serkonan au masterpost
finally posting a dishonored au that's been bouncing around my head for a while now. it's been buried in the Emsider cult discord till today and i haven't really worked on it all that much for the last few years but still wanted this post to serve as like a masterpost to link back to when I commission/write something set in it.
it’s basically just a no-rat-plague, nobody-dies-everybody-lives, childhood friends to lovers emsider au lol. based on the premise that a few minor choices made differently many decades ago results in a lot less angst. more under the cut
Jessamine discovers Euhorn's secret—that of her playmate being her sister and helps her on a path to inheriting the throne, because it's only the right thing to do.
Corvo is sent to Dunwall a few weeks late due to some uncertainty as to who he was to serve as Royal Protector for, because of spats about lines of succession and performative debates in Parliament about whether Euhorn should be ousted or not for siring an illegitimate heir with a commoner.
Paloma Attano is actually able to spend her final days on this earth with her son before passing away peacefully in her sleep one morning.
Corvo and Jess still meet as protector and charge but as someone who no longer has any obligation to keep up with what's expected of her on account of her not really being the empress apparent anymore, Jessamine abducates and moves to Karnaca with Corvo and their daughter and takes a local administrative job. The rest is history.
Deirdre doesn't die after the encounter with the crazed noble but instead she's nursed back to health by Billie after Daud and Thomas who happened to be in the area at the time in the rooftops for reconnaissance intervened and saved her life
Spared the immense grief and desperation that Deirdre's death would've begotten, Billie doesn't get sucked up into Daud's fold and in her place, Thomas becomes Daud's right hand.
Instead everything is as it once was: Billie and Deirdre against the world, always and together.
They make plans to leave Dunwall for southern shores
Absent Billie's keen eye and skills, something somewhere goes wrong during his contract to kill Empress Delilah and he fails his mission.
A bloody and magical duel later both Witch and Knife strike up an accord.
Daud and his Whalers switch sides and gets revenge on the conspiracy against her.
The rat plague is avoided, and Dunwall doesn't sink into chaos - much.
Billie and Deirdre Lurk have a small ceremony aboard the ship they stow away in to travel to Karnaca.
Deirdre, a curious soul, hears rumours of preternatural happenings near Shindaerey North Quarry and takes a trip there with her wife.
There they rescue an orphan boy from a group of cultists - Matvey. Billie gives him the Lurk name and they take him in as their son.
Shindaerey Peak being what it is, the rescue end ups happening 4000 years ago and they come back out of the Cultists' den back in the future, effectively transplanting Matvey into present day
The experience gives them nightmares to this day, though Matvey is too young to remember much other than dancing on his peasant mother's feet, his absentee nobleman father showing up one day after she died wanting to take him to a "pretty place" and putting him to sleep atop a slab of stone.
The land that his adopted mothers take him to and the languages they speak are alien to him
However with Deirdre and Billie's knowledge of some modern Tyvian and his having picked up a primitive version of the language they speak back during his time, from foreigners or neighbors' distant family members he'd occasionally talk to whilst they'd visit his village, they're able to meet halfway and relearning tongues becomes ever so slightly easier
Other changes like technology and culture are a bit harder to get used to.
Emily and Matvey grow up next door to each other. Emily is instantly captivated by him long before she ever knows about how separated they almost were in time and space.
Matvey loves that she, and by extension her family, doesn't give a single shit about social status unlike so many around them who have continued to do since his time.
Each also happen to think the other's eyes are the most beautiful thing in the world.
They help each other learn the other's languages
Emily, Matvey, Alexi and Wyman are thick as thieves growing up. Sometimes literally—wealth redistribution is in their nature ;).
Wyman is a family friend whom Emily has met at a ball or two back in Dunwall but reconnects with in Serkonos as they had moved there for their education with a goal towards working at the Royal Conservatory in the future.
Alexi follows her friend down to Serkonos and eventually joins the Grand Guard, since she was being groomed as a City Watch captain anyway back in Dunwall
Emily follows in her father's footsteps and starts dating her (albeit informal now that she’s not royalty anymore) protector and friend.
Wyman's first partner is Matvey, though at the time they think that 1) they're a boy and 2) they're only into boys
Matvey dreams of attending the Academy of Natural Philosophy, to study the stars and its movements, this world, all of its corners and what lies beneath the surface in his dreams. This common interest in natural philosophy is what connects him and Wyman from the outset.
He shadows Hypatia and Vasco's work at the Addermire Institute, who'd been working on finding a cure to the miners' respiratory ailments (though their incidence is thankfully much lesser than in canon because of Aramis Stilton's continued efforts).
He has vague recollections of a woman that might be his mother, bedridden.
When he asks his mothers about his origins all he's met with are convincing lies that he's learned to recognize. They’ve read the Eyeless’ records. They know how close he was to an eternal state of torture and want to spare him the pain
Emily promises to help him search for his roots by themselves once they're older.
Emily starts participating in the Blade Verbena like her father before her and reigns supreme as the undefeated champion for 6 years. The fiercest fighter in all of Serkonos, she wishes in part to live up to her father's name in the arena, and for people to stop thinking of her as the rich royal brat.
Falling in love with swordplay through her father's lessons also helps.
also she totally becomes a class traitor and starts working with Lucia Pastor, stands up for workers' rights and uses her position of relative influence to advocate for good causes.
Matvey always patches her up after every tournament she wins and every scuffle she gets into, though there isn't much to do since like her father, she's quick and efficient. That is until in 1852, the first prototype Jindosh Clockwork Soldier participates in the tournament.
The fight is long and dirty and she gets scratched up pretty bad but still wins.
As the sun sets, atop a rooftop in the Batista Mining District after being patched up yet again she kisses him for the first time.
It's been a long time coming, even before just a few weeks ago when they'd both broken up with their previous partners
Cue relationship montage: sparring, ballroom dancing at diplomatic functions that Jess drags them to at Stilton Manor, throwing an absolute banger of a stag party for the Mayhew-Wyman wedding, solving the Clockwork Mansion and running away from angry Clockwork Soldiers, protesting Luca Abele's deregulations etc. etc. together.
Empress Delilah Copperspoon Kaldwin visits them during a diplomatic trip and Jessamine introduces her to her colleague Ashworth. They start a courtship.
Emily and Matvey go to a Shan Yun show together but gets separated.
Matvey is kidnapped by his father who survived the Lurks' visit to Shindaerey all those years ago by sheer luck—he wasn't there at the time—but out for preparations for the ritual that'd turn his bastard son to a god.
He takes him to Shindaerey. Em and Billie do slightly modded versions of the DOTO missions together and they save him right before the knife falls (ever since Daud helped her out, Bille had started learning her way around a sword, just in case. Corvo had even trained her along with Alexi at one point)
The remaining few cultists and Matvey's father are sentenced. The rich ones like Yun and Michaels weasel their way out of the firing line.
For the Copperspoon-Ashworth royal wedding Emily and Matvey Kaldwin take a trip aboard the Dreadful Wale with Deirdre, Billie and corvojess to Dunwall.
In perhaps the only controversial ruling Empress Copperspoon orders the Abbey of the Everyman be dissolved. Despite firm objection from the Overseers, misdeeds of the institution over centuries are brought to light with the help of a group of witch-mercenaries under the empress' employ, and a case is made for individual freedom in all forms.
Even though it's a process that is met with resistance and lasts decades, it eventually succeeds as public opinion turns on the Abbey. In its place, the Academy of Natural Philosophy lays down guidelines based on scientific rigor for research that involves the supernatural
ok so this is kinda an au of the amazing fic Waste by hirvitank (absolutely fabulous read, highly recommend)—hence the Matvey name and origins for Outtie as well as Wyman's gender trouble—with some elements inspired by noun's awesome fic unsuspected turns in the path. the bits in blue were contributed by the incomparable @lunadiane
