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title: back up on my chaos mode fandom: dishonored video games pairing: corvo attano/jessamine kaldwin summary: They have been together fourteen years. That is an entire life, and barely any time at all. (6.1k words, rated M.)

She has chosen him…. Let’s say, on a whim.

Her father’s advisor has even presented her with a painting of the man she is to choose, a man awarded at last with the finest title in the land for a near-lifetime of service for the Crown. But, she wonders – how many people live and die in her name, and they do not get such privilege?

Which pocket or which cunt has this old man filled, to be brought up to her attention in such an indiscrete way?

Jessamine may be too young to know these things, but she is the future Empress so know she must.

This is a lesson she must teach these men as well. If she listens to one request, how many others will come clambering at her feet, begging or exploiting for her favours? Ah, but see – this has not been a request, it has been an order. And this is something that she, even twelve years old, cannot accept.

She doesn’t know anything about any of the soldiers presented to her, but it is obvious to any fool that Corvo Attano is the youngest.

“Him,” she says, pointing not at other person’s choice, but her own.

The entire court is in attendance, and her actions are for all to see and understand. There is no mistaking her decision, nor her rebellion – if her father’s advisor reddening face is to be believed. She has not been cruel, merely an Empress.

Thus, Corvo becomes the Royal Protector of a 12 year old child. He is 19, not far away from being a child himself. He does not understand this choice, nor its reasoning; he knows only to be grateful for the chance. After all his effort, it might even feel like he deserves it.

***

It takes him two months of following Jessamine Kaldwin around, from lessons to dress fittings, from bedroom to ballrooms, for him to say anything more than a yes or a no to her. It is no surprise, then, that it is this:

“May I ask,” he pauses, looking at her straight in the eyes, this child that feels so much older than she actually is, “Why you chose me? As Royal Protector?”

“Displeased by your role already, Corvo?” she returns, and he is happy to be alone in her study, no other privy to this interaction.

“No, princess,” and yes, at least for now she is merely just that.

“You were the youngest of them, weren’t you? Which means you have achieved what they did, in half the time – to be presented in front of me. I wanted you because you were the best.”

Such a simple answers, but Corvo doubts that a lesser person would have thought of things like this.

***

In the first two years, many will try to challenge his position as Royal Protector. It will start innocent enough: sand in his food, a rusted sword instead of the real thing in the barracks, a shove down the stairs in dark hallways. Once, he shows up with a busted nose, but it does little to impress his little empress.

“Hit them back, would you, Corvo?” she says, her eyes glinting with mischief, but this is exactly what he waited for: her allowance.

He has been testing the leash, and finding it quite loose. She is fourteen when she visits her city guard, and finds most of them with broken noses, bleeding lips. Corvo alone stands, crisp and immaculate, and Jessamine sits in front of seasoned soldiers and much older men, and laughs and laughs.

He wishes he recorded the sound. Never mind.

***

Considering she spends all her waking hours with him, it is surprising that the first dream featuring Corvo that she remembers having is at sixteen. She wakes in her twisted bedsheets, sighing with a frustration she cannot explain. In her dreams, the caresses started from a hand suspended in nothingness, just a caress that she felt against her waist, sending flares between her legs. This a familiar enough picture, but then, her head against the mattress, ravished and frustrated with the lack of more, in her dream she dared look at the man daring to deny her so.

She hasn’t even been surprised, to know her sweet tormentor to be Corvo. Maybe that is why her dream continued, and the touches transformed to kisses. She woke, eventually, just as dream-Corvo’s lips found hers, and her frustration only grew at her mind’s inability to at least let her dream of these things, if she can’t have them. She’s sixteen, just barely growing into her forms, letting go of baby fat, and Corvo is much older, barely giving her the time of the day besides his duties. What was mere curiosity on her end grew into a full on crush, and now she can’t quite figure out how she’s so good at walking the roles of Empress and Jessamine.

For now, in the solitude of her room in the middle of the night, she burrows her face in her pillows, and she tries not to think of her dream, failing. In the morning, upset with her lack of sleep and lack of Corvo, she sends him off on stupid errands for hours, all to postpone having to look at his stupid, handsome face.

The sun is starting to set and he finds her by the pool, her shoes by her side and her feet dangling in the water. He is silent as he takes off his own boots, and sits next to her.

“Do I need to kill someone for you?” he asks, dead serious.

“Yeah, yourself,” she answers, still moody.

Corvo mimics a sword going through his chest, and he falls – with quite some flair and some great acting skills, she must admit, in the wide water before him. It gets her laughing, and when his head surfaces, he is grinning. The expression changes for a millisecond, and before she has the time to say anything else, he grabs at her ankles, and pulls.

***

The strange coiffeur, made in the fashion of her far-away dignitaries, is not really suiting her. She has known, looking at the painting hung in this palace, attending all the balls, that she is no special beauty. She has built herself an armour of glamour, to seem more lovely than she is, but that is dipped in ritual and routine and vials of powders and rouge, and she still doesn’t think the diplomacy was worth the brief change.

So she sighs, as she dips in the vanity chair, hands already pulling to loosen the corset of her dress, her chest spilling with a relieved heave. Corvo, in the dark corner of her room, watches her in the mirror and does not react. She is frustrated and tired as she starts taking pins out, her hands clumsy with wine as she tries to undo plaits. It is slow-going, and she lacks the patience.

“I need a handmaid,” she murmurs, arms around the front of her chest, trying to keep her dress in place as she moves to get up, call out for a servant to help her out of this silly outfit.

Corvo steps forward, still far enough that he is proper, but she can now look at his face, see the slight tinge in his cheeks, which makes her want to laugh. They’ve been together 6 years now, every single day spent in each other’s company, and he has seen her at her lowest, and he has seen her at her most indecent – and it is this that he finds overwhelming? She supposes, though, that she has been but a child through all that time, and she’s recently become a woman in her right, of age and of body.

“I can help,” he says instead, and Jessamine smiles, because then he hesitated because of the request, and not because of the setting.

“Please,” she says, as she seats herself back at her vanity, Corso behind her.

He never really touches her, not unless he intends to protect or support, her dog, as he has been nicknamed in the court. He never shows any signs that he minds, all the politics and hideous jealousy and fucked up relations at court. She has said it, more often as she has gotten older, that he might well be the only true friend she has. She trusts freely and foolishly, but none as fully as she does him, and none with as much.

Corvo catches her eyes in the mirror, and wonders what kind of future Empress says please to the man she has a lifetime to order around. And then, his fingers brush her naked shoulder, and Jessamine sighs a tiny little breath that has him do it again, as he moves his fingers through a tight plaid, undoing the work, smoothing out the knots. She is stiff, but stubborn and she does not look away from his gaze, not even to admire his handiwork.

“You’ve done this before, then?” she asks, one of her eyebrows raised with the question.

“No,” he says, and turns to look at what he is doing instead, taking away a ribbon in a swift movement that reminds her of how he is using his sword, “I’ve watched someone else do it for you a hundred times.”

It is an admission of something – of something Jessamine doesn’t know how to understand, just yet. But she knows it is important, because the air between them changes, charged with something more than an Empress and her Royal Protector. She turns in her chair, the movement tugging at the material of her dress, and Corvo’s gaze darkens as it lands, for the merest second, on the expanse of skin at her chest.

Someone less attuned to the man would have missed it. As it is, Jessamine merely lets him watch as she tugs at the sleeves, the whole thing held in place by her arms. She considers, for a very cheeky second, to simply let it all drop away, pool around her waist, but even she knows not to go too far, too soon.

***

“Can I kiss you?” Jessamine asks, and Corvo doesn’t look at her, but towards the ballroom first, and then the dark hallway, waiting to hear or see something that it is not there; they are completely alone.

At long last – and she was beginning to lose some of her courage, as she was waiting for an answer, her hand still fisted in the front of his shirt, balancing her height on her tiptoes, to be closer to him, he looks at her, their faces so close their noses almost bump into each other.

“Is that an order?” he asks, keeping his voice levelled, no sign of what he might think or feel of her very indecent request.

Jessamine smiles, and her hand tugs; Corvo leans just that tiny bit closer.

“No,” she answers, in truth.

They both know she hasn’t given him an order in months; he does because he wants, and she gives because she dares.

“Then yes, Jess – you can kiss me.”

She doesn’t know which makes her happier: the nickname or the assent. But then she covers the distance, her lips chaste against his, and it is like she has breathed life into him. Corvo’s arms come around her waist, pressing her flush against him, so that he can feel every curve and every inch, and his lips move, harder and demanding, and it is all she needs to reply in kind, suddenly come alive at his touch. He is gloveless, and she can feel the scarred hands of a sword master snaking against her open back, resting at the nape of her neck, as she sighs, pressing her chest harder against his, and he deepens the kiss.

From a far-away hallway, there comes the drunken babbling of a guard – Corvo will need to remedy this immediately, even though they are not Jessamine’s guards just yet, the princess still has around a year or so until the responsibility is passed over to her, but it is an unforgivable behaviour nonetheless.

He breaks away, and she licks her lips, deep in her thoughts, although she does move when Corvo kindly pushes her away, putting some acceptable distance between them. Soon, she will be wanted and requested, this a party to celebrate her eighteenth birthday, though she is closer to nineteen by now, the preparations and travel of delegates and noblemen taking too long.

Corvo turns her head towards the ballroom, gesturing for her to go first. Jessamine is kind, too young not to care, so she at least does him the service of wiping her rouge away from his lips with the tips of her fingers. He turns, quick enough to take her by surprise, and places a kiss against her palm as a thanks.

***

“Do you know what you are asking?” Corvo asks, staring down his lady.

“More than I deserve, and I offer less than you do,” she says, calmly – though he can see her hands holding tight to her cutlery, as she tries to maintain her composure.

“I wouldn’t put it like that,” Corvo says, and without being invited to, he occupies the chair right across hers, at the end of a big enough table that he is not tempted to touch her.

This is the first time they discuss her birthday party, and the indiscretion he has allowed. He has waited for the whipping to come, and it has not. Which can only mean she wants more. This is a negotiation, for something Corvo didn’t know he had before her: a heart.

“I love you,” she says, and it is only an eighteen year old with everything she ever wanted given to her that would have had the bravery to say it like that.

Or someone so certain the feelings would be reciprocated. Corvo doesn’t want to give it to her, not this easy. He loves his fiery lady, he loves that she often fails, he loves that she hasn’t given him an order in months and yet he feels compelled to listen to her every whim, he loves that for the first time maybe, he is seen as someone who is more than merely good at his job.

“So a secret,” he says, and he makes it sound like he is joking, but Jessamine cringes.

They both know, she could never marry him. She is Empress across an entire land, and he is just a good servant. She is asking him to accept it, and have her regardless. Will her title hold to questioning, will her affection last the first imperial crisis? Can he even wonder all of this, when she has asked?

“But mine,” she offers. “I will give you all I can.”

Corvo thinks, balancing if his heart can survive knowing his want and need are reciprocated but could never be fulfilled, or if it is easier to bear a love held in the intimacy of four walls, spoken of only in hushed tones.

“I want you, Jessamine.”

He waits, checking the tension between them to see if his transgression, at refusing her a title, or even a last name, will hold. It does. She raises an eyebrow at him, in that way that makes him smile at her.

“Then why on earth are you seated so far away?”

He kisses her before the chair clambers to the floor.

***

She is Empress now. For real, by tradition, by word of law, by all proceedings – written and not. As such, Corvo goes down on one knee in front of her throne, Jessamine herself too far away from him, in her regal robes, her heavy crown.

He swears another longer oath, in two languages, in front of way more people than last time, but he is now protecting someone even more important, the start of an age and lineage. He thinks, faintly, his tongue rolling around her full name, that it is a lot of responsibility for just one man.

He rises his head just enough for her to see him, and with a very quick movement, to have been missed and imagined by anyone else but her, who knows him, he pokes out his tongue at her, a mere second after finishing with his speech. It’s the most he has spoken, ever. The Empress doesn’t smile; she cannot, really, on such important and elegant occasion, but the corner of her mouth twitches.

But maybe responsibility just enough for a man in love.

***

She is asleep. He wonders, sometimes, how someone so important can sleep as if nothing is out there to harm her. Corvo finds some sort of feral pride in knowing she can have this respite and this peace because of him, because she relies and trust in him that much. She is right to do so, of course – but it doesn’t change how pleased he is. It is his life purpose after all, not to keep only the Empress safe, but his Jess too.

It should be stranger, to be a lover to such a figure. But in the intimacy of her chambers, it is merely the two of them, often naked, but always reverently devoted to each other. He slips under the covers like a thief in the night, doing the opposite of stealing.

Jessamine rolls, her body intuitively seeking his warmth, and she sighs as she curls against his body, her back pressed to his front. His arm snakes around her waist, pulling her closer still, his breath making her baby hairs dance as he settles in this embrace.

He is almost asleep himself when her hips roll, and his body responds in kind. There is the curve of her ass, delicious rubbing against his cock, and he can feel it rising to the call. How easy it is then, to move his hand, find the hem of her nightdress, slip it upwards for him to cup at her needy cunt.

“Jess,” he breathes, when he finds her wet already, and she moans when he rubs a finger between her folds, pressing it against her clit.

She moves, pressing his cock against her bodies, and she begs.

“Please, Corvo,” she says, half a whisper half a prayer.

“Please what?” he hums, his finger slowly, so tantalizingly slowly moving against her entrance, where she needs this, and so much more.

“Pleasefuckme,” she says it like it’s all just one word, just full despair.

***

The empress is fearless, because she has him. She has known him for as long as she hasn’t, and all this time, day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year, Corvo has ensured that she is safe, and strong, and happy.

Everyone cares about the city and the empire, to some extent even about the Empress – but it is him alone that cares about Jessamine above anything else, first and foremost. Well, she thinks, said care might now just have to be shared, and extended, and in that joy she finds nothing wrong. Despite all the rumours that will arise, all the scandals that will be discussed, she cannot consider the being growing inside her a mistake. Not her love for Corvo, and not its result.

So really, she mentions this new change – in her and their relationship, in brief, barely even there, at the end of a breakfast she has alone, just with her guard (and spy, and protector, and lover) on the balcony of her antechamber. She always orders more than she can eat on such occasions, half of the plates filled with food she doesn’t even like, food she can’t even eat in her current condition. Four steps behind, looking absolutely unphased by the flowery, pink painting on his plate, Corvo clears a plate of grapes and cheese, one of such indulgent fancies of hers. Jassemine fears that everyone knows, exactly what a soft spot she has for this man, but it is already too late, she has loved him for too long to allow herself the pretence of the opposite.

She has loved him for too long to draw out his happiness, too. She has learnt of this just a few hours before, her monthly bleeding missed twice in a row, a sickness with no real cause, confirmed at last by the old lady servant who’s overseen her health for all her life. So, she merely takes a sip of her tea, looking at him over the rim of her cup, and all her fears disappear.

“I am pregnant,” she says.

Corvo lowers his plate, chewing and swallowing forgotten as he stares at her.

“Hope it is obvious enough, but it is yours, Corvo,” she says, laughing, not upset but simply amused that she could have rendered someone already so quiet utterly speechless.

Then, quicker than she can comprehend what is going on, he is there, at the foot of her chair, his forehead against the tip of her shoes, sat in supplication of her. Corvo’s body is slightly shaking, and Jessamine vaguely registers the sound of his plate breaking against the marble of the floor.

She leans towards him, her fingers warm and kind as she guides him to look at her. He tries to evade her requests, several times moving his face away, turned towards his uniform, hair hiding his expression. So the Empress merely resorts to softly touching her thumb against his cheek in caressing circles, waiting for Corvo to gather some courage to face her.

His face is wet. When he at last looks up at her, he looks like a man absolved of any of his sins, tears streaming down his face, his mouth stuck in a smile that is blinding. It takes three seconds for Jessamine to follow suit, her eyes wallowing with her own joy, and Corvo places kisses against her knee, head rested in her lap, and just thanks her over and over.

***

The court, of course, has no way of knowing – merely speculating. It seems obvious to most that the swellowing Empress is a result of her Royal Protector, the two inseparable. A few smart aristocrats come up with the idea that this is exactly why it could be anyone: bound by his loyalty, isn’t the dog’s role to protect, and to hide any of his owner’s indiscretions? If she wanted to fuck a stranger to them, or even someone amidst their own ranks, it is Corvo Attono that would know of it, and would never be allowed to tell it.

It would be years before their speculations and theories will have any ground to stand on, once the heir to the throne is grown enough to take after a parent or another. For now, they merely know the Empress to be unmarried but pregnant; and no one dares to complain about any of this fact, not when her shadow has been even more ferocious in protecting her.

***

“Oh, Jess,” he sighs, crouching next to her figure on the cold marble floor of her bathroom.

The Empress heaves, her stomach empty, but the need to retch still there, making her head spin. Her forehead is glued to the floor, her arms around her navel, as she tries to regain some control over her upset body. Their baby, having some of her rebellion and some of Corvo’s stubbornness, has decided to be the commander of this ship, and their mother has no idea how to request or claim it back, make it to the many other months left of this pregnancy.

Corvo’s hands sooth away the hair from her face, hold it as she coils around the potty and her body trembles with the effort of her sickness. He rubs circles against her back, murmuring and humming unknown songs under his breath, but it is enough to ground her, to make her come back to herself from the pain and the effort. He smiles at her when she at last looks at him, and he presses his forehead against hers, his skin so warm that she is suddenly trembling with chills, her fingers undoing his buttons to glue against his warm chest, as he laughs at the (literal) cold reception he is receiving. She’s been here for too long, her entire body gone numb and cold.

“I am sorry,” he murmurs against her temple, and it is that that eventually gets a weak laughter out of her.

Instead of helping her to her feet, he simply picks her up in his arms, covers the distance to her bed. She struggles against him, citing work to be done and people to be met, and Corvo simply stares and refuses any of her requests. He holds her upset gaze, and waits – she knows what for: for her to order him around, for her wants to go above his. Jessamine refuses to prove him right, so she merely rests her sweaty head against her pillows and closes her eyes.

“Don’t let them run my empire into the ground, Corvo, do you hear me?”

“Yes, my love.”

***

The Empress screams again, and all the servants and the few nobles waiting outside her quarters make a cross sign, and turn a weary gaze to the heavens above.

Corvo cannot believe she has sent him away. Just some unrest, at a far-away edge of the Empire, so many more others who could have done it in his stead, but he knows now why she has insissted so much to send him away. She didn’t want him here for this, for the birth of their child. He almost wants to kiss her stupid face, and then make her cry for the audacity of refusing him this.

Everyone in the hallway glues their back against the walls when he steps in view. He is dirty, in his riding clothes, and blood has dried against the right sleeve of his jacket. It is not the smell or the appearance that is intimidating – but the look in his eyes, like he is ready to burn the whole world to ground to never have to hear such a wretched sound as Jessamine Kaldwin screaming ever again.

He doesn’t look at any of them, he merely opens the door to Jessamine’s room and steps in, closing the door behind him – though to most, it sounds like he is slamming it. It is a chaos not unlike that of the battlefield inside there, and it takes Corvo a moment to understand what is going on.

“Corvo,” the Empress asks – screams, at the top of her lungs. “I want Corvo!”

“He is here, your Majesty,” someone dares to murmur, and Jessamine’s eyes go wide, her head snapping up, finding him standing there, lost and desperate.

He is sick with the amount of blood he sees, somehow knowing it is all hers. He did not think – he did not think.

Jessamine waves a hand in the air, and he is there in two steps, taking a hold of her hand and pushing away a servant. Her fingers clasp to his wrist with a ferocity he didn’t expect, and dig in painfully. He says nothing, merely bends his close to his lover’s. Her hair is fully wet with the sweat of her effort, and her face is contorted in pain.

“And you dreamt of doing this without me,” he whispers against her hair, and she gives a weak chuckle.

As usual, he is two days early, all but two trusted soldiers left behind, to march at the infernal pace of a garrison.

Same brave midwife dares to say: “He shouldn’t be here,” though she isn’t sure either of whom exactly she addresses.

“He stays,” Corvo says, in a voice that not even the Empress uses. “And do something!” He barks out, winning out his nickname at the court.

Jessamine pulls him back to her, as another contraction takes hold of her, and if someone hears her Royal Protector apologising, over her screams, no one makes it known they did. The Empress is growing exhausted, trying to bring into the world the heir to her empire.

“I can’t do it,” she says, panting, her eyes trembling shut.

“You can,” Corvo says, having eyes for no one and nothing else but her. “They are ours,” he adds, and everyone present will be swearing a blood oath to take the secret to the grave, and beyond, before they will be allowed to leave this room, his sword glinting at their neck, and he will not feel any remorse for doing all of this, while his lover and his child will sleep.

And so, Jessamine does.

***

His dispatch earns them, however, a couple of years of utter peace, as their babe grows. In the early days and months, Jessamine, against the customs, had the babe’s crib in her chambers, and no maids during the night. Instead, each time their daughter started screaming, one of them would roll out of her bed, deal with it, and they’d spend the hours as she settled back to sleep discussing a future brighter than they know it would be, merely because they can’t imagine it any less so, now that it belongs to their child.

***

“On three,” Corvo says, and Jessamine sighs, but her steps pick up, to keep up with their daughter’s request to be raised in the air, each arm held by one of her parents. It is their baby that counts the steps, and then she is laughing and giggling and she is sprung in the air for a mere second, her hair following a blink behind.

They both smile at each other, above her head, and for the duration of this walk in the royal gardens, there is nothing else but the three of them, a family indeed. Emily has not yet found a way to ask about who her father is, though they know the time is getting closer, the larger her world becomes. There is an easy, obvious answer for it – she is so much him, that Jessamine finds it a bit unfair, considering the suffering she had to go through during the pregnancy. There is however, a more complicated answer as to why she cannot know, cannot know her lineage.

They have discussed this: the complicated life they built with each other, for each other. They have agreed, Emily is to be their only child. Easier to excuse just one transgression, instead of a multitude, a parentage that is easy to defend or ignore. Corvo doesn’t want to ever have to put Jessamine through the pains of childbirth, and she’d agree, if she could remember exactly how horrifying they were.

Both of them find it so easy to accept it, both of them so happy in this.

“Race you!” Emily says, and starts running.

The Empress goes next, with a startled laugh, and Corvo follows: wherever they go.

***

“We are growing old,” Jessamine says, wiping the cream off her finger on Corvo’s cheek instead, as she gets ready in their shared bed.

He turns, allowing her to rub it in his dry skin, and he thinks how he would have reacted, ten years before, if he would have described this painting of domestic bliss to his younger self.

“And that is a gift,” he decides, slipping his hands through her open dressing gown, squeezing at the rolls that were not there before.

“No,” she corrects, smiling, “That is your skill.”

He hums. “I am paid quite handsomely for it.”

Corvo moves, the closeness forcing her to roll as well, and she finds herself trapped between his knees, his palm splayed over her stomach, where she has carried their child.

She imitates his sound. “Really?”

He kisses her, starting at her neck, his unshaven face tickling her as he goes. Downwards he lets his lips travel, resting for longer at her nipples, licking and easing until they become hard and she squirms under him, then kissing the soft rolls of her body.

“Really.”

He moves lower still, finding her slick and wet, and he presses his mouth against her.

***

“Corvo!” Emily says, her delight evident upon seeing the Royal Protector.

He is made undone, for a second, by the fact she is wearing a raven necklace around her neck – the gift for her 8th birthday from her mama, it seems, packaging thrown on the floor of her bedroom.

“Happy birthday, princess,” he says, covering the distance between them and kneeling by her bed.

She is still young enough that she is effortless in wrapping her arms around his neck, hugging him as tight as she can. With each passing day, week, month, and year he will become less of a hero to her, and Corvo is not ready for it.

But for now, when he offers her a replica of his own royal sword, she screeches with glee, and demands a training regime so she can learn how to use it. This of course means Jessamine will have to be there, for one cannot be without the other, Emily’s parents.

***

“A plague, Corvo,” the Empress sighs, her pen falling onto the surface of the desk, where many letters have been started, and none ended.

He does not want to know how she feels, as the ruler of all of these dying people, the danger imminently growing and dispersing. He can protect her from most things, but he does not know how to protect her from something he cannot see, cannot understand, cannot contain. He is afraid, all the more for his utter failure.

She had no way of knowing it would be him here, standing at the entry of her study, but she has a way of recognising him, by touch alone, by the air a room has before he even walks in. She’s been expecting him, but not like this, not asking answers she cannot give about an Empire that’s been crumbling for years and she is running out of ways to glue back together.

“You cannot send me away!”

“I have no one else I can trust with the task,” she says, with a sigh, burring her head in his embrace, and she is defeated with the lack of choices, for the first time in her life.

“I don’t trust anyone else to keep you safe in the meantime,” he adds, just as tired.

Just a few weeks of this plague, and they’ve both aged beyond their time. He is trembling,

“What am I supposed to do then?” she asks. “Wait until we all die suffocated in our sick? We cannot lock ourselves in and ignore this is happening out there, however much our noblemen would want this.”

“You’ve made up your mind then.”

“Yes.”

There’s nothing else for Corvo to do but accept it then. Jessamine opens up her drawer, pulls her other armchair closer to her, and passes him the whiskey flasks and cigars.

***

They have been together fourteen years. That is an entire life, and barely any time at all.

He was supposed to see her grow old, protect her from any harm, make sure that kind and trusting heart could create the kind of Empire she often dreamt about, even when it was hard on her. They were supposed to tell Emily that she is born out of a love so strong that it could only create dynasties, and apologise together. Their relationship was supposed to be their struggle alone, and now it’s the entire world’s. Worst than anything else, this world knows him to have killed her, and that the only truth out there.

He knows it, because any new inmate asks him about it, hungry for a good story. He has none: he has at last failed, his fear at long turned real, and she has died in his arms. He feels nothing now, he is merely numb.

***

Even when he gets out, even when his life returns to some of its old shapes, Corvo is not the same anymore. He cannot be. There is no Jessamine to ask kindness and patience of him, so he offers none. It is so easy, he finds, to avenge her death on every guard he sees, for having betrayed her – and on any citizen, for having doubted her. There is no place for such people in the world, not when Jessamine is gone. He will turn Dunwell into a landscape mimicking that of his heart, if he must: deserted and infected with an affliction there is no cure for. It is grief, felt at long last, but a grief that asks for blood, a grief that festered and turned to anger instead.

It has not been enough, for all these people who merely thought of him and his as chess pieces on a game board of their own making, to take his lover and taint his title and life’s purpose. They have taken their daughter.

So Corvo, really, feels no remorse for any deaths he afflicts. Try as it must, their hurt will never match his.

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