Chapter Text
[Daud]
Daud’s end is coming.
Admittedly, he was expecting to fall asleep at his desk one evening and wake up to the feeling of the Royal Protector’s sword giving him a free tracheotomy. Or, more likely, something infinitely longer and infinitely more deserved than a swift death. Having his Marked hand chopped clean off. Getting knocked out and waking in a cell buried deep within Coldridge. Walking out of his room and finding every last one of his Whalers hung to the Chamber of Commerce’s girders. Apparently, stripped of the limitations of imperial protocol, Corvo Attano shows spectacular creativity when it comes to dealing out horrific punishments.
But when the Royal Protector arrives, it’s drifting on a raft, shivering and delirious from poison. An entrance underwhelming enough to throw a span in the death scenarios Daud has been overthinking for himself.
Daud could probably ensure his own survival if he put Attano down right here and now, while he’s unconscious and defenseless. Even the Outsider’s new favorite won’t wake up from having his head severed from his neck. But he’s had months to resign himself to the idea of dying at Attano’s blade. As everything in his life, from his morality to his trust in his men, was being shaken to its foundations, the knowledge of his own downfall has become the only certitude in his mind. The blessed dark at the end of a harrowing day.
He knows, deep inside, that whatever the disgraced Protector has in mind for him would be fair. Would bring him the sense of justice that had shattered with that debacle of a regicide. So as he watches his men lower Attano into a storage unit, he knows he’s gonna keep walking towards his fate like a madman drawn to runesong.
This doesn’t mean, however, that the Whalers have to follow him to the grave. And they would, he knows. Not all of them, but despite the dissent in the ranks, there’s a core of people loyal to the death, and a few more who still approve enough of him to draw their blades in his name. He thinks of Rulfio, of Rinaldo, of Galia, who’ll be ready to disobey orders if they think he’s pushing the line of self-sabotage. He thinks of Montgomery, down in the infirmary, of Fisher and Pickford, clearing the archives from the Overseers’ damage, of Quinn and Vladko and Aeolos, who were about to end their initiation. He thinks of Thomas, the fool, who’ll gladly impale himself on Attano’s blade if it means he can give his master a few seconds to fight or flee.
And Attano won’t think twice about mowing them down. The path he’s carved himself across Dunwall in his quest for vengeance speaks of a smart and deeply pragmatic man, with a sadistic side that he’ll gladly indulge given the opportunity. Most of the time he’ll pick the easiest route, whether it means ghosting out of sight on the rooftops or walking down Clavering Boulevard with a trail of bodies in his wake. And for a select few, those he deems deserving, he’ll take his time and grant a downfall that is mercy in nothing but name. Daud doesn’t have any illusion on what category he falls into, and on what category the Whalers will end up in.
He may welcome his fate, but he won’t drag his people with him. So he clears the way. Sends as many as he can on fools’ errands, far from the path leading from the Rudshore Waterfront to the Chamber of Commerce. Those he can’t convince to leave, he orders to go rest; he stabs holes in his own patrols, leaves gaping openings in the base’s defenses. Hopefully, in his weakened state, even more so after going through hordes of weepers to find his gear, Attano will find it wiser to avoid confrontation altogether. At least until he finds himself facing Daud.
In the hours it takes Attano to wake up, Daud paces, and prepares.
He puts his affairs in order. He leaves a note for Thomas, leaving him leadership of the Whalers if – when – he doesn’t survive his encounter with Attano. He gifts him with the last of his professional secrets, those he had disclosed to Billie but hasn’t had the time to do the same to his new second in command. He doesn’t say goodbye.
He checks and cleans his gear. It’s for his own peace of mind as much as practicality. He’s worn and tired and sure of his defeat, but he’s not going down without a fight. As he makes a last inventory of his bolts and remedies, his blood starts stirring in a way he hasn’t felt in years, with the anticipation of a fight to the death. For a split-second he’s thirteen years old again and walking to a cage where he’ll have to beat someone to death under the cheers of a bloodthirsty crowd. Then he’s back to his old body and even older mind, and he has a last confession to make.
He’s halfway through the audiograph when the draft coming from the broken window shifts minutely, as if someone were standing in the way.
He turns around and unsheathes his sword in the same move, just in time to drive back the masked figure before it can attempt a chokehold. He can see Attano stumble in surprise and exhaustion, but before Daud can take advantage of it he has his sword unfolded and he’s coming for Daud’s blood.
Attano fights like a man possessed, like he can’t feel pain or fatigue even though Daud can see his limbs shaking and blood dripping from multiple scratches. It’s good. It’s what Daud wants. Every taunt about the late Empress have him doubling down his efforts to wipe Daud’s existence from this world. He fights dirty, he fights clever; his sword may feel like an extension of his own arm, but this doesn’t mean he won’t use his entire inventory. Daud has to expend so much focus to not lose a limb to his blade that he can barely dodge the bolts, bullets, grenades and springrazors Attano throws at him.
Eventually their fight leads them outside, and Daud doesn’t know how Attano is still standing. Daud may not be the better fighter here, but his experience in using the Outsider’s gifts should give him enough of an edge to overpower Attano, and yet he can barely keep up with the implacable reaper in front of him. He lands yet another strike, slashes through the bodyguard’s thick coat and draws blood. When Attano doesn’t even flinch, Daud absurdly wonders if he can even die. That’s his last mistake.
He feels the bite of steel across his abdominal muscles, and his legs give out. Blood pours out of the wound as he falls to his knees, but he doesn’t even make it to the ground before he has Attano’s hand gripping his shirt’s collar like a hound’s bite. The clutch impedes his blood flow and constricts his airway, and when a cold blade comes to nick at the skin of his throat all he can hear is his heartbeat pounding against his eardrums. It doesn’t matter. Attano won’t say a word anyway.
The glinting lenses of the mask stare at him for a few seconds, during which Daud doesn’t move a muscle, hyperaware of the razor-sharp edge digging into his neck. His breath is whistling, dark spots are creeping at the sides of his vision from lack of oxygen. Finally. Finally.
And then, inexplicably, extraordinarily, Daud doesn’t die.
Attano doesn’t let him go. Attano doesn’t lower his blade. What he does is relax his vice grip on Daud’s collar by a millimeter. Oxygen flows back to his brain, and he can blink away the spots dancing in front of his eyes.
“I heard you earlier.” Attano’s head is tilted, eerily reminiscent of his namesake. Daud’s still catching his breath, and his throat burns and his neck stings and blood is dripping out of his stomach, but by the Void he is listening. “Were you being genuine?”
Daud’s head is spinning from blood loss and adrenalin, and he nearly asks Which part? automatically before he realizes that’d be useless. Because it was his last confession, and he meant every word of it. “Yes.”
“About wanting to repent?”
“Yes.”
When Attano speaks next, Daud can hear the hungry smile under the Serkonan lilt, even through the mask’s filter. “I could give you a chance for that.”
A little voice at the back of Daud’s head that sounds awfully like the Outsider tells him he may be about to make the second biggest mistake of his life. But he needs Attano’s hand to push him into the grave he’s so diligently dug for himself. He won’t do it himself, and he won’t allow anybody else to do it. So if the disgraced Protector has something else in mind for him, he’ll comply. He doesn’t have any other drive left in him.
“If you want me to do something,” he chokes out, “anything. You just have to give the word.”
At last Attano’s blade lifts, uncaring of how it slices Daud’s skin in the process. His hand loosens itself too, but doesn’t withdraw, holding instead of constricting. His thumb untangles from the shirt to rub against the cut left by his sword, and Daud holds back a hiss of pain at the gratuitous cruelty.
“Emily’s been taken again. I could use some backup in getting her back.” This explains the loudspeaker announcements about a new Regent that have been blaring since morning, at least. “I could do it on my own, but I won’t risk it if I don’t have to. The stakes are too high.”
Pragmatism, once again. You don’t survive everything Attano’s been through without a hefty dose of it. Daud can respect that. Daud can work with that.
“Give me half an hour to patch up and pack ammunition, and we can be off.”
This time, Attano lets go of his collar.
[Corvo]
The patch-up is subpar. There’s no time for stitches, just enough to wrap the worst wounds and layer the rest of them in elixir. When the Knife hands him a change of clothes, Corvo’s first reaction is to snarl aggressively; but he grudgingly accepts at the toneless argument that the smell of blood will signal them to any hound with a functioning nose. The shirt is too short at the sleeves and too wide at the shoulders, and the pants’ legs only reach the middle of his calves. They’re still more comfortable than the tattered coat Corvo reluctantly lets go of, and after walking through the stink of the Wrenhaven, dry socks feel like a luxury.
As they clean their cuts, the assassin probably notices Corvo’s state of malnutrition; because once he’s done with his own injuries, he hesitantly pushes a plate of food in his direction. Corvo vaguely sniffs at the cold pieces of sausage and moderately fresh fruits, then decides that if Daud wanted to kill him, he wouldn’t do it by re-poisoning. He settles in a corner of the office to wolf down his makeshift meal and watches as the Knife lays pouches after pouches of ammunition on his desk, and writes a note that he pins to the wood with a small knife.
“Where’s the Princess?”
“I last saw her at the Hound Pits Pub in the Old Port District,” Corvo answers while tearing through a slice of peach. “Don’t know where they’ve taken her.”
“That were you’ve been holing up this whole time?”
“At least we had a roof.”
The assassin snorts, seemingly out of surprise as much as amusement, and in his defense Corvo’s also taken aback by his own quip. It wouldn’t do well to get too comfortable in the man’s presence, though if he’s being honest he’s way past the point of caring about the moral standing of his allies. At the moment the bar is more towards “someone who won’t stab him in the back as soon as he looks the other way”. Plus. The food’s good. He can feel his poisoned stomach settle more with each bite.
How low has he fallen, to settle for the first bastard who hands him a meal and a promise of help.
Corvo licks his plate clean, Daud hands him a bandolier packed with ammunition and remedies, and they’re off. The assassin leads the way, walking silently through the hallways towards a hole in the wooden floor. They blink downwards, walk by a derelict shrine, and cross a flooded corridor to reach the door leading out.
Corvo has been to the Chamber of Commerce before the Financial District was flooded, and he still has a vague notion of how to get to the Hound Pits from there. But Daud’s been living here for a solid year, and knows the best ways to go in and out of the quarantined district. They take the high road, blinking from rooftop to rooftop, far from the weepers groaning in the streets below. Corvo stays a few steps behind Daud, leeching off the trail of his Blinks like a dolphin behind a ship at sea, until they hear the clanging of Tallboys patrolling around the pub.
They stop on the roof of a building nearby to assess the situation, and Daud immediately drops the guiding role, taking two steps back and awaiting Corvo’s instructions. It’s not a level of humility Corvo expected from him, and in any other situation he could have appreciated the irony of the Knife of Dunwall taking orders like a common guard. Right now, however, he has more pressing things in mind.
Watch Guards are crawling over the pub like ants, and Corvo’s halfway through thinking out a plan to take them all down manually when they hear a passing conversation about two Natural Philosophers barricaded in the workshop. Could be worth a shot, if only for the armory Piero has in there.
Daud pulls a face at the mention of Sokolov – and isn’t that something that tickles Corvo’s curiosity – but still knocks out two guards to clear the way to the workshop. Corvo finds the two scientists huddled under the tables, making a good impression of calm as they carry a civil conversation between two mortar fires rocking the entire building. They’re delighted at his arrival, if somewhat surprised at his survival, and mention a very interesting device set up on the workshop’s roof.
Sneaking to Havelock’s old room really highlights the perks of not working alone. Daud falls into step without question, follows his instructions and has some useful inputs. He’s also surprisingly merciful in his takedowns – Corvo’s pretty sure he hasn’t seen him take a single life so far. It lends some credit to his supposed regret about his decades spent in the business of death, for all the good it does him. There may be no such thing as a point of no-return, but there is a point where you don’t have enough time left in your life to fully fix what you’ve broken.
Maybe that’s the same thing. Corvo’s never been one for philosophy.
Once the blueprints are in Piero’s hands, bringing the two tanks of whale oil to the pylon is a walk in the park, and Corvo sends Daud away from the blast zone before pulling the lever. A bang that sends him to his knees, a flash of light, a whistling in his ears that disappears as he gets back to his feet, and around him every last Watch Guard is lying dead on the ground, skin charred red and black where the electricity hit them.
“You could have told me not to waste my time sparing them,” Daud mumbles when he comes back. Corvo snorts, and walks inside the pub to look for clues on Emily’s location.
Samuel spends the entire ride to Kingsparrow Island radiating enough disapproval to cow both Corvo and Daud into awkward silence. Corvo feels a churn of guilt at the boatman’s heavy glare, which is exceptional enough to be noteworthy. But he knows Samuel, knows he’s a loyal, genuinely good man in a city that has so few of them, and he knows that the disappointment is deserved. And the discomfort is more than compensated by the sight of the most infamous heretic in the Empire avoiding the eyes of a grizzled old man.
Samuel drops them off on a shore battered by the rain with a few scathing last words for Corvo, and a sour look for Daud; as Corvo watches the boat fade away in the choppy sea, he wonders about the source of the old man’s irritation towards the assassin. His questions are answered when Daud reaches for the inside of his coat to take out a worn pistol, one that Corvo recognizes as Samuel’s.
“I don’t know if he planned to attack us directly or simply give away our position to the guards, but he was intent on using it. Picked it from his pocket when I disembarked.”
Corvo closes his eyes, takes a second to mourn a friendship that his own actions nipped in the bud, and starts walking in the direction of the lighthouse. Daud falls in step behind him, footsteps inaudible even on the wet ground.
Their unlikely collaboration is going more smoothly than Corvo expected when the idea appeared in his poison-dazed mind. Corvo works alone, and Daud didn’t strike him as the kind of man who takes well to orders. Combining their two personalities was a recipe for conflict, especially with the blood in their shared history.
But Daud, for all his callousness, is an accomplished team worker and an expert at what he does. He’s spent most of his life sneaking around and perfecting his use of the Mark, and while Corvo's a fast learner, he couldn’t reach in a few months the level of mastery Daud is displaying. More surprisingly, he keeps single-mindedly following Corvo's every order. No hesitation, not even a questioning glance; only the occasional suggestion or information when he thinks that his input is wanted.
Corvo would be lying if he said he wasn't getting a bit of a kick out of that last part.
Eventually they reach the top of the lighthouse, leaving behind them a seriously lower number of corpses than Corvo intended to. Daud’s actions line up with his declared intention to make amends. So far he's keeping the death toll to an impressive minimum, contrasting absurdly with Corvo’s own trail of blood.
All these considerations grind to a screeching halt when Corvo takes in the state of the penthouse. There’s blood on the floor, a lot of it, and Corvo’s heart freezes cold until he finds the gutted body of the maid in the stairs leading to the balcony.
And then he hears Emily’s cries coming from above, and he sees red.
He gives a sharp order to Daud to not let himself be seen, and doesn’t wait for an answer before taking off. He spares no mana expense to reach the highest platform, where that piece of scum of an admiral is struggling to throw Emily to her death. He clenches his hand. Everything goes gray and still, he yanks Emily to safety; when time resume, Havelock is faced with Corvo’s looming figure and the barrel of his own weapon right under his chin.
Corvo pulls the trigger.
The following hours are hectic. They give an announcement to the remaining soldiers on the island, confirming the death of all three of their leaders. They make contact with the mainland and inform them of the impending return of the rightful Empress. They make arrangements for an official ship to come and retrieve them. Corvo requests that Captain Geoff Curnow be put in charge of the mission.
The time spent waiting for Curnow’s squad is Corvo and Emily’s first moment of peace that day, and the adrenaline drop hits hard. Emily is fast asleep on a couch, bundled up in blankets that Corvo gathered from the side rooms. He takes a minute to savor the blessed quiet, then walks to the atrium and beckons Daud to ground level.
The assassin appears in a cloud of smoke and stretches his limbs, chasing the pins and needles that must be coursing through his muscles after spending this whole time crouching on the girders above. Corvo’s in an indulgent mood, and waits until he’s done before he speaks.
“That was good work outside.”
Daud gives him a curious look at the unexpected compliment. “I’m good at my job.”
He is, and more than that. He’s stealthy and implacable, brutal in a fight, lethal when he wants to. He has decades of experience in the arts of killing and stealing and creeping unseen in the dark. He’s smart, frightfully clever even, infinitely more than Corvo used to think when he would read vague reports about him, ten months and a lifetime ago.
He’s also shown a remarkable amount of loyalty, to a point that Corvo nearly dares to call obedience. He said while they were fighting that he had never lied to Corvo, and he probably said it thinking he would be dead in ten minutes; but Corvo spared him, and Daud has yet to give even the shadow of a lie or a deception.
Corvo’s extremely short on allies. And Daud fits the bill. He’s never worked with a person powered by regret and guilt, but a drive is a drive. He can work with that.
“Still want to make good on that atonement?”
Daud searches his look for a second before answering. “Yes.” His voice is unreadable.
“Come to the Tower two weeks from now. Don’t get spotted. Meet me in my room.” He gives him a vicious smile. “I’m sure you know the layout of the place.”
Daud’s eyes shift aside. “I’ll be there.”
“And put you affairs in order.” Corvo gets a resigned look in answer. Daud knows what’s coming. “You won’t be coming back.”
Corvo has, to be perfectly truthful, no way to be sure Daud’s gonna follow the instruction. After all, if he wanted to make a run for it, now would be the ideal time. Corvo won't have the time to hunt him down among the mess of retaking the throne, and Daud is proficient at disappearing without a trace. Surely a man like him has the money and contacts to pass the blockade and leave Gristol. Void, he could even take his gang with him, restart his business somewhere new.
Nevertheless, he has a feeling the Knife will comply.
[Daud]
Daud isn’t quite sure what the newly-reappointed Royal Protector wants with him. His best guesses are either having him executed or throwing him in the deepest cell he can find in Coldridge, but if it's what it takes to relieve him of his guilt, he'll take it with a smile on his face. And Attano has a way to defy expectations, though often in unpleasant ways. He’s already done so to Daud, on several occasions in the brief time they’ve worked together.
He hands the Whalers over to Thomas. Not through a note this time, but publicly and officially, leaving no doubt as to the young man’s legitimacy. He prepares the transition, helps Thomas find his marks, gives his last advice.
He packs his bag. He doesn’t know what he’ll need, and has little in the way of personal items. What he can’t carry but that might be useful in the future, he puts in boxes that he stashes around the city. He has a few hideouts that he hasn’t shared with anyone, not even the Whalers. They prove themselves useful now.
On the day he’s meant to meet with Attano, he takes a few bonecharms he finds particularly useful, a couple changes of clothes, and his usual gear. In his spare jacket he wraps the book Port of Call, with Billie’s last letter tucked between the pages.
He gives his farewells, and he’s off to the Tower.
He finds Attano easily enough. The man’s snide remark about knowing his way in held some truth. Daud has the blueprints of the Tower etched in his mind.
He’s only half-surprised when Attano doesn't have him arrested as soon as he goes in through the window. He’s more interested in putting Daud to work. Apparently the new Protector-Spymaster-unofficial Regent is cruelly lacking in terms of stable resources and competent staff.
Daud hesitates. Seriously considers refusing Attano’s offer, suicidal as it may be. He knows Attano won’t have any qualms about using the full extent of his skills. He’s sworn off killing. He’s sworn off being a tool for the powerful. He’s sworn off this exact kind of work, because it’s a job like this that ended with an entire city’s worth of blood on his hands.
But what does he know about right or wrong anyway? Since when does Daud, the hired killer, the murderer, have the insight to base his decisions on ethics?
He owes Attano more than he can ever repay. If to reduce the red on his ledger he has to break a promise he never expected himself to keep, then so be it. At least this time he's working for someone who deserves his loyalty.
So he gets to work.