WHO: Daud and Sydney WHAT: Daud has been creeping around just fishing and chilling and gets spotted. WHERE: The Barns market! WHEN: This morning, March 24 WARNINGS: Tame! STATUS: Complete!
It had been a long time since Daud had entertained any notions of escaping the Void. He had accepted his fate long ago and resigned himself to simply trying to be better at the job of Outsider than his predecessor. Even if all he did was refrain from passing out magical power for fun and entertainment, he figured that had to be an improvement.
But then he’d done his best to intervene on behalf of the people from Vallo who hadn’t asked for any Void nonsense and didn’t deserve to be trapped there, especially not in that idiot’s time loop. He hadn’t expected that the consequence would be those people actually trying to help him in return. Here he was, though, living in their world instead of the one he’d come from or the Void where he’d been imprisoned. Living in a real world meant he had to do something with himself.
In absence of any better ideas and completely devoid of any urge to resume his original profession, Daud had found himself a fishing village. New Asgard was pleasantly quiet and sparsely inhabited. He found an abandoned house right on the docks that still had a little boat and some fishing gear and a decent bed to sleep in, so he moved in and started fishing. Thus far, no one bothered him.
A week or so later, he decided it was a good time to investigate the local farmers’ market. He’d see what he could do about getting a stall to sell his catch, maybe buy some eggs. He wasn’t planning to see anyone he knew. Not that Daud was hiding, but he wasn’t trying to draw any particular attention to himself. For this morning, he meant to look like a perfectly ordinary person, definitely not an ex-god or a retired assassin, who just wanted to buy some cheese and arrange to sell scallops over the summer.
Syd was often glad she didn’t have to man a booth a lot at the Barns, because they had people like Matthew and Gansey who were good at customer service, and not prone to just staring at someone when they were an idiot. So she got to animal wrangle and wrestle and it was preferred, even when it was cleaning out barns.
But also she got to carry around a pitchfork that was taller than her and look at least a little badass. She hadn’t expected to nearly run through a brick-wall of a man on her way to the cows, though, and stopped short before she had to remedy an accident of the pitchfork stabbing sort.
“Daud?” Syd managed to avoid saying dad, at least, and then shook her head, somehow convinced it was a local who just looked eerily similar to their grumpy void helper. Wishful thinking, since she had no way of finding out what happened to him. She struggled to course-correct so she didn’t get grumbled at. “Uh- sorry, my mistake. Anything I can help you with?”
He didn’t show any surprise at being addressed by name, even when he looked down to note the young woman greeting him was not just any young woman. She was the one he owed his escape to, her and her scruffy vampire friend who’d blown a hole in the side of the Void.
“Syd.” He nodded to her. The face, maybe that could have been mistaken for someone else. His appearance hadn’t been completely stable in the void, fluctuating somewhat between ages and uniforms. The voice, though–there was no mistaking that for anyone else.
Daud was determined not to be awkward and weird. Unfortunately, he was working so hard at it that he came off weird anyway, staring at Sydney the same way he tended to look at assassination targets. The long pause before his next remark didn’t help, either.
“Your explosives worked.”
“What the fuck.” So her gut instinct had been right, and now she was a breath away from bending over like she’d been punched there. For days now she’d missed out on sleep to an insane degree because of such wayward thought as did it even work? and if it did work, what if he was in that prison for a good reason?
Whatever. He’d helped them, and Sydney was a bleeding heart when it came to things like that. She’d been told it was a downfall, and a problem, but had never quite bought into that idea. “Are you shitting me right now? I mean GOOD but have you just been hanging out since then? Did you wake back up here when we did?”
Daud remained calm about the entire thing. He shrugged at her, even, like getting blown out of the Void was a totally normal occurrence.
“I crossed the Void through the tunnel, and emerged in the forest here,” he said. “I suppose ‘hanging out’ is as good a description as any for what I’ve been doing this past week. I found a good fishing spot in a village on the coast.”
“Holy shit.” To say Syd perked up was an understatement. It actually fucking worked. She’d have to send a thank you card to Nandor later, since he didn’t seem the type to be into free ice cream.
But now she was energized and looking around. “Have you been to the DOA? Do you have network access? It’s like the chat we had on our phones but better, I swear. There’s people here that would probably like to meet you. Blue is--” Somewhere. At her stall? Maybe. Syd couldn’t see that far across the market, but rambled anyway. “Somewhere, here. She lives in the farmhouse over there.”
Blue–Daud remembered her. The one who pulled off the trick with the Nexus slab and got overwhelmed by the meat grinder. He could say hello to her. The DOA he wasn’t so sure about. A network was probably something to keep an eye on, though. He didn’t like being surrounded by activities he was unaware of. Which probably was a reason to see about this DOA, as well, at least from a distance.
“DOA?” he asked, aiming for some starter intelligence.
“Department of Outlander uhhh- Affairs? I think. They’re good guys, founded by people like us who showed up here from other worlds.” She’d had her own heaps of mistrust around them when she’d arrived, to be sure, but Gansey and Waverly working there and having seen them now in action for two years had won her over. “They give you a little money, place to stay, network access. It’s just a starting point for a lot of people, with no strings attached.”
Daud lifted an eyebrow. No strings attached was not a concept he had much familiarity with. In his experience, everything came with strings. Some strings were easily cut, though, so it bore investigating rather than outright dismissal.
“I’ll look into it,” he said, and paused. This, Daud was sure, was where a normal person who was not either a Void god or a master assassin would engage further. Ask a question, offer some additional information about how he was settling in. He was trying to be something sort of approaching normal here, so after a few seconds to think all that over, he gruffly proceeded. “Are all your people recovering from their trip through the Void?”
I’ll look into it might’ve meant she’d have to harass him again, so Syd made a mental note to do that. If there was one thing she was good at, it was pushing grumpy introverts out of their comfort zones. Not always in a way that endeared herself to people, but Syd was beyond letting that stop her.
She shrugged in return to his question. “I think so? Blue’s doing good. Prue, Sara. We’re all kind of used to weird shit happening here and back home, but that was insane on a lot of levels.” Syd looked him over, in his casual clothes, a far cry from the appearances she’d seen in all of that. “Do you remember everything?”
“Not like I did there,” Daud replied. In the Void, he had remembered everything, from his birth to his death to the way Billie had set her boat alight as his funeral pyre. He remembered things he’d never seen, worlds he’d never set foot in, voices he’d never heard. The Void was expansive, and so too had been his mind, when he was there.
Now it came in flashes. He remembered his life as a man well enough, but his time as a god was harder to comprehend from here. He got bits and pieces of it, but not in the kind of whole-cloth memory he was used to.
That was not, however, what Syd was asking.
“I remember you, and the others from here, and the Loops,” Daud said, meaning to actually answer the question properly. “So yes, more or less. I remember.”
“I’ll take it.” Syd couldn’t manage to look pleased for him, because no doubt someone might want to forget their time in that Voidhole of Hell, but it was always nice when someone popped up with a little knowledge about what was before. “You can get really good whiskey here, and it’s--”
She looked around at the Barns, the market not far ahead, the animals that were entrusted in her care. The large black dog that was sleeping by the giant boar near where the cars were parked. Her shoulders sagged a little, in relief and comfort. For someone who had been on the run since she was twelve, staying in one place for long wasn’t an easy feat. “It’s a pretty good home. C’mon, I’ll throw you at Blue and we’ll get you some eggs and whatever else you need. Ronan might give you a discount cause you helped us.”
More kindness. Daud was too unaccustomed to it to know what to make of it. It had been surprising enough when Syd helped him get out of the Void. Somehow this very pedestrian sort of kindness, offering to help him get a discount on eggs, seemed even stranger. It seemed that being nice for no reason was typical for Syd; that was going to take some getting used to.
“…thanks.”
Daud glanced to his right, then his left, then a quick look up. (People never thought to look up.) The area still appeared clear of threats, so he gave Syd another short nod. “Lead the way.”