A/N: TEMPERANCE. Desmond/Shaun here. Haven't dealt with them in a little while... Sorry for the delays. Work has been crazy and I got to spend a few long, long hours in hospital after concussing myself and having a subsequent trauma-induced seizure. -_-;
bbb136: I find freshly updated stories are always pleasant breaks from monotony. ^_^
Awesomehatyougotthere: The clever thing doesn't sound too odd. Probably because I've heard stranger adjectives used to describe what I write. XD I'm glad you're enjoying it, dear.
thegriffin88: Should I ever find time to really develop Leon, I definitely will give him his own story and let you know. ^_^
There were several reasons Desmond had become a bartender when he left The Farm, and chief among them was his love of alcohol. He liked being able to create something that he loved. Some people composed music, some took photographs; Desmond Miles made cocktails.
He'd never really considered himself an overly-virtuous person, but he was well aware of his limits and rarely pushed them. He'd have a drink or two if a particularly flirtatious customer bought one for him, but he had his temperance. He used to, anyway.
He always thought that your virtue got chipped at while you were building it up, that once you got it up, it was like a wall, like something that could take a hell of a beating and not crumble. He didn't realize that there would always be something previously unencountered that would test that stonewall virtue. He didn't realize that the Bleeding Effect would drive him half as crazy as it was. He always figured he'd know how to handle the hallucinations, how to figure out which reality was his. He was expecting it to play out like a movie in front of him, like something he could see for an image of Jerusalem overlapping New York. He wasn't expecting to have someone long since dead and buried crawling into his mind, infiltrating everything he looked at, tainting all he touched.
He lifted the whiskey glass to his lips again, still staring at nothing. It was strong, bitter, liquid hot. He didn't feel the burn of the alcohol, or even taste it anymore. He was trying to glare a hole into the wall across from him, and he seemed to be operating under the assumption that drinking more booze would make that task easier. He'd already worked his way through an entire bottle of expensive bourbon. That had gone down a little too smoothly, and he hadn't quite learned to hate himself before it was done, so he'd moved on to cheaper booze.
It had started off as just a shot of tequila or vodka or rum, just to shock himself back into the 21st century. Then the nightmares had started showing up. He wondered if he would be drinking so much if they were just nightmares and not the god-fucking-awful memories he knew that they were. His mind wasn't just creating a collection of new and inventive ways to torture him with half-forgotten history lessons; he was thinking in Arabic as he cursed these Crusaders who were bringing their religious wars to the unwilling. These weren't things that he could ignore. He had to cling to these memories and relay them to Lucy so she could record them and give them to Rebbecca and Shaun for review, and they would question him in their own way and on their own time. He had no refuge, not even in sleep. His only out was the peaceful, empty oblivion that came with being too drunk to fucking function. There was a chance he still lived those stolen-memories-turned-nightmares, even when drunk and passed out, but he was too unaware in his inebriated state to recall them, meaning he didn't have to relive them in his sleep, or the morning after when he told them to Lucy, or in the days following when Rebbecca and Shaun interrogated him on them.
Desmond didn't jump immediately into the old alcoholic stream. He would drink himself stupid once, maybe twice a week, and only when things were unbearable and he would kill for a few hours of peace and quiet inside his own mind. They were his safe-havens from the hell he put himself through for the greater good of humanity. He was hoping that these few nights of dreamless sleep would somehow make him feel better during the waking hours, and, at first, they did.
But the Bleeding Effect gradually worsened. The ghostly visions were no longer spooky shadows he encountered when he stepped out of a particularly demanding session within the Animus, and they were no longer scary movies played out behind his eyelids when his mind was too weak to defend itself. He would start singing long-forgotten Italian lullabies while he made breakfast just before he found himself wondering why there was a strangely-clothed British man wandering through his home, acting as if it were strange for him to be speaking Arabic, his own native tongue! Then Desmond would come to his senses and realize that he had never actually learned Arabic, or that those songs he was singing had died out around the same time as da Vinci. Like a cold slap to the face, the tequila would jerk him back to the true, modern reality that he was Desmond Miles, a man kidnapped by Abstergo and saved by the Assassin's Order he spent so much time running and hiding from.
He couldn't even really remember when he had started drinking so consistently, only that it had happened, and he could only escape the visions when he was too wasted to give a fuck. He was quickly running out of alcohol, and it seemed his "friends" were growing more and more leery about purchasing more. And seeing as how he couldn't exactly walk into a liquor store himself, what with all the security cameras and all, he was stuck at their mercy.
"Planning on passing out again tonight instead of sleeping?"
Desmond didn't acknowledge the condescension in Shaun's tone, or his existence in general, really. Shaun had taken a bit of an issue with Desmond's constant drinking, claiming it was going to kill him and make him useless to them, and not necessarily in that order either. He couldn't exactly claim that he had something against people who drank, because he was known to indulge in drink himself on occasion. What he took issue with was how consistently Desmond would get wasted and and stare at nothing and respond to nothing, effectively dead, but still somehow still alive. He would never admit to anyone, even himself, that he cared enough about Desmond to get concerned for the escaped Assassin's well-being, but it eventually became something he couldn't very well ignore. He made all brands of excuses for his worrying and his concerned behavior, claiming that it was all in the name of productivity, but he had a feeling he was only fooling himself, and he wasn't even doing that very well.
For all of his griping and complaining, Shaun knew that he would find an excuse to stay awake until Desmond passed out, and then he would take the annoying fool to his room and put him to bed, bitching all the while, about how stupid he was to think they gave a damn about his alcoholism.
"I can't remember what it was like before this," Desmond said lowly, voice cracking.
"What?" Shaun wasn't expecting to get an answer from Miles, as he rarely did.
"I can't remember a time before Abstergo anymore. I know that I lived. I know there was The Farm in the middle of nowhere and routines and schedules and training, and I know there was a bar I worked at, and a motorcycle I loved, but it all feels like a fucking dream, like something I made up in my head to get away from all of the rest of it. You wanna know why I'm such a shit conversationalist? Because I'm never sure which language I should be using. I forget words in English, Hastings, completely blank out on what I'm trying to say. No big deal, happens to everyone. The problem is that my fucking brain starts suggesting synonyms in Arabic, and then Italian, and then Greek, or Latin, Spanish, French, Chinese..." His hand tightened around the glass of whiskey and he drank from it again.
"The Bleeding Effect isn't like listening to a rock radio station and passing through a bad-reception-bubble and finding yourself listening to off-color rap music. You know that you like rock and the rap isn't yours and you can separate the two. It's like listening to rock and finding yourself listening to rap, but you can't remember which one you actually like. Then you aren't sure if you should park the car and fix the radio, wait for the rock to come back, fuck with the knobs until you find the rap station, or figure out who fucked with your car and got rid of the Mozart CDs, because you can't remember if you like a brand of music or if you're confusing yourself with a grandparent. My whole life is turning into one fucked up car-ride, and I'm losing sight of more than just the radio stations. I don't remember where I'm driving to or where I'm driving from. It feels like everything I have ever known is a dream I stole from other people."
"And the alcohol does what?" Shaun wanted the words to be sneering, jabbing, offensive, but found they carried no weight and fell far short of his lofty expectations.
"While I'm awake? Nothing. But if I pass out remembering I'm Desmond Miles and end up too drunk to dream, I wake up remembering I'm Desmond Miles until the next time I start seeing places I've never heard of." The way he refilled his glass with whiskey told Shaun that he was done talking, but the way he stared at the ring finger on his left hand told him that it might not have been Desmond drinking at that moment. With a gritting of his teeth, Shaun grabbed a glass and poured some whiskey into it before taking a seat next to Desmond. The former bartender hardly glanced at him.
"Have you considered finding another way to shock yourself back into the twenty-first century that doesn't include drinking yourself to liver-death?"
"Like what? Beating my head against advanced technology? I'd end up in a coma and Rebbecca's Animus 2.0 would be demolished in a very unforgiving way," Desmond said sarcastically.
Shaun muttered something about being completely unappreciated and sipped at the alcohol in his glass. He tried to hide his wince as it burned his throat, but he wasn't as good at concealing it as he thought, if Desmond's smug smirk was anything to go by.
"Why not a journal?"
"What?" Desmond frowned at Shaun, both startled by the suggestion and the fact that the historian was still there and alive for how quiet he was being.
"Keep a journal or a scrapbook or something, all your intimate memories that you wouldn't have access to if it weren't you."
"I don't have the patience for that."
Shaun started drinking again and eventually shoved his glass away.
"Would you stop drinking if you could find another way to separate yourself from all of them?"
"In a goddamned heartbeat," Desmond nodded.
"Hn."
"Why? What are you planning, Hastings?"
Shaun took the near-empty glass from Desmond's hand and slid off of the chair he was sitting on, taking Desmond's hand and leading him some distance away from the kitchen table. They were almost halfway to Shaun's room before Desmond realized where they were headed. Something about the notion of being taken back to another man's bedroom after he'd been drinking set off a few red flags and he pulled his hand away and shoved Shaun against the wall before he realized what he was doing.
"What are you planning on doing?" Desmond wasn't pleased when Shaun didn't answer right away and he leaned in closer to ask the question again. He took pause when Shaun responded in Latin and he realized he'd been caught up in another impulse from another ancestor. He let up on Shaun a little, but reiterated his question.
"Trying to save what few braincells you have left from a lonely death as you drink yourself to death," Shaun said nonchalantly.
"You're a liar."
"I don't care enough about your opinion of me to lie."
"So what was your plan, then?" Desmond leaned closer as he spoke, already having a decent idea of what Shaun had been planning.
Shaun leaned forward a bit as well and brushed his lips over Desmond's, flicking his tongue out to trail over Subject Seventeen's infamous scar. Desmond smiled and dropped his hands to rest on Shaun's hips.
"How's this supposed to make me stop drinking?"
"Because all you have to remember is there's only one name I'll ever moan or scream, and that's yours. I'm one of a kind; your ancestors wouldn't know what to do with me, and that should be enough to remind you which life is yours. What need will you have for cheap booze when I'm here to shock you back to the right century?"
Rather than respond, Desmond kissed Shaun, properly this time, and hoped that Shaun was right, because all it would take was one psychological break and he could hurt the Brit, damage him irreparably and probably kill him. Maybe this sudden need for control would keep him rooted in his own reality and that was another step to Shaun's plan. Desmond wouldn't put it by him. At any rate, he could now think of many things he would rather be doing with his out-of-the-Animus time, and none of them were drinking himself into a coma.