Bitter Lies
"Attention, Dunwall citizens The assassin, Corvo Attano, responsible for the murder of our fair Empress and the disappearance of Lady Emily, heir to the throne, has temporarily escaped state custody. Any evidence as to his whereabouts must be delivered to the City Watch at once."
Daud knew Corvo would come for him.
He'd begun marking off co-conspirators as Corvo ghosted around the watch and took out the protected leaders. "The Masked Felon," they called him, but Daud knew that this was the work of a man possessed by regret and revenge. Most of the city watchmen were left alive in his flight from Coldridge, with only a sore neck and headache to attest to their troubles, others were found bleeding out in dark corners with the rats tearing at their flesh.
Campbell was first. In the end, the heretic brand and Campbell's fall from grace was savage and cruel, but justified. Corvo was boiling with anger and betrayal, with six months in Coldridge at the hands of the Royal Interrogator only bringing the emotion and impulse closer to the surface, and this was his first release.
Daud stood before his desk, his arms braced against the scratched and worn wood. He had only interacted with the High Overseer a handful of times, but he knew enough from his scouts that the man was rotten to the bone and seemed to make it a private joke to defy all seven strictures each day. He would not be missed, and Daud doubted the vacuum of power would remain vacant for much longer.
Daud idly wondered if he was next on Corvo's list.
"Sir." A man in a whaling mask materialized before him in a flicker of shadows.
"Thomas, report." Daud commanded gruffly, broken out of his idle musings, and straightened his back with his hands clasped gently behind him.
"The novices have laid out the metal walkways under the direction of Peregrine. Now they are almost impossible to navigate without using Transversals."
"Good," Daud said dismissively, then paused, "almost? I thought I requested they be impassable for anyone not a Whaler."
"Yes, sir." Thomas kept his body language relaxed, he was trained well from years under Daud, but Daud could tell he was frowning behind the mask. "I assure you it is secure, but we had to leave a few paths for the untrained novices and Matteo. They shouldn't have to have an escort at all times."
"I see, very well. What else?"
"Peregrine and I have created a patrol schedule, if you'd like to look over it." At Daud's nod of acquiescence, Thomas pulled out a sheet of folded paper from the inside of his jacket and laid it on the desk.
Daud scanned over the plans and names, but his mind wandered to the looming shadow of Attano's bloody march for revenge against the traitors. What information did he gain from Campbell? Had he found Lady Emily yet? Could Daud keep his whalers out of the duel when Corvo decided to take his revenge?
"Sir? …Daud?" Thomas's questioning tone prodded a response.
Daud grunted ambiguously and automatically responded, "yes, this schedule is fine."
"…Peregrine signed himself up for a double patrol with Matteo." Thomas carefully pointed out, gesturing toward the schedule.
"Yes, that's fine." Daud said absentmindedly.
"…Matteo doesn't patrol because he can't transverse. Peregrine will just sit in Matteo's infirmary to annoy him, then become bored and do something stupid, like mix a sleeping poison in Matteo's equipment and test it on the novices during dinner," Thomas paused, and gauged the lack of reaction as Daud continued to stare blankly at the shadows; while his tone stayed perfectly professional and respectful, there was an edge of worry and irritation creeping in. "Like he did last week."
Daud grunted vaguely in affirmation.
"Daud."
"Hm."
"Are you alright?"
"Yes, I'm fine, Thomas." Daud assured roughly, turning around to stare at the cork board, layered with sketches of the previous targets, ruminating in angst and guilt yet again. Corvo was coming, but was it to exact vengeance and retribution or was it something else? Six months at the mercy of Coldridge, how broken was he? What drove his actions? Why did he let some live and others not? Who does he fight for?
Thomas crossed his arms over his chest, and asked in a hard voice. "Why are you doing this to yourself?"
Daud turned toward him in mild surprise for his lack of respect and replied, "what do you mean."
"Everyone was hit hard when Billie betrayed us, not just you. The novices and younger ones looked up to her as as much they look up to you. She wasn't unkind to them. But she betrayed you, us, because things were changing—"
"Why are you telling me this." Daud interrupted him severely, a growl deep in his throat that belied his exhaustion; he didn't want to talk about this.
"Things have changed since we killed the Empress. Everyone can feel it, and we can see the affects of what we've done." Thomas all but growled in suppressed irritation.
"I killed the Empress, and I will bear the burden of that, you were just following orders." Daud corrected, glaring incredulously at his newly instated Second's audacity; he'd never heard such contention from Thomas even through the long years they've known each other. Even Billie had never spoken to him like this.
"And that excuses us?" Thomas exclaimed shrilly, the whaler's mask distorted the words almost beyond recognition. He yanked off the leather gas mask abruptly, the straps snapping loudly in protest, to reveal heterochromatic eyes, dark violet and an etherial blue. A gloved hand tangled in his messy brown hair in agitation, his fathomless eyes were narrowed dangerously, and his nostrils flared with anger.
Daud had never seen Thomas so distraught and frenzied, not after the years of missteps to gain hard earned emotional control and professional detachment.
"We were as much a part of her assassination as you were when you shoved the blade in her chest! We took shifts and spied on her for months, we took and gave bribes to get information, we suggested that the Lord Protector be far away when the assassination took place."
"We were the ones that kidnapped her daughter and held her captive. We were the ones that handed her off to the aristocrats that conspired to kill her mother, who knows what happened to her!"
"I'm the one that tethered the Lord Protector to the wall. I'm the one who grabbed Lady Emily and took her away from him. You saw the look on his face when they dragged him away. He was dead. We killed the Empress and we killed a man. A man who is now free and seeking revenge."
"Get to the point, Thomas!" Daud snapped, he didn't need to hear this from one of his men, even one he'd raised since he was a boy; he demanded at least a modicum of respect.
"Stop being so selfish!" Thomas shouted and his voice broke a bit as his arm sliced through the air in self-righteous indignation. His feet were set wide and his shoulders trembled with repressed emotion.
The whaling mask hit the floor with a dull clatter as it slipped from Thomas's grip, neither men noticed.
"You write and say that you're full of regret, but you can't see what it's doing to us! You think we're unfeeling? You think we aren't regretful and guilt-ridden because of what we did? The Empress was the only thing holding together this rat-bitten, plague-infested excuse of a city, and now she's gone. And we've sunk Dunwall into the river mud."
Thomas halted the irate words that spilled from his mouth like water to take a deep breath, trying to pull together his frayed composure.
"We did this. All of us, not just you, we were all involved. And here you are, wallowing in your own grief and regret, without a care for what your doing to the Whalers." Thomas said in disgust, his arms crossed protectively over his chest.
"This doesn't involve any of you, Thomas. I chose to take the job, and I followed it through."
"Did you not listen to what I just said! We are involved, Daud, all of us, regardless of whether you delude yourself into believing otherwise." Thomas sighed and ran a anxious hand across his face, attempting to regain his shattered composure.
"We had a leader in you, Daud, we had someone who could protect us until we learned to protect ourselves. You tied together feral street kids, ex-mercenaries, and disgraced natural philosophers with black magic, and a purpose." Thomas said evenly, his eyes pleading for Daud to understand what he was trying to say, but the man was blind.
"I gave you nothing but a short life of blood and death. You were a kid, you didn't know any better." Daud replied under his breath and turned his back, resolute to end the argument if Thomas refused.
Abruptly, Thomas in Daud's face, inches away, shadows still flickering around his form due to his rapid transversal. Grabbing the lapels of his red coat, Thomas jerked Daud forward, forcing him to meet his eerie eyes, his smooth face was twisted into a mask of vexation.
"You gave us a purpose. You gave us a reason to live." Thomas hissed through his gritted teeth in outrage and frustration, he just wanted Daud to understand what he meant to the Whalers, what he meant to him.
Staring into Thomas's fiery eyes, Daud was instantaneously struck with how Thomas had grown. As cliche as it sounded, it only felt like a few years ago that Daud transversed into the aristocrat's manor in the estate district and found an boy barely twelve locked in the basement, his eerie eyes flashing in the shadows. The aristocrat earned a knife across the throat, and the boy was offered the blood stained hand that stole his father's life.
"Everard was the kid starving on the street who ate rats for dinner, he was the thief who stole elixir and clothes instead of coin. Scarlett was the child sold to the whore house by her parents and escaped to the filthy rat-infested streets; sleeping in the sewers was preferable to being fucked three times a day. Peregrine was the man who was forced into dealing secrets and poisons to gangs; he wanted to become a doctor at the Academy."
"Vail was the woman who tried her hardest to forget all she's lost; we found her among the broken bodies of the children she was caring for, and we gave her something to fight for. Everyone knows she loves the whalers like her own kids, even if she won't admit it. Rulfio and Rinaldo were twins stolen from their home by Overseers, and they did everything they could to stay alive to see one another again, even if they had to pretend to be like the devout overseers that killed their parents and sister.
"We were the abandoned, the unwanted, the desperate. And you took us in. You saved us from-" Thomas swallowed hard, "from something worse that death."
"I didn't save you, Thomas." Daud said lowly, remembering the unnerving blankness in Thomas's brilliant eyes all those years ago. "You chose to save yourself."
"And who gave me the tools to do that?"
Silence fell at that note, and Thomas released his white knuckled grip on the front of Daud's coat, stepping back to a respectable distance.
"I don't know what you want from me, Thomas." Daud muttered after a long moment, straightening his coat with a jerky motion.
"I want you back, Daud."
"I don't know if that can happen, not after what I've done. You know I haven't killed since the Empress."
"No, you don't understand, the Whalers don't need the Knife of Dunwall, they just need you, Daud."
Daud seemed honestly confused, and Thomas ran an exasperated hand over his face.
"Before the Empress, remember what you would say to the novices when they earned the right to be called assassins?" Thomas took a deep breath and continued, "'This is the day you begin anew, take your blade and know you have the power to do what you choose.' It meant different things to each of us."
Daud did used to say that, when there was a small ceremony to mark the initiation of the novices into full-fledged assassins, words would be said and a small celebration would happen afterwards. But there hadn't been an initiation in almost a year, since before he'd taken the heavy coin that sunk Dunwall into the unforgiving sea.
"You've taken the life of one Empress and saved the life of the next."
"It isn't enough to forgive what I've done."
"No, but it's a start," Thomas replied resolutely, his tone brooked no argument.
And Daud could almost believe him, he wished he could believe him, but his forgiveness, his retribution, was held in the hands of a child and a shattered man.
Thomas continued evenly, "Do you know the names of who we lost in the Overseer attack?" Thomas knew the answer, even if Daud had been greatly neglectful to the men and women who stood beneath his leadership, he wouldn't have forgotten the names of those lost.
"Yes, of course." And Daud did know, he couldn't forget the way their broken bodies were piled up along the walkways with the dissonance of music boxes in the distance. He couldn't forget the tears his whalers tried to hide behind masks as they gently cradled the empty shells of their friends.
"How many left when Billie betrayed us?"
"three or four, at least," Daud replied, crossing his arms over his chest, not quite understanding where Thomas was going with this line of questioning.
Thomas shook his head, "No one left, after what she did… I told you, Billie betrayed all of us. Do you know the name of the novices we picked up a few months ago?"
Silence was his answer, Thomas nodded, Daud might have read the report he'd written but he didn't commit the details to memory like he would have before.
"Do you know what we've been doing as you've been… distracted?"
"I've read the reports—" Daud started, humiliated that he had to even attempt to defend himself verbally, to explain away his actions to probably the one person he couldn't fool or intimidate.
"But they didn't mean anything," Thomas interrupted.
Daud growled, growing weary of Thomas's new found tongue and audacity. "Enough, I know what you want."
Thomas opened his mouth to refute and question yet again, but he could see that once the surprise had faded, Daud was displeased with his blatant disrespect. One of the precious skills Daud had taught him was how to read the target and know when to back off.
Daud scrutinized his Second-in-Command carefully, his shouts and pointed questions whirling in his messy excuse of a mind, and saw the man fall back into loose attention, his mask still abandoned on the floor.
He turned away, an obvious dismissal, and waited to hear the soft shift of shadows as Thomas transversed away, but it never came.
Silence fell over the room as Thomas quietly padded to the forsaken mask. He picked it up, feeling the texture of stiff leather beneath his calloused fingers as he turned it over and over in his hands, and tried to think of the right words to smooth over the sudden rift of understanding between them. Daud still hadn't turned around, but his shoulders were tense, waiting, whether for words or something else was beyond Thomas's ability to judge.
"Is this the end of the Whalers?" The words were whispered hoarsely, laced with thinly veiled fear and hurt.
The Whalers and Daud were the only things Thomas had known, he'd grown up under the wing of sharpened blades and black magic; personally, he wouldn't know what to do with himself if Daud disbanded the group.
The question seemed to seize Daud's chest and clench viciously. There was a vague memory of a hasty promise made to a young Thomas, about how the Whalers would be his family and Daud would look after all of them. Obviously, Thomas had taken his promise to heart. Not that it wasn't true to a degree, and he'd done well to keep his promises, but this particular one had been broken in the last six months.
"No." Daud answered swiftly.
The lie tasted bitter on his tongue.
He tried to quell the gnawing guilt when he saw Thomas's shoulders relax as he refastened the whaler mask, there was a flash of a relieved smile before the enigmatic eyes and the honest face were covered by anonymity.
Meanwhile, Daud scribbled a note on the patrol schedule Thomas had presented, and handed it over.
"Peregrine has a double graveyard shift with Scarlett. Tell him I want none of his bullshit excuses."
"Yes, sir," Thomas replied promptly, his voice slightly muffled behind the leather, and he tucked the paper into his coat pocket, "good choice, sir, Scarlett will keep him in line. He wouldn't dare cross her during patrol."
Daud snorted, "You make it sound as if I don't know my own men."
"Wouldn't dream of it, sir." Daud could hear the smirk in his voice, and if there was one good thing about those ridiculous leather monstrosities, it was that Daud wasn't forced to witness the smug expression on Thomas's face.
"Get out of here. Don't you have a job to do." Daud grumbled, leaning over the stack of loose leaf paper that were the reports for the last few months. He was oddly tempted to make shooing motions and noises as if to scare off a self-satisfied cat.
Thomas pulled a sharp salute, just a tad on the cheeky side, and transversed away with barely a sound.
Daud sighed, glaring dismayed at the stack of reports; It was going to be a long couple days as he sorted through the back log of paper work.
A/N: Another deleted scene from Singing into the Void, detailing the relationship between Thomas and Daud in particular. I just realized that I made Thomas super dramatic, oh well.
As always, let me know what you think. Hope you enjoyed.
Thanks for reading,
Rezz