The apartment the assassins stay in is in an old building, almost empty and covered in graffiti. It looks like one good storm away from falling down, but that's not true- Desmond's seen two bad storms since he moved in, and the building's still there. Although at this point, maybe it's being held up purely by graffiti. There's more now than there was a week ago. Desmond watches kids come by at night sometimes and add to it. It's easier to sit up and watch the neighborhood than to try sleeping through the night.
He hasn't been sleeping well. There are nightmares- darkness and everything he remembers from his time being dead. Or whatever he was. So at night he sits up and watches the taggers at work, and during the day he pretty much does the same thing. Most of the time nobody comes by with a can of spray paint in the middle of the day, but there's always people around to watch.
That's why he notices them. Most of the people that go through this neighborhood, Desmond can recognize on sight. These two are different. They're strangers, but they walk with purpose, like they know where they're going and they've been there before. Desmond watches right up until the moment they disappear into the apartment's lobby, then he goes looking for Ezio. The older man is in the kitchen.
"Hey," Desmond says, and he's surprised as always to hear the words come out in Italian. It's not the apple translating for him, the way Altair's does for him, so that means he actually knows the language. It's the weirdest thing, since he doesn't actually remember learning it. Of course, he doesn't remember learning English, either. "Are you expecting someone?"
"No," Ezio says. "Is someone here?"
"A man and a woman just went into the lobby."
"Oh." Ezio's body language shifts just slightly, ready to move if something happens. "Anyone we know?"
Desmond gives him a skeptical look. "Maybe you know them," he says. "I've never even met a woman." Not that he remembers, anyway.
"Oh." Ezio shrugs. "Well, at least you have something to look forward to."
There's a knock on the door, and the two of them glance at it, then at each other. "I'll get it," Desmond says, and a few moments later he's opening the door to see the same man and woman standing there. They all stare at one another for a minute, then the woman makes a noise like a dying cat and abruptly hugs him.
"Hey!" he protests. "What-" But she's clearly not listening, so Desmond just stands there limply until the stranger lets him go again.
"You were dead!" the woman says. "And all this time, you've just been hiding out, and no one bothered to tell us? I-"
"Look," Desmond interrupts. "I have no idea who you are."
The man snorts. "Yea, and I have no idea what's going on," he says. "So how about you start from the beginning?"
So they spend the next few hours having the most awkward conversation of Desmond's life. The most awkward one he can remember, anyway. Considering the fact that he's been re-alive for less than a month, and weird stuff like this is already happening, he figures it's probably a safe bet that the parts of his life he doesn't remember must have been pretty weird too.
The man's name is Shaun, and the woman's is Rebecca. He's heard about them from Altair and Ezio, but actually meeting them in person is… good? Maybe? It makes a nice change to have someone else to talk to. But it's also bad, because they know him, and he doesn't know them at all. The conversation moves in bursts- they'll talk for a while like it's the most natural thing in the world, and then Desmond will say something wrong, something he wouldn't have said before, and they all just sit in silence and stare at the walls or the ceiling or the floor but definitely not at each other.
It's during one of these awkward, silent moments that Desmond asks, "Why did you guys come over today, anyway? I mean, it wasn't for me, so why-"
"Oh!" Rebecca nods, her eyes going wide. "Shaun!"
"Ow!" he rubs his arm and scowls at her. "You didn't have to hit me."
"We totally forgot," she says, and turns back to Desmond. "Abstergo is holding Altair prisoner."
"What? How did you forget to mention something like that? He could be dead, they could have killed him while we've just been sitting around talking-"
"Calm down," Shaun says. "He's not that kind of prisoner."
Desmond hesitates. "I think you lost me," he admits.
"They grabbed a lot of their employees this morning," Rebecca tells him. "Pretty much the whole sample seventeen team, because they know someone on that floor's been hacking their files, but they haven't figured out who it is."
"Yet," Shaun adds.
"Not helping," Rebecca says, and continues without missing a beat. "It's not all that much of a prison, actually. More like an apartment with doors that stay locked all the time."
"Yea…" Desmond hasn't been out of the apartment since the day he first walked in. Right now, it's all he can do to handle the world from behind the safety of four solid walls. "Wonder what that's like."
-/-
Guys, look, it's chapter 100. :) And it's a super unexciting one. :( But anyway, since this is a pretty milestone chapter, I figured I'd take a second and say THANK YOU too all the people that read, review, favorite, or alert this story because you guys are cool people. Stay classy.