy told us the Emperor was here to meet his daughter. I actually told him to go have breakfast with her, and leave Sabrina alone.” Joan snorts at that. “Then he...corrected me. I wasn’t really thinking much in the way of coherent thoughts after that.”

He remembers the moments afterwards, of course. But his memories were odd, like moving underwater, snapshots taken through his eyes. Being led down to the main hall, holding Anthony ’s hand to keep him from running forward and gripping onto Sabrina’s skirt. The Emperor standing there, talking with his Royal Protector and Spymaster Martin. Them going quiet, his face going blank when he turned to see Sabrina descending those steps. How they stared at each other, the Emperor in mottled confusion, and Sabrina in wide-eyed apprehension. And finally Sabrina executing the clumsiest curtsy he’d ever seen, so low the hem of her dress nearly touched the floor. Only then did the glass break, and the Emperor bowed back. Took her hand and kissed it.

The anger was enough to snap David out of whatever trance he was in.

“They met, and we all sat down to breakfast to get acquainted or some shit.” David plucks a cigarette from his pocket, slides his lighter out. He needs a f*****g smoke to talk about this man. “I’ll spare you the vexing details of that meal.”

“No, this sounds hilarious.”

“The only funny part was Sabrina trying to act like she knew how to use a fork like a rich person.” Really, they should have been impressed that she knew how to eat with a fork in the first place. Anthony  hadn’t even used silverware before that week and David spent half the meal trying to help him figure out his plethora of cutlery. “They ignored me for the most part, played happy family. He, the Emperor, got very angry when he found out I’d taught Sabrina how to fight.”

“He was mad that you taught her to defend herself?”

“Looked like he was about to faint when I said I showed her how to shoot a gun. I told him he’d have a very pretty corpse for a daughter if I hadn’t. Just brushed me off.”

“f*****g rich folk,” Joan says sourly. “Feel so secure in their castles, can’t see why everyone don’t live in ‘em.” She sits up straighter. “So wait, you knew who she was then. Why was she so shocked that she would succeed him? Feel like that would kinda be a given.”

“I don’t think she was really...you know, thinking about it too hard. She was already overwhelmed.” He takes another puff, blowing smoke out the side of his mouth. “I figured he must have had a bunch of bastard kids. That he was just being decent and providing for his damn spawn. After we finished eating, man offers me, there wasn’t really a concrete number stated, but he offered me a very substantial reward. I thought it was meant to, you know, take care of her. But then he started talking about a carriage coming to pick her up. About hiring tutors and buying her a new wardrobe. He was taking her with. And Sabrina didn’t want to go.”

He acted like it was obvious. She was his daughter, of course she’d come live with him! In his mind, she had no reason not to be ecstatic. He couldn’t understand how that might have scared her. Couldn’t understand that she might react in a way he didn’t predict. That Sabrina was a person, not his doll.

“I wouldn’t f*****g want to either. He was a f*****g stranger to her.”

David takes another drag. “He told her she had to, that she had responsibilities. She had to go, she had to live at the Tower and learn how to be a princess because she was his heir. She’d be Empress. And she fainted.”

Of course she f*****g fainted. Three hours before, she had been a street kid. The daughter of a drunk, wore rags and ate out of the trash and was spat on by the very citizens who were supposed to revere her. How was she supposed to reconcile that?

David might have passed out himself if his every instinct hadn’t screamed to catch her before she cracked her skull open on the white marble. He doesn’t think he really absorbed it until then, understood the true gravity of their situation. That Sabrina was Crown Princess of the Empire. That he was holding the future Empress of the Isles in his arms.

“Geeze.” Joan shakes her head. “I would of too, honestly. You think they could of broke that a little bit more gently.”

“They said there was a communication error,” David says sourly. “Someone was supposed to have briefed us, but the task was never assigned to anyone. There was no error. They just didn’t give a s**t what we thought.”

“Well, they must of, at least a little bit. They let her keep you.”

“No.” David glares at a streetlamp intently. “No, her father hated me. He wanted her to cut contact with us. Even after Sabrina told him Anthony  was her brother, he didn’t want us having any contact with her. She had to beg.” She had to lie, he thinks. “He wouldn’t have allowed it if it weren’t for Anthony , trust me. I don’t think the Emperor had it in him to separate the two of them.”

“Anthony  is completely adorable.” Joan nods to herself. “One of those faces you just can’t say no to.”

Well, David had plenty of practice doing that, but the Emperor never did. He never said no to Anthony  either, now that David thinks of it. Anthony  got whatever he asked for, and it was on David to step in and be the bad guy, tell him he couldn’t eat cake for breakfast or have that new-fangled toy until he donated some of the toys he never played with. It was an easy way to appease children. And living in a palace where everything was taken care of by others, saying ‘yes’ required no effort on the Emperor’s part. An easy way to get Anthony  to shut up and stay the hell away from him.

“Even after we moved in, he was always trying to get me out of the way. He argued with Sabrina when she named me her Royal Protector,” David continues. “He said she’d never be respected if she picked me, that one of the Elite officers, a boy from a good family, would be a better choice. He put me through the wringer in training. Picked on every mistake I made, downplayed every duel I won. Kept trying to convince her to change her mind.”

This was right after Catriona Kaldwin was murdered, so in retrospect, maybe it made sense to be so critical. A Serkonan peasant serving as a bodyguard, even he can see the parallels the Emperor might have drawn. But...still.

“I mean, he had a bit of a point,” Joan says carelessly. “People didn’t like her right from the get-go. May not be fair, but it is what it is. Choosing the right bodyguard, getting on the nobles’ good side, isn’t that how the game is played?”

“It wasn’t a game! It was her goddamn safety!” David throws a loose piece of rubble over the canal. “Outsider’s eyes, I swear I was the only person who f*****g cared about any of that half the time. It was all about appearances and security theater. You know, I redesigned all the patrols around the Tower. I created a special training program specifically for the guards stationed there. I’m the one who had new locks installed on all the windows, who insisted on training her to defend herself, because I was the one who knew how assassins think! Everyone else was too full of their bullshit to see past their own noses, to remember that this was about protecting her!”

David stops short. He huffs. And huffs some more, glaring angrily in the direction of the Tower, hidden behind buildings and district walls.

Joan stares at him with her an indescribable, gentle sadness in her eyes. “You cared about her a lot,” she says quietly.

David slumps, and stares at the street below. “I’d...be dead if it weren’t for Sabrina,” he says quietly. “The way I was going, right before I met her, that would have seen me dead before I saw thirty-five. And it was a shitty life. I had no real goals beyond scraping together enough coin for cigarettes, beyond just surviving another day.”

Sometimes that’s all you really can do, his mother’s voice echoes in the empty spaces of his mind. Survive because you have to, and someday you can live because you want to. David did everything he could to make himself like living, make it all feel worth it. He slipped coin under the doors of people he heard were having trouble, stole bread and produce from street vendors and distributed them to mudlarks, stepped in and stopped more than his fair share of assaults. But it all felt empty. And David thought that maybe the reason he wandered was because he was looking for something.

“Sabrina sort of fell into my lap, and...well, someone had to take care of her.” He shrugs. “Having her around was the kick in the ass I needed to get my s**t together. I stopped doing the risky s**t. Started talking to people more-people love talking about kids. I even fought differently. I took care of myself better because she needed me around, and I wanted to be around for her. It was the same way with Anthony , but Sabrina was...first. It wouldn’t have happened without her. I wouldn’t have been here.”

They sit in quiet for a long time, bathed in the last embers of the dying sunlight. They watch the canal. Listen to the creaks of the crumbling buildings.

“You must miss her so much,” Joan says softly, a catch in her voice.

David hangs his head. “I wasn’t supposed to outlive her.”

“But you did. And you want to undo all the hard work she did fixing you up?” Joan shakes her head.

“I was only a better person because of her.”

“She’s gone, David, but she still existed. Acting like all that s**t she did could just be erased like that, you’re acting like what she did didn’t matter. You know she would want you to keep being that better person.”

“I…” David leans forward and buries his face in his hands. “I know,” he says. “But I don’t...know how to do that, not without her. How am I supposed to do this? How am I supposed to do any of this without her?”

Like an answer, Joan holds up the bottle.

“Sabrina was always trying to be better,” David rambles. “To be best. Told her. She pushed herself, pushed too much. Told her she didn’t have any... nothing to prove.”

“Hmm.” Joan leans back and tips more whiskey into her mouth. “She did, though. Homegirl in a man’s world. The d**k was stacked...stocked? Everyone was aaaall against her, that’s all.”

David tries to nod, but it turns out to be a lot of work. “She was better than them,” he mumbles. “Why should she…she need to impress them? Bunch of im...im-ba...dumb fuckers.”

Lizzy’s hand finds his shoulder, and she smacks it twice before curling her fingers over the top. “Ya know, what you said, ‘bout Thalia? Don’t ‘hiccup’ tell ‘er I said so, but you was right.” She tips her head back to look at the stars. “You was so right. The rich f***s, they don’t do nothin’. I hate ‘em all, ‘cept you and your boy.”

David can’t really see the stars, even leaning back to look up at the sky. They move around like flies in a cup. That didn’t seem right, somehow.

“Sabrina wasn’t like...like that. Not like them. She cared.” He shakes his head, but it comes off more like nodding sideways. “Why she didn’t...see that? How’d she not know she was better than all them?”

“‘Cause they told her she weren’t good enough. Bunch o’ liii ars. Stupid heads.”

“And the thing is…” David’s hand paws at Lizzy’s back to find her shoulder. “She was always trying to impress me too. Why’d she do that? She was better than me too.”

“Don’t ‘hiccup’ go thinkin’ that trash.”

“I suck.”

“No, you ain’t.” Joan paws at his arm, forcing him to look at her. “You’re so f*****g good, David. You a cool witch. An’ you an awesome dad. I wanna be like you when I’m all growed up.”

“I don’t want you...want you anything like me. You hear me, Catspaw?” He holds a finger to her nose and ends up poking her cheek. “Nothing like that. You’re better than me.”

“Ya don’t know me.”

“f**k off, I know you,” he says, clawing for her hand. “And if the Out....if that bastard so much as looks at you, I will f*****g fistfight him.”

“Chaaaarming.” Joan dips forward, hands at his chest, then pulls herself back. “Did it...I wadn’t gonna kiss you, sorry.” She tips her head back and laughs, holding one finger up. “Ya know, when I’ma drunk, I always wanna ‘hiccup’  kiss people. Like, kiss evrybody. But you? I don’t wanna kiss you. No offense.”

“I don’t want...want to kiss you either.” Somehow his hand is on her thigh now, so David moves it off. “You know, Trimble thinks I’m fu...fucking you.”

“He’s, uh, producting? Naw, projecting. Cause he wants to tap this.” She smacks the side of her pant leg.

“Is not...not you.” He points at her chest. “I don’t like it. Like any of it. Not with you, but no one.”

Joan c***s her head. “Like, none of it? Not just kissing?”

“No.” He blinks, trying to focus on one lamppost, but it quickly becomes two and he gives up. “Is that weird?”

“A little,” Joan admits.

“I don’t want…” David presses his lips together in frustration with his non-compliant tongue. “I don’t hate it. I’ve had s*x before.”

“Of courzzz. You made Anthony .”

“It wasn’t bad. I liked it enough. Just didn’t like it enough to go again.” His fingers tap against the masonry. “Liked it even though I remembered things. They were always real nice, though. Patient. ‘Cept for one, but I asked him not to be.”

“You…” Joan squints at him. “‘Membered what?”

“Just…” He waggles his fingers. “Just stuff, you know?”

“Like what?”

“Nothing.” David shakes his head. Why is she asking questions? He wouldn’t have said anything if he knew she’d ask questions.

“No, David…” Joan moves her hand over, feels around for his. “Tell me.”

He pulls his hand away. “No...you think I’m weird.”

“No, said it’s weird. Nothin’ wrong with you.”

“Says who?” David stares down at the canal. “Maybe there is something wrong with me. Maybe I’ve been ruined. Can’t think of why else...why it’d just be me.”

“S’ not just you. There be others…” She grumbles. “I prove it. Show you.”

David shakes his head. “And people said I did that to her,” he says, turning back to Lizzy. “That I f****d Sabrina. I wouldn’t hurt her like that! Wouldn’t...not anyone like that.”

Joan nods and passes him the bottle. “Last bit goes to you. Get that back there, boy.”

David tips his head entirely back, almost falling over, to get the last of the whiskey at the bottom of the bottle. He stopped tasting the swill about an hour ago-has it been an hour? He has no clue how time works right now. He just knows it’s dark, been dark for...a while.

“I couldn’t hurt her,” he repeats, setting the empty bottle back down and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Did I act...act like I would? Like I was evil? Why’d they all think I did?”

“Told ya, it’s pro-deck-shion.”

“I should of left.” David shakes his head. “Should of taken her away from Dunwall. They all suck. No one here deserved her.”

“Don’t think ‘hiccup’ her dad would of let you.”

“I don’t f*****g care. Should of cared more about her life,” he rants. “Should of cared sooner. Should of taken her, hid her somewhere.”

“You know.” Joan picks up the empty bottle only to look marginally confused at it for a moment. “Dad, he tried to do something like, like that. My dad tried to kidnap me once.”

“From you mom?”

“Yeah, yeah.” She nods, her eyes half-closed. “When I was just a lil sprout. His boat-”

A door bangs open. David and Joan both freeze, barely breathing like that could give them away. The light comes from below them. David blinks a few times before he sees Jerome step out with a torch in hand, and he realizes that they’ve been sitting right above their front door.

Jerome steps forward a few feet, swinging it back and forth. Joan chucks their empty whiskey bottle in his vague direction, and Jerome nearly jumps out of his skin when it crashes on the asphalt.

“Hey, loooser!” Joan waves both her arms. Jerome jerks the beam upwards.

“What the f**k are you two doing up there?!” he yells. “How did you even get up on the roof?!”

“Got maaaad skills, baby!”

“Are you drunk? You know what, never mind. Just get off the roof, you’re scaring Eugene!”

With that, Jerome turns back around. The front door slams a second later. David scoots his butt back from the side of the building. “Come on. Should prob...should go to bed,” he mumbles.

“Yeah. f**k, gonna feel this in the morning…” Joan tries to push herself up and get her legs under her, but one of her feet slips and she goes down. David almost throws himself over the edge to catch her, but she reappears next to him in a whiff of black smoke. She reaches out either to keep David from falling off himself or to restabilize herself. They end up grabbing at each other, swaying back and forth.

“Whoa...oh, that izzent fun while drunks…”

“I told you,” David slurs. “I told you we shouldn’t be...high...ugh.”

“I get it.” Joan pats his back. “Get it, old man. Get you.”

David grabs onto her to Blink down from the roof when they reach the other side of the mall, and Joan is right, it isn’t fun. The ground seems to spin in an impossible way and he has no idea where to put his feet. He keeps his arms wrapped around Lizzy’s midsection as they walk, mostly because he forgets to take them off.

Joan unpeels herself from him when they get to her door, hands rooting in her pockets for her keys. David braces himself against the wall with one hand and watches. She finally produces her keys, fumbles with them for a moment trying to select the right one, and they finally slip from her fingers.

“f**k,” she breathes, leaning down to grab them. She can’t even bend halfway before her feet are making dizzy dances, her arms out to steady herself. David would pick them up for her, but he...doesn’t really think he can bend down either. Not and get back up, at least.

Joan finally accepts defeat, and lays against the door. “Edgaaaaar,” she whines, slapping the metal panel. “Edgar, let me iiiiiin.”

“What’s the magic password?” A singsong voice comes from inside.

“I will eat your ffff- f*****g eyes if you don’t open for me.”

“Nope!”

“Edgar, let her in or you’ll have me to deal with,” David yells, with only slightly less slurring.

The door swings open and Edgar catches Joan in a practiced, smooth motion, turning to glare at David. “You were drinking with him all night?!”

Joan wavers as she pulls away, tries to stand on her own. “You shaw me leave with him.”

“I thought you were gonna beat the crap out of him.”

“Nah, David ain’t into that s**t. I only ssssspank people who ask.” She waves in his direction, her eyes already closing. “Nightie-night, old man.”

“Night.”

Edgar glares at him once more before slamming their door shut. David stands there for a minute, staring at the dirt beneath his boots and trying to collect himself.

Okay. He can do this. He can walk over to the mill, not fall into the canal that has no safety guardrails, and make it up the bazillion stairs to his bed. That number didn’t seem right. Only, like...three flights, he thinks. How many stairs does he have to combat?

He’s over-thinking this. He just needs to go. David pushes himself away from the wall.

The ground is more uneven than he remembers. He thinks it’s just the terrain, but then his footsteps make loud clanging noises and he knows he’s walking on the metal grating. Each foot seems to go exactly where he doesn’t intend it to go, and David has to hold his arms out to keep from falling on his face. One foot in front, then the other foot, that’s wrong isn’t it? One foot has to be in back. That’s just math. Nope, bad mantra. Right foot, left foot. Better. Right foot, left foot. Right foot, nope, too much. He has to wave his arms to keep from tipping sideways into the canal. That wouldn’t be good. The water wheel would crush him.

He gets through the warehouse fairly easily, all things considered, barring his boot toe getting caught in the floor grates once or twice. The stairs pose another challenge. David finds he can climb if he takes them one at a time. Step up once, move his other foot to join it. Plant both feet firmly on the step and reassure his grip on the railing before attempting another one.

It takes forever. But he’s slowly making progress. He hears chatter from the main hall, and he hopes to the Void that nobody turns and sees him, because David highly doubts he can make conversation and act normal without revealing how completely sloshed he is.

Rounds the corner. Okay, they can’t see him anymore. One foot, two. He wavers. Grips the railing and goes again.

He’s on the last flight of stairs before his foot glances off the edge of the step, and slips. He stumbles and his other leg gives up. David pitches forward and tries to catch his fall, ends up smashing himself in the teeth. He slides down the last few steps of progress, banging his chin on every step along the way.

He stops when his boots meet the landing. Okay, this actually wasn’t such a bad place to sleep. He can just turn his head, rest his cheek on this step. Nobody uses this staircase except for him, so he won’t be tripping anybody up. This is fine. David closes his eyes.

His door opens.

“Oh my-David! Are you okay?!”

Right. He forgot about the kids.

Anthony  bangs down the stairs, kneeling down next to David’s head. “Are you hurt?” he asks, his fingers at David’s temple. “Did you fall?”

“M’fine,” David mumbles, reaching up to ruffle Anthony ’s hair. He misses his head, however, and ends up awkwardly petting the air next to his ear.

“Did David fall down the stairs?” Rose’s voice comes from the top of the steps. “Sounded like it.”

“Is he hurt?” Vasco calls as he descends the steps after Anthony .

“I don’t know, I’m trying to ask him!” Anthony  hisses.

David’s hand finds Anthony ’s cheek. “It’s good,” he nods, barely able to keep his eyes open.

Anthony ’s are wide with concern, and he presses a hand to David’s own cheek. “You fell.”

“Just a...a bit.” He tries lifting his head, and his neck lolls to the side. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not. No, don’t move your head! Just sit here for a second, we’ll look at you.”

“It’s good. Quit your…” He swallows. “Quit your worrying.”

“David.” Anthony  blinks. “Are...are you drunk?”

David tries to lift his eyelids a little more.

“I’m fine,” he repeats.

He blinks, and then there’s three kids above him, Anthony , Rose, and Vasco with the tops of their heads touching as they stare down at him in concern.

“Well, I don’t think he’s concussed,” Vasco says. “Just drunk.”

“But David doesn’t drink!” Anthony  squeaks as they all pull away. “He never drinks!”

“Anthony , think of all that’s happened in the last couple months, and tell me the man has no reason to drink,” Rose says dryly.

“No, he totally has reason, but this isn’t like him! I’m not lying, I’ve seen him drink twice in my life, and once was because Sabrina spiked his coffee!”

“You were in on that…” David says lazily.

Rose gestures to him. “See? He’s parentally judging you. He’s fine.”

“He’s not! David doesn’t like alcohol!”

“David, have you been drinking?” Vasco stares at him with an eyebrow raised.

“Yeesh.”

“See?” Vasco points. “He even says he’s been drinking.”

“My question wasn’t whether he was drunk, it’s why he’s drunk.”

“Because he’s a grown-ass man and can drink a pint if he feels like it. Now come on.” Rose squats down. “Let’s get him into bed.”

“Oh, no no no.” Vasco shoos them both away. “I got this.”

“Uh. You do?”

“You sure about that?”

“Well, you have one arm, and you aren’t allowed to pick anything heavy up, so it’s on me!”

“I physically have two arms,” Anthony  states, raising one. Rose shakes her head and folds hers.

“Just let him throw out his back.”

“I got this,” Vasco states, then slips one arm under David’s armpit. He pulls, and David does try to move with him...but it doesn’t seem to help too much. “Okay.” Vasco’s voice breaks. “Maybe I don’t got this.”

Rose rolls her eyes and steps past him. “Hey, who all’s down there? Can somebody give us a hand?”

“I’m fine,” David restates, resting the back of his head against the step. “Can sleep...sleep here.”

“David, do you hear yourself?” Anthony  gestures angrily. “You’re going to lay on the stairs all night because you’re too drunk to make it up them?”

His necks lolls back. “Uh-huh.”

“No!”

“Anthony , calm down.” Vasco leans in, speaking quietly. “Cut your dad some slack, okay?”

“He’s…” And Anthony  just presses his lips together and glares at the paneling in the wall.

“Somebody call me?” Paul comes jogging up the stairs. “No, wait, does the fine lady need my assistance?”

“Well, David’s the one who needs help, but I guess that still fits.” Rose shrugs. “Can you carry him up to bed?”

“I don’t need to…” David raises a finger, nearly batting himself in the face as it comes back down. “I can walk. Don’t need... carrying.”

“Wow.” Paul blinks at him. “You are one toasted fucker.”

“This isn’t like him.” Anthony  motions before wrapping his arms around his stomach. “He doesn’t drink. Ever.”

“Well, I used to ‘not drink’ too. Until I did.” Paul leans down and pulls one of David’s arms over his shoulders. “Come on, big guy. Think you can move your legs if I get you up?”

“Up...where? ”

“Right, right.” He wraps one arm around David’s waist and pulls. “Holy...fuck.”

“I know, he’s heavy! Which makes sense, you know, he’s pure muscle.”

Rose chuckles to herself. “That’s why we got Paul. Serkonos’s main export is apparently men with rippling back muscles and pecs you could hold a coin between.”

“Except me?”

“Your parents are Tyvian. You don’t count.”

Paul shuffles up the steps, giving David the time for his feet to find the steps and plant his boot firmly before taking the next. “Rosie, didn’t your brother have that story about me sprouting wings and flying away with this guy?” He grunts. “Yeah, I could not deadlift him. Don’t think anything could fly.”

“You should,” David slurs. “I gave you…”

“Yeah, yeah, your sparring sessions are great, but it’s gonna be a long while until I’m as strong as you.”

“Mmm.” David turns his head, dipping his nose until it meets the fabric of Paul’s shoulder. “You should bleach your hair,” he mumbles. “You’d look good blond.”

“You’re kinda biased, but I’ll take it into consideration.”

How is he...oh. Well, he wasn’t even thinking about Anthony ’s hair. David generally likes dark hair better.

“Vaz? You coming up?” He hears Rose ask.

“Yeah, I’m just...keeping an eye on them. You know, making sure David doesn’t fall.”

“Riiiight.”

Paul deposits him on his bed, and David immediately flops on his back, nearly banging his head on the bedpost. He stares up at the ceiling, only vaguely aware of someone tugging on his boots.

“Yeah, there’s no way we’re getting his coat off…”

“That’s fine.” Vasco appears in his peripheral vision. “Can you help me get him on his side?”

“Can do.”

There’s some pushing and pulling with his arms and shoulders, but David mainly just watches Vasco’s intense, serious face. He looks completely different when he’s focused. It’s funny. His hair is starting to grow in, just a bit. He must shave his head, David knows, but how? Does he use a straight razor? That has to be time consuming. Is he going to keep it shaved here? David kind of hopes he does-his head is a good shape for bald, and it’s weird imagining Vasco with hair. At least his bruises are mostly faded. Mottled yellows and greens, only when the light is right.

“David, there’s water here on the nightstand.” Rose appears besides Vasco, and David blinks in confusion at where she came from as she places a jug on the table. “I don’t know, should we make him drink some now?”

“Hmm, I don’t want him to choke. And if we put anything else in him, he might just throw up.” Vasco puts a hand to his chin.

“Okay, so we don’t. But yeah, drink some water when you’re able, David. It’s right here for you.”

“‘Tanks…”

Her dreadlocks nearly reach her waist. David is struck by the intense urge to reach up and grab the end of one. Why does she keep her hair like that? She’d be prettier if she wore it normally. She turns, and David watches her profile. Her freckles are adorable, but there’s something in the slope of her nose and the harshness of her cheekbones that pisses him off, for some reason.

“You guys all good?”

“Yeah. David should pass out here soon.”

“Tight. Come get me if he falls out of bed or something.”

There’s footsteps, and a door slaps. More footsteps, the floorboards creaking, and someone starts pulling David’s blankets over him.

“Anthony , aren’t you coming to bed?”

“Just give me a minute.”

“He’s just going to kick them off, you know. Drunk people always think they’re hot. I’m surprised he’s still wearing clothes.”

Anthony  wanders into his vision, smoothing out the blankets and ensuring David is covered. He’s so...Anthony  is wonderful. Even after everything’s David done, even though he knows David isn’t his father. Even though he hoped he was. Why would he hope for that? Why did David ever tell him differently? What would the harm be, in letting Anthony  believe that? David didn’t deserve the honor of being Anthony ’s father. He should have been grateful Anthony  even wanted him. He’s so cruel.

David reaches out and grips Anthony ’s hand between his fingers, holds onto it like a lifeline.

“I wish I was your dad,” he whispers.

Anthony  just stares at him with indecipherable eyes, mouth pressed tight and the whites surrounding his pupils seeming to waver. Finally, he leans forward and presses his lips to David’s temple.

“I love you.”

Then Anthony  drops his hand, and returns to the other side of his room where his friends are. Someone turns off the lights, and David stares into the darkness. At some indistinguishable point, his eyes slip closed.

White, glittering stones, golden trim and pillars of jade. The heavy scent of perfume hanging low in the air. A ceiling of crystal.

He’s been here before.

David’s visited the Boyle manor a number of times, of course. Accompanying his Empress to dinners in the banquet hall and teas in the library. But there’s only one other time he’s seen it like this, decked out in wall streamers and curled ribbons, people dressed in their finest milling every which way. A year ago. Sneaking Sabrina into the Masquerade.

Shaking his head, David picks up the fountain pen next to the guestbook. His gloves are gone, as are the bandages he keeps wrapped around his hands. The Mark is laid bare to see.

For some reason, he doesn’t care. He taps the pen against the edge of the table as he surveys the signatures, looking for a place to write his own and wondering whether he should sign as ‘Royal Protector’ or if just ‘David’ would be enough to distinguish him. He sets the pen to the paper and the ink blots, black roots creeping over the page and trailing up to the last name signed.

Stefan Attano.

David blinks. It could be a joke, sure. Most of the aristocracy, people who pay more attention than him, would know of Catriona Kaldwin’s murder. Would likely remember the name of her killer. Someone could be playing a sick joke. But David knows that’s not the case.

Stefan Attano is here. The man who held David back and forced him to watch his Empress die is somewhere within these walls. He has a reason to be here. A statement to make. A person to kill.

David needs to find her.

“He’s just doing his job,” a woman in a black suit and a green mask comments flippantly as David steps away from the table. “A party like this, anyone might have crept in.”

Her friend in white folds her arms. “Excuse me, my cousin is a marquis.”

“Well, of course I don’t mean you.”

The woman in white rolls her eyes, turning to David as her companion continues conversing with their male friend. “Are you trying to guess which one is which?” she asks excitedly. “I was thinking of sneaking upstairs to look for clues! Or would that be cheating?”

David doesn’t need clues. He knows Lydia is wearing black tonight.

He steps off to the side, into the parlor adjacent to the entry hall. People are mingling here, browsing the bookshelves and watching the front window, waiting for friends that have yet to arrive. David steps through the crowd, his head on a pivot, looking for a hostess. He doesn’t know exactly what the Boyle women are wearing tonight, just that Lydia is wearing the black version of the same outfit her sisters are wearing. A mask to hide their faces. Likely something to cover their hair.

David himself is wearing no mask. His face, posted on every other street corner and newsboard in the city, is on full display. His scar is distinctive-everybody must know who he is.

He’s wearing his red work coat and still bears the Mark, so this isn’t some sort of time travelling thing. Everyone here thinks he killed the Empress. Yet they don’t scream at the sight of him, don’t summon guards to drag him back to Coldridge.

“There were s****l rites, I can only assume,” one woman gossips with two men. She lowers her voice in mocking whisper and leans forward. “I heard she bathed in her own nephew’s blood!”

“Ridiculous! What sort of hygiene is that?!”

“It’s a ritual for the Outsider. To keep them safe!”

“Ella,” her male companion scolds. “You could get her sent to the Abbey.”

“Nobody that rich gets sent anywhere they don’t want!”

There’s an Overseer armed with a music box not twenty yards away. He just stares ahead, clutching his windup key like he didn’t hear a thing.

These people all think they’re untouchable. No matter how many of their friends die by blade or plague. No matter how many Empresses fall. Nothing will topple their towers until they’ve already fallen from them.

“Weeeelcome to my party,” a voice like smoke on the breeze speaks. A woman in a red pantsuit stands before him, her face a frozen mask of porcelain features, plastic flowers piled atop her head. “Hmm,” she wavers as she looks David up and down. “A few more drinks and I might find that get-up attractive.”

So that’s the Boyle costume, David thinks as he steps away. Flowers, ugh. At least it’s better than last year when they dressed as birds and left trails of feathers through the hallways.

“Careful,” a guard holds up his hand as David exits the sitting room. “That’s a wall of light, a gift from the Prime Minister to protect his friends.” He sniffs. “I doubt you qualify.”

He doubts it too. Burrows never liked Sabrina.

Flowers, black flowers on the top of her head. David power-walks down the hall, barely taking in the elaborate wall hangings and confetti littering the floor. His eyes are on the party guests, looking for that black outfit. Lydia is here somewhere. He needs to find her and get her to safety before he finds Stefan. Before Stefan makes a target of her.

Where’s Rose? She was supposed to accompany Lydia tonight. Or Vasco? Joan should be with him too. David doesn’t know where they are. But somehow, he knows they’re not present at the party tonight. He knows they’re safe. And that’s enough to satisfy him.

“My buildings are full of corpses and rats,” he overhears as he passes the smoking room. “Where’s the fortune there?”

Oh, the poor man.

“If you want to be beaten, go ahead,” his black-vested partner says. “Let your family starve. Sell your wife into prostitution. I’m sure I can get you a good price.”

“You son of a b***h!”

Really, David much preferred the back-alley manner of backstabbing to the aristocratic method. The gangs might slit your throat and leave you bleeding out in the gutter all for the change in your back pocket, but at least they don’t try to pretend they’re better than that.

He turns around and nearly stumbles into a woman in white, wearing a wide-brimmed hat carrying an array of flowers.

“I trust you’re on the guest list?” Lady Boyle fixes him with a stare before turning away, brushing some imaginary dust off her pants.

The dining hall is decorated to the nines, showing off the impressive array of sweets and wines, and one long table occupied by some type of fish that’s apparently supposed to be eaten raw. A statue at the end belches out confetti and glitter at regular intervals. David glares at it and moves away. Last year, it took two baths and three clothing changes for him to rid every crevice of his body from that junk. Sabrina had glitter stuck in her hair for a month.

“If something caused this,” a man in a gold mask says. “It wasn’t the Empress’s passing. That’s what they want you to think.”

“Watch what you’re saying!” His red-masked friend whispers in answer.

“Oh, I’m saying nothing against the Regent! She’s the one holding this all together!”

“If the plague was here before the Empress died, it’s gotten a thousand times worse since.” The man in red shakes his head. “I never saw corpses floating by in the Wrenhaven when the Empress was alive.”

“Or you just didn’t notice it, hmm? Kaldwin is restoring order to the city. Some people get crushed underfoot. Why we ever trusted that job with some bumpkin, half-breed wench is beyond me.”

“What’s out there isn’t order.”

“New growth cannot exist without first the destruction of the old, and all that. When you look at it this way, the Empress had to die. For all this to be fixed! Without her, we’re set on the path to a golden age.”

“Do you know they dug down and found the ruins of another city under this one? I bet they thought they were in a golden age too.”

Of all the things David wishes back from his previous life, none of this even registers. Never once thought about it, with any sort of longing or without. He didn’t miss this. Not the opulence. Not the company. Not the fine wines or even the food. Not the-

He stops and listens for the music being piped through the rooms at non-obtrusive levels. Okay, he missed the music a little. But they had musicians at home.

Like Lydia. Where is she?

He loops through the rooms again, glancing every which way for a black headdress. Ignoring the attempts at conversation the other party-goers try to engage him in, brush off the guards when they step forward and ask for his invitation. Fancy clothes and masks, but none the one he’s looking for.

He doesn’t care if Attano kills anyone else. He doesn’t care if any of these people are caught in the crossfire of their inevitable battle. They can save their own skins. But Lydia is his friend. He needs to find her. Needs her to be safe.

On his third loop, David grits his teeth as the snippets of conversation jump out at him, the voices and masks of all the people who have the nerve not to be Lydia Boyle.

“I happen to know Waverly is in white tonight,” one woman wearing a truly ugly fly mask says. “Perhaps she’s pretending to be a virgin?”

“I don’t know why I even came to a Boyle party in the first place! I almost wish you were that assassin, anything to be done with this!”

“Oh, didn’t you hear? Their niece has this terrible cough as of late-it’s for the best they were evicted. What if it’s the plague?”

“Really, as long as the plague keeps to the common folk, I don’t see a reason to bother. They’re ‘low class’ for a reason! If they don’t like it, they can try not being so lazy!”

“Shall we gather for whiskey and cigars tonight?”

“Oooh, that dress is an absolute scandal!”

“Do you like it?” A woman in white twirls, her skirt fanning out around her. A red sash around her waist, threads of green woven into her hair, a skull mask on her face. “It’s an exact replica of the dress the Empress was buried in!”

By the time he pushes the door from the back hallway to the library open, David can barely contain his anger. The laughter reverbs in his ears. The grating voices.

The red Lady Boyle stands in front of the fireplace, paging through a book. She sets it down as she sees David approaching.

“Enjoying my pa-”

He grabs her by the wrist, yanking her close. She seems ruffled for a moment, but her hands come to rest on his lapels as he moves his hand down to the small of her back. They step closer together, as if they were about to dance. Like David did with his Empress a year ago.

Shoves his sword through her stomach.

The tip extrudes from her back, blood coating the blade. David’s hand moves to cradle her neck as he eases her down, her head dipping and lolling lifelessly. The blade slides out of her as easily as it went in.

Someone starts to scream, finally realizing that Lady Boyle and David are not, in fact, dancing. The nobles in the room either drop to their knees or flee, screaming for help.

David steps forward. He can see the Overseer with the music box through the doorway, walking forward at as fast of a pace he can manage with that thing weighing him down. David doesn’t need magic to kill, but he also doesn’t need to waste his time with this. He draws a grenade from his pocket, waiting a good three seconds after pulling the pin to lob it straight at the Overseer’s chest. Both man and machine scatter across the ground in bits.

Guards start pouring into the room. David Blinks forward and slits one’s throat before his eyes can fully settle on him. Then there’s gunshots, and David moves to the side. Locates the officer with the gun and Blinks above him, landing with his blade through the back of his neck.

Another guard raises his own pistol. David Pulls the other surviving guard to take the shot, then drops him like a sack of rocks. The pistol-wielding guard runs further into the room to get a better shot, and David Blinks behind him. Cuts his throat.

The noble party-goers are still here, kneeling where they stood and screaming for help while making no effort to help themselves. David pulls them up one-by-one. One with a blade through the hollow of their collarbone, another with a gash in their neck. One-by-one, they die. They’ve practically formed a queue.

A guard milling about the base of the stairs spots him as he crosses the entryway, runs forward with his sword drawn. David Blinks forward and kicks, sending him hurtling backwards through the wall of light. There’s a spark, and then he’s ash.

He kills the nobles in the sitting room as well. The door was right there. They made no effort to leave.

Someone’s hit the alarm, but David pays it no mind. His vision is red, and he can smell the blood that has yet to be spilled. He wants the fight.

He bursts back through to the back hall, cutting down a guard standing directly in front of the doorway in one swipe. Another figure right next to him, and David reaches out and pushes her head down, impales the maid’s throat on his blade before he can register what she is. She sputters, chokes, stares at him with unbelieving eyes as he rips her blood out.

There are more nobles, ungrateful, scheming nobles in the smoking room. David sprints there, before the red in his vision fades. Blood fuels the haze, and David needs to keep it alive. He cuts. He kills. He watches them die.

He can hear guards assembling in the dining hall. A few servants cowering in the halls, he kills those too. It requires blood. He needs to feed this. He needs to keep it going.

One officer takes a shot at him as David enters. He deflects it with his blade, sending it pinging off to shatter a nearby vase. One rushes forward, but the others call him to stand aside, and David soon sees why.

The other Overseer steps forward, winding his music box and filling the air with that grinding, ear-bleeding noise. David stops and stares. The Overseer advances, the guards clustered together at his sides.

David runs forward. The guns go off but, not expecting this, hit air. David reaches the music box and extends his arm forward, sticks an armed springrazor to the front before jumping back.

The officers see what it is, but it’s half a second too late to react. There’s a mess of torn cloth and meat, and David has to lean to the side to keep from being soaked. Bits of flesh litter the floor. Blood splattered across his face.

“Are you here for the cameo?” The white Lady Boyle kneels on the floor, hiding behind the buffet table. “It’s in the attic. Take it. There’s a key to the vault in my bedroom, take it too. Take everything! Just don’t kill me!”

She turns and runs as David approaches, but he’s faster than her. Grabs her by the stupid flowers on her ridiculous hat and pulls her back. Plants his sword in her gut. She stumbles as he pulls it out, and he thrusts in into the back of her neck for good measure.

The alarms still blare, the music still playing, but the house is deathly quiet as David rounds back through the rooms. Corpses lying everywhere, blood soaking into the marble. Did marble stain? It would take ages to get that out.

He Blinks over the wall of light, landing halfway up the staircase and not wasting a moment ascending the rest. Lydia’s room is on the opposite side of her house as her sisters’, he knows. She’s mentioned it. The door is locked, but one blow from his sword sends it to splitters. David steps through.

Purple bedding. Laundry littering the floor. No Lydia.

Waverly’s room, she’s mentioned that they hide in Waverly’s room when there’s an intruder. Wait for their guards to dispatch the thief or stalker, trusting a single locked door to protect them. Didn’t they have a vault in the basement? They’d be safer there. Like this, they’re sitting ducks.

David makes for the raised walkway that connects this part of the house to the other wing. Over the edge, he can see the mess he’s left across the hall. Red blood and tiny, shining scraps of paper.

Four more guards pour into the hall, blocking off his progress.

They sprint to meet him. David grabs the first man by his lapels and unceremoniously shoves him over the balustrade, sending him screaming to his death below. The closest guard jumps back, his eyes wide.

David steps forward, slashing the man diagonally from shoulder to hip. His eyes focus on the farthest guard, at the end of the hallway, before he’s even had the chance to return to neutral position. His hand extends, the Mark glowing as he Pulls, Blinks, brings the two together so he can s***h backwards and open his stomach. Then he turns on his heel and sends a bolt into the last guard’s eye.

With that done, David turns and continues on his way.

The first bedroom he breaks into is a near replica of Lydia’s, done over in refined black and lacking the piles of clothing strewn about. A portrait of the Prime Minister gracing the walls. The third of the bedrooms in red, the make-up table stacked high with pots of rogue and eyeshadow palettes, the whole room stinking of perfume.

Did she go down to the basement, to hide in the vault? That’s what he would have told her to do, David thinks as he doubles back. Maybe she’s gleaned something else from his lessons than chokeholds and pressure points. But she still wasn’t safe, not with Stefan Attano at large. Who knows what all that man could do? And David needs to see her to know she’s alright, protect her from Attano. These guards couldn’t do it. Nobody could but him.

One of them, she said the key to the vault was in her bedroom. Said something else, about the Boyle cameo, their most precious treasure. In the attic.

David finds the pull cord rather easily, once he knows what he’s looking for. A hatch above the top ledge bordering the room, sliding open to reveal the crawlspace above. He doesn’t know how the ladies Boyle get to it themselves-doesn’t know how Lydia climbed up here without any sort of ladder. But he Blinks, and ducks through the opening.

There, sitting on a closed chest, is a woman dressed in black. Her legs crossed, her hands folded nicely in her lap. When she sees David enter, she reaches up and removes her mask and hat.

Underneath is the face of Sabrina Stark.

“What are you doing here?” she says in a flat tone. David steps further in, the tip of his sword trailing on the ground.

“I’m here for you,” he hears himself say. “Come on. We have to go.”

Sabrina sets the hat on her lap, her fingers fiddling with the fake flowers. “I’m not leaving.”

“It’s not safe for you here.”

“I know.” She stares at the wall, her eyes far away.

David approaches her. His coat is stained with blotches of dark red, blood under his fingernails and splatters of it across his knuckles. He kneels in front of Sabrina, feeling the wet spot in his knees where his flesh presses up against the blood-soaked fabric.

“I need to take you out of here,” he says. Safety was an illusion. Anyone could find her up here-David did easily enough. He could take her down to the vault, lock her in, but there were always ways to breach the doors. He needs to take her away. Needs to put her in a boat and take her far, far away.

Sabrina turns her face down, looking at him with that blank expression. “I can’t leave, David,” she repeats. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I have to.”

“You have to leave.”

“I’m not leaving you behind.” David free hand darts out, wrapping his fingers around hers. Clutching her white-gloved hands. “I can get you out of here, Sabrina.”

Sabrina presses her lips together, a half-smile and her eyes looking down on him with something like nostalgia in her eyes. She pulls her hands back, places her hat on the floor and stands up.

“Stefan Attano is coming for you,” he says as she steps away, watching the hatch at the other side of the attic. She nods.

“I know.”

“Then what are you still doing here?”

“Waiting.”

“We don’t have to.” David wets his lips before he continues speaking. “I can fight him, you know.”

“No. You can’t.”

“I will.”

“No.” She whirls around. “You kill him, someone else will step in to do the job.”

“Then I’ll kill them too.”

“And where will you stop? How many of my citizens will have to die for you to be satisfied?”

For Sabrina? All of them. She was better than them all. He’d kill every person on these f*****g islands for her. Set this doomed Empire aflame.

There’s blood on her hands. Her gloves blotched and stained, wet fabric clinging to her fingers.

“I need to protect you, Sabrina.” He steps forward, reaching out and taking her hand in his. “Attano will-”

“Yes. He will.” She stares. “And if he’s meant to kill me, then I’ll die tonight.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it.”

“You don’t.” She shakes her head, stepping backwards. “This isn’t about you. Maybe it’s not fair, but I can’t think of much that is.”

“I have to try.” He swallows.

“You don’t have to do anything, David, don’t you see? We all have our choices. But we can’t change them once they’re done. You just have to live with them. So don’t waste your breath.”

“There has to be something.” He closes the distance between them, his hand curling protectively around her shoulder. “I can’t leave you here.”

“You have to.”

“No! I won’t give up on you.” He stares at her, those warm brown eyes he could stare into for hours, the slope of her cheeks and the thick lips that only smile at him half-heartedly. “You’d never give up on yourself.”

“I’m not giving up on anything, David. But there’s no point in resisting what I can’t control.”

“This isn’t set in stone.”

“Yes it is! You can’t stop it!”

“I will!”

“No.” She shakes her head. Still smiling. Her right hand comes up to wrap around his bicep, her thumb running back and forth over the material. Her left snaking down to wrap around his sword hand. “You can’t.”

She pulls. His hand moves with hers, lifting his sword.

Plunges it into her own belly.

“No.” David shakes his head, staring. The blood has already started flowing, the fabric around her stomach growing steadily darker as the wetness spreads. “No!”

He pulls. Sabrina’s hand doesn’t waver, and her body is as giving as stone. The sword doesn’t budge. Not one inch, not one bit. His other hand goes to her flesh, pushing, trying to keep the blood inside of her. Try to keep her together.

“No, no, no…”

“Yes.” Sabrina’s eyebrows quirking in anger, that stony glare.

“No!”

“Yes, David.” She nods, her face grim as she stares him down. “Yes.”

David startles awake to the sound of Anthony ’s alarm clock.

He grimaces and squeezes his eyes shut, willing Anthony  to turn the damn thing off before he goes deaf. It takes a good few seconds for him to realize that it is in fact off, and the sound he’s hearing is only the ringing in his ears.

He did not miss hangovers.

David groans and flops over on his stomach. It’s far past the time he usually gets up. Normally he’s out the door with Rose, who starts her chores a few hours before the day begins for the rest of them, sometimes even waking before her. He should get up. Seize the day.

Second of Hearths.

He shoves his face into his pillow.

On the other side of the room, Anthony  and Vasco dress themselves in near silence. After a bit, David hears the telltale sounds of steps across the floor, feet creaking their way to his bed.

“David,” Anthony  says, in a voice that’s not really a whisper but not full-volume either. “David, it’s time to get up.”

He groans, more to let Anthony  know he’s not dead than anything else.

“David, it’s past eight.”

“He’s gotta be hungover, Anthony .”

“Well, that’s his own fault!” Anthony  says in a slightly louder voice.

“And maybe still a little drunk?” Vasco says, then the floor creaks as he steps forward. “Won’t kill him to sleep in one day. Let’s go get breakfast.”

Anthony  sighs. “Fiiine.”

There’s more footsteps, and then the door closes a little more loudly than it needs to be.

David keeps his head planted firmly in his pillow. The material presses on his eyes, creating kaleidoscopes of colors on the inside of his eyelids, dark fireworks like the ones shot off at the Boyle parties. He breathes, his chest barely expanding to allow room for his lungs. He feels cold.

‘You have survived all your worst days yet, and today will be no different.’

Not. In. The. Mood.

He lays there. He’s cold. He’s thirsty. The pillow presses up against his nose too much and he can’t quite get enough air to be comfortable. He could move, lay on his back. Pull his covers up. Drink some water.

He doesn’t.

He lost his coat at some point in the night. Socks too. They’re probably on the floor. He can’t find the energy to lift his head and check.

He lays. Thinks blank thoughts. There’s nothing, no energy and no motivation to do anything else. He just lays there.

The door opens again.

“Hey, David.” Anthony  is quieter this time, tiptoeing to his side. “We brought you some breakfast. Ricardo made bread this morning.”

He doesn’t move.

“David,” Anthony  groans, then the bed dips as he sits down. “You can’t just lay in bed all day.”

“Why not?” Rose’s voice comes from the general direction of the door. “Let him stew in his misery, if that’s really what he wants to do.”

“Can you just...eat something? Please?”

“Anthony , this man has been going hard, nonstop, since the minute we broke him out of prison. He sleeps, like, four hours a day. He deserves a day off.”

“Come on, David.” Anthony  stands up again, and David feels his hands at his shoulders, shaking him. “I know what day it is, but-”

David turns his head just enough to get the words out. “Go away,” he roars.

Anthony  steps back, quiet. Rose steps forward.

“Just leave him be, Anthony ,” she says gently. “From what you’ve told me, it’s probably good if he gets a good cry out today. Leave him alone.”

“I...fine. I guess.” Anthony ’s hand over David’s fists, balled into the sheets. “There’s bread and water on the table. Just...come talk to me if you need to, okay?”

Then Anthony , mercifully, leaves.

He lays some more. Faintly, he can hear the day’s activity. The gaggle of voices downstairs, water creaking through these shitty old pipes. Even some faint birdsong outside. He hates his supernatural hearing.

He wants quiet because even the rustle of his bedsheets make his head feel like it’s going to split open, and every decibel to reach his ears infuriates him with its audacity. But the quiet closes around him like thick humidity on a summer’s night and he’s suffocating in it, drowning in his own thoughts.

Time passes like a dripping faucet. He lays. He waits.

David turns on his back. His eyes are unbearably dry and his eyelids stick to its surface for one unbearable, excruciating second every time he blinks. But he lacks the energy to just keep them closed. He lacks the energy to do anything but lie.

Twenty-four. Not an exceptionally exciting birthday, but one she should be here to celebrate all the same. One she should have been allowed to see.

He’s seen...ten of her birthdays. Technically eleven, but she didn’t tell him when she turned thirteen. It was only a few days later, when he was giving her some speech about maturity and how he had to make decisions for her because she was only twelve that she put her hands on her hips and replied brattily that she was thirteen now, thank you very much. A ‘celebration’ for them then would have likely amounted to David shelling out the coin for-or just stealing-three honey nut treats or something to that effect, but he...still wishes he had done that, when he found out her birthday had passed. It would have been something, to show someone gave a damn about her.

Her fourteenth, she was a princess by then. She had a party, a cake taller than she was and a mountain of presents. She was visibly uncomfortable with the attention and her father reassured her afterwards that they could have a smaller celebration the next year. By her fifteenth he was dead, and an Empress’s birthday was an international holiday whether she liked it or not.

Would this have been the year she finally told everyone to stuff it, that they weren’t celebrating while Dunwall was in its death throes? Or would she have folded under the pressure to have a party, an excuse for her court to drink on her dime and make fun of her outfit behind her back? He’d like to think she’d have put her foot down at last.

There will be no parties today. Not because Sabrina finally showed her spine, but because there are so few people left alive in Dunwall to celebrate. Because everyone in her court is too afraid of the Crown Killer to leave their homes, to gather with other potential targets in a place where they’ll be vulnerable and ripe for the killing. Because Sabrina is dead and didn’t turn twenty-four this morning.

She’s dead. Dead and wrapped in a shroud, arms crossed over her chest and laid to rest in a cold block of stone. She’s dead. David lays on his back and pretends he is too.

He can feel her at his fingertips, tapping at the glass and begging to be let in. She’ll want to make him feel better, he knows. Why?

Why doesn’t she go comfort Anthony  with her presence? Why is she with him, whispering words of encouragement and helpful secrets into his ear? What has David ever done to deserve it? He watched her take a blade to the gut and did nothing. He watched her die.

It’s not the same, he knows, with her trapped in that wooden idol. It’s just wrong. She’s fractured. Unwhole. She’s uncomfortable and distressed and he’s the one that let it get to this point.

He wants Sabrina back. He doesn’t want the bandage that is the Talisman on his grief, but he doesn’t deserve even that.

After a while, David pushes himself up. Slides his legs out from under the covers, lets his toes brush against the floor. He took off his pants at some point apparently; he’s just sitting there in his drawers.

At least nobody’s up here to see it. David doesn’t care about Anthony  seeing him in his underwear, but he has scars. Less so than on his arms, but they burned him here too. Whipped the back of his thighs and calves with reeds. One witch took a dagger and stabbed him in the meaty part of his thighs, multiple times.

He stares at them, the jagged marks where the knife met his flesh. Thinks about how Sabrina’s stomach would have looked, if she wasn’t so decomposed by the time they pulled her from the water. Deserved it. He deserved it.

There’s no pain. David would prefer pain. He’d rather distract himself with the discomfort of his hangover, rather immerse himself in the memories of his tortures. He has the brief, stupid thought of grabbing one of his knives and opening up his wounds, just to be able to feel them all over again. But then someone might notice him moving oddly to accommodate the injuries, there would be questions-Anthony  would be so upset. No, if he was going to do that, he’d need to be smarter about it. But he still wants the pain. He wants something to fill this void inside him. His bones feel like ice, his stomach a yawning chasm. His insides are crumbling in on themselves, shattering like glass, crunching under the pressure because there’s just nothing there to resist it. His chest is a vacuum. He’s empty.

And he can’t stand it.

Is this what the rest of his life, his life without Sabrina, going to be like? Will he ever be able to think of her without his heart feeling like it’s been poked with a cold needle? Will he ever be able to eat or take a sip of tea without that voice in the back of his head reminding him that his Empress is no longer able to do so, that he doesn’t deserve sustenance, doesn’t deserve the very air he breathes? Will he ever start feeling anything else?

He stands up. It’s been hours by now-the sun is coming in bright through the skylight, though the floor is still cold as the grave. Past noon, he guesses.

David puts his pants back on. It’s all the activity he can manage for the moment. He sits back down on his bed, twists and reaches up to the ledge behind his bed. His hand finds the pistol he keeps there easily.

He pulls back the chamber, checks that it’s loaded. Of course it’s loaded. He checks it every night, ensures he has some reliable method of fighting back, if he’s startled out of his sleep and needs to. He’s never fired it. Not this one. He had one at Dunwall Tower, but even that one he used more to garner attention than for offense. He’s had to shoot a few people, but if they were out of swinging distance for him, they usually weren’t much of a threat to Sabrina. He protected her with his sword.

David pops the cartridge back in. One bullet, he knows. This pistol is a single shot-Jerome’s mentioned being able to find a magazine upgrade, effectively turning it into a revolver-but David has no use for a revolver. Wouldn’t hurt. But he’d rather use his coin to improve his wristbow or buy more supplies. There’s no reason he needs to modify this pistol, or the one he keeps in a holster on his coat. Not now. His fingers dance over the metalwork, hover over the hammer, the barrel.

Puts it in his mouth.

He has no intention of squeezing the trigger, of course. No, not when there’s so much to do. Not when Anthony  still needs David around. And if he was-not like this. Not fast and messy- loud like this. People would probably hear, know instantly, have to live with that sound and the knowledge of what had happened.

And if they didn’t, someone would find him. Unexpectedly. Probably Anthony , f**k, that’s the most horrible thought. But possibly Rose or Vasco, as they practically live up here too. Reed occasionally comes up to tend the fire. Oh, Void, if Reed were the one to find that, David would never forgive himself. And no matter who found him, someone would have to clean him up, wouldn’t they? One of the servants. Ricardo would insist on doing it, so the kids didn’t have to. He didn’t deserve that. David couldn’t do that to him. And what was left of him, where would they even put him? If someone in their group died suddenly, they’d probably have to bury them in the yard-or sink them in the Wrenhaven. He knows Anthony  would object to that, insist on interring David someplace with honor. They’d have to stash his body somewhere. Attract rats. Smell.

Anthony . No matter how many notes or audiographs David leaves him, Anthony  would think it was his fault. There would be no convincing him of it, that the opposite was true. That Anthony  is the only reason David’s bothered to live this long. He’d wonder forever if he should have anticipated it, could have saved him, would never accept that he couldn’t. He’d blame himself and his memories of David would be forever shadowed in a red mist.

No, he’s not going to pull the trigger, but David sits with the barrel of his gun in his mouth and basks in the knowledge that he could. One twitch of his finger and this could all be over. No more missing Sabrina. No more worrying about Anthony , no more thinking about all the ways David could lose him too. No more remembering Coldridge, no more silently fearing the possibility of being rendered unconscious and brought back. Done. He’d be done. And whoever found his corpse or had to scrub his blood and brain matter from the walls, that wasn’t his problem. He’d be dead. Just like his Empress.

Part of him is tempted. But the other part-the part that should be setting off alarm bells, should be screaming him away like he’s on the edge of a cliff and that cliff is on fire-that part is only whispering to him. Telling him softly that he can, but he shouldn’t. Gently leading him back. That part is small. Overwhelmed by the parts of him that scream to just do it and get it over with.

But Sabrina has always brought out the best part of him, hasn’t she?

The muzzle tastes like gunpowder, and that tastes exactly how it smells. His teeth close around the barrel. He bites, hard, and squeezes his eyes shut.

Then he pulls it out of his mouth.

David grimaces as he rolls his tongue over. That’s a taste he won’t get out of his mouth for a while. He pulls the cartridge out again. Puts the pistol back on the ledge-the cartridge on his nightstand. Tips his head back and breathes.

He needs a f*****g drink.

The hall goes noticeably quiet when David walks in. People look away, glance down at their laps and barely seem to breathe as he passes. David glares at them all and walks to the kitchen.

He knows the cabinet where Ricardo keeps his stash of spirits. Cooks with them frequently. They’re all fed here on Thalia’s dime, but alcohol and cigarettes worked differently. That, everyone was responsible for providing themselves with. Wasn’t a big deal, considering most people here weren’t currently wanted for regicide or presumed dead. David can’t show his face at the market, so he’s always just given Jerome some extra coin and tells him what brand of smokes he wants. Alcohol has never been a concern.

He’s...technically stealing. And he doesn’t know if Thalia covered his cooking spirits or if Ricardo paid for them with his own coin. Well, David’ll pay him back either way. He’ll buy him a whole stockroom of liquor. Man’s got a job for life at the Tower as far as David’s concerned, and he’s not just saying that because he sorely missed Serkonan cooking.  

Wine, no. He doesn’t f**k around with that fruity s**t. He wants something that will get him drunk in as few sips as possible. Sake, he holds a grudge against for once making Sabrina so drunk she almost ended up in bed with some i***t who tried to take her to his room to ‘sleep it off’ and didn’t realize David was watching. He’s always preferred whiskey, but judging by the current throbbing at his temples, whiskey no longer prefers him. Getting old really sucks, he’s finding.

His hand closes around a bottle of rum. He’s feeling nostalgic. His mother drank rum, straight from the bottle. And mezcal, but he’s never been able to find any of that since moving to Dunwall.

He stands up and turns for the door, only to see Paul standing in the doorway.

David doesn’t really remember all what happened last night, but he vaguely remembers falling down the stairs like an i***t and having to be hauled back up them. He thinks Paul was there. He has the faint notion that Anthony  was quite upset with him.

“Hey,” Paul says, folding his arms. He nods to the bottle in David’s hand. “You want a drinking buddy for that, or do you want to be alone?”

David pulls the bottle closer. “Alone.”

Paul nods. “Cool, cool.” He looks around not meeting David’s eye. “Look, I...get it. s**t’s f****d man, and you gotta do what you need to do. But you scared those kids last night. You’re making people worried about you.”

David just reciprocates his stare. He knows. He doesn’t need a lecture.

They watch each other. Finally, Paul breaks first, huffing and looking to the floor.

“Drink some water at least, you piece of shit.”

David fills up a cup from the tap and downs it all while maintaining eye contact. Paul doesn’t move when David passes him by on his way out.

The air is crisp, feeling more like a fall day than a late winter one. Still too cold for it to really be comfortable, so David is alone outside. Suits him fine. Dusk is just beginning to set in.

He finds a spot at the side of the mill, in the barren space between the brick and the shitty apartment building Trimble’s lives in. There’s a single scraggly tree growing back here, likely stunted from the lack of sunlight, but now it just looks sad. Naked, without its leaves. David figures it’s perfect.

Moves behind the tree, positioned just so most wouldn’t see him at first glance, but David can easily lean back and see the entirety of the mill yard.

His fingers close around the hilt of the sword that’s graced Sabrina’s table for the past month. It’s been bothering him lately, the fact that he essentially has his jailer’s sword up there. Sabrina wouldn’t like that. And no matter how hard he cleaned it, he couldn’t stop seeing witch’s blood staining the blade.

It wasn’t right. Wasn’t fit for an Empress.

He plunges it down into the earth. It sticks up like a tombstone, half buried in the dirt. David sits cross-legged in front of it.

Opens the bottle, fills his glass halfway. Then he tips and pours the liquor out over the ground. Something his mother did, or similar to it. She’d spill a capful of every bottle she opened on the ground, saying it was for the spirits. She explained to him, when he’d get concerned about ghosts, that she meant the spirits of their ancestors. That it was meant to symbolize sharing a drink with them, to honor them. He thinks she also meant the spirit of the Outsider, but she didn’t say any of that to him.

David knows his mother technically fit the criteria of a witch, but she was nothing like the witches that plague Dunwall now. She was just weird. Not even a bad weird-just weird in the sense that people didn’t understand her.

He doesn’t fully understand everything she did either-forgotten some things, others just left unexplained. But he thinks this kind of ritual would apply to Sabrina too.

It feels weird, like consecrating this dead ground. And really, all he’s doing is wasting liquor. But he hopes she appreciates the gesture.

He pours another glass and sips as he stares at the upright sword, the slightly darker patch of dirt. Sips. Waits.

He should say something. Say what he needs to say to her. He’ll talk to the Talisman afterwards, talk to her for real, but he needs to get used to this. To talk to her and not hear her answer back. He needs to reconcile the fact that she won’t be back. That the Talisman, as much as he feels blessed to hold it, is only drawing out the pain of his grief, delaying his acceptance.

Acceptance. David doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to accept the travesty that is Sabrina’s death.

Didn’t he more-or-less accept it in Coldridge? He spent six long months without the Talisman, without even this echo of her voice. How did he do this before? Well, he supposes the answer was that he didn’t. David didn’t do anything in Coldridge. He ate and slept, walked to the interrogation room. He sat, he felt pain, and he counted down the days to his execution.

He doesn’t...wish they had let him be executed. David’s grateful for this chance, to get revenge and to be here for Anthony . But if they had chosen someone else, if he’d been hanged that day like he was supposed to be, well, David can’t say he’d really prefer this option to it.

This was easier when he expected to die.

David straightens his spine, sitting up a little straighter. Clears his throat.

“I miss you,” he says.

The wind is his only answer.

He listens to it for a bit, brushing off the voice that tells him this is stupid. Talking to no one.

“I miss you a lot.”

What else is he supposed to say? David doesn’t know how any of this works.

“I...replay what happened a lot in my mind. I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.”

‘Sorry’ doesn’t seem like a strong enough word. This whole thing feels like a cheap farce of a penance. David wishes he were on his knees in front of Sabrina’s tomb, kneeling at his Empress’s feet where he belongs. And do what? Fall over it and beg her forgiveness? David would not be so brazen to ask Sabrina to forgive him.

“They’ll die for it,” he says, closing his eyes. No, he didn’t come here to talk about revenge. For once, David doesn’t want anger coloring his thoughts. “I know I can’t make it up to you. Some things are beyond forgiveness. But I’ll die working to earn it.”

The wind picks up, and David feels the breeze at his cheek. He takes another drink of rum, downing as much as he can stand in one gulp.

“You’ve told me...that I can’t change the past,” David says slowly. “And I’m not trying to. What happened happened. You...you’re gone. I could have stopped it but I didn’t, and I just have to live with that.”

And part of living with it was imagining all the ways he could have stopped it. Could have saved her. That is part of his punishment, the penance David will spend the rest of his life serving.

“I think back to what I could have done that day, and I think I’m not looking far back enough. I should have noticed...stuff. I should have noticed and took care of it before it was a threat to you. But I-”

He presses his eyes closed, shuddering as he swallows.

“I shouldn’t have let them take you that day,” he breathes out. “When the Spymaster’s agents came for you, I should have snuck you out the back, or...or something. I shouldn’t have let them find out whose daughter you were. It was my duty to protect you and I failed. I’m...sorry.”

He’s not stupid enough to think she’s controlling the wind, but it’s a nice thought as it ruffles his hair.

David blinks rapidly. “There’s...a lot of things I’ve never told you, and part of it was decorum, but it’s mostly just because I’m a broken human being. I’ve always been. You fixed me more than I thought any person could, but some things just...aren’t repairable. Like me.”

He shifts. “Always planned to tell you, someday. But I never could, not until now.” Not until no living person would hear it. “I’m not sure if I can tell you it all now either...but I’ll try.”

He owes it to her to try.

“I...wish I’d been your father. Because then none of this would have happened.”

There’s nothing but silence.

Of course there is. David is talking to a dead woman.

He turns the drinking glass upside down. Stands up, draining as much of the rum as he’s able to before tipping the bottle over and pouring the rest of the contents over the dirt.

David goes over the mall rather than through it, no need to alert people to the fact he was leaving. He’d be back soon anyway.

He Blinks until he finds the riverfront and a relatively unoccupied stretch of bank-not difficult, considering nearly everyone’s dead-and stands on top of the tallest building that doesn’t look prone to collapsing. He puts his toes at the very edge of the ledge, looks down. Marvels at the drop. Holds out his hand and lets the empty rum bottle slip from his fingers, waits for it to shatter on the ground below.

David sighs and inches back, ever so slightly. Stares out at the water, the one boat swimming around the Distillery District on the opposite side of the river. Finally, he allows Sabrina to come to his hand.

‘Darkness has been falling across Dunwall, ever since that day,’ she whispers. ‘But it is the moment just before the light goes that matters most of all.’

Her voice is like that first lungful of air after your head breaks the surface of the water you were drowning in. Relief spreads through him, but it’s swiftly followed by an overwhelming sense of dread. She speaks without a throat, without lungs, and even though David knows in his heart that this, she will always be his Sabrina, she’s wrong like this. And it hurts.

David presses his lips together. “The light’s already gone. It went out the day you passed.”

‘I hear laughter echoing across the halls of your sanctuary, small kindnesses that take from our hands and multiply. This is a world awash in corruption and pain, but don’t despair. There is goodness here too.’

Well, he’s glad that she can see it, at least.

“It would be brighter,” he breathes, holding her up. “If you were still here. There’s-” He swallows. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t give to turn back the clock.”

‘Time is an illusion, as is death. The weight of our choices against the strength of our hearts, that is a balance we must maintain.’

“If death is an illusion, then tell me how to break it.” He strokes the face of the Talisman, feeling her under his fingertips. Like dipping his feet in the ocean and feeling warm waves wash over his toes.

‘We are divided like this. A river of souls, and only through crossing it may we reunite.’

“I know I can’t bring you back,” he says to her. “I’d give anything to, but I know better than to wish for it. I’d join you now, but…” David looks up at the water.

‘You are needed.’

“I know,” he breathes. “I know. But wherever you are, I...wish I could be with you.”

Sabrina was always...fearless isn’t the right word. Everyone has their fears. Even David, he’d tell her as a girl, sitting on the floor of their hotel room and reminding her that anyone in her position would be afraid. But she was brave, always put on a tough face and charged ahead no matter how scared she felt.

But the Void is a very fearsome, terrifying place. David’s seen it, and he wishes he hadn’t. Whatever aspect of Sabrina that isn’t with him in the Talisman is bound to the Void. And he just doesn’t know how much she suffers for it. Doesn’t know if she’s afraid of fading like she’s meant to.

And, despite knowing he’s needed here, David wishes he could be with her so she didn’t have to face it alone.

Not...yet. He doesn’t have to let her go quite yet. For now, he can hold onto this piece of her. And pretend.

Sabrina is quiet for a long moment, both of them drinking in the presence of the moment. Then, very quietly, she whispers to him.

‘When this crisis has passed, you must promise to release me.’

“You know I will,” David says.

‘Promise me.’

It’s an order. Straight from the Empress.

“Cross my heart,” he mumbles, making the motion. “Once Anthony  is safe. I promise.”

If she were able, David might swear she sighs.

‘I only tell you this to make easier our farewells,’ she tells him, and David swallows the lump in his throat. ‘Like this, I am eternal. But no being is meant to see forever, to be what I have become. I must return home. You must take me back and allow me to die.’

“I promise,” he repeats, and brushes his lips over the Talisman. “When this is over, I will guide you home.”

He holds her close to his chest, staring out at the river. The orange sky just beginning to fade to purple over the city. Her city.

‘Your mind is fraught with planning and directions.’ She sounds almost...amused.

“Can you blame me?” he mumbles. “I have a lot to think about. A lot I need to do. Not sure where to start.”

‘You want me to point the way, to help you on a path. No.’ She breathes. ‘Let us be lost here together for a moment.’

Despite himself, David allows himself the smallest of smiles. “For you? Anything.”

Then he closes his eyes. Feels the wind at his back and the sun on his face. Smells the river brine mixed with the salty sea air, the hard coldness that comes with the winters. Even as his fingers close around the shape of the Talisman, David focuses on the warmth behind it and if he tries, he might be holding her hand.

He thinks of nothing. Together, David just lets them be.

“Morning, asshole.”

David grunts in Lizzy’s direction. Paul gives them an odd look, but goes straight back to interrogating Grim Alex.

She’s stonewalling them. New for her. But David doesn’t let it get his hopes up too much. It’s been over a week. She’s not going to talk. He needs to start looking for new leads. That’s why Galia’s here, after all-they’ll talk it over after they’re finished with Alex.

Joan sidles up to him. “Heard you spent the whole day drinking yesterday,” she hisses.

David doesn’t so much as twitch his head in her direction. “Yup.”

“He drank a fifth of rum by himself,” Paul says with a flat face. At the corner of the room, Trimble clicks his tongue.

“David!” he scolds. “That’s not the kind of irresponsible behavior I expected from you!”

“I didn’t drink all of it,” he says, rolling his eyes. Maybe half the bottle got poured out.

...Though he did nurse a bottle of scotch that he stole from Edgar for the rest of the night. That’s up in the attic, under his bed. Half of it left. Hopefully Anthony  won’t find it.

Joan folds her arms and glares at him. “If you told me you were an alcoholic, I wouldn’t have bugged you so hard to go drinking with me, old man.”

David turns to her. “I’m not an alcoholic.”

“I’m using the politically correct term, but I’ll call you a drunk if you want to be a b***h about it.”

“I’m not that either.” He rolls his eyes. “I had completely unrelated reasons to stop drinking the first time.”

“David, normal people don’t go from not drinking to downing fifths in one night.”

“She’s got a point, David.” Galia opens her eyes to blink at him accusingly. “No shame in it, you know, everyone always wondered if you were a recovering alcoholic.”

“I’m not. I only drank yesterday just...because.” He rolls his shoulders. “I haven’t drank anything today, have I?”

He hasn’t, and he isn’t going to. It was the third. He can handle the rest of the month now.

“...It’s ten, David.”

“And I’m fine.”

“Why’d you all think that?” Joan wrinkles her nose in Galia’s direction. “He done this before?”

“No, he just never drank and was ultra-weird about the Empress drinking.”

“Was she an alcoholic?” Paul asks.

Galia nods.

“No, she was not!”

“She drank, like, a bottle of wine a night, at minimum.”

“It helped her sleep.”

“You would knock drinks out of her hand at parties, David, you must have known she had a drinking problem.”

David huffs. “No, I was trying to keep her from embarrassing herself. She was a...sloppy drunk.”

Galia rolls her eyes. “You mean a slutty drunk.”

“Oooh.” Paul turns around. “I didn’t know this.”

“Oh, yeah. I made out with her once. Got to feel up her boobs.”

“Lucky,” Joan whines.

“I don’t want to hear about this.”

“That makes sense; she was predisposed to alcoholism,” Trimble drawls. “Both her parents were alcoholics, by all accounts.”

“I’ll agree on that one, but can we change the f*****g subject?”

The way this was going, David’s going to need a drink today.

“Right!” Paul snaps. “So. Alex. Have anything to share about that?”

Alex remains huddled in the opposite corner, facing away.

“We’re not going to get anything out of her now,” David says. “Our only option is to keep her locked up until we can treat her and find our witch some other way. Fleet, have any of your contacts turned up anything promising?”

“Hmm?” She opens her eyes again. “Sorry. Nodded off for a second.”

David hears footsteps, and he turns to see Paul walking slowly around the cage. He opens his mouth to say something and Paul holds up his hand, continues walking to the corner where Alex sits with her knees up to her chin, mumbling nonsense.

“Hey, uh.” He sticks his hands in his pockets. “Are you...okay?”

The mumbling just gets louder, but no more intelligible.

“I think...yeah, I think she might have officially gone nuts,” he says, pointing. “Like, she is not okay. Even by her standards.”

“Congratulations, Trimble, you’ve officially driven a woman insane.” Joan folds her arms.

“She was clinically insane before she stepped foot into my clinic.”

“This ain’t your f*****g clinic.”

“Guys, seriously.” Paul stands up straight, blinking. “Should we do something?”

David steps over to him, rolling his eyes. “Do what? If she’s ill, maybe she’ll relinquish control of Hypatia.”

“Or, you know, Hypatia could die too?”

“She’s not going to die, Paul. She’s taken water. And it takes longer than a week to die of starvation.” David scoffs. “Trust me. I know.”

“Yeah, don’t feel too bad for her, Paulie,” Joan pipes up. “She was literally going to chain me and David up and eat us in bits. I didn’t even know being eaten alive was a fear of mine. Now I know.”

David turns back to see Paul having approached the cage, and is reaching out to the bars. He lurches forward to pull him back, but it’s too late.

The second Paul is within reaching distance, Alex leaps. Her hands close around his wrist and she pulls, hard, and Paul’s skull clangs as it smacks against the bars. David barely sees Alex bring his hand to her mouth before his arms are around Paul’s waist.

By the grace of the Void, David’s able to pull him free alone, though Joan is already at their side to assist. Paul’s eyes are wide, holding his wrist.

“She bit me!” he yells, like it’s a surprise. Indeed, there’s a pair of distinct teeth marks at his forearm, and a bloody scrape that trails down to his pointer finger.

Joan smacks his head. “No f*****g s**t! That’s why we say don’t approach the cage!”

“Let me see.” Trimble is behind them, snatching Paul’s wrist and examining it with displeasure.

David whirls to Grim Alex in indignation. “You do know the day you kill one of our friends is the day I kill you, right?”

“I’ll kill you first,” she snarls, sticking her face through the bars.

“For the last time! You. Are. Not. Getting. Out! If you hurt anyone here, I will personally unload every bullet in this godforsaken place into your head!”

“Killing me kills Hypatia!”

“I don’t give a s**t!” he roars.

He turns away then, both in disgust and concern. Trimble is shoving a scrap of cloth onto Paul’s wound, clicking his tongue.

“Apply pressure to this,” he says flippantly. “It broke the skin, but it’s not deep. Unless whatever this is can be transmitted through bite, he’ll be fine.”

“Better hope she’s not really a werewolf,” Galia says, standing on her tiptoes to see over the crowd.

“She got a chunk out of Rosie-Ro’s leg and she hasn’t developed a hunger for human flesh yet, so I think he’s okay.”

“If you won’t let me have him-” Alex shrieks, pointing. “Then give her to me! I just need one!” She bangs on the cage bars. “Just one. I’ll take my time. Make them last…”

Joan just wrinkles her nose at you. “Yeah, no. We’re kinda attached to her. And Paul.”

“Then bring me one you aren’t so fond of! There must be someone here you’d do without!”

“Uh, no, people generally don’t feed their friends to crazy bitches. Not sure why you thought that’d fly.”

“They will if it serves them! Him-” She jerks her finger to David. “He’s been deceiving you all! He bears the night-black Mark of the Outsider, branded across the back of his hand!”

“We already knew that.” Joan holds her arms out. “Literally everyone here already knows.”

“Uh, Lizzy…” Paul points hurriedly to Trimble.

“Oh, I’ve seen it too.”

“What? When did that happen?!”

“Giant fiery ball in the river, remember?” Joan flutters her arms like a bird taking flight. “We had to strip him naked. I got to see his d**k too.”

“Lizzy,” David chastises.

“What? And anyway, I dunno why you’d want to eat an old man like David. Feel like he’d be all stringy.”

“I...don’t even know whether to be insulted right now.”

“It’s great luck that this happened,” Trimble raises a finger. “With this particular group, but if you two were so careless as to show her the Mark-”

“Kinda had to use it!”

“Well, she could tell our other allies, is all I’m saying.”

“David and I already talked about it.” Joan jabs her thumb into David’s sternum. “She opens her mouth, we just say she’s being crazy and trying to stir up trouble. Anthony ’ll believe David over this monster.”

One would hope. But lately, David’s not too sure.

David sighs, rubbing his nose. He did, in fact, give a s**t. Whether she’s any help to him or not, Hypatia is Eugene’s niece, and Eugene has been nothing but good to him. That, and Hypatia is genuinely a good person. A better person than David is, at least.

“What’s going on?” he asks her flatly, turning back. “You’re acting weird, even for you. Is…” He sighs. “Is something wrong?”

He’s asking a crazed cannibal if there’s something he can do to help. David needs that drink. Preferably sooner rather than later.

Grim Alex glares at him, but even he can tell that her eyes are losing their fire. “You know what I want.”

“I’m not-” He pauses, looking off to the side. “You need meat.”

“Yes, yours! I will strip the flesh from your ribs!”

“David, we’re not feeding her little cannibalism addiction.” Lizzy’s annoyance shows through. David, however, is unfettered.

“Will any meat do?”

“What?”

Alex’s face actually goes neutral for a moment, staring at David with big, round eyes.

“You need the protein. Does it specifically have to be human meat? Because that’s going to be a problem.”

“Why?” Galia shrugs. “Corpses are a dime a dozen out there. We don’t even need to kill anyone, just bring back one of those poor fuckers.”

Paul makes a disgusted face. “Galia. Those are people.”

“They’re rat food anyway, why does it matter what they get eaten by?!”

“We’re not bringing in dead bodies.” David shakes his head.

“Why not?”

“Have you considered the reason why they’re all dead in the first place?!”

“We’re immune to the plague!” Galia points. “She probably is too!”

“There’s people here who aren’t! We bring a body in, we risk infecting the entire group! I will not allow plague in this place!”

“And it’s just gross.” Joan raises her hand. “Just saying.”

“So.” David huffs and turns back around, folding his arms. “Does it need to be people?”

Alex glares at him with an intense hatred, but it’s nothing David isn’t used to. Finally, she drops her gaze. Shakes her head.

“No.”

David sighs. “I can get you meat,” he says. “But in return, you need to answer our questions.”

“You want me to roll over for scraps like a hound does for its master?”

“I mean, you act like a dog,” Joan scoffs.

“If you want to eat, you’ll do it.”

“What are you going to give me?”

David actually hadn’t thought about it yet-figured he’d deal with things as they came. “Fish, likely.”

She breathes hotly, looking away. “I don’t like it. Meat-eaters, those are best.”

“I didn’t ask what you liked. We aren’t rich and the city’s in the middle of a blockade. That’s what I can get my hands on. So. Fish?”

She scowls. “I loathe you, David. If your Empress were still alive, I’d tie her down and make you eat until your stomach burst.”

“I’m about to walk away. You can either take the deal or starve.”

“Fine!” She drops to her knees, glaring daggers at the floor. “Fine. I’ll tell you about Ashworth. But I need it raw.”

“I think we can accommodate that.” David turns around. “Galia, can you go to the market and buy us a fish? Something still on the bone?”

Galia drops her arms to her side. “Why am I on grocery duty?”

“Just do it.” He steps forward, pressing a few coins into her hand.

She sticks her lip out, pouting. “Ugh.”

Then she turns on her heel and stomps out of the store. David waits until the storm door slides down behind her to roll his eyes.

“So.” He turns back to Alex. “Ashworth.”

“Oh, no. I tell you now and you’ll just leave me to starve. You can wait until I’ve had my meal.”

“And how do we know you won’t just clam up once you’ve eaten?” David steps forward. “You don’t get it, do you? We hold the cards here. You don’t get to make the rules.”

“How ‘bout we compromise?” Paul pipes up. “When Galia gets back with your breakfast, you fess up.”

Alex glares, but she doesn’t object.

“That’s fine, but we need to make this clear. You tell us Ashworth’s full name,” David says, listing off on his fingers. “You tell us where they are and how to get to them, and how they can be killed.”

“You know what, fine.” She huffs. “I don’t even care anymore. They’re all disgusting creatures. And clearly they never valued me for what I am.”

“Yeah, they’ve barely bothered to look for you,” Joan snorts.

David smacks her arm. “No tricks, I mean it. If you give us fake information, I will know, and I will kill you,” he threatens.

Alex smirks. “Unless you don’t come back.”

“I’ll come back. I don’t doubt you’ll conceal things in the hope that Ashworth will kill me, but understand this. I am not so easily defeated.”

They mill about for a while, waiting for Galia to return from the market. David’s hand is itching for a smoke, but Alex can’t leave the room and as much as he dislikes her, David doesn’t like subjecting non-smokers to that smell.

...Really, he wants a drink. David’s looking forward to that half bottle of scotch.

Joan jabs him in the ribs with her elbow. “Bet you ten coin we’re gonna have to take Ashworth down at this Boyle party anyway.”

“I’m not gambling with you.”

“Slut.”

Galia slams the door open with a scowl, and holding a long, bluish fish.

“s**t smells,” she sniffs, walking back to the group. “Was sorely tempted to bring back a minnow or something.”

“If you had, I’d just send you back,” David says, reaching out to take the fish by the tail. “And take away your Bond.”

“Is that like, your version of grounding us or something?”

David turns back, holding the fish high in the air. Grim Alex’s eyes follow it like a panther’s, her mouth hanging partially open.

“Okay. Talk.”

“Yes, yes.” Alex nods excitedly. “The woman you’re looking for. Breanna Ashworth. She leads the witches, second only to my mistress.”

“f*****g damn…” Joan stomps. “It was the chick! If just one hoe would of used a goddamn gendered pronoun, we’d know!”

“The fact that David never guessed is proof of his incompetence. Delilah brought her to the Tower multiple times to work over the Empress. He must have seen her! What kind of Protector are you, to not take notice of those who shared her bed?”

David clears his throat. “Off-topic. Tell us where to find her.”

“Mutcherhaven District. The old Brigmore Manor.” She stumbles over her words, practically salivating. “Many of the witches have relocated to the Tower, but Brigmore is their home. Their base. It will not be penetrated so easily.”

Brigmore. Why was that familiar?

“Mutcherhaven is outside the city walls,” Joan muses. “Which are locked down. It’s outside the quarantine zone. We’ll need to take a boat.”

“We’ll figure it out,” he tells her, then turns back to Alex. “So how are you going to make penetrating it easier for us?”

“There will be a party,” she says quickly. “On the night of the Boyle Masquerade. A ball meant to rival that of the old barons and mock those that walk the halls of high society. Allies and potential allies of the coven, people who would understand their ways. Wear a mask and become one with them, and you will get you chance at Ashworth.” She pushes her face up against the bars, grinning maniacally. “And that’s where your story will end because Ashworth will tear you apart and leave you strewn across the floor like the dirt you are!”

With that, David tosses the fish. Alex’s hands dart out to catch it, and then there’s only the disgusting sounds of wet chomping and chewing as Grim Alex devours the fish, scales and eyes and all.

Joan sidles up beside him. Smacks their shoulders together. And finally leans forward to look at him with a stupid grin on her face.

“Looks like you’re taking me to a party after all.”

David just scowls.