Sō̂this
Summary:
local reincarnated teenager cannot get a moment's peace, sources say.
Kassandra side-stepped cautiously along the rooftop to crouch closer to the boy, who had hastily scrambled along the ridge of the roof to put himself once more out of reach. Desmond huffed, but otherwise did not make any further attempts to flee, now more mindful of their precarious position after his near-brush with the effects of gravity.
«Hunrah -» she stumbled over the unfamiliar word, grimacing as she butchered the pronunciation. «Hunrhunasi-rach?»
«hṇrhṇasich.» (Do you understand?) the teen corrected automatically, still focused on trying to figure out how to haul himself into the nearby tree from his perch at the edge of the roof. He paused, eagle-gold eyes flickering to glance warily in her direction. «wahæáid. hṃ æű hṇrhṇ gwarômi.» (It is true. I understood you the whole time.)
«dű gwesá gwaràsachṛ?» (What were you doing?) she asks.
He gestured back towards the skylight with a look on his face that clearly said he thought it should be painfully obvious. «...hṃ zorhwul ṛ chuômi lolhæsômi.» (...I wanted to see the sun.)
«dű duàs hnomṇá shuàgwàsi.» (Tell me your name.) He said after a moment, tone cautious and wary but not openly hostile.
"Kassandra."
«...khàssṇdṛa.» he tried, testing the sound of the name on his tongue. She made a face in response and huffed wordlessly to herself, rolling her eyes. Great. The boy's sire and dam pronounced her name the exact same way, every single time, and it drove her mad.
"Yes." she said. "Fine. Let's go with that."
«ḷ dű duàs gwesá smṛàsi hnomṇrá?» (And you? Do you remember your name?) she asked, gesturing at him encouragingly.
«hhnomṇrá? ...keyṃ hakrosàs.» (My name? ...dweller-of-meadows.) He murmured, turning to offer her a cautious smile. «fe—»
Yes! She cheered internally. Finally!
"Desmond!" A man's voice called out from below them, simmering with irritation. Kassandra leaned forward slightly, and blinked, startled, and then shook her head and frowned when she saw the voice's owner standing below them, arms crossed and a scowl on his face. It took her a moment to recognize his voice as the one who had called in Desmond's injury over the walkie-talkie.
…So this was the famed Mentor of the modern Assassin Brotherhood.
William Miles.
The way that the boy beside her shrank back, curling in on himself, one hand flying protectively to his mouth, made her hate the man below them a little more than she already did.
Little wonder Hytham and the rest of their family avoided the modern Brotherhood like they carried some sort of plague, if this was the man who led them.
"What do you think you're doing up there?" Miles Sr. snapped. "Quit wasting the doctors' time and get down here."
The "what if we were all clones of one another" family genes were just as dominant in Miles Sr. as they were in his son beside her—though probably (hopefully) not to the same extent.
Truthfully, when she had first seen him, she had halfway expected him to start speaking with that same rolling purr as his family's distant ancestors did, and go blathering on about 'the inherent superiority of holograms' or some other equally asinine Precursor technological advancement.
For a disconcerting moment, she had thought she was looking at Hytham's mentor, and had only been mildly surprised by his abrupt change in attire; unlike his most distant ancestor, Miles Sr. actually seemed to make fairly decent choices in fashion.
Pity that was seemingly just about the only thing likable about the man.
The-dweller-of-meadows had not been lying when he told khàssṇdṛa he had understood them the whole time.
Not exactly.
The ceaseless ranting and harsh, belittling words of the man before him still registered as perfectly intelligible to his ears. It was just… he did not trust himself to be able to respond in kind. His mind was still a tangled, hazy web, memories still unspooling within his head.
Technically, he should probably not even be awake right now.
The adrenaline high from his earlier panicked attempts at escape—when he had awoken, he had first believed himself trapped in lingvi again, the havi prepared to subject him to gleipnir's lasting sting once more—was wearing off, and he would desperately like nothing more than to retreat to some high up, sunwarmed place and sleep until his head no longer felt like someone had filled it with a thousand-thousand incredibly angry, incredibly noisy bees.
He kept his tongue locked firmly behind his teeth, even as the man's anger slowly mounted as he failed to respond to a question he was evidently expected to actually answer—if he responded now, he wasn't sure that he would be able to manage to output English.
Almost without even thinking, he directed his gaze to a spot just to the left of the man's ear, letting the words wash off of him with practiced ease as the man paced back and forth before him in the small, cramped office space. He had heard far worse from far more dangerous people.
Far, far worse.
This was nothing.
…It still hurt, however, when the man lashed out impulsively, catching him across the face with a backhanded slap for refusing to answer.
The yelp that startled from his throat as he stumbled backwards and into the arms of khàssṇdṛa's silent companion, and the tears that stung at his eyes when the stitches on his wound came loose again were merely instinctive reactions that this body had not yet trained itself out of.
Truth be told, he had been expecting the slap from the moment the man had barked at him with strident, barely concealed fury-ladened impatience earlier on the rooftop. He knew this man was undoubtedly his blood-sire in this life, but looking at him now, all that the-dweller-of-meadows could see was flickering shadows of havi and tyr.
Hands—one of them, he notes curiously, missing a ring finger—steady him gently and then hold him for a moment against the other's chest. There is a barely audible warning rumbling slowly building in the other's chest, and khàssṇdṛa's companion bristles fiercely at the Mentor, steady, comforting kin-ally-protector blue of his aura purpling slightly with the warm red hues of outrage-willingness-to-defend.
With the all-too-familiar pain stinging at his lips and the taste of his own blood on his tongue came a sudden, unexpected clarity, striking him like a bolt of lightning in all its surety: this will not be his life, and this man is not his father.
Pain irrelevant but not forgotten, he swiped a hand across his face as he gently untangled himself from the protective embrace of his maybe-kin, and stepped forward, eyeing the Mentor with newfound contempt.
They kept calling him Desmond.
That was his name, he knew that, but it still picked at (new?) old wounds to have some other name not of his own choosing forced upon him, one other than those he bore in his (first?) youth.
[«Lælaps.» His uncle rumbles, ruffling his hair. «You'll be swift enough to catch me one day yet.»]
[«Fenris.» His sire's voice murmurs in his ear, laughing. «My little dweller of the fens.»]
This place was not a farm, he decided. It was a prison dressed in pretense; and there was nothing he had ever hated so much as a gilded cage.
A/N: this fic has a prequel now, called "dies caniculares"