Dishonored: the Empress at Night

A bit of Dishonored 2 fanfic requested by a reader. Enjoy!

***

Only someone who spent a lot of time examining the Empress would see that there was something different about her now.

Not that there was anything unexpected about things in her changing, she had just survived a coup attempt that, strictly speaking, could be more accurately described as a successful coup and then a counter-coup, but it wasn't like that. Empress Emily, much like her coterie and the media besides, seemed content with pretending that the majority of that had not happened, was consigned to a past that no longer existed. There were predictable consequences of what had happened, ones that the Empress was not displaying.

But there was something, something that Joseph could see, though he would never admit it. It wouldn't do for a mere guard to talk about such things; it would be considered idle gossip at best, and something close to active sedition at worst.

So, he kept quiet and did his job, watching over the halls of power in as close to stoic silence as he could manage. This wasn't such a bad job, and he wasn't about to throw it away on his imagination. He watched, because that was the thing he was there to do, and hoped the entire time that the Empress wouldn't notice the degree to which that watching always seemed to stray to her.

Because if there were something, and she was hiding it, and she suspected he knew...?

Surely there was no way that would go well, would it?

Night watch was at least easier than the other possible shifts, in that it was quiet and less likely to involve disruption. There was tell of someone skulking around the palace grounds at night, the rumor mill did constantly grind away, but Joseph had never seen hide nor hair of any mysterious trespassers.

Not until tonight, as these things always went. Your life never changed much, until it did.

His route taking him past the outermost walls of the central palace building, Joseph's path through the house was lined with windows, points of ingress that needed to be checked and double checked at least twice a night. Thankfully this could mostly be accomplished at a glance, but occasionally he stopped, tried to lift one of the window panes out of its frame or jostle a lock. It was important to at least feel like he was working sometimes.

The shadow that blurred past the window, then, was something he saw right away, knowing almost as quickly that he would never be able to deal with alone.

That was in part just simple observation; after two rebuffed coups achieved by cloak and dagger above all else, those employed to guard high value areas knew well enough what happened to soldiers who went following mysterious figures alone. But even taking basic self preservation out of the picture, the thing that passed Joseph by this night moved in ways he could not hope to replicate, possessed of a deftness and speed that had him outmatched even before he had begun. In a very real sense, the best fighting chance he had was to fall back and call for reinforcements.

Of course, then, the silhouette vanished along the side of the building for a moment, only to reappear, sidling inside from some unseen crack.

It saw him almost the moment it entered, strange senses directing it toward the nearest source of trouble. A severe head atop a thin neck snapped in Joseph's direction, a being of fulminating shadow that existed for the first few moments of its attack as a liquid darkness flowing his way. That a human figure resolved itself from that black, shedding the shadows like a clinging mist, did not alleviate Joseph's shock; in fact, it made it worse.

A human from that beastly litheness could only be the work of the Outsider...

She- and it was a she, beneath all that magic- raced across the hall in a few great strides, momentum carrying her far further than her own steps could. She was on him in moments, long before he could so much as draw his sword, let alone begin its arc; had the woman been bringing her own weapons to bear she would have cut him down with ease. But there were no blades in her hands, no firearms, just the jarring impact of her body hitting his, then the second, of their combined weight hitting the wall.

There was a thud, quieter than Joseph might have expected.

There was the exhalation of a breath long held, and cold eyes peering from over the rim of a black cloth mask. An impossible darkness spread from her thin form, tendrils that cut through the world, void made manifest and reaching from her back into the frames of the nearest windows. They tethered her in place, and more importantly, cut off any escape route Joseph might have had.

For a moment there they just... stood, a moment frozen in tension and indecision. Joseph, back pressed to the wall and eyes wide, found himself looking over the woman with rapid, almost frantic glances, soaking in the details of her person in hopes of retaining something identifying. He swallowed thickly; there was no getting around the fact that the intruder was straddling him, feet planted on the wall at either side of Joseph. She was so very close to him, tight trousers pushed into his stomach to keep him in place, her body hot and trembling with exertion.

Her thighs were all lean muscle and power, clung tight to Joseph's waist. Her hair was dark, raven black and swept to one side, fringe down over hazel eyes that inspected him with close, dispassionate attention. Swords at her belt were of a particular design, reminiscent of ones Joseph had seen before. There was a scent on her, subtle and flowery, a low smell of expensive perfume...

'M-majesty?!' The word had left Joseph's mouth before he could think to restrain it, tumbling into the world to incriminate him. The consequences of being right were literally unthinkable, recognizing his queen in a situation like this would give her so few means of recourse that would allow her to keep her reputation intact, he wouldn't have been the first of the help to have gotten in the way of the nobles and been shouldered aside...

'Ah. Yes, I suppose this shouldn't have been terribly unexpected in my own home, shouldn't it?' With a voice that was undeniably recognizable, Empress Emily Kaldwin demurred from behind her mask, her eyes narrowing. 'I do apologize, but you won't remember any of this in a moment. I'll pull some strings, make sure you aren't penalized for sleeping on the job.'

Her hips shifted as she changed her position, lowering herself in such a way that her ass came to rest somewhere... a little stiffer.

'Really?' Her brows beetling, the Empress lilted more with intrigue than agitation. She tilted her head to one side, something speculative in her gaze that hadn't been there before. What she did not do, however, is move away.

'But I'm your Empress!'

'Ah, yes,' Joseph tried his hardest, but couldn't hide the tremble in his voice, due most principally to the contact of warm, tight womanhood against him. The idea that one might act to mislead the the woman atop him was unthinkable: 'I-it's possible that my current, ah, impropriety is because you are my Empress, Highness.'

Thought processes that were surely inscrutable and too complex for the average man played out behind the Empress' eyes, her cloak of darkness licking up the lines of her body, hugging at curves that it had only hung loosely from before. Emily Kaldwin looked down at Joseph with magic in her gaze, an intoxicating danger in posture and manner.

'Tell me,' she said finally, once her thinking had reached its inevitable terminus. 'Are you alone on your detail, young man?'

For just a moment, the span of a single muscle motion, the Empress of Dunwall bounced down, trouser-clad ass rubbing the length of Joseph's... impropriety. Everything in him shuddered at the touch, disbelief and, yes, arousal trembling through him. It felt like the rug was all the way primed to be pulled out from under him now.

'Silence is a yes, young man,' the Empress said. 'In that case, we have some latitude, which I'm sure I can put to good use convincing you to keep your peace...'

Tendrils of black magic tilted Joseph's head, in the same moment that Empress Kaldwin settled herself down further, now straddling his hardness. She kissed him, forcefully, and on her tongue were voices from other places, a taste like silver and other fineries, her lips like the rim of a crystal wineglass tilted to his mouth.

Joseph imbibed whatever spellwork his Empress fed to him.

She tasted cold and clean against his tongue, the taste of polished and honed metal, vaguely sweet and... appraising, in a way he could not quite appreciate. One of her feet lifted off of the sill of the window, planted itself gently against Joseph's stomach, all pointed heel and subtle pressures. The Empress held him pinned there thusly, stroking the bespoke leather at her instep up and down his abdomen as she sucked his tongue into her mouth and planted black magic right at its tip.

Shadowy tentacles clung to Joseph's body as Empress Kaldwin slithered down it, pressing herself firmly to his erection at every possible moment, drawing pulses of need from her guard as she descended. Her eyes, when he caught them, brooked no argument, held the firm convictions of a ruler on the march, a queen that knew what she was doing. Even had he not been one of her subjects, Joseph would not have known how to argue with that look.

Which became a matter of some urgency when Emily Kaldwin, who had dominion over all the lands of Dunwall, began to undo his pants.

Strangely enough, even after everything that had happened so far, Joseph found that he wasn't prepared at all for this; her gloved hand delving below his belt was by no means unpleasant, but it was the sensation he had least been expecting, even with the taste of her still in his mouth. With the kiss it had felt something like skimming across the surface of a dream, as though any moment might see him snapping back to a reality where he was alone in the halls and there were, again, windows to check.

But every moment this rolled on drew it, strangely, closer to reality. The sensation of this generally worked the other way, and feeling it pulled in reverse was unnerving.

Nervous as it made him, though, Joesph could not deny the Empress' hot breath on the tip of his now bared cock, filtered through the dark material of her mask but no less real. He shivered, and she pulled down that mask at least, revealing the rest of her face and cementing the fact that this unprecedented chain of events was, somehow, happening.

'Oh, don't look at me like that, young man,' she said, a tsking admonishment in her voice, and for a moment her lips brushed the head of his cock. Joseph squeaked. Emily shook her head: 'I've not grown a second head or anything. You have no idea how stifling royalty can be, but it's precisely the sort of thing I can drop under this mask and a good shadow. I don't need you to understand it fully, just to... indulge your Empress a little, alright?'

'Yes, ma'am!' Joseph exclaimed, then winced at the sudden volume of his voice, echoing down the empty hall.

'Oh, given the circumstances I think we can be less formal,' she replied, extending her tongue and tasting the man before her for the first time. 'Emily is fine.'

She acted with, indeed, the confidence of royalty, moving with an assertive grace that Joseph simply did not have the reaction speed to rebuff. He was in her mouth before his could even finish opening to speak, warmth and wetness engulfing his length in a rather singular stroke. With an active tongue and lips that gripped tight even as she moved, Emily's oral attentions took Joseph's breath away, pressed him flat into the wall; the bulk of his attentions went right to his hips, drawn forward to his Empress with every bit of leverage he could find.

Emily, on her knees and with her eyes drifting closed, groaned high in her throat, the sound feminine and vulnerable in a way that he had never heard from her before; it was the sound of a woman cutting loose, giving into a moment without reservation. Not something, Joseph supposed, that an Empress of a land like this would get much opportunity to do around others.

Certainly not something he would see fit to interrupt, regardless of the risk of discovery.

The thing that surprised him the most was just how hard the Empress went from the out, as though in this one set of acts she knew no restraint at all. Her strokes were deep and forceful, hitting the back of her throat over and over again. Her arms folded primly behind her back, balance exquisite and shadowy tentacles moving in spite of it all; it seemed that they were the true receptacles of this woman's wild passions.

Joseph tried not to move, conscious at every moment of the dangers of having void magic as close as it was, but those dark tendrils were unexpectedly intimate, running up beneath his uniform and against his skin with tickling, mistlike tips. There seemed no end to them, no length to which they could not extend, no... place on him that they could not reach. His clothes began to writhe with their sinuous coiling, brushing at his thighs, his chest, curling around the curves of his ass as their mistress worked at his cock.

His toes curled inside his shoes; Emily was close to fucking her mouth on his length, heedless and happy in her wantonness. It was not a side of her that Joseph had ever seen before, this woman so unleashed that her exertions had her gagging hard enough to draw tears.

When her eyes flicked up to meet his own, though, he understood: this was more than just a momentary loss of control. There was magic in what she did now, her gaze black and her Outsider's mark shivering against her skin. Suddenly the patterns her tentacles traced upon his skin seemed less a stimulating randomness and more directed, lines and sigils of something Joseph could not possibly understand, building and building in time with his own lusts.

A more prudent man might have backed away, but as Emily's tongue smacked against his tip one more time, no action seemed less likely to Joseph. He wanted it, god how he wanted it, and he knew that nobody who looked with a dick in her mouth like Emily looked with his in her mouth could be plotting something bad.

It was clear, just by looking at her, that in this moment she only wanted the one thing. And Joseph was not far from giving it to her.

His hands came up, fingers sliding through the darkness of Emily's hair as he grew closer still, holding her to him. More tendrils of darkness wrapped around his wrists and drew taut, offering not an inch of freedom; their tips drew new symbols along the insides of his arms, pleasant and ticklish in equal measure. He could not hold out for long... and Emily's fervent sucking suggested she didn't exactly want him to either.

Though he held out for as long as he could, Joseph finished their dalliance with a twitching of his hips and a gasp that caught in his throat. Emily, her eyes avid and locked firmly on his, drank him down without skipping a beat, her clasped lips drawing further shudders of sensitivity from the man until, after some seconds had passed, his orgasm faded.

There was a strange, nerve-based cold that ran through Joseph in the afterglow, the workings of magic that, for a moment, he did not understand. A little cum-drunk, and severely interested in watching Emily swallow, wiping her mouth with delicate fingers, he didn't put all the pieces together until her tentacles had receded. Something tingled below the belt, in a way distinctly different from his standard post-orgasm sensations.

It continued, long past the point that any transitory feeling should last...

'W-what did you...?' Joseph's voice had inflected the thing like a question, but it came out breathless, coming on the back of some internal contraction he couldn't quite place. Emily rose to her feet in front of him, the workings of her spells vanishing into the cool, quiet night.

All except, that is, the little marker spell the Empress had left just above his crotch, her sigil curling, delicate, complex.

'This is my palace, of course, so I really only do this to keep my skills sharp and... well, for the fun of it,' the ruler of all the land spoke with a giggle in her voice that bespoke an amusement she rarely felt in day-to-day operations. She placed a hand against her mark, fingertips gliding along the curving lines of her guard's new tattoo. Just a little concentration and the blooming sigil activated, pinks and blacks flickering across its surface.

Joseph gasped, very nearly cried out; in just a second he was hard enough to go again, the Empress' saliva still glistening on the end of his cock.

'This is purely for fun,' Emily said, giving it one last tap before, perhaps with a pang of regret, re-fastening Joseph's trousers. She stepped back, a smile on her lips as she pulled her mask back up: 'So we'll see each other again. Keep your eyes on your Empress, young man, she'll be doing likewise...'

The darkness took her in, swallowed Emily Kaldwin up and left Joseph alone in the hall. Silent and moonlit, there was nothing at all to tempt Joseph away from the idea that it had all been a dream...

... Until the next morning brought news that his next guard shift had been changed to just outside the Empress' bed chambers. ***

Keeping his back to that door was the hardest thing that Joseph had ever done.

She was in there, and the fact that he could not see her sparked his imagination like little else. His mind kept returning to the night before, the sensation of her mouth on him, her crawling shadows squirming along his skin in some alien embrace. His runaway fantasies kept prodding him with questions, what she looked like beneath those severe gowns being foremost among them.

And through it all, every moment, the possibility that Emily would leave her chambers eventually, that he and she would be alone in this hall together was a constant anxiety. What would he even say to her? What could he say?

Joseph had looked in his mirror back at the barracks, found the mark she had left on him still present and shining the next morning. He was no symbologist, but the dancing lines had looked positively regal, and the prominent heart shape they surrounded left little room for arguing as to the Empress' intent.

The Empress of Dunwall had attached a- possibly not metaphorical!- leash directly to his crotch, and now he just had to wait until she tugged.

Her every noise caused him to jump, the comings and goings of her maids and butlers an endless increase in tension; he could not turn around, but he knew she was there whenever the door opened and one of them passed him by. It seemed to Joseph that hours had elapsed before the Empress finally saw fit to enter the palace proper, striding out once a moment came in which she was not seen to by a series of retainers.

Hoping against hope that she had not heard the noise he had made when she exited, Joseph rushed to close the door to her chambers behind her, and thus had his back to the Empress while she checked, both by sight and by magic, that they were alone together.

She could still feel the mark she had placed on him calling out to a place deep in her brain, an understanding of his nerves and blood vessels, the seats of his pleasure, uncoiling in her mind at the first thought. As he had been guarding her, thinking about her, the mark had throbbed in her too, its glowing sigil visible through the door, through the walls, through reality itself. A beacon of temptation that Emily Kaldwin had forced herself to ignore in order to go about her morning.

But no further...

Casting one last look behind her, to the empty hallway that was, itself, guarded from outside, Emily committed her attention fully to the task at hand. It would have been simplicity itself to push the man through the door he had just closed, but in truth she only had a few moments in which to play, and besides, a little risk of discovery made that play all the more fun.