Chapter Text
Even when Corvo began to find his voice again, neither of them wanted to bring the events after her mother’s death quite into focus.
She could see on Corvo’s face that recalling Jessamine was no longer the sharp, visceral tangle of emotions it had been in their shared time at the Hound Pits. Now, it was something blurred, but still aching, safe so long as he kept it tucked far away.
Emily was beginning to think that Corvo still saw her as the child that the Loyalists had claimed to protect, innocent and only just oblivious enough to keep her safe. Most of the time, he hardly acknowledged what she knew to be true. She saw more than she told, and he could never stop the court’s whisperings - stories were often exchanged at the time of her coronation about the victims of the Masked Felon alongside those few that he spared, and always with the implication that the reason another Kaldwin sat on the throne was tangled up with him. She remembered every moment she lived out while he was in Coldridge and a part of the Loyalists in vivid, awful detail, no matter how much he wanted her to forget it. Heights still made her stomach turn, and now even the Empress was unsettled by large storms.
It was strange between them now. With all hope of facade gone with Jessamine, she had hoped that they wouldn’t fall back into the too-stiff propriety of an Empress and a Royal Protector. She used to dream about their perfect reunion as family all that time ago, back in the stuffy attic of the Cat. At night, Emily would imagine the moment she would finally find him again over and over, the moment when she would break away from Prudence and the Pendletons at last and find him waiting on a whaling trawl in the Wrenhaven, to take her to one of the secret smugglers’ hideouts that she’d read about in books. And when they came home to the Tower, no one would question that he was anyone but her father, and things would carry on. But when the true moment came, the stranger under the mask was just barely Corvo. The front of her blouse came back stained red from their embrace, and the sound of the awful things he wore like talismans kept sticking to the air around her, like a half-forgotten song. He stayed a stranger for a long while, and all of her fantasies had really only kept her from thinking too deeply about the coming days.
After everything was over, he was still her Corvo, in a sense. His loss for words ceased to unnerve her approximately two hours after she had discovered it at the Hound Pits, so it was something beyond that, something she couldn’t quite place. A part of her didn’t want to. His past had always been shrouded in mystery, and the continuation of that trend to the more recent past would do both of them more good than they would care to admit.
Eventually, she was in Dunwall Tower again, living the life she had longed for; not a failed Empress, but not a prosperous one, caught up in bad memories and the fact that she wasn’t her mother. A part of a larger machine, so to speak, though it seemed that all she had done since she was eleven was sign and seal papers and speak nicely to the right people at the right time. She found new people to trust and new books to read, and if she was lucky she wouldn't have to think about anything that wasn’t directly in front of her. Which, at the moment, was the time she had neatly set aside to take a simple lunchtime meal with her father. Just this once, she would have preferred to think of anything else but the present.
Outside the bay windows of her study, ships bobbed up along the Wrenhaven, the gray of the river matching the hazy winter sky. There had been no snow for a week now, but that was a blessing; even melancholy gray skies were preferable to the heavy snowflakes that fell like ash over the rooftops, mixing with the smog of industry here in the heart of the city. She could see the whale oil factories in the distance. Sometimes, at night, she swore she heard whalesong, pained and distant. Of course, she had thought the same at the Cat, too. Sokolov had said years ago that it was the mark of an unquiet mind. She had laughed at that, young but already cynical. Even she could recognize that.
As if on command, a whaling ship slid across the water, silent in spite of the whale hung grotesquely above the deck, which sometimes tossed its great head or threw its tail in some last effort to escape. It was no longer a frightening sight, but one she took with great curiosity. It was the wrong season for whales altogether. If there were any, they came from Serkonos or near to the coasts of Pandyssia, where the waters were always warm. It had traveled far to find itself here, struggling under her gaze.
The sound of the heavy oak door opening broke her from her thoughts. Her hand instinctively flew to the concealed dagger at her side. Corvo, if anything, had her trained well, and she relaxed as she saw that it was his face that looked back at her.
“Father.” She stood up from the desk and made herself smile, even as the greeting felt foreign and bitter in her mouth. The unpleasant memory of her mother scolding her for using that word in association with Corvo a hundred years ago came rushing back with every intonation. She had forced the title to die in her throat for years, and now she used it freely with a person she could hardly say she knew anymore.
That was too harsh. She owed Corvo more than she could ever say, though a quiet voice in her head always insisted that she did so at a dear cost.
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything.” He looked tired that day - but he always did. Years ago his long hair began growing patches of gray, and the crow’s feet around his eyes seemed to grow deeper every time she saw him.
“Of course not.” She moved from behind her desk to peck him on the cheek, and he returned with a weary smile and a steady hand against her forearm. “I haven’t been sent anything to seal with my regal hand for at least twenty minutes.”
In actuality, she had an entire stack of documents to review from Spymaster Shaw, and some sort of boat launch speech to ghostwrite, and pages of parliament notes to look through for the sake of keeping some semblance of knowledge about her empire. Of course, three menial tasks were the busiest that she became, which was still an afternoon’s worth of undistracted work. But she had been staring out the window anyway, and she could hardly refuse with him right here in front of her.
He chuckled at that, not with the expected ease but with a shifting stance closer to awkwardness. “Careful what you wish for, or you’ll have to cancel our plans.”
They both shifted, failing to see the humor as soon as the joke left his lips. Corvo glanced away out the window, toward the Wrenhaven. She had spent so much time with him as one of his sole companions, but still he twitched under her gaze, caught trapped and suspended motionless.
It was a long, quiet walk to the dining room.
Someone whose name she didn’t know brought them a hearty soup in the dining room. Emily sat at the head chair, Corvo beside her, while the table meant for twenty or more stretched out in front of them.
“Have you seen Alexi lately?” Corvo broke the silence with hesitance in his voice, as if he thought interrupting her soup might be a faux pas. “She asked to review security measures with me. Must be lonely.”
“Or she’s already looking to replace you,” Emily added. He laughed at that, a bit more genuinely, before he turned back to his soup.
The problem arose when they both found that their bowls were empty. She took a deep breath, setting her spoon down with the resolute click of something ending.
Her father was sitting here, right in front of her, and she couldn’t think of a word to say to him. Her gut twisted at the implication. She spent years pestering him with questions, even when he couldn’t find the words to answer, but now she found him a stranger to her. It was easy to remember when she used to braid his long hair, or when he used to let her ride on his shoulders if her mother wasn’t around. It was more difficult to try to form a relationship with him based on a childhood friendship.
When she looked to him again, she saw his face was darkened, not in anger, but in the apathetic gray that showed through the windows outside. Her heart twisted, almost out of pity, and she made a last effort by reaching out her hand and placing it on top of his.
“We haven’t sparred in a while. I’d offer to go now, if I didn’t already know that I’d win.”
He looked up, and his smile just barely chased the gray from his face. The old Corvo, the one she had imagined while locked in the attic of the Golden Cat, was there somewhere, far away. With a voice younger than his years, he replied, “You wish.”
At least when they sparred, she didn’t have to speak to him.