Hope long gone and certain he's facing death, Corvo gets something he never expected: a genuine chance to escape Coldridge.
[CW violence and injury, depression, ptsd and grief, torture]
--/
Author's notes: This is a crosspost from A03.
This is also an AU where I started out with the basic canon I could remember and added a bunch of my own minor ideas and flavor text as I went.
Notably:
I made up some backstory for Corvo, and he speaks a language I made up called old karnacan.
And it doesn't come up much in this story but Pandyssia has a developed culture and civilization, regular contact with the outside world and its own government.
Piero doesn't do creep stuff in this, I wrote a sort of failed mutual romance attempt with him and Callista instead. I understand that's not a perfect solution and it may not work for some people. I don't mean to excuse or ignore the crappy problematic stuff that's in the original game. But I don't feel capable of addressing it in depth and properly beyond this disclaimer.
--/
Corvo woke in his cell in Coldridge.
I'm going to die tomorrow. Vas kathana, I'm going to die and there's nothing I can do about it.
That inevitability had been bearing down on him for a long time and he thought he'd come to terms with it long ago. Nothing like close proximity to know what fear of death really is.
His last fencing teacher had told him that. One of the legendary Karnacan swordmasters, a remnant of the Imperial Remeran guard. Had taught him the nerve hold to disable enemies. Had put the mental block in his head that wouldn't allow him to talk under duress.
He'd been young and brash enough to think there was no downside to it back then, only rescue or an honorable death.
Not months of being unable to betray himself even if he wanted to, over a point of pure vanity that meant nothing. Everyone already believed he'd killed Jessamine, adding his own voice to the lie wouldn't matter now.
It seemed the high overseer and the old royal spymaster had finally given up on trying to torture a false confession out of him. Had decided to just kill him and get it over with.
In darker moments he'd have liked the chance to stick a blade in both of them. Had once, early on. Snatched one of the torturer's tools and pinned the Spymaster's arm to the table with it. It had earned him the most severe beating of his life and they'd been a lot more careful with restraints afterward.
He put his head in his hands and tried to find solace in something.
Only a half remembered nightmare lingered, of the day of the assassination... But, no. He wouldn't think about that any more. The injustice he couldn't right, the daughter he had no power to rescue.
It had tortured him more than the tools and beatings, at first. Driven him to doomed escape attempts. Now their memories were ghosts and ash, coming only to torment him in the fading hours of the pain-soaked delirium he was still being forced to endure.
The agony of what he'd lost would never diminish but somehow he'd found a way to cut himself off from it. Exist in a shadow of his own mind where he didn't have to feel it anymore.
No... it wasn't solace he was after, it was oblivion.
Would it be quick? A headsman's axe, the old standby for traitorous nobility?
He'd heard the looped message on the voxcom for days now, talking about dignitaries attending like it was an exclusive theater production for the wealthy and well heeled. San dam.
Maybe they'd want spectacle, something nastier. Possibilities he couldn't push away intruded his thoughts. Burning? Flaying? Gutting?
Salty sweat ate at the burns already on his body, the fresh ones charred and blistered flesh, most thumb-sized, grayish open sores, the oldest scabbed and healing. Gifts from the High Overseer's brand of interrogation, the man seemed to enjoy fire. But the interrogators holding the hot irons were always careful not to push things too far.
Can't damage the goods too soon.
Will I scream? Beg? He wondered through a close-eyed grimace. Please, zalaryn ta, not that.
It doesn't matter. It will be over soon.
Everything he'd ever cared about was gone, swallowed in despair and numbness. Only a spark of vain mortality and the fear of it being extinguished was left.
And then the damndest thing happened.
A guard came, slipped him a meal tray with a note, a key. Told him he'd need his strength.
He just stared at it for a long while. Not exactly in shock, but unable to comprehend a world in which that could happen.
He heard distant footsteps in the concrete, and reached for the bread. He knew not to give the guards the opportunity to take it or spit on it out of meanness. He took the note and key too because it would be stupid to leave them out.
He ate slowly. It wasn't good bread, but it was a sizable piece, and he was always hungry these days.
And hope, painful as it was, began to wake in him again.
Anger threaded through his chest too, faint red ribbons. Someone's been planning this for a while. They could have told me sooner. not left me to the fear of torture and death and despair...
Maybe there was some wisdom in not telling him until now. Would he have been able to fake the beaten down hopelessness of someone knowing their death was coming? Or would the confidence it gave him tip someone off?
But he was still angry. He looked at the damp floor and miserable peeling paint of his cell and let out a harsh breath.
He could hear the guards outside, knew their rhythms well by now, although he'd learned it out of concern for not having his food stolen or rats thrown in his cell. They were well into their shift, comfortable, complacent, but not long enough to have grown bored and cruel.
Now was a perfect time.
Could he manage it?
Corvo had never expected to fight again, had given up hope of ever using those skills after his second failed escape attempt. He flexed his fingers and fell easily into a crouch. Time to see.
He chose his time carefully, snuck up soundlessly behind one of the guards and wrapped an arm around his thick neck.
Trapping his windpipe so he couldn't scream, but more importantly pressing the side of his thumb just the right way on a nerve in his neck, holding it while the guard gurgled and struggled... and seconds later, went limp.
That was an old, old secret. Probably only a handful of people trained by the swordmasters of Karnaca knew it any more.
Choking a man unconscious took minutes and unless it was fatal wouldn't last for more than a short time. A nerve hold worked in moments and left someone safely out for hours.
Corvo pulled the guard quickly back around the doorway. His heart raced, a second guard patrolled here and it wouldn't be long before he came back.
He got the body out of sight and pressed himself into the shadows of a cleft in the wall.
The second guard met a similar, swift fate.
Corvo dragged him out of sight as well, and pressed his back against a wall behind the doorway, catching his breath. Adrenaline jangle his nerves, but it was a familiar, not unwelcome feeling. Hopelessness might haven taken his will to fight but it hadn't robbed him of his reflexes. They were still there, sharp, waiting just below the surface.
He regarded the other prisoners in the cells next to his. Jomikey, Fish Head, a few recent additions whose names he hadn't bothered to remember.
"Hey toss us that key, killer!" Jomikey called. Corvo took the key from the single pocket of his prison clothes and tossed it over. Jomikey caught it deftly. It probably wouldn't work on their cells, he knew. but the gesture would buy him some good will. They might be less quick to sell him out.
The prisoners stared at him and the fallen guard with hungry, predatory eyes. Grinning and jeering at their misfortune.
He thought, briefly, cruelly, of leaving the guards propped against the bars. He had no particular love to spare for Coldridge's guards, not after what they'd done to him, not after seeing them kick men half to death in the yard for fun. The prisoners would finish them off and enjoy it. But... Jomikey and Fish Head and the others didn't have death sentences. Letting them kill the guards wouldn't do them any favors.
He got an uncomfortable, black feeling like vertigo, like sudden remembrance. And I don't kill when I don't have to. He tried to remind himself, half afraid for a moment that he'd forgotten that part of himself too.
He dragged the unconscious guards into his cell, back into the darkest corner, and heaved the heavy sliding door shut.
For good or ill he was going to try escaping Coldridge a third time.
--/
Some time later he stalked into the guards' storage area, every nerve and sense alert for footsteps. Still trying to shrug off the weight and stiffness of despair and the unchanging days.
They plan for me to go to the canal, and then the sewers? He tried to remember the outside world. Yes, got to be.
He searched the guard's lockers and found a tin of gun grease, thick and black. Cheap stuff.
He shrugged off his shirt, barely noticing the pain now as it caught at the burns underneath. He started covering them with the sticky black grease.
The tin had dust and finger tracks and a dead fly in it. Applying it to his wounds might get them infected, but letting canal and sewer water touch them would almost certainly end in death or worse.
That done, and with a sizable number of Coldridge's guards snoring in hidden nooks on the path he'd taken to get out, Corvo went and made the final preparations to blow the door. He set the timer, scrambled into the heavy steel bin just next to it, and stuck his fingers in his ears...
The blast was still deafening and the shockwave hit hard, rocking and shoving the bin a foot sideways.
Through his stunned hearing he could make out the ringing of an alarm.
Corvo scrambled over the side, through the ruined door, and leapt over the railing into the canal.
A few bullets whizzed through the murky, sickly warm water. He swam hard, staying under until the dark shadow of the wall loomed in front of him.
He clawed at the mossy metal, lifting his face carefully, quietly out of the water. Clawing over to the bank, catching hold of the boards and debris washed up there.
Yelling overhead. Had they spotted him? He was so close, just a few feet from the sewer outflow pipe. But he couldn't make himself move. Someone shouted again. He laid flat under the cover of the broad ferns, utterly still, fingers spread in the- Mud. Let's call it mud.
More yelling. Gunshots hitting the water. He screwed his eyes tight, expecting at any moment to get a bullet in the back.
But it didn't come. The guards had gone after a boat, its occupant hurrying away from whatever trouble had caused the explosion.
Hope threaded through him. A careful glance seemed to show no one was watching. He dashed for the round outflow pipe and into the sewers.
Darkness closed around him. His footsteps splashed. He found a ladder, grabbed it, took several turns in the murky brick passageways. Then up over a barred gateway, through a hidden hole in the brickwork he had to slide on his belly through. On and up and down, until he was long gone enough down a hidden shaft that he felt sure no one would be following.
Elation, blind animal relief at escaping death had begun to flood his mind, his thoughts. Ate its way through the barricades erected by despair. And at last everything crashed down on him, there in the darkness. He went to his knees and wept, helpless and uncontrollably, until there was nothing left in him.
A long while later, he got back to his feet and kept going.
He didn't know the sewers as well as those who called them home, but he knew this part better than most. He'd made a point of knowing all potential escape routes and inroads for assassins this close to the tower. If only that had mattered. Guilt returned too, the crawling and terrible abyss just behind his thoughts, fresh now and razor edged like a blade digging back into a healing wound. Bitter thoughts twisted through his mind, remembering the sick feeling of the assassin suspending him in the air, helpless, appearing out of nowhere to...
No. That wouldn't help, not now. He had to get out first, just get out. There would be time to reckon with those memories later.
He swallowed hard and kept going. Took a few more turns, doubled back, walked backwards to confuse his footprints in the soft sediment. And reached the narrow opening to the main channel, that lead eventually down to where the "friend" from the note has said a boat waited.
Along the way he found the marked case, and another note. Claiming that the people who arranged all this held allegiance to the true Empress. Corvo wondered if they meant the same thing by that, that he would have.
Inside the case... Assassins gear. A crossbow, elixirs, a clever folding sword. Extremely well made. Whoever had arranged this had money or very good connections.
He turned the sword over in his hands, testing the folding mechanism and the balance.
Voices warbled up from some other passage, down and away.
Time to question the motives later, he had to keep moving.
--/
The sun was slanting down toward the horizon, rays thick and amber colored, by the time Corvo reached the storm overflow where the boat waited. What time had it been when he'd first left the cell, midmorning?
He shaded his eyes and crept carefully out onto a good vantage point, wanting to look things over before he made himself known.
A section of rock let go under his hand and pitched him down the steep slope. He caught himself before he reached the bottom, but the noise had given him away.
"Over here Corvo, we've gotta get away, quick."
Vas kathana.
Corvo was pretty sure nobody was following him anytime soon, but there was nothing left for it. He half slid the rest of the way down the rock face and came up to the edge of the embankment.
He climbed warily into the boat and sat down facing the boatman, who flicked the lines loose and steered them quickly away up the river.
"I'm Samuel" The boatman said, offering him a hand in greeting.
Corvo didn't take it. Not out of distrust or rudeness, though the look on his face probably made it seem like that, but frankly because fading adrenaline was making him jittery and he knew his hands would start shaking badly if he tried.
Samuel didn't seem unfriendly, but Corvo wasn't in a trusting enough mood to show anything that might be taken for weakness.
Samuel didn't seem to mind too much. He looked away, over the river.
Corvo eyed him warily, glancing up now and then to take note of where they were going.
After a while Samuel looked back to him and studied his face. He looked thoughtful, not calculating.
"Look like you could use a few good meals." Samuel said, reaching into a sack next to him and handing Corvo a sandwich wrapped in paper.
Corvo blinked. "Yeah... thanks." He took the sandwich and bit into it. Dark rye and honeyed ham. Simple fare, but half starved as he was Corvo was willing to rank it with the best things he'd ever eaten. He finished it quickly and tossed the crumpled up paper in the bottom of the boat.
"I tried to get out a few times." He said. "They already kept me in Isolation and tortured me within an inch of my life every few weeks, half rations was the only punishment left I guess."
Samuel grimaced but didn't say anything. After a while he turned the tiller and brought the boat neatly up to a stone mooring space.
Corvo climbed out, somewhat less wary and on edge than he had been. His hands seemed steady enough now.
Several people met him there. Introduced themselves with names he probably wouldn't remember by tomorrow, tired as he was.
"We ought to explain things." One said.
"No, we'll tell him tomorrow. No need to rush into it just yet."
--/
Corvo climbed up to his room, bone-deep tired. ("All the way at the top." They'd said "just stop when you run out of stairs.") He got in bed and stared at the ceiling, unable to sleep just yet.
He rubbed his face, looking out at the crescent moon shining lazily in the deepening sunset.
He did something he hadn't done in decades, there in the quiet darkness. He whispered a silent prayer, for Emily, her safety, the vanquishment of her enemies, the strength and cunning to do it himself if he could.
Not by the hateful and bloody strictures of the abbey, but by the old gods of Karnaca. The ones his grandmother prayed to, had taught him the prayer for. Before the Abbey of the Everyman had stuck its ugly face in, before the inquisition.
Salt and Stone and Bone and Fish. Who he didn't really believe in anymore. But...
--/
Author's notes: I had a total mandela effect moment with thinking the place where Corvo leaves the sewers to meet Samuel was set up above a high ledge, and thinking it was a weird design choice and weird that Samuel somehow spots him and calls out to him right away even though he's too high up to see right away... anyway, I didn't feel like rewriting it after I replayed the mission and found out I was wrong.
Salt and Stone are a reference to the three gods (Salt, Stone, and Storm) from the game Sunless Sea.
Gruesome detail: I dropped some molten metal down my boot at work once and the healing stages of the burn looked like what I described here. Strangely it wasn't as painful as it sounds, I think because all the nerve endings got roasted.
--/