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septemberskye · 5 years

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Angst/fluff prompt #78 - “You’re worth it.” Corvo/Daud pretty please :D

Head’s up: there’s on-screen bone-breaking in this one, but it’s not graphic.

Daud has words for whoever gathered the intelligence on Dapper Rodney. It’s true that he and the Roaring Boys are “poorly organized and supplied, with no detectable power structure” but “a minimal threat” they are not.

He rattles the handcuffs.

Some half-wit (and he knows it wasn’t one of his Whalers, they would’ve given him an accurate report) is going to catch it if he can manage to get loose. He doesn’t like his chances, though.

With the Geezer finally dead and buried, Rodney had the idea to form a gang of his own and started operating out of a tumbledown warehouse on the edge of Draper’s Ward. Daud had suspected the power vacuum left from the Hatters’ collapse was the only thing that let them last long enough to become a problem, and now he knows he was right, along with a few other things that aren’t very important at the moment.

He’d just meant to get out and stretch his legs a bit, investigate a little. He hadn’t even left a note to say where he was going, thinking he’d be back before he was missed. And it has been easy, so easy to sneak in, look around, and take some notes, all while perched safely up in the rafters.

Well. He thought.

Dapper Rodney has a tallboy.

The ground had started shaking and he recognized what it was immediately (though all the tallboys were supposed to be decommissioned and hauled off for scrap, how had the Roaring Boys gotten their hands on one?) and dropped his pen as he fumbled to get it put back in his pocket because he had to leave. He watched with mounting horror as it fell, tumbling end over end, and hit the ground, springing apart into so many incriminating pieces. It was a fancy one too, with little bits of gold here and there. Not the kind of thing that might blend into all the dirt on the floor.

Someone walking past had noticed the pen scattered around, then he got the tallboy’s attention, and he’d been the one to actually see Daud. He imagines they wore about the same looks of surprise. And it had all been downhill from there—he’d abandoned stealth in favor of speed and tried to run, and then they all chased him, and then—

Well, it doesn’t matter how he got caught and he doesn’t want to think about it anyway, it’s pissing him off too much. Nothing like this has happened since Black Sally tried to put his eye out.

The Roaring Boys had a fun time roughing him up and crowing over his Mark, and now he’s handcuffed to a leaky pipe in a mostly-dark room, he might have a couple of cracked ribs, he certainly has more bruises than he wants to count, and the whole left side of his face hurts—Dapper Rodney has a vicious right hook. He doesn’t know what else they’re going to do to him—doesn’t think even they’ve figured it out yet—but he doubts it’ll be pleasant.

He just hopes they don’t try to ransom him to the Abbey.

He uses his Void gaze to get a better look at his surroundings. It’s some kind of storage room, there’s shelves on the opposite wall, maybe he could—no. He can’t pull his hand out from behind himself far enough to tether anything helpful. There’s a big tool chest a few feet away he could probably get, but that would knock it over and get everyone’s attention.

There’s nothing for it, he supposes, and tries to just pull his hands through the cuffs.

He stops at that when he notices he’s chafed himself raw and leans on the pipe, grimacing at everything that hurts. He’s been an idiot, a thrice-damned fool, and now he’s paying the price.

A few minutes later, there’s voices outside. They go on for a little while, then there’s a sound like someone being shoved into the door and Daud hears, “Just do it, you piss-ant, I don’t need a reason!”

A scrawny, greasy character with the worst half-assed beard Daud’s ever seen comes stumbling in, adjusting his crumpled top hat and grumbling under his breath, but he stops when he realizes he’s being looked at and his lip curls. Daud tries to hide the hitch in his breathing as he saunters closer, not wanting to give him an easy target.

“Not so tough are you now, eh?” the man says in a thick Morley brogue. “Knife of Dunwall.”

Daud doesn’t dignify that with a response.

“You’re stuck.” He pokes Daud’s chest with a very grimy finger. “And we did that. Us, the Roaring Boys.”

“Are you sure?” The man’s probably scared of him, Daud thinks. His eyes keep flickering around like he’s half-expecting Daud to break loose and come for his throat, and he wouldn’t be trying so hard to gloat if he wasn’t at least a little afraid. If he can push him just far enough, he’ll go away.

“Shut up,” he snaps, but he doesn’t look so brave now. “We can take anybody that would come for you.”

“I doubt—” before Daud can even finish his sentence, the man rears back and hits him right in the solar plexus, hard. He doubles over as much as he can, breath leaving him all in a rush as most of his vision goes dark with spots, and fucking Void, that hurts.

“Shut up!”

Daud’s feeling very spiteful, and wants him to piss off and leave him alone, so he turns his hand and tethers the tool chest. Everything in it spills out all over the place and the man just about jumps out of his skin before he flushes an ugly red and grabs a pipe wrench.

Daud feels the bones in his calf break before the pain registers. Then it’s all he can do to stand somewhat upright as the man waves the wrench around and shouts, “None of that shit! You do it again and the other one goes, you hear?!”

“Hey!” Someone else looks in. “Leave him alone, the boss wants him one piece!”

“Leon just told me to—”

“Shut it! I don’t want any lip from you!”

He makes a rude gesture at whoever told him off and stalks out of the room, slamming the door behind him and muttering, “Fuckin’ witch…”

Daud eases himself onto the ground, breathing shallowly through gritted teeth. That did not go the way he’d planned.

Nothing is going the way he planned.

He’s not sure how long he sits there in the dark. Eventually he starts getting hungry and it finally sinks in that he’s going to miss dinner. Void, what’s Corvo going to think? Wyman? Emily? They’ve just started building a fragile trust, and now he’s gone off and left without a word to any of them, with no idea of when he might be back.

Or if.

He can’t even walk.

Fuck, unless the Roaring Boys try to give him to the government to collect the price that’s still technically on his head because he technically isn’t spymaster yet (unlikely) he might die still handcuffed to the pipe.

Oh, Void.

He feels a couple of tugs on the other end of the arcane bond—someone’s looking for him but he’s not going to take the bait, not even enough to check who it is. He’d need four, maybe five of them, all fully armed, to get out of this scrape and he can’t summon that many, especially not with the shape he’s in.

And—oh no.

If he dies, all the Whalers will know instantly (he thinks) because the bond will break. Leonid and Montgomery would take it especially hard, and he doesn’t want to—

He’s just going to have to get out.

Somehow.

As soon as he has the thought, the temperature in the room plummets, feeling like winter seawater, and Daud can see his breath fog in the little light there is until most of it is blotted out by a shadow that slowly grows denser.

“Oh, fuck,” he groans. “Not you.”

“Oh, Daud,” the Outsider says. Interestingly, he gives off a faint blue-purple light of his own. “What trouble you’re in this time.”

“Don’t remind me.”

He drifts closer, a few inches above the ground as always, and lays a hand on Daud’s calf, right above the break. He comes close to snapping at him for it, but his hand weighs nothing at all and is so cold it dampens the pain. “And yet you’re still so determined to escape—”

“I know,” Daud interrupts. He’s very short of patience and knows the Outsider won’t do anything worse than give him the silent treatment as punishment. “Are you going to do anything useful or just float there and talk?”

“Dapper Rodney found his tallboy by the Wrenhaven. It’s operator abandoned it, hoping no one would ever find out what he’d done, and he drowned when he tried to swim across the river. I suppose his wish was granted, in a way.”

Daud blinks. That’s…surprisingly straightforward, and gets rid of the worries that someone—an officer looking to flee the country, maybe—had sold it to the Roaring Boys.

Of course the Outsider has to go and ruin it.

“Just how do you propose to escape? Your hands are bound, and unless you can fashion a splint and hobble off, I don’t see how—”

Daud grinds his teeth. He doesn’t want to hear it. “Can you do something helpful and go away?”

“Hmm,” he says, and then he’s gone.

*****

Corvo, Emily decides, is worried.

It’s always hard to see on him, but he’s looking at every noise just a little too fast, and he fidgets with the silverware, running his thumb along the engraving. She’s certain it has something to do with Daud’s conspicuously empty chair. There’s a full place setting waiting for him, so his absence is probably unplanned, which would fit with Corvo’s nervousness. She knows they’re…close, even if she still can’t bring herself to like it. Or him.

She gives his chair a hard look, hoping he’s not gone strange again. He’d done that—holed up in his room or his office depending on the time, just about refusing to come out of either because of some odd sense of guilt. Corvo had been horribly worried when he found out, and now Emily has to live with the knowledge that they’ve started sharing a room.

Wyman comes in and sits down beside her, but she doesn’t feel like talking and mostly ignores them even though it makes her feel a bit badly, folding her hands in her lap and picking at the cuticles. Callista would scold her for it if she were here, but she’s not and can’t do anything about it, so there. In the corner of her eye, she can see Wyman glance between her, Corvo, and Daud’s empty chair, and they hum softly. They’re clever, they’ll figure it out.

Emily sighs and hears a strange not-sound, everything going muted like the room is full of treacle instead of air. She shivers, glances up, and the table—no, everything is grey, with a strange distortion making it all look just slightly wrong. She raises her eyes and gasps because there’s a person in Daud’s chair, a young man, dressed very nicely and sitting very upright. There’s darkness spilling off him like smoke, and his eyes are pitch black from edge to edge.

“Room for one more?” he asks, smiling slightly.

Corvo does not have the reaction Emily was expecting.

“No,” he hisses, half-standing and pointing an accusing finger the intruder. “I told you, you’re not to talk to Emily, she’s had enough trouble without someone finding out you’ve spoken to her. She doesn’t need the Abbey breathing down her neck, they’d want Daud and I killed—”

“Relax, Corvo. I’ve halted time.”

Emily stares at him. What?

Corvo grits his teeth and sighs. “Why have you come?”

“Really, I thought you’d be more pleased to see me. I’ve just spoken to Daud—”

“Where is he?” The intruder levels him with a look like Corvo’s the rudest person he’s ever met, really, he cannot believe people these days, and he quiets. “I apologize.”

Now Emily stares at the intruder, because she’s realized she’s sitting across from the Outsider (she’s almost angry at herself for not figuring it out earlier, but she wasn’t exactly expecting the whale god to appear at her dinner table, of all places). The Outsider gives her a look like he’s read her thoughts, and she hurriedly looks away, unnerved.

Wyman just stares, transfixed. The Outsider barely looks any older than them.

“Where is he?” Corvo asks again, his voice low and quiet like he’d much prefer to be louder.

“Draper’s Ward.”

*****

“So,” Slackjaw drawls. “You want me to round up a few of mine and go down to Draper’s with you ’n them”—he nods at the Whalers—“so you can pick up someone you’re sweet on while we beat all of Dapper Rodney’s within an inch of their lives.”

Corvo crosses his arms, wishing Slackjaw wasn’t quite so observant. All he’d called Daud was a friend. “Yes.”

Slackjaw sighs, considering. Then he levers himself off the edge of his desk and says, “Of course we’ll go. Rodney’s been pissing me off lately, anyway, he needs the lesson. Let me find a few of the boys.”

*****

Daud grits his teeth and tries to breathe deeply and slowly. Montgomery had explained to him once how shallow breaths did more harm than good, and it all made perfect sense at the time and sounded wonderfully logical, but he aches all over and it’s hard.

His calf hurts, his boot feeling strangling tight around it, and he’s grateful for the dribble of water leaking out of the pipe. It’s cool and distracting. His one consolation is that his ribs might not actually be cracked, just bruised, except when he thinks that, he starts to laugh.

He’s probably going to die, but at least his ribs are alright.

Oh, Void.

At least no one else has come to bother him, that’s a small mercy. He closes his eyes and tries to get as comfortable as he can. He doubts he’s going anywhere.

A few minutes later, someone goes running past the door, boots pounding heavily. Then another person, and there’s a sound like a grenade’s gone off somewhere. He hears the tallboy stomp away, and things suddenly get much louder.

Daud just stares at the sliver of light shining under the door. It sounds like there’s a full-fledged gang fight happening just outside the warehouse.

He sighs.

He certainly doesn’t want to be involved in it, and resignedly tries to pull his hands out of the cuffs again. He has no idea what he’ll do if it actually works this time, but he’d rather not be a sitting duck for whoever else has shown up to find. He supposes he doesn’t even really have to get away, just find someplace out of sight and hunker down long enough for the gangs to sort themselves out. Then he can summon Thomas and Tynan and have them help him while the Roaring Boys are distracted.

Of course, that plan goes about as well as all the others he’s made, and he’s still well and truly stuck.

A soft voice outside the room says, “He’s in here,” and Daud goes very still, thinking shit.

The door opens, and the person responsible is very short, they don’t look like any of the heavy-built thugs Dapper Rodney seems to favor, but he can’t make out any other details because the person is backlit. Then they turn their head, revealing a Whaler’s mask and what in the Void is Leonid thinking—

She steps aside, and Corvo comes in, followed by a slightly bow-legged figure that can only be Slackjaw. Corvo hurries toward him and drops to his knees, touches his face with gentle fingers and draws back when Daud flinches.

“Are you alright?”

“‘M fine.” Fine enough, at least. He’ll live. “They handcuffed me—”

Corvo glances up at Slackjaw, but he flaps a hand dismissively. “Relax, I brought my picks.”

He crouches down, knees popping loudly, and sets to work, finishing surprisingly quickly. The cuffs fall with a clank, and before he can protest, Corvo and Slackjaw have each taken one of his hands and heave him up like he doesn’t have broken bones.

He can’t stop the strangled, pained noise and gasping breath that follow, but at least they’re quick to catch on and rearrange him so he’s between the two of them with an arm draped their shoulders.

“Seems to me you’re not fine,” Slackjaw says cheerfully.

Daud rolls his eyes.

When she catches sight of him, Leonid bites her lip and furrows her brow, clearly worried, but she keeps her head. “This way,” she says, and starts walking. Daud’s proud of her.

She leads them past the worst of the fighting, though they do have to duck to the side and wait for Tynan and one of Slackjaw’s men to finish dealing with a few of the Roaring Boys. Then they’re out of the warehouse and hurrying down the street—though they’re still not very fast.

There’s a rail car waiting and Thomas helps bundle him into it, then they’re off. Daud leans into Corvo’s side, tucking his face against his neck, and he lets him, even wraps his arm around him to pull him closer. Daud has questions he’d like answered, but he’s exhausted.

Questions can wait.

*****

“It’s good to see you’re feeling better.”

Daud pauses in demolishing his plate of peppercorn blood ox and potatoes long enough to glance up at him, then grunts and sets back into it like he’s not going to see food again for a month. Corvo pulls a chair up to the bed and lets him, they can talk when he’s done. Between the cast, the rings of bandages around his wrists, and the black eye, he looks terrible—but, Corvo tells himself, it could be much worse. This isn’t anything he can’t recover from, even if he will be sullen until Montgomery lets him get back to life as usual.

Eventually Daud lays his fork down and pushes the tray away, finished.

“What happened?” Corvo asks.

Daud sighs, frowns. “Thought I’d go see what the Roaring Boys were doing, the report I got said they weren’t good for much of anything, but I dropped my fucking pen and their tallboy saw me—and they modified it somehow, it doesn’t have the bow anymore—but they caught me and I think Dapper Rodney came from one of the illegal boxing rings, he acts like they do, and he did this.” He gestures at the black eye and Corvo nods, trying not to smile. He shouldn’t, he really shouldn’t, but Daud never rambles like this unless he’s had medication and it’s endearing.

“And then they stuck me in that damn room and one of them sent in some idiot to see if I was,” he waves one hand like he’s trying to grab words out of the air, “still alive, and I pissed him off so he broke my leg. And then the Outsider showed up so I told him to leave, I didn’t want to deal with him, and he did, and then you got there and now here I am.” He sits there silently for a moment, and then his eyes narrow. “Wait.”

Corvo lets him think, wondering where his mind’s gone now.

He points an accusing finger. “You brought Slackjaw, why didn’t you take the Watch? If anyone finds out you were there, you could—” Corvo tries to head him off, but Daud won’t have it. “No, you should’ve taken Curnow instead, if someone saw you were with Slackjaw you could get sent back to Coldridge, why did you—”

“Daud—”

“Why did you come at all?”

Corvo stills. Surely he can’t think—

“Daud, listen.” He catches his hands, giving him one less thing to distract himself with. “Listen to me. You’re worth it.” Daud tries to protest. “You are. And if something like this happens again, I will come for you again, alright?”

Daud looks stunned that he would say such a thing, like he doesn’t really believe it. “Alright.”

“Do you want me to sleep here or in my room?” Corvo doesn’t want to run the risk of hurting him by shifting around in the night, what with the broken bones, but he’ll stay if Daud wants him to.

He falters. “Here.”

“Okay. I’ll be right back.” He gives his hands a squeeze, rises from the chair, and leaves the room. Out in the hallway, he sighs and scrubs his hands over his face.

He and Daud will need to talk in the morning.

#veechaos #this got longer than anticipated #corvo x daud #dishonored #hope you enjoy :3 #prompt fill

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