Nusquam est Verus.
By Portrait of a Scribe
"Nothing is real…"
It's cold. That's all you can feel, at the moment. It's cold, and it's wet, and then you realize that you can't breathe.
For a long second, you panic, flail around. Then you realize that you're sinking despite your efforts. All of your armaments, all of your armor, it's all pulling you down, down, down into the depths. Your mind flashes back to the words that your best friend muttered before you left the hideout this morning. Something about quips and sentences and paper daggers of the brain, or something along those lines. It seems so long ago that you saw him, left behind him and your wife in order to carry out your mission.
Your mission. Did you complete it? Was all of this not in vain, after all?
But it doesn't matter. You're sinking again, sinking, sinking, and there's nothing you can do about it (tooheavytooheavyohGodI'mgoingtodie) and you're afraid. So afraid.
For a second, you think you see blue. Numbers and letters and lines flash across your eyes for a heartbeat. You think you see clouds and hear a voice that says, "Shit, he's desynching!" And then it's all gone, and water's entering your lungs. You're choking, drowning. You're so far down that you can't even see the sunlight, anymore.
Suddenly, something breaks the monotony of the gloom. Something grabs onto the back of your shirt, hauls you upward. You dazedly wonder how it is that they're moving you, your head foggy from the lack of oxygen.
"Calm down, Desmond, it's okay." There's that voice again. The blue fog is back, the letters and lines flashing across your vision once more. Another little voice in the back of your head is screaming a warning at you, telling you that you have to move, that you have to get to the surface, or you're going to die.
You start kicking. Weakly, at first, and growing weaker, but it's at least a token gesture. The hand fisted in the back of your tunic shifts suddenly to wrap around your waist. Cold lips press to yours, and suddenly, there's air there. Stale air, but air nonetheless. You take in what you can, what they'll let you, and then fight back the choking that comes with the acquisition of oxygen as the other person makes you start swimming again. Their movements are beginning to feel somewhat frantic, but you can see light above you again.
You give another weak attempt at swimming, even though you really don't know how to do so. A second later, a hand bursts down through the water and grabs onto the back of your tunic, pulling you up, up, up, towards fresh air once more…
The next thing you know, you're jerking out of a trance with a strangled gasp, the golden sphere on your desk rolling away from you to clunk dully on the floor of your office. You clutch your pen tightly enough that it folds in half, the feather bending at an awkward angle. Your best friend has his hand on your shoulder, and your wife is kneeling in front of you. Both of them are worried.
"You must stop this," warns your best friend. Your wife, too, pleads with you to stop what it is you're doing. But you know you can't. Not until you've learned all you safely can from the object.
For now, you stoop and pick up the orb, putting it away. You will look into your Apple of Eden at a later time.
But as you walk out of the study behind your wife and best friend, you pause for a second, wondering who on Earth Desmond is.
Then you decide that it probably doesn't matter, and that you need some food. Desmond, and your Apple, can wait for a while.
Disclaimer: I don't own Assassin's Creed.
Purposefully left this somewhat vague, as it was done for a class presentation and I didn't want to have to add in a copyright, and so that the characters involved are left up to the reader to imagine.
Personally, for me, it was Altaïr, with a little bit of Malik and my OC, Sabeen. You can imagine whomever you want for this.
Thank you to everyone who's reviewed my other Assassin's Creed stories! You know who you are.
-Portrait of a Scribe