I'm never going to escape this universe. For some reason I've been writing a lot of Desmond-and-Haytham scenes, so that's the theme of this chapter!
(A reviewer asked in the last chapter whether Arno or the Frye twins are likely to appear. I'm afraid I don't have a PS4, so I can't play their games! Maybe it's for the best; a central cast of eight is already quite a large one to juggle.
Thank you so much to everyone who's reviewed; the responses to this fic have really driven me to keep writing.)
Visitors (Desmond and Haytham Edition)
Haytham edges cautiously towards the far side of the theatre, listening to the Beggar's Opera below. He isn't here to take in the music, of course, but he needs to remain aware of it; if the singing suddenly stops, it's likely the performers have glanced up and seen him crossing the stage.
When the singing does stop, though, it proves to be the least of his worries.
The entire theatre has vanished around him. Haytham finds himself crouching unnecessarily for balance; the narrow beam beneath his feet is now a solid floor. His new surroundings are dark and cavernous, illuminated in places by a strange blue light. His target is nowhere to be seen.
Haytham stands carefully, testing the mechanism of the blades at his wrists, and looks around.
There's a man watching him.
"Uh, hey," the man says. Haytham takes a step towards him to check his reaction. Unguarded. "I was wondering when this'd start. Haytham, right? I'm Desmond. You already know the drill, or—?"
Haytham seizes Desmond by the throat.
"You are going to tell me where I am and how I came to be here," he says very softly in Desmond's ear, as Desmond chokes and clutches at the hand around his neck. "You are not going to cry out or do anything that might alert any friends of yours to our conversation. Do we understand each other?"
Desmond, his eyes wide, nods very quickly. Haytham loosens his grip.
"We're Assassins," Desmond gasps out, once he's steadied himself enough for speech. "We're on your side."
Haytham, who almost ran him through at the first two words, pauses. These are Assassins who believe him to be an Assassin? From the hidden blades, he supposes. But then how do they know his name, and why kidnap him? "That isn't the information I asked for."
"Okay, okay. Just..." He pulls feebly at Haytham's hand again. Haytham withdraws it, but flicks out his hidden blade, making sure that Desmond sees the movement.
Desmond takes a deep breath.
The tale he spins is nonsense, every word of it. He claims to be Haytham's descendant in the future (a far-flung descendant, Haytham reassures himself, disquieted by the scruffiness of this young man claiming to be of his blood), and he says he's been experiencing Haytham's memories through a device called an 'Animus', and here he hesitates.
"And... please don't be offended," he says, with a nervous glance at Haytham's wrist, "but I'm pretty sure I'm imagining you right now."
Interesting. "You think I'm imaginary, and yet you fear me?"
Desmond shifts uncomfortably. "I can't be sure my mind's not dedicated enough to this whole illusion thing to make me stab myself in the neck."
"Humour me," Haytham says. "Assume, for the moment, that I exist. What would this mean for me?"
Desmond shrugs. "This, basically. Sometimes you'll just show up here. I'm the only one who can see you. Or I might appear in your time, and you'll be the only one who can see me. And I guess you'll probably meet the others."
"The others?"
"Altaïr. Ezio. Maybe you've heard of them."
That Altaïr and Ezio? Surely not. He's been wondering whether he should kill Desmond, whether that would prevent the unwelcome displacements he's apparently now expected to accept, but perhaps he should leave things for a while, see what transpires. If he truly can meet Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad... it's an interesting prospect, at the very least. He knows the value of information from the past better than most.
"You'll go to them or they'll come to you," Desmond is saying. "And they sometimes talk about some other guys, so you might meet them as well. I guess maybe they're people I haven't met in the Animus yet."
Haytham nods, barely listening. Something is beginning to stir in his mind.
Haytham has vague recollections of meeting strange people and finding himself in strange places as a boy. The encounters stopped when his father died, and he's always put them down to imagination: the wild fantasies of an understimulated child. He missed the loss of them, when he found the time to miss them amongst his other losses. But now he is an adult, with his own concerns, and this time-travel business, however novel or edifying, seems likely to prove an inconvenience.
"How do I return to my own time?" he asks. "I was rather in the middle of something."
"It'll happen when it happens," Desmond says. "Shouldn't be a problem, though. You'll be back at the same point you left; no one will notice you were gone. Uh... but you looked like you were balancing on something. When you showed up here, I mean."
"I was."
"Okay. Then, uh... just don't forget that's where you'll be when you go back. Ezio keeps complaining about us making him fall off buildings."
"Oh, excellent," Haytham says. "I foolishly thought my life was difficult and dangerous enough already. Now that I've received the gift of constant distraction, I wonder how I ever managed without it."
"Sorry," Desmond mutters. "But it's not so bad, once you get used to it." He hesitates, his eyes flicking to Haytham's wrist again. "Just... try not to kill anyone. We're all Assassins. And these guys are kind of important to me."
There it is again: the conviction that he's an Assassin. Perhaps, if Haytham is now routinely to be plucked out of his life and deposited in unknown locations full of his enemies, it's a misconception worth encouraging.
"It's a little early in our acquaintance for promises," Haytham says, "but I'll make an effort to leave them alive."
The 'visiting' hallucinations are the most obvious impact of the Bleeding Effect, but they're not the only thing Desmond has to deal with. You can't experience your ancestors' thoughts in the Animus – if you could, the 'Haytham's a Templar' surprise would have been a lot less surprising – but emotions, sensations, those all come through. And...
You... fall in love, in the Animus. It's ridiculous, but you do. You meet people your ancestors loved, people who died centuries before you were born, and you fall just as hard for them yourself.
It wasn't a problem with Altaïr. The time Desmond spent as him, he didn't really seem to have romance on his mind. There was a strange twinge of something that seemed to pass between him and the people he killed – the strike of the blade, the way he held them as they died, there's an intimacy to it that's hard to explain – but, for the most part, Desmond can deal with the feelings Altaïr left him.
Ezio is tougher. Desmond lived through so much of his life in the Animus, and for most of it Ezio was a man who could fall in love twice a week. But, although his feelings were always passionate and genuine, they usually didn't last that long.
Usually. There are still a couple of names Desmond can't think of without feeling like something's gone missing in his chest. Cristina. Sofia.
He's asked Shaun about Dürer's portrait of Sofia. Apparently it's in a museum in Vienna. There's a part of Desmond that wants to visit and see it, once all this is over. But he can't be sure he wouldn't break down in front of it, and he feels like that'd be hard to explain.
Haytham and Ziio...
Haytham kept a tight lid on his emotions when Desmond was going through his memories, most of the time: so tight, in fact, that Desmond started to wonder whether emotional synchronisation had been taken out in the latest Animus upgrade. Maybe that's why it hit Desmond so hard when he found himself alone with Ziio in that cave, and she took his hand, and suddenly everything he'd suppressed—
Haytham, he tells himself, firmly. Everything Haytham had suppressed.
He replayed that memory a few times afterwards, to 'improve his sync rate'. He had to stop when Shaun and Rebecca started giving him weird looks. He doesn't think he'd be able to go through it again now, anyway; not since he dropped in on the aftermath as a visitor, which would have been awkward enough even if he hadn't been painfully in love with one of the people involved.
And now here he is, standing feet away from Ziio, and all he can do is stare. All he can think about is how alive and real she looks, and how beautiful she is, and how she'll die a few years from now when this house goes up in flames.
She and Haytham are sitting in close conversation, broken off when Haytham looks up and sees him. Really, Desmond? he mouths.
"I can't exactly help it," Desmond mutters. He hesitates, trying not to look at Ziio; she makes him feel like he's falling apart. "Can I talk to you?"
Haytham looks at him flatly for a long moment, then heaves a silent sigh.
"What's wrong?" Ziio asks.
Haytham shakes his head and gets to his feet. "I saw something moving around outside."
"Again?" she asks, half-laughing. "It's never anything. Stay."
"For my own peace of mind." He leans over to kiss her. Desmond looks away. "I won't be long."
Desmond, taking the hint, walks out into the sunlight, harsh on his eyes after so long in the temple. Haytham follows him out.
"This is a valuable moment for me," Haytham says. "I'll thank you to keep this brief."
He won't let Desmond take over. Of course he won't. Desmond isn't even sure what he wants to say to Ziio. But he has to ask.
"Sorry, Dad," he says. "I was just wondering if I could talk to Mo... m..."
Haytham raises his eyebrows.
Desmond collapses onto the ground and buries his face in his hands.
Of course, he has to deal with Connor's feelings as well.
Desmond slams back into his own body in the middle of Abstergo, breathing hard and covered in blood. He looks around at once to see who possessed him. He hadn't noticed a visitor around, but to be fair he'd been kind of distracted by worrying about his dad and, oh, yeah, the billion security guards who are now lying dead at his feet.
It's Haytham.
No, seriously, it's Haytham.
"Thought we had an arrangement not to take each other over," Desmond says, trying to laugh, trying not to sound like he's freaking out, failing at both.
"Yes, well, rules must be bent in desperate situations," Haytham says. "We were about to lose you."
"I can fight," Desmond says. "That's kind of what this Animus thing is about, remember? Giving me the skills of my ancestors?"
"You may have the ability, but you lack the conviction. You hesitate before every kill. Surely you've realised. When you face enemies in these numbers, hesitation is fatal."
It's true. He knows he wouldn't have been able to take all these guys down; he knew it before Haytham took over, and a part of him still hasn't caught up and realised he's lived through it. The Animus can teach him techniques, but there's a big difference between 'killing' someone in the Animus and doing it in real life. If Desmond kills someone in the Animus, he's just re-enacting something that happened centuries ago. If Desmond kills someone as himself, they're dead. Because of him.
"So I'm meant to believe you just stepped in to save my life?" Desmond asks. He can't look down at the bodies; he feels sick. "You know these are your guys, right?"
"It's regrettable, yes," Haytham says. "But you are working to save the world, aren't you? I have no intention of standing back and watching all the Templars have achieved undone in a few short centuries."
Huh. It's still weird as hell that a Templar Grand Master just rescued him from a bunch of Templars, but maybe it makes sense. Desmond knows, from watching him work with Connor, that Haytham is prepared to put ideological differences aside for a common cause.
Thinking of Connor and Haytham makes him think of his own father. He glances behind him, toward the room where they think he's being held.
"Yes, yes, go and save him," Haytham says, impatiently. "And good luck to both of you. God knows you're the only chance in our little group for a father-son story to end well."
"Your visits are always a pleasure, naturally," Haytham calls above the crash of cannon fire, "but I'm a little busy for hospitality at the moment. I'm sure you'll understand."
Desmond looks around, trying to push down the panic in his chest. It's still hard to get it through his head that he's not physically here, he's not in any real danger. Cannons, he thinks, and Fort George, and then shit, Fort George—
"Oh, shit," Desmond breathes. "Haytham, I think this is—"
He cuts himself off. Yeah, Haytham already knows that Connor is going to kill him, but maybe it'd be best not to give him anything more specific than that.
But Haytham nods, walking briskly (to meet Connor, to meet his death). "This is when it happens. I know."
"You don't have to fight him," Desmond says. He knows it's hopeless. He's already seen it in the Animus, he knows the past can't be changed, he knows this conversation isn't even real, but – he has to try, doesn't he?
"My duty is clear, even if the outcome is already set," Haytham says. "I hope I don't strike you as a man who shirks his duties."
"Then..." There has to be something he can do. Haytham may be a Templar, but he's helped Desmond before. And he's one of them. "Let me take over."
Haytham stops short and laughs. "Take over my body? Forgive me, but that would explain why Connor gets the better of me."
"Just... at the end," Desmond says. "So you don't have to feel it yourself."
It occurs to him as he's speaking that maybe it's not a great idea to be in someone else's body when they're dying. He doesn't know how this works. But it's the only thing he can offer.
Haytham gives him a strange look, careful, analytic.
"I'd prefer to be alone with my son," he says, eventually. "But I appreciate the thought."
"Okay," Desmond says. And then, absurdly, even though they both know the outcome already, even though he doesn't want Connor to die either, he hears himself saying, "Good luck."
