#writins

Corvo stared. He'd stepped foot in here just the once, when Daud showed him where the place was, but it wasn't the worn walls or junky furniture—not much different from Daud's last haunt—that he was stuck on.

"You're wearing glasses," he noted.

Daud answered, "Hn," which was to be expected. He had no patience for the obvious.

Corvo leaned back against the window frame. "Doesn't exactly fit your..."

"You going to close that window or not?" he growled, and Corvo swung it shut, a smirk crooking his mouth, then unfolded his legs down to the floor and headed straight for the stove in the corner nearest the desk.

It was ancient, its vents glowing with hot coals; Corvo added a scoop from the case nearby then removed his shoes and socks and crouched with his back to it, hood down and hair swept over his shoulder so the heat could reach his head and neck. The coat would dry on him well enough—the damp, he could live with until he got back.

Daud grabbed something from under the desk then got up to loom over him. "Wasn't exactly expecting company," he muttered to the question Corvo hadn't fully voiced, and held out a towel. The glasses were still perched on his nose, incongruous. The frame and lenses gleamed with a flicker of firelight. It made him look so much less like what he was that he almost became unrecognizable.

He added, lower but still too rough to be called soft, "Anyway, my reputation's already a wash when it comes to you."

Corvo's smirk melted a little. He took the towel, pressed the slush of half-snow from his hair and brushed clumps from the crannies of his coat.

Daud's arms crossed, brow furrowing with a scowl.

"There's a spare coat and shirts in the bedroom," he offered.

"Won't fit."

He shrugged. "If you catch cold," he said, lip curling with disdain around the words as he turned back to his work, "I will say I told you so." He gave the growing puddle around Corvo's boots a last pinch-lipped glare. "And clean that up. The floorboards are warped enough."

That was almost subtle for him, Corvo considered, giving the floor a cursory wipe—Daud never acknowledged worry unless he could bite someone with it.

Though the thick wool of Corvo's coat kept him mostly warm, it still hung wet and heavy on him, leeching through to his shirt, the damp chafing at the scars under his layers. Now that the option was open, the discomfort he'd resigned himself to seemed pointless.

Didn't like the thought of Daud's too-short sleeves riding up his arms, however.

He scratched at the dry flat scarring under one cuff. Daud eyed him sideways from his seat at the desk.

"Scar cream in the bedside drawer," he added with just a hint of self-satisfaction, too aware of when he'd won, and Corvo bared a canine and got to his feet. He could keep his damp shirt on, let it dry in the heat of the stove. It wasn't as though Daud hadn't seen it all already, anyway.

As soon as he moved away from the fire the floor turned icy cold; his bare toes curled and he quickened his steps, but it was no better in Daud's bedroom—a draft somewhere left it as chilled as the windy rooftops had been.

Small, too, he decided, rubbing his hands over his arms and squinting around critically. No bigger than his own closet. A cot, a dresser, and the bedside table Daud had mentioned fit in it with just about enough room left over to stand.

Corvo took a moment to search through all of his drawers, telling himself it was good to keep an eye on things and mostly wondering if it would still be as bare bones as the life he'd glimpsed two years ago. The spare coat was folded neat and gray in the dresser's topmost drawer, along with the spare wire-traps and knives. He wouldn't be searching for secret compartments in that mess. Not yet, anyway. The next drawer held three shirts in varying states of yellowed and gray with age, as well as some pants and less neatly folded underwear.

(Corvo had told him, once, that he payed him enough for him to buy new shirts, and Daud had given him this sour look and told him, I don't dress up for clients, Attano, as if it'd been an insult. A lot of things were to him, he supposed. Especially when it involved questioning his way of doing things.

He did dress up for clients, though: dressed big and mean. Part of the pageant, he'd said another time. No one built a reputation on nothing but skill.)

Corvo shook off the thought and got back to searching—but the last two drawers were empty except for a cobweb and a handful of grit.

This was... disappointing. He could always start testing the floorboards for hidden caches, but he'd likely find nothing except mold, dead bugs and rats.

Corvo turned to the bedside table and fought with the drawer until it rattled open. There was the tin—and as he went to pick it up his attention caught on the handful of fabric crammed in the back, the edge of a bloodstain visible. Pulled out and shaken loose, the wide tear and deep stain in Daud's spare binder were more obvious.

The blood looked old. He didn't keep many spares of anything, so he must have been too busy to repair it—wouldn't have kept it if he didn't mean to do so—did he have another?

Not his business, Corvo tried to tell himself, but didn't let go. The fabric was smooth under his thumb.

Unsettled by something he couldn't quite name, he bundled it up into a tight roll and tucked it in the back of the drawer again, snatching up the tin, then shucked off coat, armor, and shirt, and the package he'd kept tucked against his side fell out with a soft thump onto the floor.

He picked it back up—set it down, unnecessarily gently, on the bed. He could just leave it here, he considered, let Daud discover it later. He'd appreciate the chance at skipping out on all the—the ceremony of it...

Yet that would go against the spirit of the thing, wouldn't it. He sighed through his nose, sat half-naked on the edge of the bed, and twisted the tin open.

All his scars had purpled with the damp and cold; he smeared cream over the ones that itched the worst (his wrists, the burns on his jaw—the wind had chapped them something fierce) then on everything that hadn't healed so well in the aftermath of... well, before Emily's coronation—and finally on the oldest ones, the two across his chest and the long silver line down his hip, that weren't doing so bad but might get dry and irritated if he didn't.

There. Done. He eyed his wrists, added a little more there, trying not to work the skin too hard, then stood and frowned down at his shirt. He'd have to be careful putting it back on or it'd wipe off all the excess and rub his scars sore again.

As he stooped to pick it up, something in the lay of the floorboards made him pause: a smaller piece between two boards, a little out of alignment, the gap to either side slightly bigger than it should be.

That wasn't saying much here, given the state of the floor—Daud wasn't being dramatic about the warping—but Corvo followed his suspicion and picked at the wood, and it lifted away with no effort, revealing a tiny dust-filled cubby with a crumpling of paper inside.

He picked it up. It was too light to be holding much, if anything, but when he pulled the paper flat something fell out and pinged against the floor, and he bent to see what it was and found a single one penny coin.

The paper said: Did you have fun?

His mouth twitched. That bastard.

Daud was still at the desk when he came out with his shirt back on and his coat and armor slung over his arm. Damp fabric clung unpleasantly to the residue on his scars. He dragged a chair around to the stove, hung his wet clothes across it, and tossed the crumpled note on top of Daud's work as he leaned his hip against the desk's edge. He was keeping the coin, of course.

"How long was that there?" he asked.

Daud sat back in his chair, gaze even and neutral behind those peculiar glasses in that way that meant he was hiding a smirk of his own. "Since early summer. Expected you to check in on me earlier."

(They'd had that argument, too. Dangerous show of trust, bodyguard. Don't tell me you're getting soft because we share a little history. Strange, that he could remember so much of what Daud said—remember him down to the particular showy contempt on his face—but couldn't recall what he'd answered. Something about picking his battles, he thought.)

"I would have if you'd told me you got injured," Corvo retorted, and gestured at Daud's waist about where he'd pictured the injury to be.

The sly self-satisfaction slid off Daud's face. "It's been weeks. It's healed."

"Show me."

He scowled. The easy slump of his body had hardened into wary tension.

Corvo grunted, waving his hand like a dismissal and half turning away, leaning the heel of his hand on the edge of the desk. "You don't have to take the whole thing off. Just pull it up so I can see."

"I'm not the self-conscious one," Daud grumbled, giving Corvo's damp shirt a pointed look, but he got up and untucked his layers from his pants to hike them up his ribs then rolled the edge of his binder back.

The scar tissue looked thick, reddened—healed, yes, but not well. The tiny discolored spots along the edge were probably from stitching himself up and pulling the threads, then not bothering with an elixir to close up the skin. Corvo's fingers twitched. He refrained from touching.

"You could have stopped binding while it healed," he remarked, voice going the kind of quiet that never went down well, and predictably Daud pulled his clothes straight and started tucking them back into his waistband.

"Shirts wouldn't fit right," he grunted.

"You know wearing it doesn't—"

"Don't start," he cut in, and his lip pulled back. These conversations always seemed to go like this; Corvo had never managed to figure out how to tell him, or at least not in a way he would accept, that the point wasn't for him to wear himself out for them.

"Then take a day," Corvo said, even quieter, though it was too late now for it to make much of a difference to his healing, too late because Daud hadn't mentioned it, hadn't because—because of pride? Because somewhere he thought that working through it was a kind of paying them back?

He'd never pay that debt, he knew that. Still he kept trying to give them worse to do so.

"Take a day," he repeated, knowing this was the wrong way to go about it, that Daud would just fight him harder. "Take two. The big galas are over, there's at least a month until the next event..."

He couldn't help but answer that struggle with open hands. It'd felt like a terrible risk, the first time—the second and third, too—and then the risk had lost its edge as the knife he'd expected, the one Daud kept calling up in name and implication, never showed.

Corvo knew it could—but he also knew, by now, that Daud wouldn't be the one to wield it. He only thought that Corvo hadn't yet learned how to pick his allies better.

"Conspiracies don't take vacations, Attano," Daud growled, and on cue, "and you don't either. Stop giving me more leeway than you give yourself."

"I take days off when I'm healing," Corvo said pointedly. "And I took a few hours to come here, tonight."

"Should've sent advance notice. I'm booked up with work."

"Not even thirty minutes to break midwinter bread?"

Daud paused in the middle of sorting the papers he'd spread over the desk.

"Did you... what, order in from that pastry place in the Serkonan quarter?" he muttered. "That's not how it's done, bodyguard."

"I made some with Emily. The kitchen staff helped."

Corvo watched Daud's face out of the corner of his eye, the way his mouth pinched flat and his gaze flicked over headings and paragraphs, not taking anything in. He shoved a handful of pages that looked torn out of a notebook to the side, picked up the top one, set it back down.

"Well, good," he said. Picked up his pen, jotted down an annotation, crossed it out. Dropped the pen again. "Don't see what I have to do with it."

"You know what it means," Corvo answered.

It had been good, remembering this part of himself, sharing it with Emily—but even if she'd come to know hunger and fear in a way he wished she hadn't, it had only ever been something temporary on the way back to how things were.

His father used to tell him the mountains were Karnaca's roots. When the peste swept over the shores, the mountain people retreated to the valleys and survived there until Karnaca grew again and trade picked back up—and now they were threaded all through the city, were its loam and bedrock, while almost nothing but names was left of Clemente Landing. His father's parents had been from the mountain. He'd shown Corvo and Beatrici how to mix and knead the midwinter loaf, and they'd shared it with their neighbors like they were meant to, last year's hard-won spoils bright, telling each other they'd survived the deep snows, the bitter mountain cold, and would keep surviving through to spring.

It was less cold in the city, right by the sea, but once he lost his father, his sister, and their walls got thinner and their plates emptier, that promise had seemed that much more important. He'd forgotten it, for a while, in all the plenty of Dunwall Tower... but these last few years had brought the memories back.

Daud didn't look at him. "... Only knew it from neighbors," he said, a tightness in his voice.

"Then let me be your neighbor this year," Corvo replied, and went to get the package from his coat.

It was a few slices, enough to share. He'd taken the liberty of buttering them before wrapping them up in the wax paper, which stuck them together when he tried to pull the pieces apart. Poor planning. Still, Daud took the slice he held out with its crumb-speckled butter topping, held it up in a brief, awkward toast, and bit into it.

He paused. He chewed. Made a vague humming sound, and swallowed.

"Yeah, I forgot the sugar when we made the dough," Corvo said, and bit into his own slice.

Daud coughed and tore off another piece. The loaf was also a little dry—overcooked, maybe? not enough butter in the kneading? He couldn't remember there being that much, butter wasn't cheap in Batista, but maybe there was a trick to it he'd forgotten—and Emily had very politely told him it was good, but they'd made sweet jam tea to get the slices down easier.

"It's still bread with dried fruit in," Daud rasped. Then he added, "... Thanks," eyes down on the half he had left like he was looking in, looking back, somewhere deep—by the half-curl of his mouth, maybe somewhere treasured, too—until they flicked up and met Corvo's eyes. "To spring."