Chapter Text
The sound of water lapping against the hull of the boat is soft and soothing. The nights, these days, are quiet. The city is at peace. The seas are as well, at least at the moment. It's very late at night and the lights of Dunwall are a glittering blur of shoreline, and the stars glitter on the slick mirrored surface of the sea, and Samuel is perfectly content to just sit and take it in.
He is not stupid enough to try and sleep out here, alone in a small boat on the wide ocean - but he would like to. Everything is simpler at sea. Words like conspiracy and loyalist and lost love do not make much sense when the only voices around you are those of salt and wind and sky.
Though it's not that he doesn't get lonely, sometimes. Quietly so.
He's taken Corvo out here a few times, now that there are no missions circumscribing their trips and no murder at the end - just the two of them, sometimes with a bottle of whiskey, Samuel talking of nothings and Corvo sometimes appreciating the gaps and the silence and sometimes filling in with little nothing-observations of his own. It is a very comfortable sort of friendship. The Lord Protector is a good listener. He seems to like the way Samuel can spin harmless little stories that settle around them both like a blanket.
They do not talk much of politics, certainly not anymore, not when Corvo lives and breathes it every day and already has far too much tension in his shoulders. They do not talk, much, of the past. They have raised a toast to the men the Loyalists used to be, and that was enough. Samuel went to sea to forget, after all, and he supposes that he can lend Corvo the same favor.
And besides – he decided long ago that there were things he was simply not meant to know.
No. If Samuel does not ask about the mark on his hand, or the particulars of the hellish trek back from death and the Flooded District and meeting the Empress’s killer, or the nightmares he knows the man has of falling though an endless void of the words YOU CANNOT SAVE HER - just as Corvo does not ask about the name of his boat - it is not because he does not expect answers to come. It is not because either of them would mind telling. It is simply trust. It is because they are both men who know to sit and appreciate the silence and the turn of the waves and the wide peaceful expanse of the sea.
And the sea is so calm, now. Barely a sound against the boat's grey hull. Barely a ripple on the surface. The water is silk-smooth, mirrorlike. Samuel peers down and watches shapes move underneath his reflection, so many fathoms down below, dark and vast and slow. A great bulk of something silver passes by below him. It is so many hundred times larger than his little boat. In the moonlight it seems to shine, and Samuel draws his coat around himself.
There are things in the deep that have no name, and he is only an old sailor who is without friends (but not friendless) alone on the water. If something wished to swallow him whole, it would. There is nothing he can do, and so he does not worry.
And besides. The night is very beautiful.
It is late, but sleep and shore are a long ways off. Samuel fusses underneath his seat for a mug and a thermos of still-warm tea. The boat tips, just a bit, as he does so; and the mug rolls out of his grasp and rolls down the length of the boat, stopping at the bow with a soft clink.
Bent down, Samuel watches a hand reach down and pick it up.
“Do you mind?” asks the young man from his teetering perch on the bow of the boat. He is sopping wet, dark hair sleek and plastered to his skull, dripping water all over the boat; he should be shivering but he isn’t, not at all. His eyes are fathomless and dark. He holds the mug forward to be filled. “You’ve got a second one. I’ve never had tea.”
Samuel stares at him for a long, long moment. And then he straightens, very slowly.
“No,” he says, carefully, “if you’re who I think you are, I suppose you haven’t.” He clears his throat. “There’s, uh, a bottle of whiskey too if you’d rather –”
“No, no, tea is fine. Water flavored with the ghosts of faraway leaves. You humans come up with such odd things.” His lips twitch. “Don’t be so afraid of me, Samuel Beechworth. I am more than some ravenous being from the deep who wishes to eat you alive. And you are so much more than some old sailor.”
“I’m not too sure about that,” Samuel manages.
He does not pour the tea.
(Of course the Outsider’s been reading his mind. Of course.)
And the Outsider’s eyes are studying his face so intently, and he cannot read if the glitter in them is cruelty or laughter. “No,” he says, and the words are almost warm. “You are essential. You know the waters of the city like you know the lifelines on your palm, and there is power in that. Much. And you know me already, Samuel Beechworth, whether you are aware of it or not; for you know all my currents and all my dark places.”
Samuel finds that he’s staring again. He clears his throat and searches around for the first words he can find. “You’re the one making all the lights on the river at night, aren’t you? The faces.”
“I am.”
“You scare a lot of people with that.” He sits there for another long moment. “What do you want?”
The Outsider takes the thermos from Samuel’s dumfounded hand, and pours himself a mug of tea that steams in the night air, flicks the tip of his tongue out to taste it. “I only wanted,” he answers, “to greet you properly, at long last. To thank you.”
Samuel cannot help himself; he laughs, a short and genuine sound. “Why? What for? Should I feel threatened?”
“Oh, no. As I said, you are essential. I mark those who I wish to set the game in motion, but nothing could be done without men such as you. You do not have the same sort of draw as Corvo, for example, but that does not mean you are lesser.” A faint flicker of a smile over the rim of his mug. “After all. What could Corvo have done, alone, without you to guide him there?”
Samuel folds his hands in his lap. The Outsider’s tone pulls at him, like the barbs in the backwards-curve of a fishhook, scraping and catching and not quite letting go. He takes the thermos back from the man, considers the second mug for tea, sets it aside. Rubs a hand over his chin. “Is that how you see him?”
“Hm?”
“Corvo. Or whoever you’ve shown favor to. You said game, seems to me you don’t really think of those men as…well. Men.”
The Outsider tilts his head, briefly, considering. It is clear that he does not quite care. “Game is too simple a word, perhaps.”
“You know, there’s a lot of reasons that Corvo and me don’t talk about politics in this boat.” Samuel is only a little surprised at himself; if this being wishes to swallow him whole, after all, there’s not much he can do either way. His voice rises a bit. “It’s not my place to go asking about that stuff, sure. But we don’t like all the fancy double-talk those aristocrats use. You can dress it up all you like, but at the end of the day it all still smells the same.”
The young man’s lips twitch; on another being, it would be a smile. “Are you angry with me?”
“No.” Samuel shrugs. “A little.”
“Your thoughts are turning so quickly towards teeth and shadows and breaking waves. How interesting. I’m not going to eat you. I am not so cruel.” He sets the mug on the floor and stands, tipping the little boat dangerously so that water licks over one edge and so that Samuel has to scrabble for balance. “Goodbye, Samuel Beechworth. Thank you for the tea.”
“No,” says Samuel. Flat and firm. “Sit.”
The Outsider blinks at him. Startled. His grin is white in the dark. “You would –”
“Don’t give me that look.” Samuel crosses his arms. “Sit.” Hint of a smile. “I don’t think it was very smart of you to appear to an old sailor while looking like half a boy. Mr. Outsider. Sir.”
And the Outsider (in the second most surprising thing of the night, the first being the words Samuel has just spoken), sits. Perched on the prow, knees drawn up, eyebrows raised in expectation.
Samuel pours the tea.
“You just said you weren’t cruel,” he begins. His words are calm and carefully chosen, as always. “And you’ll forgive me, but I worked for Havelock and his snakes. And that’s one of the biggest lies I’ve ever heard.”
“So you know me, then.”
“I know that Corvo’s half-convinced the Abbey’s going to brand him as a witch. I know the poor man can’t sleep with whatever nightmares you put him through. Sleeping and otherwise.” He shifts, feet knocking hollow against the hull of the boat. “He said you’d chosen the man who killed the Empress, too. Daud or whatever his name was. He was another one of your little…” he grimaces at the word. “Game-pieces, or whatever you want to call them.”
The Outsider gives a long and eloquent sigh. “It’s all much more interesting and complicated than –“
“You gave your magic to the man who killed the Empress, yeah? And that’s just one thing you’ve done. That I know about.”
The being sitting on the prow of his boat and wearing the skin of a young man merely looks at him, and his eyes are blank, and the water runs down and over his skin in a map that Samuel cannot hope to read. Or care to. He does not answer.
“Seems to me,” says Samuel, flat, “that you’re responsible for a lot of the horrible things wrong with this city.”
“Also for fixing them, then,” he responds lightly. “With Corvo.”
“Poor man.”
“Poor man,” the Outsider agrees.
“Not much of a fix for all the misery you caused at all.”
“Oh, not at all. He was never intended as a fix.”
Samuel gives a little snort and looks away. He sips his tea. It is no longer quite warm. It is oversteeped and tastes perfectly ordinary and familiar, which is not something that can be said for the rest of this situation.
He sips his tea, and the Outsider sips his, and the stars shine in the sky and the waves lap against the hull of the boat, and the things that move in the deep are unknowable and beautiful and horrible and far below.
“Is that your judgment?” murmurs the Outsider after several moments of silence, when the tea has long since gone perfectly cold. “Have you marked me with your own brand, then? That I am cruel, and callous, and cold, and all those things your Abbey speaks of?”
“Oh, no.” Samuel sets down the mug, rubs a hand over his mouth. “Like you said. I don’t know you and I don’t ever want to, frankly. I’m just going off what I see. And it seems awfully rude of me to say only bad things about some god who shows up in my boat, when I’m only an old sailor.”
The Outsider’s eyes turn up at the corners, just slightly. “Ah, Samuel. You will never quite believe it, but you are so much more than that.”
“Heh. If you say so.” He looks up, catches a black eye with is own. “And if you don’t mind me saying so, Sir – you are the most childish, selfish, bratty young man I’ve ever had in this boat.”
And that young man gives a wide and white and blazing smile in the dark. He laughs, just once, soft as he moves forward, wobbling the boat once more. Before Samuel can think to react he finds that there are arms wrapped around him, thin and smelling of seaweed or ozone and faintly damp – the Outsider gives him a brief, tight hug that he can feel all down to his bones.
And then the boat tips and rights itself with a slosh of water. And Samuel is alone.
For a long while he can only sit there, utterly stunned. And then he begins to laugh, quiet and first and dry; and then loud and genuine peals of laughter that ring out over the empty water and make it a little less empty than before. And when he looks over the side of the boat, he can see a creature moving in the deep below all in shades of silver and blue and empty-eye black; and when he pours himself a final cup of tea (still laughing) he finds that it is steaming hot once more, that it stays that way as he sets his course for shore.