hopepainandshit | TLV: IC Inbox

"Read it yourself," he mutters, staring at the door. "I didn't kill her."

"No, it was worse than that," he says quietly. He's trying to keep his voice even, but it's a hard-won calm. "You turned her into a prisoner, you sold her to a man that was obsessed with her."

He doesn't deny it. He doesn't justify it. The truth is there, in that file, and he can't run.

He just watches Richter. Silent.

His gaze remains, but there's no point belaboring it. Corvo knows.

Next page.

"Hiram Burrows."

"I put a blade through his heart," Corvo says with no hesitation.

"You knew he was guilty," he says plainly. "And you didn't give anyone else a chance to realise it."

"No."

He clenches his teeth. "He was the mind behind it all. I wanted to see him killed."

He doesn't even deny it. As time went on, Corvo started to care less and less. He started to see and think only in blood and death. He would be willing to brand Campbell. Burrows had no chance.

"No one else knew," he repeats pointedly. "That means for all anyone knew you slaughtered him in cold blood. That you would kill anyone with the right reason. Nobody would be able or willing to trust you, if they couldn't tell what you're thinking."

"I don't care. I was a wanted man anyway. He deserved to die. He deserved that and more."

He gestures to the file. "As did Daud."

"You were wanted because of him. If he had made a full confession, would you be known as innocent?"

He shrugs. "I don't care, Richter. I don't. I enjoyed putting that blade through him, and if that makes me the inmate here, then so be it."

"If you don't care then why are you bothering to get me to read this?" He flicks Daud's page back to the table. "Burrows and Daud were the power behind it, but everyone else was a stepping stone on the way. You didn't need to kill any of them."

"No, perhaps not. But I wanted to."

He glances to Daud and then back up to Richter's face. Daud, who had been the Outsider's sacrifice. Corvo was the next.

Richter just sighs quietly.

"I don't think enjoying killing the person who wronged you made you an inmate." Well, he does a little, but it's a symptom rather than the cause. "But I think the part where you didn't give a shit about the people you hurt on the way to do it might be."

"Who? The others involved in the conspiracy? The guards? Who deserved to be spared?" he challenges.

"They probably thought they were going to help make things better. Killing them, or whatever fucking worse thing happened to the Pendletons, that doesn't show them that they fucked up by believing in this conspiracy." He spreads a hand across the sheets. "The only way to prove these sorts of people wrong is to prove them wrong, not kill everyone. That makes them think they must be right because why else would they be getting murdered with no explanation?"

"That wasn't my job, boy. I'm not here to teach the gods damned world a lesson and guide them gently towards the fucking right thing."

He rolls his eyes.

"That's what Jessamine would've been doing as Empress." No hesitation on that particular landmine, but his tone is soft, almost gentle. "Wasn't it?"

"She was the Empress," he says and his voice is low, a warning.

"And she didn't get to finish her work. Because they killed her."

"A person's work doesn't end with their death unless you let it," he says quietly. He's not angry, but he's not repentant either - it's quiet steel, a sword stuck upright in the line in the sand.

"Emily was too young to take it up. Everyone else was trying to destroy what Jessamine worked for." He looks back at Corvo. "You could've kept her work alive."

He's quiet for a long moment. Not shut down, but thoughtful, eventually shaking his head.

"No," he finally decides. "No, the country was too far gone. Once I got out of prison, it was too late."

"So you gave up."

For all the ways that could be scornful or derisive... it's not. It's just kind of tired, sympathetic. "You could've made a change. You could have set things up so when Emily does come into power, there were people she trusts around her, people who would challenge her denounced and out of power, out of the way. The city could have been on her side."

Corvo's prepared to argue that he didn't give up, that he simply did what he needed to, but he doesn't. He doesn't because the rest of that statement leaves him utterly unprepared to defend himself. It's clear that he hasn't actually thought about it in those terms, in that way, and hearing it feels like the air gets sucked out of the room.

Corvo sits back, staring at a point past Richter for a very long moment.

He's silent, though all defenses have gone out of him.

And Richter watches him back, head tilted slightly just so it's not staring directly at him. But he turns his face away slightly when he speaks, to give Corvo that courtesy.

"You love Emily. I don't doubt that for a moment, or how far you'd go for her. But you didn't do any of this-" he taps the pages, silently. "-for her. You did it for yourself."

Again, he's silent, but again, it's because he's taking it in. He's absorbing that guilt, because that's the only thing he can feel right now. It drowns him, and the air to the room hasn't come back and he doesn't know if he'll ever be able to breathe again.

He stands slowly, not to leave or escape, but to simply move, walking away from the table with his arms folded.

"I - started it. Doing it for her. To get her back. And then I got her back. They put my daughter, my ten year old child, in a fucking brothel. I didn't care what happened to any of them, except that they should all hurt."

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