#tgoed

[nihilnovisubsole]

I don't know if you're still in Dishonored fandom, but I recently stumbled upon... a recording of what Daud sounds like in French and-- I need to share this with someone, I can't feel my knees (it's on "dishonoredaudio" blog, post/115959350943 )

there was a reason jo said she’d know his voice anywhere 🌹

[nihilnovisubsole]

given your blog and such I feel like you would have been asked this already. but it's been a hot minute so, please: what happens to Joanna after /death of the outsider/ or does her story end fully with 'the house on campo seta road'?

no, i haven’t been asked that

i actually wrote a little post-post-epilogue almost eighteen months ago, and let it sit in my drafts so the story wouldn’t overstay its welcome. i’d forgotten about it, but since you asked, i’ll throw it under a cut for you. fair warning, though: it won’t make any sense unless you’ve read both tgoed and the house on campo seta road.

a few months after the events of “the house on campo seta road,” billie finds her way to the front door of madame jo’s. she debates whether she should go in, but eventually, she knocks. jo answers. she’s taken aback, but invites billie in and puts the kettle on. daud and billie spend the afternoon reminiscing about times past - old jobs, his dealings with the outsider, and what happened between them in dunwall.

after a few hours, billie says she just wanted to see what he’d made of himself. she can leave, if he wants her to, and he’ll never see her again. “your life is your own now,” daud says, “but you know where to find me if the wind blows you back.” billie jokes, “i guess you and that courtesan got along better than i thought.”

a few weeks later, emily - now in a budding courtship with her tyvian handmaid - quietly makes good on daud’s request and pardons rebecca haight. she hopes it will pass by parliament and the abbey without incident. it does not. when the abbey finds out what rebecca did, the outrage is swift and furious, and emily soon finds herself embroiled in one of the biggest political battles of her time. parliament tries to curtail royal power. emily pulls rank. the abbey tries to investigate her for heresy. she only narrowly shuts it down. at one point parliament questions whether emily is psychologically fit to rule, and suggests electing a regent, like hiram burrows before. emily endures a grueling political death march of obstructionism, insults, and backroom deals, and even corvo - who was not really dead - can do nothing to stem the tide.

seven years later, in 1859, emily finally signs the “haight declaration” into law. it severely restricts the ways overseers can prosecute “moral crimes,” and decriminalizes the use of pennyroyal in the isles. it takes a few days for the news to reach karnaca, but soon, people start to murmur in the dockyards. when jo reads the news in the morning paper, she buries her head in daud’s chest and cries.

and sometimes, the dock workers swear they see the dreadful wale again, anchored far out in the harbor in the small hours of the night.

[nihilnovisubsole]

varric and daud!

varric:

for all varric writes smutty literature and brags about what a ladykiller he is, he doesn’t get around that much. which is to say, barely at all. he’s tried brothels and flings and flirting with rich older women at balls, but between his physical insecurities and the ghost of the bianca thing, it never works out.

to carmine, who’s still a virgin, this actually makes him more attractive. she finds it less intimidating, and hopes he’ll forgive her shyness and lack of experience. [he does, of course.]

this is totally not an obscure headcanon, lmao. i think most people assume this about varric. oh well!

daud:

in tgoed universe, daud still has the red coat that he wore as leader of the whalers. it’s in the storage room above jo’s clinic, hanging by itself in an old wardrobe.

jo asks him once why he keeps it, if he’s never going to wear it again. daud tells her that, honestly? there’s not much tangible proof that he exists. he left his sword on jessamine’s grave, many of his former students are dead, and that building in the flooded district has to have fallen down by now. all he really has to his name are his journals and the red whaler coat, and, well, it gets you thinking. the only proof that you lived is the trail of people you killed.

jo jokes about how retirement is making him existential. but once in a while, she opens the wardrobe and dusts off the lapels.

[nihilnovisubsole]

would u do an obscure hc for daud?

this is more an AU thing than an obscure headcanon, but: in the tgoed universe, daud stopped smoking about a year before he met jo. one night, he’d been hunting a mark who was especially paranoid, and when the mark entered the room daud was hiding in, he smelled the tobacco on daud’s clothes.

daud finished the job, but he was disturbed by how close he’d come to getting caught, and realized he’d have to give up the habit to be truly invisible. he references this in one of the entries in the red leatherbound notebook - “where i spent a whole spring hacking up death and thought i’d caught some pandyssian plague.”

that’s why there’s no mention of him smoking in over 55k words of tgoed. i admit, i was a little surprised that nobody pointed it out!

[nihilnovisubsole]

After Emily Kaldwin falls unconscious on the Karnaca streets, she wakes up in the house of an old friend - and her bitterest foe. But before she can process that they’ve built a life together in the years she’s been on the throne, an Overseer witch hunt traps her inside with them, and the tension between them starts to boil. Will Emily emerge unchanged when she learns what really happened fifteen years ago? And how will she feel when she confronts her mother’s killer once and for all?

The House on Campo Seta Road is a three-part sequel to The Garden of Earthly Delights, taking place over one night late in Dishonored 2′s storyline. Scheduled updates will return, as well as illustrations for each of the three parts - and characters and details from the first fic will resurface in new ways.

Stay tuned for Part 1 on Friday, July 14th!

[nihilnovisubsole]

The House on Campo Seta Road: Part 2

Still struggling to reconcile the present Daud with the man who ruined her life, Emily looks to anyone she can for comfort - even the one who knows Daud’s crime best of all. When she takes Joanna to task for her relationship, Emily learns more than she bargained for - but there’s one more threat ahead of them before the night is done.

Read on AO3

[nihilnovisubsole]

The House on Campo Seta Road: Part 1

After a strange awakening and reunion with the old Knife of Dunwall, Emily does the only thing she can - fight for her life. But when another face from her past intervenes, things get even stranger still. Sparks fly as empress and midwife clash over what’s fair in love and war - and Emily’s about to discover that she’s not the only unexpected arrival that night.

Contains a side character birth scene.

If you haven’t read The Garden of Earthly Delights but are interested in this fic, I strongly recommend at least skimming it beforehand. This story is a direct sequel and contains many references to the first one, and follows its own canon-divergent version of several events.

Read on AO3