The sound of the bass seemed to just materialize when Desmond pushed through the hanging beads and half-open door out into the main area. He realized suddenly that anybody could've heard him with Christine up the stairs. For a moment, it embarrassed him... but then the infectious sound of the thumping bass crept into his blood. It served as a reminder of feelings long-forgotten, and his mind seemed to shift itself to a new – or old, more like – point of view: one in which he'd never really minded a crowd. The bass thudded on...
"Got it all worked out?" sighed Adrian, when Desmond came up to the counter.
"Yeah, something like," answered Desmond. He leaned against the counter on one casual elbow. "Got an apron for me? I'm covering for Chris."
Adrian's glassy eyes flashed up. It took a moment, but a smile came to his face after it had passed.
"Oh, thank the Lord!" he bellowed, surprisingly loudly given the music. "No offense, man – I'm sure she's great with a dick and all that – but she's been making me absolutely CRAZY these last few days."
The colors flashing from the overhead lights changed from a generally green hue to a generally red hue. Desmond's neck did a jerking, bobbing motion on its own. This tune was catching...
"Yeah, she is real great with a dick," he replied... in a tone that didn't sound to him like any he had used for months beforehand. "Just ask mine."
"Ooohhh... there ya go," sighed Adrian with a slap on the shoulder and a devilish grin.
But not one to match Desmond's; nobody's ever did. "Gimme the apron. Show me the new ropes."
As he stepped around behind the corner, that feeling came back to him. The one where the whole world seemed to just blur out behind the constant over-stimulation. And he remembered: THIS was why he missed this job.
Who had time to think about their problems, even when a woman like Lucy was involved, when there were constant drink orders on the table? Trying to keep the ingredients straight was rough enough; trying to get the drink to the right hand was even moreso. Who cared if her best friend hated you?
Why worry about YOUR best friend on the side of your life you knew you should technically be living? Knew that you WERE living, even if you were taking a break from it for a moment? The lights chased the memories of Shaun's disapproving glares from your head.
When the ground rumbled beneath you, how could you be bothered with trivial things like your shaky relationship with your parents? One of whom, your mother, you had just seen for the first time in close to ten years...
Fuck Lucy. Fuck Shaun. Fuck Rebecca, fuck my parents, and fuck the Animus, Desmond thought savagely. "Here's that Shirley Templar for you, sir!"
"Hey, thanks a lot, man!" the drunken, toothless patron answered. "Have one with us, why don't'cha? 'S on me!"
"You got it!" shouted Desmond back across the music.
The music... The sweet, sweet music that played in time with the dancing lights...
For a moment, his enhanced senses added to the visual thrill. To the sensual high... He traced as many of the different lights as he could all around the room, trying to keep up with them. And he thought, with a cocky smirk and a prominent jut in his lips, that he did a pretty good job of it, too. All while balancing a tray of multicolored drinks on a tray in one hand and sliding them off onto the tables to the customers with the other. And they must have been to the right ones, because nobody complained about a messed up drink order.
Or maybe they were just too drunk to notice...
Or maybe that was him.
At around early morning, a woman who looked vaguely familiar to him asked for a dance. For some reason, he looked around to Adrian as if to ask for permission. A habit he'd returned to since reuniting with his father, he supposed... But Adrian had two girls hanging off of him while he was running the kitchen, anyway – Desmond doubted he would care even if he had been in the position to make the choice.
Their sweat seemed to mingle as their bodies pressed together. Perhaps it was because all the music in this genre sounded the same, but the dance seemed to go on for quite a while. He vaguely registered being passed back and forth between sets of grabby hands. Grabby hands all looking for HIM. All looking for HIS attention. For HIS approval. Not knowing, and probably not caring, about his crazy background as the son of an Assassin leader. An asshole of an Assassin leader, who had beat him a few times as a kid. He wasn't a kid anymore.
He was a man. A man completely losing his grip on the world around him, but a man all the same. A man who crashed up against the bar at some point and laughed loudly with a couple of girls, his friend behind the bar, and a trainee, but still a man.
What stood out to him last, for reasons that he didn't ever remember figuring out, was when the clock told him his shift had ended five minutes ago. His shift he wasn't getting paid for, he assumed, but that was all right... The break room was so cool and comforting. It had been here that he remembered getting drunk and asking Christine to marry him once. Not a bad idea, he wondered why he didn't revisit the concept?
"Oh, screw it all," he slurred quietly to himself.
But he was awake. Even before the Animus, he was always awake. Always aware. He always knew... Knew right where he was and almost exactly what was going on around him. The Animus had just made it worse, with those extra personalities attached serenely to his mind.
One of them was regarding him, it felt like, with some distaste. "Desmond..." he sighed, in his rich, Italian tones. "You are exhausted. Running on empty, in every sense of the phrase. Lie down and go to sleep. You will see it in the morning..."
"And fuck you, too..." Desmond mumbled.
But he did it anyway. The sounds of the bar faded as the morning hours came. He heard Adrian talking to someone else.
"Don't mind Desmond in there. He used to be a regular tender. He just covered for us at a bad time last night. He was pretty consistently smashed for most of it. He won't bother you and if he does, go wake up Christine. She's the only one who seems to know how to deal with him..."
Desmond frowned. Deal with me...? he questioned of himself.
"Is he... is he crying?" asked an unknown female voice.
The sounds of beads clicking rattled painfully in Desmond's brain. In the corner of his vision, two white figures glowed and departed... leaving ghostly trails behind them as they went away.
"Yeah..." answered Adrian. "He, uh... well, he was saying– well... never mind. It sounds like he's had a shit life since we last saw him. Leave him alone. He'll wake up better, he always does..."
"Okay. Thanks, Adrian."
Desmond clenched his eyes together and tuned them out. "No..." he whispered to himself. "Just stop. No more..."
He never realized he was crying. Still didn't, in fact. And he hated to admit it to himself, but he probably wouldn't have ever believed it to be true if he hadn't had to pry his crusty eyes apart when the sun's rays fell on them through the window the next morning.
If there was one thing the spa was good for, it was the opportunity for abuse of position. If one could call it "abuse", anyway... As he settled into the brand new, red leather couch next to Lucy, Desmond didn't feel particularly inclined to think of it that way. Or when he was swimming in their pool. Or using their workout equipment. Or their facilities usually meant for the guests and off duty employees... "Off-duty" being the keywords, there...
Sitting in Lucy's lap was a very large, old-looking photo album. His surname was posted on the front in fancy-looking letters. A true symbol of his family's trait for embellishment, he supposed.
And probably assembled for me by my mother, he'd thought when he'd first seen it.
Not that he wasn't grateful for it. He was. But his parents' expectations irritated him, even if that irritation was mostly just a habit now. He still supposed when they arrived for the holidays, he would be expected to make it sound like he was just fascinated by his family's history. Or, at least, to his mother. He was fairly confident his father would understand it if he was sick of his family's history.
"Thanks a lot," he heard from the back of his mind.
Nothing personal, he responded mentally, with an outward smirk playing on his scarred lips.
"God, they looked so happy after you were born," remarked Lucy.
She had opened the book and splayed it out from the center of its contents. Where the table of contents – In a photo album, Desmond noted with mild distaste – placed his childhood pictures. In the picture she was looking at, William was balancing his son on his knee while his wife and mother-in-law appeared to be running in circles nearby. Whoever was taking the pictures must've been getting a good laugh, though... because the next few in the series were all taken at the same time, with an almost flip book-like effect showing a number of objects entering and leaving people's hands. Desmond's eyes traced by themselves the faint signs of blur and other imperfections present in the photos.
"They're good pictures, for such an old camera," he pointed out aloud.
"They've probably been restored or something like that," dismissed Lucy. "My God, your eyes..."
He blinked and frowned. "My eyes?"
"Yes, your eyes," she replied. "Those two orbs you see out of? In the front of your skull?"
"Har, har, Luce." He winked. "What about my eyes?"
She leaned her head in his direction, down on his shoulder and angled her own eyes upwards to his. "They've always been mesmerizing, I suppose..."
This elicited a chuckle from him. "Even my dad never denied that. Must be the power of me."
She laughed, but most of it was muffled behind Desmond's free hand; the one that wasn't holding a cup of ice tea from the snack table. When she stopped, she smacked it off her mouth.
"Jesus!" he complained in a sharp whisper. "You could've just licked my palm or something."
"Most people hate that," she countered.
"Do I look like 'most people' to you?"
She wandered her gaze lazily back to the album for a moment, and ran a finger lazily over another picture of him as an eight-year-old.
"No..." Then she paused, as if she was trying to figure out rather to ask the next question or not. Apparently deciding she could, she looked back up tentatively. "Do you think anybody guessed?"
Inside, he cringed. It manifested itself as a growl in his stomach. One that he hoped she didn't hear. But he couldn't help it; her fascination with his "savior" role was nerve-racking, at times.
"Guessed what?" he played dumb anyway.
"What you would become."
"A bartender?" he tried weakly.
She didn't bite. She leaned her head forward and looked at him through her dripping bangs, as if to ask him if he really thought she was that clueless.
He sighed in defeat. "No, I don't think anybody guessed. I remember my grandma on my dad's side was very impressed by certain things, she said. Like how fast I grew, how deep my voice was even when I first started talking, or... yeah, my eyes, even... But nobody ever seemed to think deeply into it."
"Including you?" she challenged. "Come on, Desmond, I read the reports. I know you weren't the only child on that Farm."
"No," he replied defensively. "I wasn't, but it's not like I was a social butterfly. I didn't really have a lotta... friends, you could say."
"Everyone wanted to be your friend," she said with crossed arms and a barely hidden smile. "Your dad said they could hardly get the other kids to go home at night."
"Well... I didn't like them, anyway." He took another sip of his tea.
"Did anyone ever comment on your attraction factor, then?" she tried. "You know, not just that your good-looking, but how people kind of magnetized to you?"
"No," he said. "They didn't."
"I beg to differ!" she exclaimed. "I read the reports about the bar, too!"
"Ssh, ssh!" he hissed. "Keep it down. There's guests in the room by the front door, which is right behind us. And yes, the bar was... well, different. It was a different setting. You've been there, you've seen how it is. Even now, the people who go there do it to let go of the muscle for a while."
She leaned back against the couch's back and flipped the page over with a conceding nod. Though he wasn't certain she was satisfied with that, he didn't know how else to put it. What else she wanted him to say...
Unless: "I don't think I turned out to be anything special, anyway."
She actually grinned when she turned to him after this. It made him feel more defensive; his arm muscles tensed, causing him to squeeze his thin paper tea cup.
"Well?" he demanded. "I don't think I did. I mean, yeah... there was that whole... saving the world thing–"
"–oh... mmm, yeah... Just that little thing..."
"–but..." he went on with a glare, "...I think that's all over now. History, so-to-speak. Over and gone. I'm faded into obscurity, and I'm pretty comfortable like that."
She sniffled. "Part of your stealthy habits, huh?"
"Maybe so," he said with a shrug. Although he'd actually never thought of it like that, it seemed a fairly plausible reason... "Taught like that as a kid, lived like that when I ran away, stayed like that in the bar, and then... well, obviously, as a reemerged Assassin..."
She reached out and poked the end of his nose once. "You're the man," she said. "But that's probably why you'll never truly be obscure. Even here, they know your parents. You are the Miles family, after all..."
"Such a weird last name..." he mused, turning his tea cup between his hands...
"Not necessarily. I think Shaun's in the weirdest..."
"'Hastings'?" he questioned. "Nah. Rebecca's is the weirdest."
"Rebecca's is just Dutch. Or Norwegian, or something like that..."
He grinned. "It sounds Irish."
"Whatever. The point is, everybody sort of knows you."
He sighed, and his eyes cast down as he continued spinning his tea cup. "Didn't feel like it for a while, there..."
"That's because you didn't want it that way," she answered without missing a beat.
He frowned, one lip jutted out in confusion. "Mmm... I may not have wanted the whole world on top of me, but there was a difference between respecting my bubble and taking off over the horizon."
"What? Was that me who did that?"
"It was everybody," he said truthfully. "It was just you who was the hardest to figure out."
She took a deep breath and turned the page again. He drained the last of his tea through his lips and set the cup down on the side table. It had taken a lot to convince her to come back to work with him; he was messing it up dwelling on old news. So he slid a little closer to her and put an arm around her shoulder. Pleasingly, she responded by returning her head to his shoulder.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know how many times, how many ways I can say it."
"I'm not asking you too," he whispered back. "I'm sorry. That I brought it up."
In spite of the unpleasant topic, a smile bloomed across her features. "You didn't. I did."
"No, I'm pretty sure it was me," he bantered back. "Talking about the family."
She batted her eyebrows and her eyes went back to the photo album. For a few more moments, she turned the pages and studied the pictures. As she went, Desmond recognized a few of the people she was flipping past, but... not really a lot. It was the picture of his father's sister that triggered a sigh in Lucy, and she scooted a little closer to him until their bodies were pressed right up against each other.
"I remember your aunt," she said sadly. "She was such a nice woman. She stayed with the Brotherhood long after my dad died. Used to leave me newsletters, of sorts... to keep me informed after I turned seventeen."
Desmond swallowed a lump that had built in his throat. It had been her seventeenth birthday that had signaled the beginning of his father's plan to keep her adrift from the other Assassins long enough to make her a good mole to penetrate Abstergo. It was quite a few years after that before she even had any contact with the Assassins again. Unless one counted Gary, and he tried to remember that it was good she'd at least had that much... Through the still-very-present feelings of jealousy that reminded him of their presence in his gut whenever he was reminded of her ex-boyfriend in any way... He reached his other arm across his body and wrapped both of them around her, tightening the security of his grip on her as both a comforting and a self-reassuring signal.
"Did anyone else from your family know mine?" he tried asking carefully. "Was it just your dad, or...?"
She smiled, and lifted one hand to grip the front of his t-shirt. "No, it wasn't just my dad. My own aunt also knew your family. She was there when you were born, actually. Technically, I knew OF you long before I KNEW you."
The weirdest feeling that his personal space was being invaded crept up on him, beginning in his groin. Lucy's aunt had seen him naked... Gross...
"My Aunt Lenna really didn't approve of my dad's being gone all the time," said Lucy. "She was usually on him about it all the time. Back then, there was a concrete Mentor for the Assassins. Both of our fathers were pretty involved in it. Perhaps that's why everyone turned to your dad when everything went to shit after Daniel Cross' meltdown."
"'Meltdown'?" Desmond chuckled. "That's what you're calling it?"
"Well, okay... okay, so he was a real asshole. I'm not denying that now, and never have. But that's just... I don't know, what came to mind when I thought about it. Anyway, my dad was gone all the time doing things for the Mentor. Aunt Lenna often hinted she thought he was having an affair."
"Ouch," said Desmond through his teeth. He couldn't imagine that was easy for Mr. Stillman to endure, given the true nature of what he was doing...
"Dad laughed it off a lot, but what I remember is how he used to word things..." she said. "Like he was trying to say it without actually saying it..."
"Say what?" asked Desmond.
And then it occurred to him, but too late: Lucy answered him anyway. In a shaky voice with a single tear rolling down her cheek.
"Goodbye."
He released a sharp breath from his lips and rested his chin on the top of her head. Below his line of sight, he felt her clutch on his t-shirt tighten a little. She did not cry much as a general rule, and that didn't change in that present moment, either. But she did have to take a few more deep breaths to calm down.
"Is she, uh... is she alive?" he asked.
She always told him she loved the sound of his voice. Especially when her head was near his chest or neck, both of which happened to be by her ears now. For that reason, he put his husk into his question purposefully, with force. He felt her cheeks perking up in a smile. It brought a smile of his own out on his face; she had recognized his intentions, and liked what she saw.
"Yes..." she responded verbally, "...but I don't know where. I see updates on her social profiles every once in a while. Unless someone else is doing it, she's alive and very well."
There it was again: that conflict. The question was, what was more important? Lucy's happiness or his? He looked down with just his eyes at the beautiful blonde hair in her head. If he loved her, he should prize her wants and needs above his own as much as possible, right? Right...?
So, why was the only question he asked, "Do you think you want to go find her" rather than: "Do you need to leave... me, I mean" like he knew he probably should be suggesting to her.
Lucy leaned back, and observed him with both eyes from his torso to his face. Her hands splayed flatly across his broad chest, and then roamed pretty freely from his t-shirt to his shoulders, finally locking behind his neck. He felt her thumbs rubbing up and down at the base of his hairline there...
"Maybe someday," she said through a cracked voice. "I'm not done with you and New York yet, though, Desmond."
She leaned forward again, to place her forehead on his collarbone. A shudder ran through him, causing his eyes to close and his breathing to hitch for a moment...
"I missed you too much. And I still have affairs to settle with the Assassin side of my life before I can go back to the personal one I lost."
Her lips pressing on his neck left a small wet spot that was cold in the room's air. He forgot it seconds afterwards as her fingers walked themselves up into his short, brown-black hair, scratching very lightly on the top of his head.
"I intend to go back. Someday... But I want to take you with me when I do."
His eyes flew open as his heart thudded, moving a hundred miles a minute at the settling in of the implications she was making. Showing him, for the first time, a future in his mind's eye that didn't force him to choose between having her and losing her. She leaned back against his hands at her waist and traced his jawline with her fingers.
"Kiss me," she whispered between suddenly ragged breaths.
Breaths to match his own. He pulled her forward with a resolute nod, grateful that his one tear did not break free until after their lips were already together, his body was falling slowly forward on top of hers, and there was no way she could see that brief show of relief that he had just recognized on his... on THEIR... horizon.