IV. A Fine Serkonan Vintage

Martin lifted the glass Havelock offered him to his lips and tasted the same poison used to kill Campbell.

He drank it anyway.

There was music playing, and it dragged his mind towards something resembling wakefulness. He groaned as he realized he wasn't tucked into some bed somewhere, or slumped over a table, but standing. After a brief moment of fearing he was in some kind of stocks again to keep him upright, he saw that he simply… was.

Just as the earth around him simply wasn't rooted to itself, floating up into a boundless blue-purple hazy sky.

Was that- was that a-

He stared at the leviathan hanging motionless in the heavens as his stomach turned to lead shot and his blood curdled in his veins. Was this death, then? Death, in the Void, in the Outsider's realm? The Strictures never spoke of death, except that it was an end. A reprieve from the soul's constant war. But he remembered the poison in his cup, and he could think of no other explanation.

A woman's laugh - Callista's laugh - was the only thing that made him turn around.

She was in the arms of a young man, and they were dancing to the music that played too loud and too fast from somewhere he couldn't locate. It didn't sound like Serkonan music, or Gristol music, or Tyvian music, or even drinking songs and sea shanties. It was bright and vibrant and crashing and cavorting, and Callista moved as if it were the beating of her heart. Under her partner's hands, her hips not only swayed but actively twisted, and she grinned, expression seemingly forever stuck in joy.

They were the only moving, living things in that cursed realm, and Martin found himself running towards them, only to come up short at the edge of a cliff.

The young man in Callista's arms turned his head, and Martin stared into cold, unfeeling black eyes. His jaw tightened as eerie recognition surged inside of him.

"Get your hands off of her," he said, his voice carrying unnaturally in the still air, cutting through the music as if it were cloth hanging in space between them. "She's not dead. I made sure she was not dead."

Callista didn't look at him, and didn't seem to notice as the Outsider stepped away from her. She simply continued dancing. Her eyes, too, were blank and empty.

That was not Callista. He took a deep, steadying breath as the Outsider simply stepped upward, barely moving, as if distance was no issue here. Coming in close, the Outsider canted his head to one side, considering him.

"You're not dead, either, you know," the Outsider said.

"He's been like this since I found him," Corvo said as he let Callista into the room at Dunwall tower he had set aside for the former High Overseer.

Callista stopped just inside the doorway, looking between him and Martin. "You didn't kill him."

Corvo shook his head.

"Why not?" She swallowed down the riot of emotions for the fifth or sixth time since entering the building. "He had the others killed, Corvo. He had you killed."

"I'm not dead," Corvo said, and Callista bit down a hysterical laugh.

"By the good graces of Samuel Beechworth! Corvo-"

"I thought," he said, "you would be happy. To see him alive."

She looked over to Martin, unconscious in his bed, face contorted in what looked like pain. His hands fisted in the bedsheets, knuckles white.

"I am," she said, so softly she wasn't sure if she'd spoken or exhaled.

"He will be kept under guard," Corvo said, "if he ever wakes again. He will be no danger, and no Overseer. That will be enough."

Callista took a few more steps towards the bed, then paused again, looked back again. "Is this your particular brand of mercy? The one that leads to fates worse than death?"

Corvo shrugged, and shut the door.

He relived his past three times over, that he could count. His childhood in the Abbey, the daring flight, the soul-crushing poverty and fear, the army, the roads, the coin and violence and death, the conspiracy. He relived only the agony of it, over and over again.

And in the pauses between each iteration, the Outsider would look at him and say, "Do you think you're dead yet?"

But he knew. The poison that had killed Campbell had been not the Tyvian stuff that Havelock had procured for Corvo Attano, but a Serkonan blend that was now very rare and very expensive. Havelock had been exceedingly stupid in his final days. If he'd gone with the leftover Tyvian tincture, Martin would have been rotting in the ocean by now.

But he was too smart a man to ever let himself die the same way his predecessor had. It would have taken a far greater dose of the Serkonan poison to kill him.

Havelock hadn't compensated appropriately, if he'd suspected at all.

Martin talked in his sleep. He mumbled and he hissed and he shouted. Getting him to take food or water was a trial; he responded to each as if choking or drowning, and he fought her every inch of the way.

Sometimes, he spoke of a black-eyed man, and all Callista could think of was Emily's night terrors.

She spent her days talking with Corvo and with Emily about what would have to be done in the coming weeks and months, taking breaks to check on her patient. She was no nurse. She couldn't be the one to change his clothing or was the spittle and blood from his dried and cracking lips. But she did pat his hand every so often, until the sight of him unconscious and likely dying drove her from the room in fear.

Why couldn't he have done them both a favor and died properly, easily, quickly? Or better yet, why did he have to be so arrogant and power-mad? She wanted to take him by the shoulders, shake him and demand an answer. He could have been High Overseer without turning on Corvo, without killing Lydia and Wallace. And yet, and yet, and yet.

He had done all of that.

She left his room in disgust as often as she left it in fear.

"Kill me, and be done with it," Martin said.

"I am a neutral force in this world, Teague Martin," the Outsider said. Callista had, luckily, long ago stopped appearing during these little meetings. There were no more heretical dances to distract him. Only pitch-black eyes and a small, curious little smile. "I can't kill you."

He laughed, bitterly, around the lingering memory of poison in his mouth. "Then when one of your supplicants begs for your attention next, tell him where to find me!"

The Outsider considered this for a moment, then shook his head. "But how would they recognize you? No, that is our first step, I think." And then he reached out a hand, settling it over Martin's face.

Martin's screams woke her.

She started awake in her chair to Martin arched in his bed, eyes open for the first time in over a week. He clawed at his face, and she shot forward, grabbing his wrists before he could gouge his eyes out. She watched as his skin bubbled from brow to chin along the right side of his face, boiled and burned.

By the time the nurses came, it was too late. The Outsider's mark stood in bright red, raw flesh, and Martin was unconscious again.

He woke up two days later. Callista was in lessons with Emily, and by the time the news reached her, he was washed and dressed and sitting up in bed. The right side of his head was wrapped in heavy bandages, but he already knew what he would find when he was allowed to remove them.

He smiled weakly at Callista as she entered, shutting the door quietly behind her.

"I'm going to need a mask again," he said, voice rasping and weak. "I thought those days were over."

"Then you will have a mask. Though I don't think the Abbey will take you back. Treason and the mark?"

"Corvo says it isn't a real one," he said. "I won't be able to do the… things that he does. Pity, that. It would have made all of this a little… easier."

She hovered by the door.

"Come over here," he said, and for a moment it looked like she would refuse. Then she sighed and smiled at him, shaking her head, and joined him on the edge of his mattress. "I have a bed of my own, now," he offered.

"If you weren't half-dead, I would hit you," she said, scowling.

"It was just an observation."

"Lydia and Wallace are dead."

His expression fell, and he looked down at his hands, then towards the door. "Yes, well. I never said I was a good man, just that I was a man."

"Aren't you going to tell me that- Havelock made you? That it was all his idea?"

"It wasn't." He chanced a glance back at her. She didn't look as if she were filled with hatred and rage. Just… exhaustion. She looked as exhausted as she had that first night. "It was my idea as much as his. It seemed… like an opportunity."

"And if Havelock hadn't owed my uncle that favor?"

"And if I hadn't reminded him of that favor?" he asked, softly.

The color drained from her face and her mouth hung open. "… Oh," she said.

"Lydia and Wallace… he did insist on. But two deaths on the books weren't to be so great, in the scheme of things." He frowned. "I miscalculated. Even before we knew Corvo was coming for us, we knew it was a failure. We should have waited."

"Or just supported Emily as she was."

"Or that, yes."

He fell silent, staring down at his hands. She was going to leave. It wouldn't be so bad, he thought. He'd known he would lose her when they all left the Hound Pits. That was always part of the plan. It had been hard the first time, knowing he would leave her to death and misery, but now she had a home in Dunwall Tower. Yes. Yes, this was the best outcome. He could go somewhere where the mark wouldn't matter, or perhaps take a page out of Corvo's book and grow out his hair, and perhaps masks would be in fashion in Tyvia this fall-

Callista settled a hand over his.

"The Abbey will not take you back," she said, "and you are too dangerous to let go unwatched. But Corvo says he may have use for you."

Gingerly, he stroked her knuckles with thumb. She didn't pull away.

Oh, he thought. That's a good sign.

"So as long as you intend on continuing to live, it seems we'll be close by."

He looked up at her to find her trying out a very small, very experimental smile. It really did help her features quite a bit, her eyes shining again despite how tired she must be. "And I have a bed," he offered.

"You dog," she said.

He grinned, and let out a little bark.

End

A/N: This started (at least for the first chapter) as a response to a request for Martin/Callista pwp, and somehow picked up feels and a lack of cracktasticness. Um. Oops?