Aramis's hand is warm in his, firm from years of toil, yet knowingly gentle—aware of his own strength. As they walk through the halls, up the immaculate stairs, Kirin wonders how much longer all of it will last. How quickly things succumb to time, how quickly the moss and the dust climb in. And he knows he is thinking of a time that didn't come to pass, but which resides under this time like a second skin. Where precisely does this time reside? Does it seep into the bricks and foundations, just dust sinking into the cracks, drowned and damned? How close he was to capturing time itself, or failing that, its illusion.
Aramis says something cordial to rouse Kirin from his thoughts, but Kirin misses it.
"We're here," Aramis repeats gently. A tremor hides under his soft tones, as they enter the room.
And as time circles them, a strange peace comes over Kirin. Everything makes sense to him again. He's been here before. He walks along the static figures, surrounded by people who are no longer alive, as they re-enact their part before returning to their place, grey marionettes against the florescent blue lines chaining this plane of existence to the next.
Aramis follows him into the heart of the séance, fighting against his instincts. "Kirin," he calls. "Kirin, there's something hideously wrong here."
Lost in his own thoughts, Kirin doesn't hear him. Instead, he marvels at the lines—everything is part of the lines, aren't they? They seemed to be anchored, piercing time and the Void—what if he gave them a little push backwards? Would that be enough to loosen them? Would that send them back in time?
He experiments with Luca's form, standing behind him as Luca begins the séance again, another ceaseless compulsion. He tries to feel for the wound in time, and as he does so, groping in the unknown, searching blindly for that fraying tear that connects 1849 with 1852, an early memory flashes before him, one of the first whole ones he has—he's five years old, and at the Serkonian seashore with his brother. He reaches into the opaque water along the jagged line of broken seashells and heavy kelp, wondering what he'll find next.
The florescent lines tangle, net-like, around his fingers. He lets them go, and they return stubbornly to their place. They need momentum to force them back in time. It's not enough. Luca moves forward to embrace Delilah as she tumbles from the Void.
Kirin pulls the lines towards him and then pushes them back into their correct time. Luca disappears, blinking out forever, lost to 1849 now and buried in an anonymous grave in the future. Kirin, in turn, falls back onto the floor, his heartbeat loud. There's a strain that's been lifted somehow now.
Aramis only watches him in horror. "Kirin, what was that?"
"It's the lines," he replies, slightly out of breath now. "I'm making them right."
He can't remember what he was doing in this room, but the Void calls him anyway—the wound in the Void. He tries again with Grim Alex: it's getting easier now to control the lines, and every time he draws from the Void, he feels as though he's seen eternity. The sensation of alternatively being haunted and at peace builds as he sends Grim Alex back. His own memories tumble forth in a horrible tangle: he's eighteen, and he's found his mother lying on her bed, and on the nightstand, an almost empty bottle of sleeping pills. There's one pill left at the very bottom of the bottle, overlooked in her despair. Next to her damp pillow is a hastily scrawled letter he'll read later, terrible and accusing, about all the shame and disgrace he's brought on the family with the little incident at the Academy. His brother won't blame him directly: her death is just another one of his silent burdens, and Kirin's only sorry that he missed witnessing the light fading from her eyes.
It's harder to get up from the floor this time.
He's underestimated how firmly the lines are entrenched, but he can't give up now. The Void beckons to him again, and it's so sweet to give in. The Outsider was right: time is an ocean, and only he can map its currents. Breanna leaves next, and with her, goes Delilah. Then, he's eight again, and drawing out ciphers in his room alone. His brother won't check on him for hours, and Kirin has learned to not expect anything else. Besides, isn't it more fun this way? Just him and the secrets of the world.
He staggers from the floor now.
There's only one person left—himself as he was on the night of the séance.
Surely, surely if he can soothe the warped space by moving time forward, can he also not bring stuck things in time forward? Could he bring himself forward in time? And what would happen? Would they merge together, two magnets inevitably drawn together? And if they did, would he become whole again?
Where does it go when it's gone?
"Kirin," Aramis begins again, taking advantage of the lull in Kirin's actions to summon what's left of his strength. "Kirin, I think we should let the Empress know about this. She must have people to handle these... anomalies. The Lord Protector for starters." He places a hand on Kirin's shoulder, trying to draw him away from the remains of the séance.
Kirin only stares at himself, endlessly entrapped by the knowledge that everything is so close at hand. He just has to reach for it. It's really that easy. This was only a minor roadblock: he'll be himself again and then he'll be himself again. All the quiet pain and despair that had been floating free-form and unvoiced in his head spills out: he doesn't want to be like this for the rest of his life, struggling in a strange world, irrevocably changed, and if there's a chance that he could be different…
He doesn't want to spend the rest of his life depending on the kindness of others, hoping that his personhood won't be too tiresome, or tedious, or simply too much to indulge. He knows how easily it can all be taken away now, how fragile his whole world is. What if Hypatia becomes too busy or dies? What if his maid changes positions or gets married? What if her inevitable replacement thinks that trying to include him is quite ludicrous, or that it's fun to hurt him? Maybe they'll send him to Addermire one day, because it's too much work to let him live as he'd like to.
Inside his head, there are so many things he simply cannot voice now, severed feelings and beautiful diagrams. Instead, he has only the persistent dread that he will never be better, but paradoxically, he cannot stop trying to be so, lest his fears of returning back to that horrible state come true. His efforts are measured by an invisible ruler, and he resents that his personhood rests on doing the impossible. And his body has simply become its own crime scene, with no answers to ever be found, just the cumulative damage.
Kirin breaks away from Aramis's gentle hold. "It's almost done," he says, and there's a wordless horror on Aramis's face.
Kirin finds the lines that hold his past self to that moment in time and begins to slowly loosen them. There's a tension that bends and gives as he does so. Currents, he thinks. All currents. He starts to pull the lines towards himself, the inverse of what he's done with all the others.
He doesn't notice when the blood starts to run into his mouth. Far too late, he realizes that it wasn't a wound in the Void calling to him.
It was his own.
But he can't stop. Even if he wasn't caught in the sweetness of the Void, he'd never let go of the lines for fear that he might never get to try again. He simply must see his hypothesis through.
Aramis pulls him back, trying to break his concentration. "I can't let you," Aramis says. "This is dangerous."
Kirin's only vaguely aware of Aramis now. His blood follows the tendons of his throat, running into the white of his shirt. The lines are so close now. He pulls them towards him, and as they disappear, aligned now with his own time, everything fades to black.
"Did you get your answer?" the Outsider asks nonchalantly, from his perch in the ceaseless night of the Void. "Time flows differently here: It's linear and circular and everything in between."
"This changes everything," Kirin muses. "We've been thinking of time wrongly. All the formulas must be rewritten."
The Outsider considers this with a smile. "Why? So more creatures can be cut open, and new fuel sources ripped from the earth? You forget, I've been watching all of you for such a long time. Again and again, I've watched great men tear this city apart—for profit, for pleasure. And there's always someone else who pays the price. Some men mistake their violence for greatness, a kind of stolen immortality, and they're always so surprised to see their legacy fall into obscurity. You know something about that, don't you?"
"You made me," Kirin replies. "You shape the world in your image."
"I didn't make you do anything," the Outsider says. "I didn't even set these events in motion. I've only been watching." He grins.
The Outsider reappears closer to Kirin now, his hands behind his back. "Where do things go when they're gone? I know what torments you. You want to know how your mind was stolen from you. How your great gift could possibly have been burned out. Where it could possibly have gone to."
He pauses and gestures to the endless expanse of darkness. "But why don't you tell me?"
As Kirin comes to his senses, a small surprise registers with him that, instead of lying on the carpet, he's cradled in Aramis's arms. Blood is drying on him now, stiffening his shirt and cracking along his skin. He slowly becomes cognizant of Aramis calling his name over and over again, searching his face for any sign of life.
Relief breaks across Aramis's face, and he murmurs a stream of reassurance, not meant to be particularly intelligible but soothing nonetheless. Aramis strokes his face. "There, there," he says. "It's alright. I don't know what that was, and frankly, I'd rather not know, but I think we should leave this room—have it burned or consecrated, or both maybe. There's something horrible here." Under his words is a carefully contained terror, blocked off in his mind so that he can tend to Kirin.
"It was beautiful," Kirin replies weakly. "There was a hole in the Void, and time was slipping out." Bliss fills him at the memory of drawing on the Void. "Time, time is both fluid and static there. Marvelous."
Aramis, in turn, gently tilts Kirin's head back, pulls out a pristine handkerchief, and applies pressure to his nose to stop the bleed. "Let's go back to Dr. Hypatia," Aramis says. His voice trembles from the panic, but his words and his hands are carefully steady, as if to keep Kirin from noticing. "I don't want to know what transpired here."
"I did it," Kirin manages in short bursts, balancing his need to breathe with his discovery. "I saw the lines, and I put them back in time." He frowns as he tries to remember. "No, that's not right. All but one."
Over Aramis's shoulder, he watches himself stagger around, both in and out of time. The grey drains from him slowly, giving way to the lush color of life. "Fascinating," he can hear himself mutter fervently, a dispassionate observer. "A ritual to touch the Void can move people forward in time. Could that be? Clearly, this cannot be the present. I cannot exist in two places at once. No, this must be the future—the new present. Do they exist on top of each other? Not in a linear state, but side by side, able to be transversed at will? Bubbles, perhaps, of existence?"
Aramis blanches. "Kirin, what's going on?"
Both of them look at him.
"Did I perform a corresponding ritual in the future—the present—to draw myself forward in time, thus connecting myself across time?" his double continues to muse to himself, surveying the scene. "Clearly no one else was drawn forward. The séance marks are gone as well."
Aramis makes up his mind. "This is all a trick of the light," he says, clinging to something, anything. "It's alright, Kirin, I have you. We're leaving this room now. We're going back to Dr. Hypatia. She's been waiting so long already." Aramis gently helps Kirin to his feet, taking care not to transfer his terror to Kirin. He gives Kirin's hand a reassuring squeeze. "It's alright." And if he didn't have Kirin to care for, he fears he might slip into the horrors that threaten to invade his mind. Perhaps his words are more for himself than Kirin, but he says them all the same.
Kirin can't remember all of what preceded this, but he senses that something has irrevocably changed: he understands now that his condition cannot be ameliorated this way. And as he listens to himself, all the minute differences between them sting him. They are not the same, nor could they ever be.
As he ponders on the realization that time has somehow fled from him, made itself known even as he tried to erase it, he notices that there is now a fourth person in the room. He frowns: why is Daud here? Has he been watching this whole time? And in that moment, he understands that Daud means to kill his past self—to resolve the impossible.
"No!" Kirin cries out.
In his desperation, he pulls at the golden lines again and reshapes them into a net to prevent Daud from moving any closer. At this, Daud's eyes widen in surprise. And Kirin knows he will regret this for the rest of his life, but he lets himself go free into the world. And a loss overflows in his heart, as his double bolts from the room, disappearing into Aramis's mansion.
When he turns to Daud, what greets him is not just the golden lines preventing Daud's movement, but the ones inside him as well. He could kill Daud. Just like that. The thought shocks him so badly that he lets go of the lines—to do that would be like destroying a masterpiece, burning down a library of secrets. And this is perhaps his second mistake tonight. Daud steps free with the careful grace of someone used to killing. There's a strange look on Daud's face, coldly calculating.
"You realize what you've done?" Daud asks at last. "You won't know peace now."
"I didn't know it before," Kirin retorts, and there's a rising bitterness in him. It might have looked like peace, but it never was.
Daud watches him wordlessly, perfectly still in the fading sunlight. "He will destroy you," Daud says at last. "In ways you can't imagine."
"I don't care," Kirin replies sullenly. He can't bear to look at Daud now; he knows Daud's right, but he can't bear to admit it. It's too horrible to acknowledge that his plans have all failed.
"He will come back and kill you," Daud continues. "It will be easy for him. If he hasn't come to the thought already, he will soon. He will kill you and take your place."
Kirin crosses his arms.
Daud presses on. "He'll fake a miraculous recovery, but if you think that's how it ends, you must not know the Lord Protector very well. If he is very, very lucky, he'll spend the rest of his life in a prison cell probably in Dunwall. And if not, he'll get one of the many quirks of fate that have been known to follow the Lord Protector."
"Quirks of fate?" Kirin repeats.
"I wouldn't think too much on it," Daud replies, but Aramis's face has changed, as if a piece has finally fallen into place. Kirin suspects that if he can just figure out what that revelation means, he would understand something crucial. But it eludes him, and perhaps this one is for the best.
"Are you angry with me?" Kirin asks at last.
"More than a little, yes," Daud replies. "That was an extraordinarily foolish thing to do. Understandable but foolish."
"Is it because I don't know any better?" Kirin replies bitterly, repeating words he can't remember said to him but which have become linked to him all the same. He'll be like this forever, extraneous and out of reach, while somewhere out there, he's whole and free. "There's a better version of me out there now. He can do all the things I can't—won't ever be able to." It's miserable to admit this, but it's been foremost in his thoughts, ever since he was able to compare himself with his past self—even the difference in their voices pained him. It is so hard to be a person, to endure what everyone else can tolerate, to pretend his invisible burden doesn't exist.
"I don't think I would like your double very much," Daud replies lightly. "I never told you what I did, did I?" He pauses and looks into the sunset. "I was an assassin. I killed people for coin, and I did it for years. Held a gang of misfits, runaways, and other desperate souls all in the palm of my hand. I shared my powers among them, trained them, raised them. We killed, and it was easy living. I was far before your time. That's probably for the best. I don't doubt someone would have put a fine price on your throat, and I'd have considered it a fun afternoon to break into that mansion of yours and find you." He pauses. "I'm sure the Outsider finds that funny now too."
Kirin watches him. It's difficult to follow Daud, but he tries. "What changed?"
Daud shrugs. "Everything. Everything caught up with me. It always does," he says. "You don't want to hear about all that. It's too long anyway. I'm an old man, I have my regrets. It's what I'm entitled to, after all. I can see everything I should have done better, differently, and how that would have changed this."
"Why didn't you—" there's a word missing in Kirin's head, he fumbles for a substitute, "make me die?" He would like to say that he's gotten used to a headful of gaps and holes and burns, but perhaps that not a thing that can be gotten used to.
"I thought about it," Daud replies. "It would have been the easiest thing to do. Probably the most sensible too. But I've done the easiest path for a while now, and I've seen where it's led."
"Will you make him die?" Kirin asks. Somewhere in Karnaca, part of his past is alive: perhaps he can find the answers if no one else can.
"I don't know yet."
"I could not bear it if he died," Kirin says truthfully.
"You'd be surprised what you can bear." The shadows crawl across Daud's face. "But to answer your question, I will leave him alive only if you promise me one thing, and if you promise me this, you must mean it. If you go back on your word, I will not hesitate. I have killed an ocean of men, one more won't matter."
"What do you want me to promise?"
"That you will never give any of your power to him. I don't care what he promises, I don't care what he claims to do or make. I don't care if he says he can make you whole."
"I promise," Kirin says, and as if to solidify this, he writes it down in his notebook.
Daud pauses. "Where's the first place you would go?" he asks Kirin.
"The Clockwork Mansion," Kirin replies automatically.
"Good," Daud says. "Thought as much." He steadies himself. "Right, I'm going to find your double."
"I want to come with you," Kirin says, much to Aramis's alarm. "I don't want to be left here. I'm not a child."
"It's dangerous," Daud counters.
"I know." Kirin turns to Aramis. "Please," he says. "I would like to do this. I would like to see him again."
Aramis only surveys his face with a kind of helpless sadness. He gives Kirin's hand a gentle squeeze.
Daud shrugs. "Well, I can't stop you, so you may as well."
Kirin and Daud take to the roof, and just before Kirin does so, he glances back at Aramis, who seems so lost in his own house, holding himself together despite the horrors. Travelling is as exhilarating at Kirin dimly remembers it. It's so easy to draw from the Void now, to control the ebb and flow of it through him. They stick to their usual pattern: Daud goes ahead and waits for him to rejoin him. Kirin is particularly proud of the fact that Daud only has to catch him once. They travel this way in silence for a little. And over the roofs, the Clockwork Mansion looms. This journey is not a homecoming, but a wake. And Kirin cannot quite articulate the string of melancholy pain in his head at seeing the remnants of his no-longer home, a place he knew so well. But he must do this, if only to say goodbye to it all.