#jessamine being royal protector in a world where corvo is ruler of serkonos and how even if i thought that fic was excellently written

[deathlonging]

AUs can be very interesting due to they break down what a specific character is carved out of and question the malleability of those materials but obviously some of these are more rigid than others and subjective as this can be sometimes its undeniable. obviously when thought is put into it you can dive deeper into the character than ever before and that is the ideal scenario bc changing one or two small things about them will always be more boring than analyzing the aspects that survive a massive shift while the transformative narrative is haunted by the aspects that don't. key word here btw being narrative bc that is the driving force and at the end of the day how you show the differences. pretty easy to avoid erasure if you know what you're doing which is why it feels frustrating when people insist on flipping power dynamics or gender with little to no thought about the structural factors in play like.....what place did these occupy in the narrative before you twisted them for a new character perspective? what did that say about the society the narrative is set in? what was its impact on the characters? how would the characters change not only within this new narrative but having lived through the social structures that support it? you can only really bring these up as questions when there's a certain amount of thought that goes into the AU as a character/world study of course like there are different kinds of fanfiction like anything else and being pedantic about the shortsightedness of some when they do not intend to focus on the issues mentioned is pointless. but anyway more often than not aus have the character studied like a bug for example in a world where labs as we know them don't exist. and they do not bother to analyze the difference between a bug studied by a scientist and one studied by a schoolboy in his room. not to imply any inherent superiority of one over the other btw this is just to establish the extremity of difference in these two situations

[ckyking]

witchsong

just finished my second playthrough of dishonored 2 (royal bodyguard ftw) and finally decided to write something for this fandom years after playing dishonored in the first place. so, witch!corvo and some attano feels for everyone~ i hope you enjoy!

You are a man full of secrets, most of which not even Jessamine was aware of before her assassination. Now, however, with her heart beating in a perfect counterpoint to yours on the right side of your chest, caught halfway between Void and the barely more tangible fabric of your world, you are certain that she knows them, just as well as the ones she gleans from the mists and whispers back into your ears.

Still, Emily is not her mother, is not her father, and can no more hear the Void than she can stop herself from stealing away in the dead of night, jumping from rooftop to rooftop as she lays down the burden of ruling for a while, grasping at the freedom the sea and the stars taunts her with.

She is very much like the aunt she has never known – will never know – in that way.

If you are a tree, roots digging deep and anchoring you wherever you go, branches grasping at the sky and lulled to sleep only by the come-and-go of the waves, Beatrici is a leaf, dancing away in the wind, footprints as light as a feather as her wants and needs circle and circle, their only constant the tug of her veins pulling her away, away, away.

But Emily always, always come back, and this is all Jessamine, lovely Jessamine with jewels falling from her lips, as bright as the blood that stained them, bright Jessamine who turned courtesies into blades to keep her Empire safe. If she knew anything in this world, it was duty, and your daughter bears it in her bones just like her mother and her mother’s father and all the ones that came before him.

Emily bears the weight of her mother’s line proudly, and you are glad that your blood – your father’s blood – is still and quiet in her veins.

As the Duke of Serkonos approaches, Luca Abele who is not even a tenth of the man who came before him, you wonder if you did not speak too soon, if this is not your homeland calling and calling for the daughter it has never known, just like it calls for you and your sister and all the ones whose blood churns in their veins like the Ocean crashing against the Jewel of the South’s coast.

All of those idle thoughts desert you as the woman the Duke had brought before the throne steps out of her litter, clad in black and red and blood, so much blood, blooming from her shoulders and neck like the roses whose scent hangs heavy in the air, sweet and cloying.

Witch, something whispers in the back of your mind, and your left hand, your marked hand curls as you step in front of Emily, Void seeping slowly into your chest as she talks of sisters and throne and rightful place.

I knew her once, but no more. Vines crawling through dead flesh, steel scraping against bone, wit sharp enough to cut the world and paint dripping from a discarded brush. Delilah.

Delilah—Delilah became a witch, you know for sure; clawed her way out of the grime and despair with broken nails and a silver tongue, played men and women alike until the Outsider gave her another instrument to pluck the strings of, magic which sang sweetly under her hands, tempting and ripe with possibilities.

But you, with your deft hands and sharp teeth and dark, dark eyes—witch eyes, your mother used to say as she cleaned yours and your sister’s wounds, you were born into this, born for this.

Delilah is not her sister, whose heart beats with yours; is not her niece whose veins sing low and sweet the songs of the sea and the trees. She cannot even begin to guess at the secrets you hide, but oh, is she going to learn.

Before you became the Royal Protector, you were Corvo: void-touched Corvo, quick-hands Corvo, alley-cat Corvo. And always, always were you half of corvoandbeatrici, your sister and you rulers of your own little world as you prowled in ever-widening circles around the place you called home, with your soft mother and your stoic father who loved you so, so much.

Witch-children, they used to call the both of you; an insult, a talisman held against the darkness reflected in your child-eyes, night-dark for you and witch-green for her. But you adopted it as your very own badge of honour, the two of you who lived and breathed by the tides, whose mother had to fetch you from the shore as you watched the great leviathans emerge before sinking back into the depths, the sea a great oil spill where the stars came to die. Your poor mother, who gave birth to changelings, half-here and half-there, too sharp and too angry and too much.

But the thing is, she loved you, your gentle mother, just like she loved your father, who towers over you in all of your memories, this giant with dark eyes and a constantly furrowed brow, with rough hands but a gentle touch. The man who carried you in his arms and your sister on his back as easy as breathing; who held you tight to his chest as if to take you back into his body, where you would be safe and protected from the world who cursed your existence before you were even born. The man who smiled only for the three of you, his lips cracking his marble facade slowly, almost painfully; this man for whom happiness hurt more than sadness. But he did it, for you.

You remember his large hands carefully holding yours as he taught you the ways of the earth, tending to hellebore and wolfsbane and bloodswort in the little garden you kept at the edge of the forest, far from prying eyes and from the Abbey who would brand you as heretics before burning you on the pyre of their convictions.

You learned how to carve bones and make them sing for you, silvery and bright; how to blacken them with hellebore when a simple charm is not enough; how and when to encourage growth, and when to salt the earth and try another time. All of those lessons you held close to your chest, especially in Dunwall where great beasts of steel and steam rose; especially after his death, as bright and shocking as the stars going out. Until they told you that the very trees he loved killed him, you refused to believe it, and you hated him for it, for leaving the three of you alone. He had seemed immortal, back then, as much a constant as the sky or the sea, a guiding hand in the darkness.

But you know that the things he could do – the things he taught you – have a price, and you will choose to believe that this was it, that this what was expected of him, and not a simple death, a stupid death which could have been averted with a little more luck, which you know how to weave from nothingness and carve into being if you so wish. You would have done so in a second, in a heartbeat—if you had known.

(You buried the what-if with the rest of your regrets, down, down into the void where Jessamine lives and dies and lives again, where your mother dies out of heartbreak over losing you and your sister one after the other)

And it is even worse when you remember that he was a healer, your father, for those like you who did not have the means to see a real doctor. But he had died too quickly for even his knowledge to help.

Broken bones, illnesses, pregnancies, you had seen all of this and more before you were even nine of age, curled with your sister in one of the corners of the room your father treated his patients in; a sink, an old table, two rickety chairs and shelves full of jars the only things contained within. The cushion you and Beatrici observed all of the comings and goings from with curious cat eyes – predator eyes, you would hear muttered under the visitors’ breaths – you stole from a noble, Beatrici’s first foray into overt magic as she unlocked the windows with a glance before slithering inside and coming out just as quick, prize held awkwardly to her chest. The thrill of it sustained you all the way home as you ran and laughed, high on your success and the magic that swam in your blood, as comforting as the deep thrums of your father’s chest as he sang you to sleep, your very own whale-song to tempt you down into the deep.

A life for a life, she had whispered against your cheek when a child was born only for the mother to die, exhausted and bloody from carving herself out to shape a new life with her own hands and bring it forth into the world. She always understood those things faster than you, your sister, born kicking and screaming years before you. But it’s alright, because you were different, and completed each other. Your were the calm to her storm, the ice to her fire.

Because your sister was even angrier than you, at times, and she knew how to use it, how to stoke the fires and sharpen it into a blaze hot enough to melt everything in its path. She did so only once in front of you, when men took a liking to your tan skin and wide eyes and promised to take the both of you to Dunwall, where you would be loved more than you were in the south, where your very blood sang for you to be. Love tasted of dirty hands and greedy hearts when they spoke of it, and Beatrici burned. Fire leapt from her fingers, from the cigarettes clenched between their teeth and from the lanterns sitting around them, and they burned with her, those screaming men who would have broken you before throwing you overboard, Dunwall nothing but a distant dream to the very end.

Her scorching hot hand in yours; the wildness of her gaze as she tugged you away and ran; the breeze teasingly pulling at your hair even as it fed the fire burning white behind the two of you; your shadows like giants stepped out of a tale, dancing and flickering against the wall of a crumbling alley. You keep all of this close even as Delilah steals the Mark from you, untangling you from the Outsider’s gift before casting both aside.

But doesn’t she know, you can take the boy from the sea, but not the sea from the boy.

Your hands, your eyes, your heart; a witch, through and through. Oh, my love, you were always more than you appeared. Delilah is just as blind as I was, once upon a time.

Ramsey’s greed presses against your chest, and Emily’s anger, icy and slow-moving, a great monster awakened from its slumber, straightens your spine even as the cold metal of a pistol comes to rest under your chin, forcing you to tilt your head up.

A life for a life, you think as you breath and reach, pushing past the City Watch Officer’s pleasure at seeing you at his mercy – or so he thinks – to coil your will around his. Without the Mark to aid you, the Void buckles under your command, tries to drag you under and make you a vessel for its will until you are consumed by madness, but you hold fast, left hand clenched even if no tattoo flares to life at the gesture.

Your father’s whale-song wells up in your breast, and the scent of growing things fills your nose, just like it did for years and years before you left the only home you had known.

Like this, Ramsey’s will breaks against yours, and it’s easy to sneak a tendril of Void, your Void, where trees mingle with broken shelves and frozen fires, under Delilah’s notice, to wrap it almost tenderly around the guards’ neck, around the Duke’s, to twine it around the thorny twists of Delilah’s not-quite-flesh, your fingers curling against your palm with each new life in your hands. And then, finally, you wrap it around your own neck, where it nestles lovingly against your throat, pooling around the muzzle of the gun still held to your head.

You smile at Delilah when she realizes what you have done, and her hand reaches fruitlessly for you even as you force Ramsey to pull the trigger.

Emily’s horrified scream joins the one she let out when she was taken, fifteen years prior, but you don’t quite hear it. No, your past flickers before you, and Jessamine’s heart beats in your chest, and the Outsider’s gaze is heavy on your back. The Void grazes your tongue and fills your mouth, grows in spikes and spirals of obsidian from your chin and spreads until it covers your entire face, a not-quite-living reminder of the mask you have not worn since the Rat Plague took over Dunwall and Pietro-that-is-not made it for you; as a gift, as an offering.

Lead tastes like your regrets, and your sister’s fire and your daughter’s rage.

(Your head explodes in a thousand of black shards, and the ones whose fates you shackled to yours fall around like dominoes, one after the other. Off with their heads, little Emily in white whispers from the space between dreams, before she wakes up, Callista’s admonishments loud in her ears)

And then you are back, whole and healthy and gloriously angry, the Void swimming around you before twisting back into itself, the world narrowing into a single point where time and space do not matter anymore before righting itself abruptly, leaving Emily to look bewilderedly at the fallen men and women at your feet, at your smiling face.

You know it’s not enough to keep Delilah down for long, not with her spirit parted from its cage of flesh, but you have won time, and time is all that you need to scoop up your sword and tug Emily by the hand, to run away from the throne room where dirty hands and greedy hearts reach for you, and toward the sea, toward the home that calls back to you.

Perhaps it is time for Emily to learn as well, those lessons that have not failed you once in your long and tiring life; the earth and the sea and the stars, the blood that courses through her veins and reaches for the Ocean.

Serkonos calls, and you finally answer.