June 1995
-/-
The first time Desmond meets Ezio, he has no idea what's going on. He hears a confusing mess of words in a language he doesn't know but understands. He feels something like fingers in his head, reshaping his brain, forcing in something that shouldn't be there. He wakes up and finds himself twisted around in his sheets, covered in sweat and panting slightly like he's just run all night.
It's at least midnight, but there's no clock in Desmond's room and he doesn't know specifically. Doesn't matter. It's absolutely quiet, which means the whole rest of the Farm is asleep. Even the generators that Desmond is used to hearing more or less all the time are quiet. It's weird, and he doesn't like it, and he wants to go back to sleep but he also kind of wants to tell his parents that he had a really weird, creepy dream. But his dad will just tell him that eight is too old to come bothering them in the middle of the night.
So Desmond sits down on his bed instead, and closes his eyes. He can still sort of hear the voices, if he concentrates. For a long time, he sits there with his eyelids squeezed shut and his back pressed to the wall. He can hear the voices, whispering, and even though it is creepy—especially at first—it sort of starts to lull him to sleep. Desmond rests his head on the wall behind him, listening to the whispers of someone else's life in a language he doesn't understand.
Desmond doesn't understand it, not then, not yet. But this is the moment when he decides to let it keep happening anyway. It's not so bad, maybe. And anyway they're only dreams and whispers. It's not even like it's anything real.
-/-
He's not the only one having dreams that night, although of course he has no way of knowing that tonight. But there is someone else waking up from dreams that don't belong to him. Callum Lynch is alone tonight, which is lucky maybe because he wakes up screaming, and even that's not enough to drown out the whispers. They're in his head, they can't be drowned out by anything he hears and he's absolutely positive in that moment that he's going crazy.
Seventeen years old is too old to cry but too young to go crazy. Cal rubs at his face and crawls into the shadows under the overpass where he's been staying for the past week or so. He doesn't want the screaming to draw attention from the cops, or a street gang, or anyone else. It's not safe here (it's not safe anywhere, it hasn't been for a long time but it's so much worse here, now, as he sits and shakes and waits for the voices to fade).
"Mom?" he whispers, into the predawn quiet. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine she's still there with him. "Mom I, uh… I'm hearing stuff, like… in my head, and I… Mom I'm scared…"
Cal sits there, shaking under the force of the whispers, even as they start to gradually fade away. He doesn't want to hear voices and whispers. He wants to be normal and sane and go home, wherever home is, and find his mom waiting there for him.
And it's never going to happen. Because his mom is dead, because his dad killed her, because he's been running ever since and he doesn't know if he'll ever be able to let himself stop.
-/-
When Desmond wakes up, he's still sitting on his bed with his back against the wall, head lolling to one side. There's a little bit of early morning sunlight peeking in through the window, and he can hear the Farm waking up outside.
He knows his mom will come in soon to get him up and moving, so Desmond yawns and stretches and rubs the crusts out of his eyes. Then when his eyes are open, he realizes there's something… someone here that isn't supposed to be here. A man, grown up but not quite as old as his parents, was crouched in front of his bed.
"How did you get in here?" Desmond whispers. He pulls his knees back toward his chest and hugs them a little. He should be scared but this man isn't scary. He wears funny clothes, a long white robe with a hood pulled down around his shoulders. He smiles a little and reaches forward to pat Desmond on the hand. Says something that Desmond (somehow) both understands and doesn't.
"You'll be safe with us," he says.
"What's that mean?" Desmond asks. "Who's us?"
The man only smiles, and Desmond smiles uncertainly back, around his missing front tooth. He trusts this man for some reason. There's something that just… makes Desmond feel really comofortable with him. "Okay," he tells the man quietly. "You can stay if you want to."
And that's when he looks up, and sees a small crowd of people behind the man. Some look a lot like him, others seem like strangers. "Whoa," Desmond whispers, looking up at all of them.
-/-
When Cal manages to pull himself together and stop… sulking (he's not going to say crying, because he can't afford to cry), the first thing he sees is a man with his face, wearing some kind of ancient looking robe and studying him with an intensity that almost hurts. Cal flinches backward, until his shoulders are pressed against the concrete support of the bridge he's sitting under. He can feel stinking water soaking into the back of his T-shirt, but that guy is freaking him out.
"What are you doing?" he asks. "Who—"
"Quiet," the man says. "I'm trying to figure you out."
So Cal does the only thing he can think of. He stares back at the stranger, tries to figure him out. And after thirty seconds or a minute, the man nods. "Yes," he says.
"Yes?" Cal says, and the man smiles. It's not exactly a happy smile, just a small, satisfied twitch of the lips.
"Yes," he agrees. And after a moment, Cal smiles too. Something feels like it's waking up inside him, stirring his blood or something even deeper, and he thinks he likes it.
-/-
Desmond gets up, pushing himself off the bed and walking forward in a kind of daze. The room is full of people, grown ups, ones he's never even seen before. But he knows them all. There's a kind of pricking on his skin, and when he looks down at his arms he sees goosebumps there. He rubs absent mindedly at his arms and looks back up at the room of strangers that aren't strangers.
He knows their names. The man kneeling in front of his bed is called Ezio. Desmond mouths the funny sounding name, working his tongue around the z in the middle. The quiet man next to the window, with his arms crossed and his eyes invisible under a long white hood, his name is Altair. The man next to him with the (awesome) looking bow and arrows strapped to his back is called Connor—no, no it's not, his real name is Ratonhnhaké:ton, and Desmond thinks he sees the man smile at him a little. And he last man, the one with his arms over his chest, who no one will look at… his name is Haytham. Desmond gives him a long look, because he's not dressed like the others, because he's giving Desmond this look that says he's really unimpressed, because there's just something different about this guy. But in the end he decides he's okay with Haytham.
There's just something about these people, all of them, even Haytham, that Desmond trusts. The door opens, and Desmond turns around to see his dad standing there, wearing a T-shirt and pajama pants, looking at him skeptically. "Desmond," he says. "Did you sleep at all last night?"
"Uh…" Desmond stops in the middle of his bedroom, and looks around. "I slept some." They're gone. They're all just gone.
Not gone, a voice in his head whispers. We are with you.
Desmond's smile gets wider.
"I heard you moving around last night," his dad says, and Desmond shrugs.
"I woke up," he says. "But then I fell asleep again."
"Well, just get dressed," his dad says, turning away. "Okay? Then come downstairs for breakfast."
"Yea."
His dad takes a few steps away, then stops and turns back to him. "Are you sure you're feeling okay?"
There are voices in his head and invisible people somewhere and he doesn't know what's going on but Desmond has never felt happier in his entire life. "Yea," he says. "Yea, I'm really good."
-/-
The man's name is Aguilar. Cal just knows it, even though he knows there's no way he possibly could. Just like there's no way he should know that the man standing just behind him is called Arno. "Who are you?" Cal asks, because he knows their names, and he knows… deep down he knows they're on his side, he doesn't understand who they are or what they're doing here.
"Family," Arno says, and although Cal recognizes that he's speaking a foreign language (it sounds like maybe French, but Cal's not exactly bilingual), he also understands him perfectly.
"You're… oh." And then even though he knows he's too damn old to cry, Cal buries his face in his hands and sobs. It's just… it's been so long since he had anything like that. When Cal is breathing normally again, and his face is mostly dry, he looks up and he doesn't see either Aguilar or Arno. It doesn't really matter. Maybe Cal's just going crazy (although he kind of doesn't think so—he doesn't feel crazy at all), but it doesn't bother him.
Cal stands up, legs a little shaky. Even if he can't see them, he just… knows that they'll be back. He grabs his bag, and heads out from under the bridge. He doesn't really know where he's going, he never does, but for the first time in ages, he feels like he's going to figure it out.
-/-
Yea, so... honestly I just want to write about the bleeding effect and my two favorite modern characters. :) I have absolutely no idea where this is going, but hopefully it will be interesting.
I'm hoping updates won't take too long, although chapters will probably be on the shorter side.
