The time passes slowly for Altair. He's surprised by how hard it is to impersonate Desmond- after all, he's had little to do for the past week other than watch him, and Altair usually prides himself as a good observer. Maybe he hasn't been watching carefully enough, or maybe it's just a lot harder than it seems to pretend to be another person.

And maybe it's worse because he has confidence in his own skin. He knows exactly how his body works- how quickly he can react, what his limits are, how long he can keep going. But Desmond's doesn't work the same, and maybe if Altair was untrained, he wouldn't notice as much. Instead, every move he makes strikes him as wrong, and he can tell the others have noticed. It frustrates him, because he should be so much better than this.

And then there are the little things, the ones no one else sees. Altair and Desmond have different tastes- he's noticed it before at meal times, but now he has to remember to reach for the foods that Desmond would choose first (it does help that none of the food here is similar enough to food from his own time to throw him off). He's constantly surprised when he looks down at his left hand and sees five fingers there. At night, he settles in to sleep, only to find himself in a body that's used to sleeping in a different position. And muscle memory is a powerful thing.

Two days pass, and in all that time, Desmond doesn't stir at all. On the second morning, Altair wakes up and realizes that he needs to do something if he wants this to change. He's been trying not to think about what this is doing to Desmond, but he knows it can't be good.

He hears a voice nearby, and it takes a couple tries before he realizes that the voice is trying to catch his attention. Answering to someone else's name- something else he still can't quite get used to. He looks up and there's Shaun, wearing his usual long suffering look.

"What?" he says.

"Are you just going to sit there all morning?" Shaun asks. "Rebeca's got the animus set up for you."

"The animus," says Altair. "Right." He's not too sure how this is going to work. The one time he and Desmond tried to go into he animus together, it rejected them completely. Altair still had no idea what had gone wrong then, but Desmond had guessed that it probably wasn't built for two minds at once. After all, he'd pointed out, his genetic information hadn't changed just because Altair was there too. But Desmond wasn't exactly a scientist, and Altair had no idea if the animus would reject him now- if it would pick up on Desmond, asleep at the back of his own mind, or if it could somehow realize that Altair wasn't the person that was supposed to be there.

But he couldn't exactly say anything without raising Shaun's suspicions, and he couldn't really hope for it to work in the long run. He'd just been lucky they'd been planning a rest day for yesterday anyway. He knew he didn't have any chance of avoiding today's session.

So he doesn't argue, just follows Shaun to the animus, climbs in, tries to act like this isn't the first time he's done this. His instinct is to stay quiet as the others run their checks and do their set up, but Desmond usually spends this time hiding nerves behind a curtain of pointless chatter.

Altair isn't very good at idle conversations.

But finally the world around him breaks apart- Altair realizes he's holding his breath, and forces himself to breathe normally. After a second that seems to last forever, the world of the animus builds around him, and suddenly he's in the strange position of being inside Desmond's body while sharing a mind with Ezio.

The Italian's mind feels strange to Altair, who's gotten used to sharing with Desmond. Ezio's mind is constantly moving. Even now, with his body covered in injuries (Altair can feel them, and he guesses that Ezio must still be recovering from the incident he saw earlier, where he last the apple), his mind is racing a mile a minute. It feels a little like watching a spider run, all eight legs moving at once in a confusion that shouldn't quite work but somehow does.

It's different from Desmond's mind, which Altair decides is more like a wind. Sometimes he's quiet, or depressed, his mind focused on one problem, worrying at it like a persistent breeze. Other times, his mind is like a strong wind that catches everything in its path and carries it along. It can be changeable, but never without changing everything around it.

"Desmond." Lucy's voice seems to come from nowhere, and it takes Altair a second to remember that he's not really here, that his- or Desmond's- body is lying on the animus five hundred years in the future. "Your sync rate's really low. Try and focus, alright?"

Right. Altair gives himself a mental shake, and turns his attention back to the scene in front of him. He's already handicapped by not actually being Desmond. If he wants to get through this, he's going to need to give it his full attention.

Something flickers in the back of his mind. Just a little, but it's enough for Altair to recognize the shape of Desmond's mind stirring, and suddenly it falls into place for him. When Ezio was injured, Desmond's mind shut down. Now that Ezio is beginning to recover, Desmond starts to wake up. So all Altair needs to do is play out the memories until Ezio is back on his feet.

Easy, he tells himself, and knows that it won't be.

-/-

Here, have a chapter, and also my apologies because I wrote it between 5:30 and 6:30 in the morning.