Chapter Text
The moon rose over the rooftops as the clock ticked on the clinic wall, and Joanna wrote some notes in a thick logbook, then cleared the afterbirth and mopped the floor.
Emily scooted her stool toward Mrs. Dent’s bedside as Joanna tied off the baby’s cord, then cut it with the scissors from the cart and threw the rest away. Once she’d inspected the stump, she refilled the bowl and sponged it off - and in the midst of it, she giggled.
Mrs. Dent peeked up. “What?”
“I’m still thinking about it. ‘Outsider’s tits.’”
“I swear, I’ll never live that down…”
Then once Joanna had weighed the baby and bundled it in Mrs. Dent’s arms, she disappeared down the hallway - and left Emily, Mrs. Dent, and the baby alone.
Mrs. Dent busied herself with the baby, and Emily had nothing to say - so she took a long, languid look at the clinic to avoid making eye contact. A white chest of drawers behind each bed. The white basin sink, three faucets long. Ivory blankets with hospital corners, and white, ironed slips on the pillows. And a long, black poster with white paint, hung underneath the clock - cross-sections of hips, not pregnant, then very, drawn from the front and side.
“Uh… Your Highness.” Mrs. Dent finally spoke up. “I don’t mean to be peculiar…”
“Hmm?”
“You may wanna take yourself elsewhere…”
“What?”
“Jo said I’m supposed to try to feed her…”
“Oh.” Emily swiveled the stool so her body faced away. “I won’t watch.”
“It’s not that I’m modest, or anything.” Mrs. Dent lifted the baby up. “It’s just I didn’t want to offend you.”
Emily swiveled back. “Please. After tonight?”
“Good point.”
Mrs. Dent undid the shoulder buttons on her white patient gown, and she wrestled with it as she figured out how to fold the fabric aside.
“Actually,” Emily began, then stopped to sort out her thoughts - “while you’re doing that, could I ask you something?”
Mrs. Dent propped the baby up to her breast. “Sure. I mean - yes, Your Highness. Go on.”
“Do you know the man who lives upstairs?”
“Huh.” Mrs. Dent mulled it over. “Come to think of it, I don’t.” She nudged the baby’s cheek toward herself, and it latched on. “I hear a violin playing up there sometimes, and Jo tells me that it’s him. But I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen him. It’s like he’s a ghost.”
“So you don’t know who he is.”
“I wouldn’t know him from the Outsider himself.”
Emily didn’t answer. A whistling breeze rocked the sign outside.
“Why?” Mrs. Dent asked. “Do you know him?”
“I… um…” Emily hesitated - “I did. Once.”
Mrs. Dent kept holding the baby close, and waited for her to explain.
“He’s a criminal. A hired one. And he hurt someone very close to me.” Emily pulled her lip into her teeth when she felt a quaver coming on. “And I guess I just didn’t predict he’d be doing so well for himself.” She swallowed hard. “I thought he’d be dead, or a beggar, or something. You know, that’d… make sense, I thought. It’s just surreal that it’s like nothing happened all those years ago.”
“Well, for what it’s worth… which is… probably not much… there’s plenty of shady characters that come down here to forget the past.” Mrs. Dent patted the side of the baby’s blanket as it nursed. “Take my husband. He was a Dead Eel before he left Dunwall. I was a Hatter, myself. Now we’re tinkers.”
Emily listened, deep in thought.
“I don’t know what he did, so I’m sure I’m not being much help. But in all the years I’ve been coming here, he’s done nothing but haunt the walls.” Mrs. Dent flattened some of the baby’s tufts of hair. “If he were up to something and hiding it, he’d be doing a damn good job. I can’t tell you if he’s sorry - but I’d say he’s not doing it anymore.”
Emily folded one arm over her stomach, then brought her other fist to her mouth. The clock kept ticking over the made beds and the clean white chests of drawers - like the whole clinic stood still, except for their corner with the glowing lamp.
And from behind her, she heard Mrs. Dent gently cut in again.
“Uh… Your Highness?”
Emily snapped her attention back to the bed. “What?”
Mrs. Dent turned up her eyebrows. “Would you mind if I named her after you?”
“I- um…” Emily found herself tongue-tied - “you’d want to do that?”
“I don’t know.” Mrs. Dent stroked the baby’s head. “She looks like an Emily to me.”
Emily cracked an awkward smile. “Well… then… I’m flattered, thank you.”
“No, thank you for spending time with me.” Mrs. Dent fiddled with the blanket under the baby’s chin and hushed. “I know that there are people out there who think you aren’t up to snuff. I say put them on the throne as children and see how things work out.”
Emily let her forearms go limp over her knees.
“I worked so hard at it. I promise.”
Mrs. Dent just said, “I know.”
They sat in another short silence together, and the wind creaked through the window panes - until Mrs. Dent’s eyes went streetlamp-wide as she remembered what she’d done.
“Oh, and… sorry for swearing around you.”
Emily snickered. “I’m not going to cut your head off. It’s all right.”
“It was kind of the heat of the moment, I mean…”
Emily held up her hands. “Trust me, I know.”
Mrs. Dent fed, and Emily rubbed her fingers back and forth between her knees - and the silence grew more heavy and still with each minute on the clock. Then Emily noticed voices drifting in - first Joanna’s, then, softer, Daud’s - and the wheels squeaked underneath her as she stood up from the stool.
“Are you going to be all right here for a minute?” She murmured.
Mrs. Dent blinked. “Sure, I’ll be fine.”
The boiler kept making noise as Emily slipped into the night-blue hall, and she edged toward the yellow-lit room where she heard the voices and clinking glass.
When she reached the corner she flattened herself against the stairway wall, and peeked in through the open doorway to see what she could find. Shelves. More shelves. A bare whale-oil bulb hanging from the ceiling on a wire. Daud sat on the unvarnished table, stripped down to his suspenders and bloodied shirt - with a brown bottle and his folded waistcoat and a couple of jars at his side.
And Emily watched Joanna turn his open collar down, and poke and prod around the deep, black bruises forming on his throat.
“Have you seen any Overseers on the streets from up there?”
Daud tilted his chin to give her a better view. “No.”
“I didn’t leave any bone charms lying out, did I?”
“I put them away for you.”
“In the…”
“In the lead-lined box.”
Joanna exhaled with relief. “Good.”
Emily crept toward them until she passed the moulding on the towel closet door - and she craned her neck just far enough to see them, but kept her feet in the shadows.
“Outsider’s blood. She can hold her own in a fight, that’s for sure.” Joanna dabbed some of the dried blood off Daud’s nostrils, then stepped away. “I hope she didn’t break it.”
Daud sniffed. “What’s it to you?”
“What’s it to me? I’m the one who has to look at it all day.”
“Hnh.” Daud grunted and sniffed again as more blood seeped out of his nose. “It’s just a face. You’ve been looking at it for sixteen years before.”
“Sweetheart, please.” Joanna came back and patted Daud’s cheek. “Your face has been through enough.”
Emily’s stomach tightened a little, but she shook it off. Joanna shoved a cotton ball up Daud’s nostril and pulled another out of its jar, and as she uncorked the brown bottle Emily read the label. Alcohol.
“I wouldn’t have minded if she’d killed me,” Daud mused.
“Well, I would have. Very much.” Joanna tamped down hard on the cotton ball to get the last dregs in the bottle out. “Who am I going to give a hard time around here, if not you?”
“You almost killed that guardsman last week.”
“Which, the… the one with the limp? Abel?”
“Right.”
“That was different.” Joanna held the cotton ball up to his brow bone. “He was in way over his head and his poor lover was already ten weeks along, and I was so busy trying to calm him down…”
Daud hissed when she touched him…
“I know…” Joanna’s voice dropped to an indulgent coo as she dabbed at the cut above his eye. “Anyway, I took care of it. She won’t have to worry about it anymore. She won’t have to worry about him, either. At least that’s what I hope.”
Emily kept watching, her cheek pressed against the wall.
“You know, I got a letter from the Cat the other day.”
Daud rubbed his swollen cheek. “That so?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Is Betty still running things over there?”
“She is. Can you believe it? I don’t.” Joanna tugged Daud’s eyebrow up and swabbed beneath it, her face inches from his mouth. “I had no idea when I gave it to her it’d be a lifelong inheritance.” She set the cotton ball down beside him and took some gauze and tape out of the other jar, then taped over his eyebrow and patted his shoulder, as if to say I’m done. “She says she got another note from Portia. She’s living by the old waterfront. She’s a painter now, she’s actually kind of making a name for herself…”
“What does she paint?”
“Courtesans.”
“Mm.”
“Betty says she’s pretty good.”
As she heard the old courtesans’ names, Emily grinned despite herself.
“Whatever happened to…” Daud licked some dried blood off his lip - “what was her name… Loulia?”
“Oh, she’s a clerk for the Courier now. Betty wrote to me about that last month. I always knew she’d go back to clerking, the Cat was just too dull for her.” Joanna opened the storage cabinet and started putting her supplies away. “Violetta, um… I think Violetta got married a few years ago, and I think Genevieve has been making ladies’ intimates in Drapers Ward…”
Daud cut in. “Jo?”
Joanna set the gauze jar down and looked over her shoulder. “What?”
“Do you miss it?”
With a great heave of her shoulders, Joanna sighed - and turned around - and she squeezed Daud to her chest and buried her cheek in the top of his head.
“Why would you say something like that?”
Daud let a moment of silence pass.
“Because.” His hand crawled up her back and his gaze sank to the floor. “I’d hate to think you threw away your livelihood for a man who didn’t deserve it.”
“You really didn’t.” Joanna chuckled and smoothed his graying hair. “But no. I still don’t miss it. Not a day in my life.”
Emily’s face fell from confusion to disgust, and she took a deep, shaky breath as she unstuck herself from the wall. She fled straight up the staircase. She grabbed the railing too hard on the way up. From the inside pocket of her coat, she pulled a small, leathery heart - and when she brushed its glass face, the gears inside it whirred, and it came to life.
“Mother?” Emily sat on one of the varnished steps with a graceless whump. “I’m sorry to drag you into all of this, but I need to talk to you.”
The Heart lit up and cast a greenish glow on the lower half of Emily’s face.
“You overheard them, didn’t you?” Emily squeezed the heart near the top, around its valves. “What am I supposed to think of this? Do you even know what’s going on?”
I feel the joy of the mother, the grief of the miscarriage, the fear of the adolescent girl.
Emily blinked. “What?”
All feelings pass through this place.
Emily sighed. “That doesn’t help.” She planted her face with indignation into the palm of her hand. “I mean, I don’t know how to feel about the people here.”
The Heart stayed silent - so she squeezed it again.
He sees his students in his dreams, the Heart said, and he wonders where they are. Vladko. Rinaldo. Thomas. Billie Lurk.
“Billie Lurk?” Emily mumbled to herself, then - “no, never mind. I don’t want to talk about any students. I want to talk about Jo.” She stared into the Heart’s clicking gears, like that would convince it to tell her more. “She tried so hard to be a friend to me when I was at the Cat, and she- what? She just accepts him? How can she sleep at night?”
The Heart hesitated - before…
She bought fresh flowers for the clinic this morning. Her mother would be so proud of her.
“Come on.” Emily gave it another vigorous squeeze. “Now you’re just being dense.”
She has left the brothel behind, but she still wears her jasmine perfume.
“Jasmine? Really?” Emily curled her lip. “Why would I care about her perfume?”
Again, no answer - but Emily softened her brow.
“You’re doing that thing where you talk to me in riddles again, aren’t you?” Emily caressed the Heart’s skin back and forth with her thumb. “All right. I’ll humor you. The perfume is from her old life… but she’s left the brothel behind. She’s not a courtesan anymore… she’s doing her mother’s work.”
The Heart waited for her.
“The jasmine then… and the flowers now…” Emily frowned again, this time in thought - “she’s still the same Jo. So the bad is the same… but so is the Jo who was my friend.”
The Heart pulsed once into her hand, as if to say, that’s right.
“But that means that the Daud who killed you, who… he… he stabbed you in the gut, and that’s the same Daud who’s in there? Soothing her? That’s not how these things are supposed to go!”
I almost didn’t recognize him, the Heart said. But I will never forget that scar.
“Exactly!” Emily flung her free hand out toward the wall. “Haven’t you ever met someone you thought was irredeemable, but then they did something decent, and they didn’t make sense anymore?”
The Heart said nothing.
Emily huffed. “What am I saying? Of course you have.” She pushed a lock of loosening hair back behind her ear. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t yell at you. None of this is your fault.”
The Heart just beat in time with its gears - in and out - then in - then out.
“It’s just… the day it happened, I started thinking.” Emily glanced through the balusters to check for eavesdroppers, and found none. “All the things I wanted to do if I ever got my hands on him. I could have him hanged. I could behead him. I could put him in front of a firing squad.”
The Heart didn’t respond.
“And then I started thinking if I just wanted it badly enough, something terrible would happen to him. I wouldn’t even have to do it myself.” Emily grit her back teeth, and a poisonous flame lit in her eyes. “Losing the hand that killed you. Crows picking out his eyes. You’d be horrified if you knew what I was wishing at ten years old.” She hiccuped, and her fingernails dug into the Heart’s sides. “But now that I’m here in this house, and I… I’ve seen him, and I…?” Tears pricked at her eyes. “I don’t know if it’d make me feel better.”
She hung her head.
I was wrong.
Emily’s fingers scrambled around the Heart, and she cradled it in both her hands. “What?”
He has strayed from the path within him. He never killed again.
Emily bit her lip - and squeezed its leathery flesh one last time.
His hands did violence, her mother’s voice said. But there was a different dream in his heart.
Emily rubbed the back of her neck - then her temple - then the bridge of her nose - and she gazed down to the end of the staircase, and let out one last dejected sigh.
“I’m sorry to trouble you so late.” She closed her eyes and kissed the Heart on its glass window - and nestled it back into her pocket and patted it for good measure. “Good night.”
Some time after the clock chimed midnight, Emily shuffled back downstairs - and made her way to the supply room doorway, and hesitated before she went inside.
She found Joanna alone in the narrow room, still in her white coat dress, with a litany of metal instruments spread out across the tabletop. Forceps. Scissors. Tweezers. Some kind of fork with curved tines. A motley collection of long, thin sticks, with loops and scrapers and hooks on top, and a pile on the doorway end with everything at once. She pulled them out of a small autoclave and lay them on white towels in straight lines, undisturbed by the clinks and wheezes from the boiler cabinet in the hall.
She mouthed numbers as she counted down the rows with her finger - one - two - three - four…
And she still didn’t see Emily there - so Emily cleared her throat.
Joanna’s eyes snapped up to the doorway, and she stopped counting.
“What?”
“Uh…” Emily searched for something to say. “Do you need any help in here?”
“Don’t be silly. You’re the empress. I can do it by myself.”
“I don’t mean to badger you about it, but I could use something to do.”
“Oh.” Joanna shrugged. “Well, if it means that much to you, I’m not going to resist.”
Emily dragged a short stool over from the corner of the room, then sat and picked up a pair of scissors that curved at the ends. She stuck her fingers through the holes and peered at them, then opened and shut it - open - and shut.
“Just sit right where you are and hand me things from that dirty pile.” Joanna scraped something off the inside of the autoclave lid with her fingernail. “I’ll tell you what I need next.”
Emily hesitated - then put the scissors down.
“All right, first…” Joanna studied the autoclave with her hand on her chin - “could you hand me the #2 curettes?”
“The what?”
“The ones with the tear-shaped loop on top.”
Emily dug through the tangled pile and found two - three - then four - then five - then held them out across the table in a messy handful. “There you go.”
Joanna gave them a good go-over, then turned them all loop-side up - and stuck them side-by-side in the autoclave dish, one by one.
“Could you hand me those scissor-looking forceps?”
Emily fished another pair of scissors out of the pile with a clatter. “These?”
“That’s right.”
Joanna took them from her and stuck them over on the end by themselves.
“And the #3 curettes?”
“Those…”
“Are the ones with the notch at the end.”
Emily grabbed three, then four of them out of the pile like a bunch of matchsticks - and this time, when she handed the bundle over, she talked back.
“So.”
The autoclave clinked as Joanna loaded the curettes, but she didn’t respond.
“We’re just not going to talk about it, are we?”
“No.” Joanna rearranged some of them so they stood in even rows. “We’re not. I’m a grown woman, I can make my own decisions about things. And so can you.”
“So you decided it was fine that he kidnapped me.”
“No. I didn’t. I almost killed him when I found out.”
“Oh, you almost did, but you didn’t.” Emily’s voice tinged with snark. “He’s a killer, Jo. I don’t think anyone would’ve missed him when he was gone.”
“And he’s the only man who ever treated me like the equal that I was.” Joanna turned one of the longer curettes upside down. “People are complicated. Dunwall was complicated. Things are so much simpler now.”
Emily fumed.
“I’m not going to ask you to forgive him. Frankly, I’d think you were a doormat if you did.” Joanna tried to shove a pelvimeter in, too, but when it didn’t fit, she took it out. “And you don’t have to like me anymore, either. But you should know he saved your life.”
Emily set down the steel retractor that she’d picked up.
“What?”
Joanna moved the autoclave over and cleared the clean instruments out of the way.
“I… I mean…”
Joanna blinked. “You mean you don’t know?”
Emily grimaced. “Saved my life? How?”
Joanna closed the autoclave lid with a sudden, metallic snap!
“My dear…” She lowered the lever and sealed it shut - “why do you think Delilah is so mad at you?”
Emily shook her head and raised her hands, to say she didn’t know - and Joanna sighed.
“Fifteen years ago - the day your mother died - Daud had a visit from the Outsider.” Joanna rested her fingers on the autoclave top. “They weren’t on good terms with each other, and they hadn’t been for a long time - so the Outsider decided to give him…” she squinted - “what we’ll say was a parting shot. A name. ‘Delilah.’ No clues, no directions. That was all.”
Emily stared at her, and her hand fumbled through the pile for something to hold.
“He’d never heard the name, and he had no idea who she was, so he didn’t think about it. He tried to forget it. Along with everything else he’d done.” Joanna picked up the autoclave and set it on the other, shorter table against the wall. “But six months later, he realized it wasn’t going to leave him alone - and he started to wonder if the… Delilah thing was some kind of second chance.”
Emily found some kind of spoon curette and squeezed it, still staring at Joanna headon.
“He started digging into some of the most decrepit places in Dunwall, and the more he looked, the more he could see that Delilah was bigger than he thought. And I don’t know if I believe in cosmic punishment, but if it’s real, it hit him. Hard.” Joanna hooked the autoclave up to the lamp-sized whale oil canister on the shelf below. “He lost respect. He lost some of his Whalers. He nearly lost his mind. His own lieutenant, Billie, betrayed him. I don’t think he’s ever been the same after that.” She flipped a switch on the side of the autoclave, and it started to make soft chuffing sounds. “Finally he traced Delilah to Brigmore Manor, and saw what she’d been planning all along. She was going to possess you - but he outwitted her, and trapped her in the Void.”
Emily let go of the curette with gaping, haunted eyes, and she took a shallow breath in, but forgot to breathe it out.
“Until… you know.” Joanna gave Emily a sheepish shrug. “He thought it would be permanent. I don’t know how she broke out.”
Emily blinked - and blinked - and finally let the stale air out of her lungs - and her gaze fell to the pile of dirty instruments as she stewed in her thoughts.
“The point is, if Daud hadn’t intervened, Delilah would’ve finished her ritual, and she would have been playing empress in your skin until the day you died.” Joanna stepped away from the shelf and took her place back where she’d begun. “What you make of that is up to you. I just think you deserve to know.”
“You’re lying.” Emily’s shoulders sank, and she kneaded her palms. “He wouldn’t do that. You have to be making this up.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not.”
“Then you think too much of him,” Emily mumbled. “He’d just as soon Delilah went through with it.”
“Not quite.”
“How did you put that together?”
“He told me.” Joanna lowered her voice. “He says saving you was probably the only decent thing he ever did. That maybe it would… make amends for some of what he’s done.”
But just as Emily opened her mouth to answer, they heard a thundering knock - one, two, three bangs of a heavy fist, echoing through the clinic walls.
Emily flinched. An eerie, waxy pallor came over Joanna’s face. With slow, wraithlike footsteps, she inched toward the supply room door - and she took Emily by the shoulder, her fingers shaking and wire-taut.
“Emily?” Her soft voice quavered. “Stay in this room.”
Emily whispered, “What?”
“It’s the Overseers.” Joanna reached into the instrument pile with her other hand. “I’m going to turn the light off, and lock you in…”
“What if it’s Mr. Dent…?”
“It’s not.” Joanna pulled out a scalpel, and the blade gleamed under the light. “Now. Once I lock you in here, I don’t want you to move, or make a sound. I’ll tap on the door when it’s clear. Then…”
Emily started to get up. “Please, I can get rid of them…”
“No.” Joanna slipped the scalpel into the pocket of her coat, and she kept taking shallow breaths as she dragged her feet into the hall. “I’m going to go upstairs and tell Daud - and then I’ll come back down.” She gulped. “This is my clinic. I have to do this alone.”