Welcome one and all to the thing that is distracting me from my upcoming Voltron series (A Druid's Curse), because I love Thief (2014) for all it's MANY faults and I love Garrett and also Corvo is a badass and I need the interactions. Look. I don't know what happened. I'm sorry. I just can't help myself.

I make no promises with this fic! It'll keep going until I finally get more invested in writing ADC and it'll come alone as it does. I don't have many solid plans - a few, but not many - for this, it's mostly stress-relief and wanting more but not having any more so having to make more myself. You all know how it is.

Prologue is short of course, but the next chapter is already being written! Crossposted to AO3. As always, I recommend reading my stuff on there, it's better edited and formatted.

Ciao!

The flames inside the Clocktower had burned down to nothing. Usually, Garrett made certain that at least the embers remained - it got cold easily in the unfinished structure, and while his leathers offered some protection from it, and he had warm blankets should the need truly arise, fire was his preferred method of warmth. The flickering light that sometimes seeped out only helped fuel the fear of ghosts that helped protect him.

Tonight, he let them die. A dull ache nested in his skull, coiled behind his right eye. He'd gotten used to the constant pain, gotten used to accommodating for the lapses it caused in judgement, gotten used to slowing down to ensure he wasn't missing things. Or seeing things.

Even so, it was particularly bad tonight. It had been a year since he'd sunk the Dawn's Light, a year over which he'd continued to hope that it would ease, that with Erin gone and the Primal… wherever it had ended up, he could move away from the visions and the headaches and the bullshit.

It was, as he should have known, a vain thing to hope.

The City had slowly started to recover from the attempted coup, as the Gloom ended seemingly overnight and its citizens stopped dying. Well, died less, anyway. It would have recovered much faster if not for the martial noose that still choked it.

With the Baron dead, Thief-Taker General Harlan had seen fit to take control via what remained of the Watch and set himself as a martial ruler. Conscript notices had gone out to bolster the ranks of what was now little more than a personal army. Those conscripts that had gone unfilled had been slashed off the General's roster with blood instead. Garrett had stayed in his tower, taken a good long break to let himself heal, and watched the City surrender to Harlan's boot on its throat.

In the cold, Garrett flexed his left hand. It ached too - less noticeable than his eye, and thus the ache wasn't exactly pain - but he stretched and flexed all the same, working out the stiffness. His gloves sat on the bed beside him, unclipped. Even now, studying the thick, white scar left behind, Garrett felt relief boil in his chest. He'd been lucky - he'd been so lucky. If the General had shot him with any of his explosive bolts - well, he'd probably just be dead in that case, so maybe that wasn't worth worrying about. But if the General had used a normal crossbow instead of his wrist-mounted one, then the bolt would have been twice the size; even with the miniaturised bolt, Garrett had been lucky to escape fractures. It had hurt enough that he suspected the bone had been scraped, but his metacarpals had held, the bolt slipping between his index and middle.

And even so, after the agony had subsided, Garrett had lost feeling in his fingers for a while. It had been hard to worry about, at the time, in the middle of disaster and hunting for Erin and figuring out what the hell the Primal was supposed to be. Afterwards, he'd worried sick.

He was lucky.

Months he'd spent defaulting to easy jobs, choosing quantity over quality, just so he could focus on healing properly. Boring, dredged months - but Garrett knew he couldn't risk worsening the injury. It had to heal right, which meant it had to heal slow. A thief's hands were his life.

He flexed the hand. The stiffness was starting to ease, movement and heat loosening the tendons and giving him back full motility. He'd come to accept it; as long as he kept care of it, his hand had healed good as new. It was another thing he had to keep track of, another thing to worry about in the grand scheme, but it could have been much worse. He was lucky.

Sighing softly, Garrett looked up and studied the inside of the Clocktower. The walls stared back, a dull off-grey. It was unnatural, in the darkness, both shadow and light lost to him. Everything had a strange, flat quality to it, as if it wasn't quite real. It almost looked like he was living inside one of Erin's drawings.

And the flames were dead. Even Garrett's night vision wasn't that good - he should have been navigating by memory, by the faint blurred edges of solid mass and the echo of empty space. In the dark, he saw more by the shadows things made than the things themselves. But this-

It was time to admit it. There was something wrong with him.

Closing his eyes, Garrett focused on the ache in his temple, trying to feel out the tendrils of Primal energy. It had always felt alien, in the past - Erin's attacks and visions, the energy that had erupted around them at the Baron's Manor, on Dawn's Light. Even holding the fragments of the Stone had caused the same feeling. A creeping sensation, slow and wet, like whale oil oozing under his skin. The faint clicking in his ears.

When he felt it this time, he did his best not to recoil. It pulsed softly, the pain and the Primal, and he felt the liquid feeling seep out. It was like bleeding from his eye, but when he automatically touched his face, his fingers came off dry. Unease bubbled in his gut, anxiety and fear mixed with the strange hollow sensation that always came with using the Primal's power. It tasted of poppies, in the back of his throat.

Garrett pushed it away, tried to unfocus, tried to lock the energy back up in his eye where it- didn't belong, but had come to stay. He knew better than to think he could be rid of it entirely. If it had remained despite the ritual to draw the Primal out of Erin, then it would remain forever. But still, Garrett ignored the pain as it crept down his neck and bloomed across his shoulders, flowing down his left arm to his hand. He might not like it overly much, but the abilities that came with his little sliver of Primal were - while limited - incredibly useful tools. If only he could keep control of it.

He didn't like to be so reliant on anything. Tools could be lost. Even his eye could be taken. If he relied on them too heavily, then he'd be defenceless without them. His hands, his wit, and a shadow were all he should ever truly need.

When he finally opened his eyes again, whole body aching with the tension and oily slick feeling of the Primal, the Clocktower's greyscale wall stared back. It didn't quite look real, picked out without shadow or light, like one of Erin's drawings.

Garrett lay back on his bed and stared up at the clock mechanisms, steadily ticking away. It was time to admit it.

There was something wrong with him.