AN: Just a short story. I'm not sure where or when the inspiration originally came from, other than wanting to explore one of those reluctant Overseers.
During the Fugue Feast, some Overseers flee Dunwall and temptation. Others remain safely ensconced behind the walls of the Office of the High Overseer. But a few—many of them fresh recruits, the ones who haven't entirely left their former lives behind, despite the words they murmur—slip from the bunkhouse when the evening settles.
They keep to the shadows. They speak to no one. If they're seen, no one speaks to them. They leave the grounds unmolested.
Even the Overseers cease to exist in this time outside of time.
-o0o-
Ashley Benton has been an Overseer for five years.
He tries not to let that bother him.
On the night of the Fugue Feast, he's one of the few fully pledged Brothers who dons street clothes and slips away from Holger Square.
Knife on his hip—the Feast brings out all manner of men and monster—he makes his way down Clavering Boulevard, following the music, the lights, the scent of seared meat and freely flowing beer.
The streets teem with bodies; there are more people out this year than in previous years and he thinks the plague, beginning to press into the richer parts of the city, has something to do with it; people are desperate to forget, for a moment, that death lurks in the shadows. Everywhere he turns, they fling themselves into the festivities, some in various states of undress, all bearing some manner of glitz and color. Most faces are hidden behind masks or paint, save for a few very brave or stupid souls.
Ashley's own mask is a deconstruction of the one the Overseers wear. He's changed the head strap from uniform blue to a vibrant red. And, with thanks to Jacob for access to the workshop, he's carefully removed the lower, left portion of the mask-face, keeping his eyes covered and showing one side of the dour mouthed expression; it is balanced out by half of his own often smirking mouth. For more dramatic effect, the arching eyebrows have been painted black, the eye holes lined in black.
Even with the changes, or perhaps because of them, people in the crowd balk and twitch as he passes. A few dart out of his path. One or two brave women and men reach for him, run fingertips over the golden curve of his masked cheek, the bright blue edging of his white shirt. He smiles at them, winsome, wicked, but doesn't slow.
He's not sure what he's looking for tonight, but he'll know when he finds it.
At the end of Clavering, near the pier, there is music, slow and rich like honey. The murmurs of a curious crowd accompany it.
He catches a flash of bright fabrics, the glitter of gold on the edges of a shawl. The woman dancing sports the garb of a Serkonan festival, all bright jewel tones, flowing layers and sheer fabrics that highlight the smooth, duskiness of her skin: a flash of arm, a length of thigh. On her face sits a mask of gold, a near mirror to his own. It curves to cover the right half of her jaw, leaving the left open. The frown is less thin and dour, the nose slimmer, more arched, almost birdlike.
He stands with the enraptured crowd, watching color cut a swathe through the air, the arc of gold as coins clatter at the dancer's feet, a flash of green as her eyes find his.
As the musicians wind down for a break and the dancer moves among the crowd with her collection hat, Ashley follows. He drops a 10 piece into the hat as she's sifting through the shining array of ones and fives. Their fingers touch, their eyes meet and when she smiles, he thinks of old stories about sailors and sirens.
They come together in one of the many small hideaways that dot Clavering Street, seeking privacy in the shadows of the buildings. Still, the lights of the fireworks and the hand held lanterns find them. They spangle her dark skin and he follows the pattern with his lips, then his fingers, sliding the gauzy straps from her shoulders to tongue the curve of her collarbone.
She is welcoming, but not passive, pliable but not pliant. She meets him, touch for touch, kiss for kiss, laughs when their masks clash together, causing a shriek that seems like it could be heard over the roar of the festival.
She pulls him into her with legs around his waist, her arms looped behind his neck. Her mouth tastes like spiced wine and, as another firework explodes overhead, her eyes gleam with all the colors of the Fugue Feast and he loses himself in them.
-o0o-
Ashley wakes to the sound of the loudspeaker announcing the end of the Feast. He's on his side, on a worn mattress, in a little alcove near Holger Square and the morning sun is just spilling in through the window grating. The spot next to him is cold, has been for some time.
He remembers the Clavering alley, the woman and her warm, spiced honey scent. Remembers stumbling, together, away from the crowds, finding the little alcove – some bolt hole for a transient or heretic, no doubt – and bearing her down onto the mattress within, shedding clothes in haste and pushing back inside her as soon as they were bare. As though he belonged there, wrapped up in her body, tucked away from the world and time.
Ashley can smell rain on the wind on this first day of the Month of Earth. Beneath the rain, there's the salt from the ocean, the still strong scents of beer and wine, apricot tartlets and spice cake from the street vendors. Outside, he hears feet shuffling past, revelers heading back to their homes, their employ.
Somberly and with no little struggle, he pulls on his trousers, his button-deprived shirt, fastens his mask over his face in preparation to for his trek back to the Office and joins the flow of people outside, some struggling along by themselves, others walking in pairs or triads, leaning on one another to steady themselves and revel in one last moment of creature comfort as the sun rises.
-o0o-
Breakfast is a subdued affair; the dining hall in the Office of the High Overseer is quiet, the usual chatter having dropped several octaves, enough so that one could easily hear the scratch of breath inside the mask their neighbor has…inexplicably worn to breakfast this morning. More than one Overseer, and not so few new initiates, is suffering the effects of over indulgence.
Ashley sits next to Initiate Whitshaw, a young man from Wynnedown, whose pale face is wan and pinched in the center; he's clinging to his tea cup like a man in a storm clings to his skiff's side. His head droops so low an orange forelock almost swims in his tea.
"Too much whiskey last night, eh?"
"Serkonan Brandy," he mutters, then raises his head so fast his neck cracks. His eyes, bloodshot and baggy, stare at Ashley, aghast. "That is—I—er…."
Ashley laughs, claps the kid on the back. "No worries, boy. It's a rare Initiate who doesn't attend the Feast."
"And a fully pledged brother?"
"Common enough," Ashley says, nodding to the masked Overseer at the table across from them, his hair sticking up over the mask strap, his head lolling to and fro in the rhythm of sleep.
Initiate Whitshaw snorts into his tea. Ashley returns to his toast. The masked Overseer nods too far one way and upsets his porridge, the bowl landing hot and sticky in his lap and for a moment the silence of the cafeteria is broken by the sound of muffled cursing in Tyvian brogue.
The Fugue is over.
Time returns to normal.
-o0o-
The months after the Fugue Feast see Ashley ensconced in the thing he likes most about his Overseer role. He's spent this morning tucked away in the little room he calls his office. It's not much bigger than a custodian's closet, but it's private, which is what he needs when he's sitting with a man who's lost his wife to the plague, with his last memory of her the very image of a woman gone mad, rushing him with hooked fingers and blood tears on her cheeks. Or today, as he held the hand of a young mother who's just buried the last of her three children, a babe, only seven months old, bitten to death by rats in her cradle. The other two were taken by the plague months earlier.
He turns his face away, blinks wetness from his eyes as he escorts the woman from his office; she leaves a tithe in the donation box and, hugging herself, shuffles out into the damp, grey morning.
"Benton, you're on Jasper's party list."
"Now?" Ashley looks toward the short line of people outside his office.
"No, yesterday. Meet in the Backyard. Silas'll take the rest of your counsel."
Slightly mollified—Silas was a good listener—Ashley returns to his shared quarters to prepare.
They've been conducting more and more raids these last few months. With the death of the Empress, the loss of young Lady Emily, the imprisonment of the Royal Protector, it seems the fabric of the city is falling apart. Plague and rats and heretics abound. Some of his brothers are convinced the Outsider is laughing at them and it makes them cooler, sharper, more brutal. And in turn, the heretics are more cunning, more slippery. More than one Overseer has been put out of commission—a broken bone, temporary blindness, a digestive disorder—after a raid, which has necessitated them all being added to the rotation.
Ashley's always hated the raids, even before the end of the world came to Dunwall. Hated barging into houses and apartments, the screams of parents, the cries of children as they were separated and their homes turned upside down in the search for signs of heresy reported by their pious and noble neighbors.
No one ever talks about what those neighbors had to gain from the accused's misfortune: room to expand their business, quiet on the floor above them, a chance to woo their neighbor's wife.
He tries to get out of them when he can; it works if he's in the middle of an appointment or due for rounds in the city, but he can't try too hard otherwise he'll end up like Irvine with nothing but weeper rites and raid duty for weeks on end.
Ashley arrives in the backyard in his raid uniform, which is not dissimilar from his daily uniform, only the boots are taller (for wading through all manner of filth), he has gloves, and his coat is lined with a hardy weave to protect from projectiles or bites (heretics can be unpredictable). And, of course, there is his mask, gold and glum and suffocating. He doesn't lower it over his face until he has to.
"The Theatre District," Jasper says as they gather on the docs, "has seen a rise in reports of strange activity in the alleys and alcoves. Supernatural sounds, humming, a woman talking to a man whose voice is accompanied by the sound of the ocean and whale song. Pair off and sweep the area. Artifacts, heretics, we may find either."
And with that, they're on the boats. Cramped, crowded. But ready still, to serve, to spit in the face of the Outsider.
Ashley watches the sun cast gold and mauve shadows across the buildings, thinks of silken skin, gossamer and the taste of Serkonan spices.
The Theatre District is on the edge of Draper's Ward, crammed between the opulence of the Estate District and the mercantile property of the tailors and seamstresses who cater to the opulence. Since the beginning of the plague, it's been heavily quarantined in some areas, heavily patrolled in others.
They dock in the patrolled area, and spread like a flock of strange blue-black birds breaking formation.
Ashley's partner, Morris, is old guard, has been an Overseer for years. He knows the tenets inside and out and recites them under his breath as he goes through each apartment, searches personal belongings, shuffles family treasures like so much trash.
He's not completely by the book, though, and suggests they split up in the next building, to cover more area more quickly. The word is out that the Overseers have come and people stream from their apartments when they can, not wanting to be caught inside. Ashley knows even the innocent flee in the face of the Abbey's interrogations.
Ashley goes through three flats and finds nothing but the dregs of family life, photographs and graded school assignments. But then, at the top of the building, he comes to a small flat, with a half open door, that smells of Serkonan spices and sweet incense. The air is warm and thick with it.
And there is humming coming from inside the apartment, low pitched and beautiful. It fills his ears, seeps into his bones, the spaces between his muscles, and the tender meat of his brain and beckons him inside. At the rear of the flat, violet light spills from a small, windowless room. He follows the wordless song, passes through the door frame and into the womb of the Void.
The walls are draped with silks in black, blue and violet. In one corner, a mattress on the floor is piled high with pillows and blankets in similar shades and in the opposite corner is the altar, a monstrosity of wood and metal, cobbled together by hand, tall spires nearly piercing the rooftop, silken clothes flapping like lost spirits in the light breeze that Ashley can't account for.
The shelf of the altar is festooned with small white carvings in shapes that look familiar but which he can't name. It's not until he touches them that he realizes they are bone. Fresh Morley orchids erupt from a blue vase in the altar's center. The scent of them is vibrant, sharp and sweet with an underlying headiness that lingers like rot on the back of his tongue.
His eyes are drawn back to the shards of bone, the hum in his head grows louder as he reaches out to stroke the moon-pale curve of one, and the near imperceptible wind shifts again and he looks behind him, sees a slim, dark arm sliding into an open space in the wall, its hand grasping a leather bound book. In the shadow of the crawl space, in the flicker of the altar light, he can make out the curve of a cheekbone, the full line of a mouth and he doesn't need to close his eyes to imagine this face behind a mask, beneath his fingers, beneath his lips.
The panel slides shut again and he turns for the door, just as Morris walks in, head held high, eyes glinting behind his mask as he surveys the room. "Anything?"
Ashley keeps his eyes on Morris's mask. "Just the altar. Some bone artifacts." He realizes he's holding one in his hand, the one that seemed to call to him and he holds it up before Morris's eyes, before placing it back on the altar.
"Ugly thing," Morris says and Ashley blinks, wants to ask him if he can't hear the beautiful song, but he knows better.
Morris sniffs and begins a slow walk around the room. His boots scuff softly against the floor. Ashley can barely hear them over the song of bone, over the sound of his own heartbeat.
He watches Morris pull apart the bedding, run his fingers along the cloth of the altar, pull it away, sending bone clattering to the ground with shots like pistol fire. He sniffs again, turns to the walls, runs weathered hand across them, makes a throaty sound of discovery as a panel swings out from the wall.
"It's a trick older than you are," he tells Ashley as he reaches into the gloom, grasping blindly and tearing the woman from inside the wall, throwing her to the ruined bedding. "Used by bootleggers and black marketers."
She turns her face up, looks at Ashley and he knows she recognizes him, sees through the mask.
Violet light licks over her sun-kissed skin, shines silvery purple in her dark hair, turns the tender skin beneath her eyes the purple-blue of a bruise, turns her eyes—that he knows are warm and brown—black as river water, as the ocean deep and for a moment Ashley feels the world tilt, feels himself fall into nothing.
Then something is scrabbling at his hip; Morris, seeking the manacles on Ashley's belt. He tears them off with a grumble, binds the woman's wrists behind her back, before hauling her to her feet and shoving her toward Ashley.
He thinks she still smells of spiced honey and night air. He remembers his smell on her, the sharp-sweet scent of their sex laced with the odors of the Feast and brackish water from the river. Her skin is soft under his touch and it makes the song in his head crest, even has he holds her arm and pulls her through the apartment, out into the street and to the waiting boat.
-o0o-
Late that night, Jasper congratulates the Overseers on a successful raid. There is a business owner dealing in heretical artifacts on the side, a house wife who says she called on the rats to kill her husband, a scullery maid with a strange birth mark that will require further examination, a toothless beggar woman with bones woven into her hair, and her.
Ashley still doesn't know her name. She refused to give it, even when she was strip search, examined. Even when the Overseers pull a round bit of bone from the lining of her trousers, pale as the moon, unreadable markings etched into its surface. It's enough to condemn her.
Ashley doesn't sleep that night, but turns in his bunk, still hearing the wordless song in his head, seeing her black eyes in front of him. He wonders if he might unlock her cell door, spirit her away on one of the skiffs docked in back, but knows he's just as likely to be caught and executed along with her, so he waits and watches the sun rise.
-o0o-
They execute heretics at dawn, in the center of Holger Square.
He and the other Overseers who participated in the raid are there to witness the culmination of their work.
She is the last to die. The early morning sun coming through the clouds casts a strange, twilight hue over the square as she's forced to kneel. She looks straight at him and he very nearly takes a step forward until she shakes her head and for a moment, he thinks he can hear her voice, soft and accented, singing, sibilant, in his head.
And as the shot rings out and she slumps to the ground, blood pooling around her, he knows what he must do.
The remains of the day pass slowly and it's all he can do to focus on his counseling sessions, on the people who've sought him out for help. He tries to not only advise them of the moment, but to leave something for them to look to for the future.
-o0o-
When evening falls, he slips away from the others, makes his way to the edge of the property, a small storehouse by the river, where the bodies of the heretics are stored before they are thrown on the pyre. He finds hers easily enough, unwraps the shroud from her face and torso, her body pale, naked, unmarred save for the single bullet wound to her forehead.
The tools he needs are nearby, foul looking things that he's certain he's seen in the interrogation chamber. He selects the two that he's seen in use and with utmost care lifts one of her arms from the shroud. The beautiful appendage that had moved with such grace, that had held him tighter to her warm body, now so much meat, cold, stiffening and so heavy in his hands. He slices through the flesh of the forearm, through the muscle and the thickened blood, until he reaches bone. Even with the proper tool, the bone does not cut easily and it takes more than one pass to sever it completely.
He washes the blood from it, admires the delicacy of its structure; it will make several fine, small charms. He tucks it into his inner jacket pocket, then rewraps her body and leaves the storehouse, heading for the river.
There are always one or two skiffs prepared and ready for use in the backyard. He takes one of them now. When he's out in the middle of the river, the lights of the backyard a blur in his vision, he removes his mask and throws it into the deep, watches moonlight glint off gold until it's swallowed by black water.