Edit: Changed one line. Lucy now has met Subject Sixteen.

Thanks to Crazy Penguin Lord for beta-reading (and not despairing of me and my grammar in the process)!

Chapter 10: Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin

Climbing the side of a warehouse should be easy. Not much of a challenge for an Assassin, even blindfolded and with both his hands tied to his back, Desmond thought grudgingly. It was rough wall at the worst, with crevices and nooks all over the place. Containers and long forgotten crates littered the ground all around, stable and stacked high enough to get him up part of of the way. To Desmond, it looked like the entire, damned setup was mocking him and his borrowed skills making the Assassins' voices in his head growl in irritation.

If not for that, maybe he would have turned away. It was an easy conclusion to make; after all, if Altaïr had gone to the roof, he had done it to be alone, and only an utter fool would intrude on him there.

On the other hand, Desmond found that common sense was in short supply anyway, and if he had had any of it to start with, he probably wouldn't be anywhere near this entire mess now. Besides, something had briefly shivered in him, too; it felt like sadness and bitterness, but it didn't feel old the way he somehow expected. Somehow, something had torn a fresh wound past the mental armour which Altaïr had had centuries to perfect.

Earlier, Altaïr had hacked Abstergo again, trying to get a handle on how much they knew and how close they were on their tracks. Suddenly, he had lifted his head and asked, "Lucy? What do you know about Subject Sixteen?"

His tone of voice was off, calling attention beyond what the simple question would have warranted.

Lucy had walked over to him and leaned against the desk at his side. "I was assigned to Sixteen very late and I met him only briefly before… he died,"

she had said. "Abstergo abused him badly until his mind snapped. They had hoped he would have memories of the Apple, but he didn't. That's why they brought in Desmond in the first place."

Altaïr had looked past her. "But he was a descendant of mine?"

"Most of his memories suggest it, but I wasn't privy to the specifics of it."

Altaïr hadn't reacted for a long minute. Then he had whispered. "There was a child."

"Altaïr..." Lucy had began and then faltered. "I thought you knew about Subject Sixteen."

But he had waved her off, silently, and when it became clear that he was unwilling to continue the conversation, the others had returned to their work, although the mood took a long time to recover. When Altaïr had vanished, Desmond couldn't quite recall, only that suddenly he was gone and Desmond knew, beyond doubt, that the eagle had sought some higher place.

The sky above was hung with bulging clouds, ominously lit by sheet lightning travelling up and down the horizon. It wasn't the season for rain, but the wind tucked harshly at Desmond as he finally stood up on the roof and pretended he wasn't breathing any faster after the climb.

Altaïr sat with one long leg hooked against a pipe and his back against an unused chimney, the other extended casually before him. He tilted his head slightly to acknowledge Desmond's presence.

"Do you, uhm, want to talk about it?" Desmond asked uncertainly, while the memory of Altaïr in his head seemed as undecided on the topic as the man himself.

Altaïr merely shook his head, just slightly, and a smile ghosted over his sombre features.

"You took a difficult route to come here, there is a ladder over there."

"Yeah, well, I figured trying couldn't hurt." Desmond stepped forward and sat down cross-legged, saying, "Unless I fell, that is."

"You are better than you give yourself credit for."

And with that coming from Altaïr, he was instinctively inclined to believe him and disregard his own impression.

They sat in silence as lightning crackled across the sky. The glimmer of fading day was a thin silver lining in the distance, almost swallowed up the city lights. It was, Desmond thought, a rather good impression of a doomsday scenery. The clouds looked solid enough, low enough to touch them with an outstretched hand, ready to smother all the life that buzzed below them.

The quiet scrape of boots on the dirty roof tore Desmond out, away from his thoughts of the coming apocalypse. For a split second, Desmond was startled, frayed nerves expecting all kinds of attack, but Altaïr remained relaxed.

Twisting, Desmond watched as Ezio wandered into view.

"So I hear the rookie didn't find the ladder?" Ezio said as he dropped down at Desmond's side. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and held it out to Desmond, who looked at them as if he had never seen their like before.

"I didn't know you smoked."

"I get little chance to express my self-destructive tendencies."

"There is no guarantee that these things won't kill you," Altaïr said, but reached past, much to Desmond's shock, and took a cigarette for himself.

In the huge open space of the warehouse, the differences between Altaïr and Ezio had drawn themselves in sharp relief. Altaïr with his tightly-coiled intensity, always lethal and always with that hint of coldness; he never let you forget you were in the presence of a killer. Ezio, on the other hand, sprawled. Up here, their similarities suddenly belied any superfluous difference.

The tension between both Assassins never went away; it wavered in the air, not unlike the lightning now illuminating the darkness, waxing and waning seemingly at random and putting everyone's teeth on edge. Not because they would be halfway at each other's throat, but because the impression remained that they had fought, once, and neither had liked the outcome. Nothing had been resolved between them, nothing was finished, they had merely postponed this fight between them to some later date and with both of them unaging, they had the time.

All that was muted now, replaced in this odd corner of time and space by something shared and companionable.

Desmond could tell, knowing something of both men, that this was a respite, an illusionary moment of quiet. Nothing else seemed to matter here and now. And the invitation was there - by a pointless, casual token - to join them for real and not in some virtual, computer controlled environment.

He had smoked for a while, after leaving his parents and their strange world. It had been an act of defiance, then, a way to prove his newly found freedom. It had quickly become meaningless, though, expensive, inconvenient and besides, he hadn't wanted to waste his health away. Now, however, it seemed unlikely that lung cancer, decades from now, would be a problem.

Ezio lit up for all of them, three tiny points of bright warmth against the steel-grey of the clouds and the white-blue of lightning.

The smoke grated in Desmond's throat. In that moment, it tasted of anger and rage and scorned pride, coming to him across the centuries. This close to Altaïr, he thought he felt a connection, like an Animus malfunction, when he failed to jump into the other's skin and only received a steady trickle of knowledge, or thoughts, or feelings.

When at length Altaïr began to speak, it was in the same quiet tone he had used before. It sounded almost laconic, a thin layer of armour reconstructed across vulnerability.

"There was a woman once."

And, softly, Ezio said, "Doesn't it always start like this?"

Altaïr met Ezio's gaze past Desmond and held it for a moment. "I knew her before," Altaïr continued, then paused as if searching for words. "Before everything. Before Al'Mualim betrayed us and set me to hunt his enemies, before he made me kill him. So very long before I looked into the Piece of Eden and got lost." He fell silent again, picked his words carefully, deliberately. The emotion there was raw, but muted, strange to him after such a long time. "I swore to keep her safe and I failed. I swore to find her, but when I did, the Templars had already taken her life."

It stirred in Desmond's memory now, roused by Altaïr's words, seeping though and tainting his thoughts with sudden flashes of crimson and he heard an echo of screams. Blood splattered across his cheek and Desmond had already lifted his hand to wipe it away before he remembered it wasn't there at all.

"You killed them all," Ezio said. It wasn't a question. Revenge was a familiar thought.

"No, I didn't," Altaïr said slowly. "I followed the traces the Templars had left behind and tracked them to a fortress in Albania. I didn't kill them all. I spared one knight. I send him back to his masters as a warning."

Do not challenge me, ever again, or what you saw here will seem like a taste of mercy compared to what I will do to your order. The words were full of cold rage on his tongue. Desmond sucked hard on the cigarette. A young man's face swam up in front of his mind's eye, splattered with the blood of his brothers-in-arms, eyes wide with horror and the certainty of death burning in them.

Altaïr shifted, startled Desmond, lifted his voice a little. "But I didn't know there was a child, seems they had the trump all along."

Desmond would never have said anything. He was still struggling with the foreign memories, the feelings and tastes of harsher days, but Ezio had no such qualms.

"How do you know? That it was that particular woman?" he said. It was almost a challenge, Desmond could tell.

"I saw the files," Altaïr said simply. "Everything makes sense."

"That doesn't make it true," Ezio said pointedly.

Faintly, Desmond wondered how far Altaïr was willing to have himself pushed. The revelation hurt him, even though it was centuries past now and he was too much of pragmatist not to know that. If Ezio did not relent... but Ezio never meant to hurt, belatedly Desmond realised it. Ezio understood both pain and suffering and his way, from those hot days of his youth until now, his way of dealing with loss was facing it head-on and with his teeth bared. And he was doing it now, too, with his cigarettes and his directness, because he was the only one from whom Altaïr would accept both.

Desmond looked at Ezio, saw the sparkle in his dark eyes, and Desmond almost thought he saw him wink, but he could be mistaken in the uncertain light

Altaïr stubbed out the cigarette and regained his feet. The connection between them flared out, grew thin and faint.

Altaïr looked down on Ezio and Desmond, his expression unreadable against the still flaring sky. "Rebecca should be done with her test run," he observed. And all the armour was in place again, leaving Desmond with nothing but the scent of fresh blood in his nostrils and the scratch of smoke in his throat.

He would have to climb back down now, walk back into the warehouse and submit his mind and the sorry remainder of his sanity to the Animus.

Desmond completely failed to suppress a groan. Ezio threw his arm around him and pulled, until Desmond rested against the Assassin's shoulder.

"I could almost think you didn't like me," Ezio said with a chuckle.

Desmond pushed himself off of Ezio, feeling somewhere between a little brother and someone's son. "I like you fine," he said. "As long as you stay outside my head."

He wouldn't have been surprised if Ezio had ruffled his hair. But Ezio only laughed and finally let go of him.

Altaïr put his head to the side again, an eagle's gesture, now more than ever. Then he took a step to the side, casually, over the edge of the building.

Desmond knew his heart skipped a few beats; he sure as hell didn't need it, because he wasn't breathing either. The shock subsided quickly. He had jumped higher structures than this one, after all, if only in other people's memories. Ezio had the decency not to laugh aloud.

Desmond scrambled to his feet and stepped to the edge with, hopefully, no apparent hesitation. He peered down to see a pile of broken crates and an ancient looking metal container. There hadn't been a crash, though, so Altaïr hadn't even needed either of them.

Ezio appeared behind his shoulder. "Take the ladder, rookie," he said.

Desmond glared. "Do you think I'm stupid? I'd break bones I didn't even knew I had."

For a second of pure horror, he was convinced Ezio would shove him over the edge and the damned Assassin probably knew it. "We'll learn the proper techniques tomorrow," Ezio said reassuringly.

"Whatever Rebecca and her baby have left intact by tomorrow, it's all yours," Desmond said, warily and only half-jokingly. Ezio laughed again.

Back inside, the others had already grouped around the Animus chair.

"Finally," Shaun breathed impatiently, before he turned away and did something on his computer.

Rebecca patted the chair invitingly.

"It's perfectly safe," Lucy assured Desmond when he sat down.

"It's not that," he told her earnestly. "It looks like a dentist's chair, that's all."

He leaned back and tried to relax. He concentrated on the clanking of keys at his ear as Rebecca hit them, hoping vaguely the thin, rhythmic sound would lull him into some sort of meditation.

It always felt a little like falling, akin to what he once experienced with Altaïr and Ezio and their particular affinity for heights, but this wasn't nearly as pleasant. It meant freedom for both these Assassin, unbound for a few brief seconds from the constraints of existence. In the Animus, it was more like the floor getting pulled out from under him.

Then he stood in the unshaped blue virtuality of the Animus loading screen. Gingerly, he moved his hands.

"Why am I myself?" he asked. He heard an echo of his own voice being fed back to him.

"We are not loading any memories," Lucy explained. "That also means we won't be making the bleeding effect any worse."

Desmond thought of the scratches on his arm and pulled a grimace, but wasn't sure whether his real self mimicked it or not.

"Okay, I'm locating the eagle," Rebecca said. "Won't take long."

Keys yapping, a few quick mouse clicks. The blue around Desmond wavered, bulged outward and finally took shape. The white eagle sat in front of him, perched on part of the background blue folding outward in the shape of a think branch to support the eagle, but it remained undefined, hanging in nothingness.

"Can you see it?" Rebecca asked.

"Yeah," Desmond replied and eyed the bird. It returned his look steadily from pitch-black eyes. "Can't you see it, too?" he asked.

"No, our video feed is scrambled, but I expected that to happen. The Animus wasn't meant to show individual fragments of memories like that."

A faint feeling of disquiet climbed up Desmond's throat, but he doubted much could be gained if he voiced it.

Rebecca said, "Okay, I'm loading the other half of the code now." Click, click, tap. "As I see it, it was meant to do this automatically, but the code got corrupted over time. Here is comes."

The eagle in front of Desmond gave a high-pitched scream, too loud for an animal, almost metallic, than it spread its wings and took to the air. It flew a slow circle around Desmond, than suddenly began to expand. Desmond squinted, turning and trying to keep the bird in his field of vision. It lost shape, spread itself out thin until it looked like a sheet of milky glass. It kept growing until it formed a closed circle around Desmond. "Well," he said, "It did something."

"Wait," Rebecca said. Apprehension had slipped into her voice, but Desmond tried not to let it worry him.

The wall around Desmond shivered, making him blink in an attempt to focus on it. It moved. It shifted and twisted, slowly forming patterns of some kind.

At head height, a line of blurry writing manifested, condensed from the mass of the rest of the wall. It ran around Desmond like a marquee.

"It's writing," he said. "I think."

"Yes," that was Altaïr's voice. "We stabilised the video. We can see it, too."

Desmond took a step forward in an effort to get closer, but the circle moved with him, keeping him at its centre. "I can't read it."

"You wouldn't," Shaun said. "It isn't exactly a living language."

"What does it say?" Desmond asked.

"Deciphering ancient writing is an art form, not that I expect you to be aware of such intricacies" Shaun declared. "So I'll spell it out to you. It is a very difficult task and you want me to do it properly, don't rush me. Especially as this could be a touch clearer."

The undefined blue around Desmond darkened, became something similar to a night sky with depth the Animus loading screen usually lacked.

Desmond made another move, but found his feet shaky under him, his sense of balance taken from him just as he had got used to its augmented, Assassin extend. The wall flexed and snapped like rubber and closed in on him.

He yelped in surprise. "Is it supposed to be doing that?" he asked, fear sneaking into the echo of his voice. It didn't seem to make sense, given that this wasn't his first ride in the Animus, and while he was unsure of what it sometimes did with his head, it wasn't dangerous enough to cause real fear. Maybe it was his loss of balance and the darkness that had him so shaken. That, and the advancing, jittery wall of writing, of course.

Rebecca muttered something, but he couldn't understand it. He heard the keys yap frantically under her fingers, though, far more so than he had ever heard them.

"Oh no no no," she sputtered rapidly. "Not good."

"Leave it," said Altaïr calmly. He couldn't be further from the agitation Desmond had heard in Rebecca's voice.

Instinctively, Desmond lifted his hands to shield his face as the wall threw itself at him, covering him from head to toe. It felt almost like water, rippling along him, enveloping him. It wasn't even unpleasant as such just strange, a sensation he couldn't find the words to describe. The slithering writing was in his eyes and refused to be blinked away. He knew he was falling backwards, for real this time as if he had forgotten that he was sitting in a chair. He flailed desperately. Dark blue night embraced him, wrapped around him like velvet.

Voices came from far away, severed from their meaning somehow and their familiarity rapidly fading from his memory.

"I don't know what's going on." Rebecca? Nervous and hectic. "I'm pulling him out."

The velvet crawled into his throat.

"I said 'leave it'!" Altaïr's voice cut clean through, like the knives he used, like the deadliness that always surrounded him. Cold ran up and down Desmond's spine, keeping the blue at bay for an instant, making it waver as if hesitating.

"I don't know what it does! I can't..."

Desmond didn't know what had interrupted her. The tapping of keys sounded like gunfire.

"Rebecca, don't." Angry, white-hot snarl. It sounded like death.

And then another voice, female, strained and strangely reasonable in all of this.

"It's too dangerous, Altaïr. Cancel it, Rebecca."

Lucy? Save me, Desmond thought, I'm vanishing. The dark was everywhere, only the writing still glowed where it had inscripted itself on the insides of his eyelids.

"Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin"

"And this is the writing that was inscribed: MENE, MENE, TEKEL and Parsin. This is the interpretation of the matter. Mene, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; TEKEL, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; PERES, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persian."

- Daniel 5:1-31

Author's Note: My Subject Sixteen interpretation is a bit off, but I think canon leaves enough leeway to play it like this. If it bothers you, consider it a small slip into AU.

I would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has left a review! It's really great to find my pointless scribbles are good enough to make it worth your while!