I Will Show You Fear In a Handful of Dust: Chapter Two: Death by Water
Summary: In Treviso, the First Talon sees to his responsibilities. CW: suicidal ideation. Lucanis/Rook, but like...the worst timeline, friends. 5.4k.
Also on AO3.
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"Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool." - T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Lucanis returns to the villa with the rising of the sun. He takes the Crow's Road in the half-darkness, silently leaping from eave to eave, sure footing taking him along the well-worn paths he's traced countless times before â the rote familiarity welcome as he counts down the minutes until oblivion. It's close now; he can feel it with every step closer toward the villa. He need only do his usual checks and check-ins to ensure it is secure, and then he can retreat.
It is almost a disappointment to find it another quiet night, no threats to speak of. Lucanis has spent the better part of the last eighteen months cutting down House Dellamorte's enemies â reminding any Crow or House just exactly why Dellamorte is the first. It has been a long and bloody campaign to secure the place of a dying House. Not everyone has been content to blindly let an abomination lead the Crows. He has learned that religious fervor often far outweighs logic â that there is no arguing or convincing he can do that isn't at the end of a knife.
It is such a waste, he thinks, to have to slaughter so many from his own cuchillo houses simply because they would not accept what he is. Would not accept that he is not somehow controlling Caterina through blood magic or worse. The worst part is that so many remained loyal to House Dellamorte all the way to the end. And that when he had plunged his daggers into their chests, when he had slit their throats, when he had watched the light in their eyes extinguish, he had known that they believed he was the true threat to House Dellamorte.
Caterina, at least, seems content with the current state of things. Her approval, as elusive as ever, is not something he can boast despite doing everything asked of him without question. Still, it is so much easier to exist with someone telling him what to do, the contracts he must take, the meetings he must attend, the Crow Houses that must be slaughtered wholesale. It was why he had returned here, after all. It had been the only path he could see. In truth, it had always been the only path there was. Caterina named him First Talon in front of all the Crows, and there was never going to be any escape from this life. He had thought, perhaps, he might put it off a while. He had hoped, at least, that he would not be returning here alone. He had believed, naively, that it wouldn't be so bad if she were by his side.
There is no sense of homecoming to the rooms Caterina had prepared for him. They are the First Talon's rooms, bedecked in all the finery fitting his station. He barely uses half of them. Lucanis has never been a man of excess; it was not a choice. The villa he called home always stood in stark contrast to the reality of his training. Before the Ossuary, he'd had an apartment in Treviso. A quiet, unassuming space, the kitchen taking up most of it â lots of windows to let in the light. It had been the first place in his life that really belonged to him. The furniture and walls didn't hold memory or ghosts or judgment. It was simply his. Sometime while he was presumed dead, Caterina had it emptied, all his possessions brought back to the villa. And when he had, at last, returned, this room had been populated with his things. It had felt oddly violating to see all the furniture and books he'd picked out and placed in his apartment with care suddenly here. It all still looks out of place in this room. A bureau here, a desk there. He hadn't asked for this in the same way he hadn't asked for the title of First Talon, but what do his wants matter now, anyway?
He removes his armor and weapons automatically, routine and muscle memory taking over. He is grateful that so much of his life can be given over to perfunctory movement, how little thinking it takes to lay out his knives, cleaning and oiling the blades. His gloves are blood-soaked â ruined, he thinks. He'd been sloppy, but he'd been spoiling for a fight he didn't get. And in the end, it hadn't mattered anyway. The contract is done.
Somewhere, buried in the back recesses of his mind, there is a door, and he can feel the pressure mounting inside of it as his demon paces, frustrated behind it. They do not speak, and they do not fight. Lucanis's waking hours are his own, his mind blessedly quiet. His sleeping hours, however, belong to Spite. That is the deal they made when tangled up so much in each other's grief.
Losing her felt like it happened in triplicate. There was his grief, the gnawing open void of it all. There was Spite's, the animalistic, feral edges of his demands for her return that have never entirely ceased. And then there was everyone else's. Their sorrow and their pity, their very existence a reminder of her. It had been too much; it is still too much.
And so he reaches for the sleeping tonic on his nightstand, downing it as quickly as he can, the astringent, bitter taste as familiar as it is unwelcome. He lies back against the bed, embracing the empty nothingness of the oblivion it offers. He cannot sleep any other way these days.
He looks forward to and dreads these moments before oblivion in equal measure. His body still, his mind whirring, his demon aching to escape his confines. Lucanis drifts, feels as though he's drowning in the quiet, but she feels closer in these moments between wakefulness and sleep. Though she never set foot in the room, he still listens for her footsteps among the many in a house stirring for the day. He feels somehow that if he listens carefully enough, he'll hear her familiar tread, the soft sounds of her breathing beside him. That she will return, plucked out of a rift in the Fade, and all of this time and pain will be just a pleat in time, a wrinkle he can tuck away and never think of again.
When he wakes, he is alone. Again.
The sun shines with mock brightness through the windows of his room, the curtains drawn back by Spite sometime as he slept. The sun's position tells him it is early afternoon. He is draped over his desk, a stack of papers beneath him, ink staining his fingers. Spite was writing again. His mouth is dry, and his teeth ache. A side-effect of the tonic, and one he never quite manages to banish.
He runs a hand down his face and wishes he had slept longer. He does not wake rested, not with Spite as active as he is. Some days, Lucanis wishes he didn't wake up at all. If Spite did not retreat on his own, he is not sure he would fight for that control again. It would be so easy to fade away. Perhaps that is why Spite does not fight for more than he has been given.
He looks down at the pages scattered beneath him. Spite's writing is a cramped, dark scrawl; each word looks as though it is scratched into the page. It is a miracle he doesn't break more quills. No part of Lucanis really wants to read whatever Spite has written, but it is impossible not to glance through it, not to see whatever compels his demon so.
If there were water
  And no rock
  If there were rock
  And also water
  And water
  A spring
  A pool among the rock
  If there were the sound of water only
  Not the cicada
  And dry grass singing
  But sound of water over a rock
  Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
  But there is no water
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Spite's ramblings make little sense. Who is a third Spite is referring to? There is only him and his demon here. If only there was someone else, someone to make sense of all this for him. Someone to calm Spite. If only upon waking, Lucanis wasn't met with the bone-deep certainty that his happiest days are behind him.
He stands and attempts to wash his ink-stained hands in the bathing chamber. The ink flakes away the same way old blood does, and neither he nor his demon speaks to one another. Spite hangs just there, just outside of his periphery. If he doesn't look, he doesn't see him. He prefers it that way.
Caterina awaits him in the office. It used to be solely hers, but she's had another desk brought in, so now it is theirs. He's always hated this room, never went into it unless he was summoned. Now, he walks into it every day, walks inside like a target to a waiting blade.
At least there is coffee that awaits him in the enchanted carafe on the sideboard. He steps there first, pours himself a cup. This is one of the few pleasures of his life, and he savors it, draws out the moment before he has to face Caterina.
"You were back late," she says, every staccato stop of the words laced with disapproval.
The question goes unasked, but he hears it anyway. "It's done."
He senses her displeasure in his curt response in the slight pursing of her lips, but she does not inquire further. "Andarateia has requested your presence at the Diamond tonight."
"Whatever for? It was her birthday last month," he mutters as he sits down at his desk. There is a stack of missives to go through; no doubt everything Caterina has already looked through and has decided is not important enough to handle herself. If the contracts and the late hours don't kill him, the paperwork definitely will.
"I'm told a delegation from Minrathous is coming. They want more help from Treviso."
He waves a hand. "Teia can handle it."
Caterina looks unsurprised. "Good. Perhaps she will listen to me finally about ceasing aid."
"What?" The Crows have been sending aid to Minrathous at his behest since before Elgar'nan attacked their city. Since the dragon attack had blighted Dock Town, and he'd been so drowning in guilt he'd been able to do nothing less than send supplies and people and help.
"We cannot continue in this way, sending aid to Minrathous for nothing. Our own people are struggling. The Antaam may be gone, but the scars they left linger. Trade routes are still mired. Take the energy spent on them and invest it here."
"It could have been Treviso -"
"It wasn't."
"I'll go. See what they want, at least."
Caterina doesn't seem annoyed or even surprised, and he has the distinct feeling he's somehow played right into her hands. But the truth is, if Caterina outright bans him from helping, he's not sure he can tell her no. He's not sure he can do anything at all. He has become exactly what she wanted. The perfect First Talon. He does everything she asks, pliant to her every whim. He welcomes it; he doesn't have to think or consider or decide. In so many ways, he wears the title but bears little of the weight. She is still in charge, still pulling every last string. And he does not fight it at all; instead, he has sharpened himself into the shape she likes best and handed her the hilt.
What else is he good for if not to be her blade?
There was an evening, a moment, a time, when she had found him in the gardens after a nearly silent, melancholy dinner with her and Illario in that old, haunted dining room. He'd retreated there, taken refuge beneath the moonlight, trying to breathe air that wouldn't fill his lungs, drowning on dry land. Strange, how the mind reaches for old stories whenever it finds itself at the jagged edge of grief. His had reached for the drowned sailor â the Antivan folktale of the man whose eyes became pearls, who forgot the cry of gulls and the deep sea swell while the currents worried his bones into silence. Still he pleaded with the sea to let him descend once more, to rescue the love trapped within the whirlpool's heart. He'd never understood that level of despair, the futility of bargaining with forces older than memory. He understands it far too well now.
Months of numbness, unchanging stretches of nothingness, and suddenly, a great heaving thing in his chest, the weight of his grief catching up to him. He had not heard the click of Caterina's cane, didn't realize she was beside him until she spoke, words quiet, full of a tenderness so foreign he wasn't sure the woman beside him really was his grandmother.
"When I lost my Adriano," she began, "it felt as though the world had ended."
He had never heard her speak of him, his grandfather. He is not sure he had ever heard her say his name. Humiliated, he had wiped the tears from his eyes and looked at her, waiting to see what lesson she was there to bestow. It had been years since she's raised her cane to him, but still he braced; where would it descend?
"They brought his body here, and I paced outside the room. Unable to go in because if I did I'd have to see him dead, I'd have to see that he was really gone. And when his pyre burned, part of me wanted to throw myself upon it."
A hand upon his shoulder; it had taken everything in him not to flinch. "We endure because we must. It will be a wound you will carry with you always, but you will carry it because your House demands it."
Before he could form words to reply, she was gone, and so was the moment, the shared vulnerability. They haven't spoken of it again or since. But he always was good at recognizing a command when he heard one: endure.
And so he has. Like a marionette on a string, he does everything demanded of him. He works until the light changes outside his office, until the sun has very nearly set. And then he returns to his rooms and dresses, puts on the armor and the mantle of First Talon. He feels as though he is losing a piece of himself every time he does this, every time he buries more of Lucanis and becomes the First Talon. There is a numbness, a quiet that settles over him; it is almost as welcome as oblivion.
Behind the closed door in his mind, he can feel Spite thrashing. Angry and trapped, frustrated and fighting, he can feel his demon's unhappiness every time he carves bits of himself away to fit into the frame of First Talon. It doesn't matter; it doesn't get to matter. It is what it is. Spite or no Spite, this was always his future.
Because appearances matter, and that's been drilled into him more times than he can count over the years, he won't be taking the Crow's Road to the Diamond, though he'd prefer it to the carriage that jostles through the streets. He makes his way to the foyer, pulling on his gloves as he steps toward the covered veranda where it waits. He is surprised to find he is not alone; Illario is there.
He doesn't see much of Illario these days. Lucanis half forgets his cousin's existence most of the time. After he was let off of house arrest, Lucanis expected Illario might leave. But he hasn't. He's still staying in the guest house, away from the main building of the villa. He's still present at the family dinners Caterina insists on every single week. But beyond that, Lucanis doesn't know how he fills his hours. As First Talon, he certainly has the means and resources to have him tracked or followed, to have every hour of his time accounted for. He simply hasn't had the energy to care.
"Lucanis." Illario's voice is soft, an entreaty.
Lucanis stares at his cousin, tries to feel something, anything. Illario had betrayed him, had sold him out to the Venatori. He tries to grasp at something â rage or anger or sadness, but there's nothing there beyond the hollowness that's settled into his bones.
Any softness that might have existed is gone now. Perhaps it was never there; perhaps it was just quiet he mistook for care because he always was more generous with Illario than he's ever been with him. "Let me guess, off to play Caterina's loyal Talon at the Diamond?"
He is reminded, unbidden, of when they were boys. Illario used to steal things from his room. Books, seashells from his windowsill â small, inconsequential things. And then he'd display them proudly, openly, as though begging for Lucanis to ask about them. He never did. He never knew why Illario did those things; he still doesn't. As a child, he had felt as though he was missing something important, that asking would somehow reveal his own weakness or ignorance.
There is something happening here, something Illario is doing, and once again, Lucanis isn't sure what it is, what it means. And, just like when he was a boy, he knows that asking will do more to show his own weakness than yield him answers.
"What do you want, Illario?" he asks, not rising to the bait. Illario would not seek him out for nothing.
Something flickers in Illario's eyes, an emotion Lucanis cannot discern. "I could come with you. We both know I'm much more charming than you are."
Lucanis tries to shoulder past him. "No."
"Come on, Lucanis. It's true! Perhaps you'll get your way if I'm there!" The words are laced with some sort of desperation Lucanis cannot quite pinpoint. Illario doesn't care about Minrathous or this meeting; what is he trying to do?
"Why do you care?" Lucanis asks, the words out before he can stop them.
Illario looks bolstered by the question, eyes flashing. "I don't. I'm just bored out of my mind. Give me something to do, cousin."
The curiosity that rose in him withers. What does it matter? What does any of this? "Do whatever you want, Illario," he says; the words sound defeated even to his ears.
Illario steps aside then, looking for all the world like he has lost something here. Which simply doesn't make any sense. "Good luck, First Talon."
The title is deposited at his feet with so much bitterness that Lucanis has to look away. Once, he would have given up the title of First Talon to Illario without question. He never wanted it, but now, when he cannot hand it over, when he has nothing else anchoring him to living anywayâŚ
Lucanis half expects Illario to pad along after him, but he doesn't. Illario didn't actually care about coming, not really. He wantedâŚLucanis isn't exactly sure. The carriage door closes; he is alone.
As a rule, Lucanis avoids the Diamond. He avoids the Grande Market, Cafe Pietra, anywhere memories of her press too close. A lifetime of memories in Treviso, and it is the ones from those months with her that are the most vibrant, the most present. They overwrite everything else â a palimpsest he cannot escape. In the Diamond, it is impossible not to look for her. Impossible not to listen for the lilt of her Nevarran accent making a joke with Chance, or checking in on Jacobus. Impossible not to expect her to be at his side, tracing the path to the eluvian.
He drifts through the Diamond like a ghost; Crows shift to let him past, the greetings few and far between. There was a time when entering the Diamond felt welcoming, a relief to be among so many Crows in a familiar place. Now, it just feels like the precursor to exhaustion.
When he arrives to the meeting room on the second-highest floor, he is one of the last to arrive, though it's clear the meeting hasn't yet begun. Teia and Viago are already there. Ashur and Neve are too. Neve looks the same as ever, graceful and poised beneath the wear and exhaustion she carries as much as he does.
"Lucanis," Neve says with a smile. Her eyes are warm; the smile is genuine. She moves as though to hug him, but seems to think better of it, halting there awkwardly half-outstretched towards him.
He does his best to summon a smile, something that will convince her that despite ignoring her letters and avoiding her for months, he is fine. "It's good to see you, Neve."
"It's been a while."
He sidesteps the obvious concern in her tone. "How are you? How are things in Minrathous?"
Her mouth tightens, eyes dimming a little. "Surviving. But we wouldn't be here if things were good."
Of course not. "Excuse me, I should check in with Teia." He steps away before she can ask him questions, before he will be forced to lie or struggle through half-truths. Neve is too clever by half, and the only chance he has of avoiding her pointed questions and the weight of her concern is simply to limit how much he talks to her. He can feel Neve's disappointment in him as he steps away, but he lets it ride. He's here, isn't he? It has to be enough.
"Teia," Lucanis says as he approaches the Seventh Talon.
She smiles widely. "I'm so glad you could join us, First Talon." There's some admonishment there, but there's no graceful way to acknowledge it, so he doesn't. He feels a sort of specific pain whenever he's with Teia, the pain of knowing he is a disappointment to her as well. That dealing with him requires some generosity of spirit, some amount of shoring up beforehand.
"Glad to be here," he says instead. It's not even entirely a lie.
The meeting begins, and Lucanis is grateful that there is so little asked of him now. He can simply sit at the table and listen. The concerns of his own House have kept him well enough occupied that he has not spent much time at all concerned about broader Treviso unless it was intertwined somehow with his affairs. Flooding had been the immediate concern. Treviso and Antiva's other coastal cities have always been protected from the dangers of more open water by the safe embrace of Rialto Bay. Elgar'nan's moving the moon had changed that. The Merchant Princes are antsy, frustrated at their inability to move their goods the ways they used to before the blight. That while ports are reopened, the seas are more treacherous to cross than ever.
Neve and Ashur's petitions are simple ones: their people are starving. For all of Tevinter's pretending at decadence, the moment the supply lines were cut off, it was revealed how little there really was to go around. Antiva has been fine, most of its farms and countryside spared entirely by the blight. There is more than enough food; what there isn't enough of is work. Fewer ships to unload, fewer merchants willing to brave the seas, means that excess sits in overfilled warehouses with no way to leave.
"We have been providing aid since long before Elgar'nan's attack and asking for little in return," Viago says, steepling his hands. "It is not that we do not want to help, but at a certain point we have to stop doing it for free."
"What does Treviso need? We were able to build the tidal gates to keep Treviso and Salle from flooding. We have magic and engineers, we have-" Ashur's voice is desperate.
"Reliable trade routes?" Viago asks. "That is what we need. If we could open up the Crossroads-"
"That is out of the question," Neve interjects.
"Why?" Viago asks. "The Crows, Watchers, Shadow DragonsâŚall use them to move small shipments, deliver messages, for travel back and forth. Why shouldn't they be used to move goods? If we opened them to merchants, it wouldn't matter that the ports are unusable. Goods are spoiling in dockside warehouses because they cannot be moved quickly enough anymore."
"And our people starve in the streets because you won't share," Neve accuses.
"Let our Merchant Princes use the Crossroads, and your people will want for nothing," Viago replies simply.
"That permission isn't mine to give," Neve is looking at Lucanis pleadingly, begging him to jump in to say something.
"Then whose is it?" Viago demands. "If not yours? You were one of the people who resided there, were you not?"
Both Viago and Neve are looking at him questioningly, and he finds the words elude him. Because they are perilously close to talking about her. And he cannot do that. He cannot sit at this table, cannot remain in this seat while they all casually bring up her name, what she might have wanted. He's not sure what's worse: listening to other people misremember her or that she is so often forgotten completely.
She had not come down from the Archon's Palace, and somehow, that meant she was forgotten. He wasn't in any state to fight it, to insist the world repeat her name, that she be remembered as a hero. She was a nobody before Varric plucked her from obscurity, and it is only in the Necropolis's halls that her name is spoken of at all.
Neve is still looking at him as though she expects him to say something, to do something. "The Caretaker, the guardian over that place, only really answered to Rook."
Rook. That wasn't her name. Not really. In the back of his mind, Lucanis can feel Spite stirring with the thoughts of her, the familiar contours of it. He tries to fortify that shut door between them. The last thing he needs is Spite making a scene here.
Viago seems undeterred. "Everyone has a price, do they not? Speak to this Caretaker. Find out what needs to happen."
"And in the meantime?" Neve stares at Viago in disbelief. Beside her, Ashur puts a hand on her chair as though he is trying to keep her from jumping out of it, across the table, at fighting Viago on her own.
"House Dellamorte will get supplies to the Shadow Dragons," he says. It's not an apology, nor is it enough, but it will have to do. Perhaps Caterina doesn't even need to know if he uses his personal accounts instead of the House's. What else is he going to spend it on?
Neve sits back in her chair, looking like she still wants to argue with Viago, but she doesn't. She looks tired, her face wan. He doubts she's sleeping enough. Part of him wants to invite her back to the villa, sit her down in his kitchen and not let her leave until she's eaten a home-cooked meal. He'd even make that fried fish she likes so much if it meant she stopped looking so haunted.
But he hasn't cooked in a long, long while. He's not sure he could survive an evening of her attention anyway.
"We appreciate all that the Crows have done for us. You've been steadfast allies, and we won't forget it," Ashur says.
Teia at least looks sorry. "It's not that we don't want to help more, but things in Antiva are not what they once were. And with the unrest in Tevinter, and with OrlaisâŚ.We have to look out for our own."
Beneath his veil, Lucanis swears Ashur grimaces. "And we thought we had to make hard choices during the war."
"If you have a problem that is more easily solved with a knife, you know where to find us," Viago replies. The offer is a kind one, but it will not feed hungry citizens.
The meeting ends, and Lucanis knows it is in his best interest to disappear quickly, to throw himself out a window and onto the nearby rooftops into the night before he can be stopped, but Neve is at his side in an instant.
"We need to talk," she says, voice low but urgent.
She leads him out of the meeting chamber and down a cramped hallway, trying doors as she goes until she comes to one that opens easily, some sort of storage space by the looks of it. She beckons him inside. It's his guilt that propels him forward, that has kept him here instead of offering up some excuse and retreating back to the villa and to the sleeping tonic that will be waiting on his nightstand and the oblivion that will follow.
He is not sure he has ever seen Neve look quite so defeated, her face twisted with concern. "Are you alright?"
Anger, he had expected. Yelling even. Her concern feels like a cresting ocean wave, comes down upon him heavily, knocking the air from his lungs. He cannot meet it or shoulder it, finds himself sinking ever lower. Neve used to be one of the few people he trusted with his thoughts, his fears, his concerns. His friend.
"I'm fine," he replies, words familiar and practiced and false. He finds he cannot meet her gaze.
She draws back as though his words have hit her with a physical force. "Strange. You're not answering lettersâŚyou haven't been to one of the dinners in months. No one has seen or heard from you."
"My responsibilities-"
"Fuck your responsibilities," she says, brow furrowed.
He cannot get her to drop this, and so his own recourse is to twist the knife away from him. "My responsibilities mean that your people aren't starving."
Neve's face twists bitterly. "For now, but even the First Talon of the Crows cannot single-handedly keep my city from dying."
"And neither can a detective," he murmurs. "Ashur could have done this meeting alone. Why are you here? Is there something you needed?"
And then her arms are around him. It takes a moment for his mind to realize what's happening, to catch up. His hands hang there for a moment, useless before he realizes the expectation to return the embrace. He cannot remember the last time he was held in this way, the last time someone sought to give or receive comfort from his bloodstained hands.
Neve's emotions were always buried things. Care tucked in sarcasm, hope beneath well-cultivated cynicism. Which has always made the moments she allows her care and love to show important. He tries to feel anything beyond the current of guilt dragging him down, down, down.
"I've missed you," she says as she pulls away.
"It's beenâŚ" He cannot find the words for an apology or a sidestep to absolve him from the guilt that twists ever more tightly around him.
"I know," she says with a nod. That small acknowledgement is enough to encompass all the months of his silence have meant to them both. "Look, I'm going to the Necropolis. To see Will and EmmrichâŚ.things have been happening around meâŚand IâŚ.don't knowâŚI need answers, and maybe it's not connected to R-"
"Stop."
"Lucanis-"
He raises his hands in surrender. "Please, Neve."
Undeterred, she steps forward. "Come with me? Please."
He shakes his head, stepping back, putting distance between them. "I can't."
"Because of your responsibilities?" The final word feels like a mockery.
Yes. No. He wishes it were that simple.
"I just can't. It was good to see you." That, at least, he means. That, at least, feels genuine.
Neve steps around him, opens the door to go. She pauses at the threshold. "I'm not the only one who misses you, you know. And when you're ready, we're all waiting."
And that is part of what makes this so hard. "Good luck, Neve."
And then she's gone, and he feels like he is somehow that sailor who has refused a life raft, still drowning in the vast, unending ocean of his grief.









