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The first time the Outsider kisses him, Corvo wakes up.
He wakes with his hand up as if he intends to ward off a blow. He is startled to find himself on his bed at the Hound's Pit Pub, not in the cell. Sometimes he wakes and he's in Coldridge, awaiting his execution.
Sometimes he's in a backstreet in Serkanan, eight years old and hungrier than ever. Lydia always leaves extra food on the table in his room for him: tartlets, sausages or freshly baked bread when they can get it. He thinks it's because she knows what it’s like to be hungry.
Sometimes he wakes and he is in the Tower, with Jessamine in his arms. She sleeps with her head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat. When she turns her face up to him, her mouth wells with blood and spills on their sheets.
Corvo shudders. Sleep will be long in coming, if it will ever return at all.
The attic room remains quiet with dark as he rises, slipping into his coat and boots. He arms himself out of force of habit, but leaves the mask on the bed. Corvo takes the Heart out of his pocket like a man fishing for a watch. It pulses once before settling.
Why am I so cold?
Of all the words the Heart whispers, this is what breaks his heart the most.
The whale oil lamps cast strange shadows on the wall. He walks to the window and spends a few minutes on top of Piero's workshop.
Corvo blinks over to the roof of the topmost tower, the one that will house Emily when they find her. He's helped to select the books, and filled the room with Emily's favorite flowers in hope. Somewhere out there Emily waits for him. He sits at the top of the tower, and listens to the river and the wind.
Corvo touches his mouth. Like all his artifacts, the Outsider's kiss burns. It soothes him to know things can still burn, still hurt.
He feels like he's fading. It's hard to remember yourself when you spend so much time watching others from rooftops, or creeping under buildings,
She called your name Corvo, when they took her. She's afraid, but trying not to be.
"I know." He tells the Heart. Past the ribbon of the river he sees the Dunwall lights. The buildings cast an eerie blue glow into the sky and the gray fog hangs over the city like a veil.
The whale glides over him like a boat. Corvo stares up at its corpse-white belly, the great tusks, observes the flex of muscles in its tail as it moves. In the Void, the whales still sing.
"What teeth they have." The Outsider says, beside him. Their booted feet dangle over the edge and the Outsider nonchalantly nudges one of his feet. "Your Samuel says he sees lights in the river, and faces. What do you see?"
Corvo sees a being bored beyond belief. Corvo sees in the Outsider the same idle curiosity the Serkanan merchants had for slaves they threw into fighting pits. Mild disinterest. A tendency to shrug if their property staggered out alive, or to raise their hands in a questioning gesture when they died.
He wonders why the Outsider meddles. Did it bring something to life inside of him?
The Outsider tilts his head. His black eyes feel like endlessness, like the sensation of Blinking, a lurch and then a flash of blue, burning light. Corvo wants to ask him if dreaming is like the Void, or if the Void is like dreaming. He wants to ask him what he dreams about, if he does dream.
He wants to ask him what on earth would possess a being to gift a man with his dead lover's heart.
Corvo says nothing because it's easier. Jessamine understood his silences and oh, how she could draw them out. The Outsider couldn't care less.
When The Outsider touches his face, Corvo flinches. He hasn't been touched with love, or feeling in so long. When the Outsider kisses him again, it's chaste, like a schoolboy's.
The wind blows high and cold, bringing with it the rotting scent of the river.