give way just enough

by Vodkassassin

Summary:

“What the fuck,” Desmond says out loud, and promptly clams up at the sound of his own voice. It’s higher. Squeakier. Younger.

Desmond jolts, leaping up to his feet and offshooting his balance by a mile on limbs that are shorter that he’s used to.

“No,” Desmond says, because this can’t be what’s happening. It can’t.

—Now a drabble fic

Chapter 1

Dying is a bit different than Desmond had expected. 

Well, he supposes that nothing can really be expected from death, seeing as how it is the ultimate unknown to all, no matter who you are. Nobody really, truly knows what death brings. Except maybe the precursors. 

But honestly, fuck those guys. 

As Desmond feels the painful tingling of pins-and-needles at the edges of himself from limbs waking up, his first thought is are you kidding me.

He opens eyes that he thought he’d never open again, to a big, saturated expanse of the bluest blue he’s ever seen. It stretches endlessly in all directions, as if someone had taken the fill-bucket tool from MS Paint and used it on the animus white room with vengeance. 

Then, he turns his head a little bit, feels something scratch the back of his head and make a rustling sound. His eyes move with him, and he finds the end of the blue. 

Oh, the sky. He’s lying on the ground. 

What the fuck , Desmond thinks, and sits up from where he’d been lying flat on his back on a random forest floor—in the middle of nowhere. 

Except it isn’t nowhere. This place is familiar. Familiar in the way your distant, childhood memories show you scenes that, if you were to visit in person now, seem smaller than they once had. 

This tree, with the carving S+G under the lowest branch. That giant boulder with the hollow place in its back that contains a clipboard on a chain for initiates to write their names down on every morning as proof they’d passed the checkpoint of their kilometer run. 

“What the fuck,” Desmond says out loud, and promptly clams up at the sound of his own voice.  It’s higher. Squeakier. Younger .

Desmond jolts, leaping up to his feet and offshooting his balance by a mile on limbs that are shorter that he’s used to. 

“No,” Desmond says, because this can’t be what’s happening. It can’t. 

He did what had been expected of him. He’d become an unnamed and unknown martyr for the human race. False gods had played with his life centuries before it had even come to be and Desmond had died for their dumbass chess game. 

He’d done everything he was suppose to. So why the hell is he back at the fucking beginning? 

“Okay, alright,” Desmond says, backing up a few steps and leaning against a tree. “This is fine.”

He hits something that’s not the tree. Desmond reaches back and pulls off the backpack he—his sixteen year old self—is wearing. It’s a familiar backpack, he thinks. It’s the one he’d packed full of his shit and ran away from the farm with. 

Desmond sucks in a breath, glancing at the run checkpoint, and takes stock of himself. 

He’s forgotten how absolutely organized he’d been at sixteen. There’s a small but thoroughly stocked medical kit in the bag with rations, a fire starter along with a small ziplock of lint, two changes of clothes rolled tightly together and tucked down near the bottom next to a pair of running shoes—a quick glance down shows him he is currently wearing a pair of worn-in hiking boots—and a nondescript looking checkbook cover that Desmond knew didn’t have any checks inside, but rather hard cash. There’s also a notebook and a few writing utensils wrapped together with a rubber band.

A voice inside his head murmurs in a small, faintly impressed way, and he feels both proud and chastised, because he knows that Altaïr could still name several other things his younger self should have packed in addition. 

Desmond zips the bag closed and slings it back over his shoulder. He takes in a deep breath, trying to sort through all the wildly spastic thoughts bouncing off the walls inside his head. Altaïr’s calm, flat voice is grounding, a constant murmur in the back of his head of which Desmond can’t quite make out the words. It’s countered, however, by the fleeting scoff of incredulousness he can feel from Ezio, who just… doesn’t really understand what he’s doing. 

For some reason, Desmond is slightly reassured by that. He’s pretty sure he hadn’t known what he was doing at the time, either. 

Actually, that’s the real question. What is he going to do now ?

He licks his lips, wincing as the action brings a stinging pain to his awareness. He holds a few fingers to the edge of his mouth absently, mind far away in thought. 

Desmond has a pretty good idea of what’s to come in the next decade or so, perhaps even further though it’s all pure speculation and estimation for whatever came after the point which he’d… died. Generally speaking. And now he has the definitive chance of changing all of that, potentially to a point where the future is once again completely unpredictable for him. Assuming he does anything at all. 

He wants to sit down on the bulging roots of the maple tree that towers over him, sit and think and muse and maybe even plan, because the place is quiet except for the sounds of nature, and for once in a long time, maybe even longer than he can remember, Desmond can actually hear himself think. 

But there’s a jitteriness in his limbs, his heart beating a strange tattoo against his ribs. He’s out of breath and Desmond isn’t sure whether it’s from the half-kilometer his younger body had just sprinted, or something else. A feeling like static eats at the soles of his feet. 

Desmond hold his arms out at his sides, wiggling his fingers to gain some feeling back as he ponders. He knows that if he waits here long enough, someone will come along and see him resting here, instead of running back like he was suppose to be doing. That someone might even be his dad, considering that Desmond has been here for a good few minutes, and yet no one else has come running up to the checkpoint after him. Meaning Desmond was in last place, technically. And there was no telling how long he’d been passed out on the ground for. Someone was bound to be by soon to drag him back . 

Desmond blinks at the boulder containing the clipboard, memories suddenly clearer now than they had been before. He’s absolutely certain, all of a sudden, that this isn’t the day he’d thought it was. This isn’t the day he’d actually ran from the Farm—he isn’t sure why he’s so sure of that, but he is. 

So why did he have his backpack with him? He didn’t think he’d started packing to run this early on.

A sharp sting lances across his mouth. Desmond brings a hand to rub at it in annoyance. When he brings his fingers away, they’re covered in blood. A sharp feeling of realization and faintly echoing anger that doesn’t belong to him rises in his chest and tightens around his throat. 

Oh. 

This was the day after he’d gotten his scar. 

Desmond glances up at the sky, heartbeat racing faster and echoing loudly in his ears, coming to a dull, static roar. The sun’s moved already, and he knows he’s been sitting here for much too long. He glances back at the checkpoint, licking the blood away from his lips in the hopes of distracting himself from the sudden sickening, panicky feeling that is rising steadily up in his chest. 

Desmond stands still for a moment, staring at the clipboard sitting innocently there. Looking at it now, it’s like some sort of symbol of imprisonment, and he suddenly feels claustrophobic despite the wide openness of nature surrounding him. Connor digs it, sure, and there’s a faint sense of peace there, but it’s buried beneath the aching longing for buildings to climb and stand atop to look out over a bustling cityscape, and just suddenly know it like it’s the back of his hand. Like it’s his . 

His fingers start twitching again. He glances beyond the checkpoint for just a moment, the panic rising up to grip at his throat, and Desmond turns and sprints in the opposite direction before he has a chance to think better of it. 

---

 

South Dakota is a mountainous region, full of sweeping hills and jagged, outcropping buttes among clay canyons with cave systems that could go on for miles and miles before coming out the other side or ending in a cavern. 

Desmond hadn’t been anywhere else in the state other than the Farm and the route he’d taken directly out of it, but he remembers flipping through a book about it’s geography in his dad’s study at a young age. Even back then, when he was still at least minimally in his father good graces - wherever that may be - or perhaps just too young to be expected to do much yet, it was like his hands physically ached for any information about the outside world. The Farm had always been suffocating, isolating. It had only grown more so, the older he’d gotten, until he’d finally been unable to bear it anymore, and fled the grasp of its looming walls. 

Well, there were plenty of reasons he’d left, but with the odd sensation of too small and not enough room, can’t breathe that is clawing at his chest, Desmond’s hard pressed to think of any of the others.  

He remembers, though, coming to the realization that South Dakota’s topography meant something else for him altogether. People - people from outside , civilians -  came here to soak up the sights and just plain walk through it all, simply because they had nothing better to do, or just because they wanted to. Which meant that, generally speaking, it wouldn’t exactly be out of the ordinary for a kid like him to be wandering through nature. Should anyone come across him, it would be easy to explain away his presence here. 

Which is what jump-started younger Desmond’s plans for running away. 

And even now, Desmond’s thankful for the information, and for the training he’d been forced to do throughout his childhood—it means less baby fat, making him look older rather than younger as most fourteen year olds that he’d seen outside the brotherhood tend to look. 

He tugs at the collar of the denim jacket he’s wearing and hooks his thumb out over the yellow line of the highway, waiting patiently. He’s been at this for hours now, and he can feel the pinching of hunger at the center of his stomach, though he’s so far kept himself from digging into his rations. He’d need them later, if he was unable to catch a ride to the nearest town and ended up having to stay the night in the woods. 

Two semi trucks and one red volvo have already passed him by, but Desmond is patient. He’s had a lot of practice with waiting for things. He’d waited to leave the Farm. He’d waited for a real life for himself outside of the “cult” he’d been raised in. He’d waited for a chance to get off the streets. He’d waited through all the memories of his ancestors. He’d waited for whatever message the precursors had for him, whatever solution. 

To Desmond, it seems like he’d been waiting his entire life. He isn’t even sure what for, anymore. Then, he’d died, so… he supposes that it doesn’t actually matter, in the end. 

Maybe he’d been waiting to die. 

Another semi truck comes veering down the desolate highway. The squeal of the breaks kicking into gear catches his attention, and Desmond gives his himself a mental shake. He watches the truck roll slowly to a stop before him, and stares up at the passenger door. It flings itself open after a moment, and the driver peers down at him. 

“Hop in,” the man says amiably, with the unconcerned air of someone who is in no way new at this. This isn’t his first hitchhiker, Desmond assumes. 

The driver crawls back, and the young time traveler wraps his hand around the bar on the side of the truck and hauls himself up into the cabin. He pulls the heavy door shut behind him, and gives the trucker a quirk of his lips once in the seat. 

“Thanks,” Desmond says, because he may be an assassin, but he is an assassin with manners. 

“No problem,” the trucker says, pushing the clutch into second gear and urging the semi back onto it’s journey. “Name’s Raoul.”

“Denny,” he supplies in turn. “Bet that’s familiar enough to remember, huh?”

Raoul laughs. “A trucker’s paradise, huh? Eh, I’m more of an Applebee’s guy.”

The ride is quiet for the next few miles, Raoul not seeming to be very nosy or interested about his backstory, which Desmond is grateful for, because it gives him some more time to think. Calm comes easier now than it had while still so close to the Farm, and with the dull roar of the truck engine in the background, Desmond finds he can finally plan. 

He hefts his backpack into his lap and pulls out the notebook and it’s wad of pens. It’s  a small thing, 7 by 4.5 inches with just a hundred pages. Easier to fit amongst his other supplies, he guesses. Desmond flips the book open and pauses when he notices that it isn’t blank like he had assumed it would be. There was writing on the first page already, in pencil, and as Desmond peers at it, he realizes with growing incredulity that it’s a journal entry.  

Well, reading through it, it’s less of a journal entry and more of a report than anything, but as Desmond assumes that he’s the only person that was meant read the contents of this notebook—it’s not like he had anyone outside the Farm—it’s obvious what it’s meant to be. 

He resists the urge to bury his face into his hands even as a strong feeling of disappointment not his own comes pulsating from the back of his head. He too distracted by his younger self’s stupidity to decipher which of his ancestors it came from, but he’s putting his bet on Altaïr. 

Ezio was a bit too vain to really and truly get why exactly it was a bad idea to write about oneself, and Connor probably wouldn't really care all that much, but Altaïr knew the dangers of having any sort of personal information on such a tangible and accessible location as paper record, not unless you were intending for others to read it. Well, his Syrian ancestor has always felt more… involved, with Desmond, than the others. Almost like he cares the most about what’s happening to him, always perking up with something that feels like distant pride when Desmond accomplishes something particularly skillfully, or a pulse of chiding when he does something incredibly stupid. Or perhaps that’s just Altaïr‘ inner-Mentor peeking through. Connor has his moments with that, too, come to think of it, and Ezio-

Desmond clutches the notebook tightly in his hands, focusing his gaze on a word in the middle of the page as the rest blurs around it in a odd, physical sort of tunnel vision. There he goes again, thinking that long dead men were actually, mentally with him, acting like having the voices of his ancestors in his head, giving him guidance, is normal . Thinking that this was something other than just another fucked up side effect of rifling through the history of his bloodline, through memories that aren't actually his. 

The murmuring goes quiet in his head for the first time all day, and Desmond refuses to think about how it seems definitively wrong to feel so alone in his own head. 

He loosens his grip on the notebook, slowly prying his fingers from where his sweaty palms have adhered his hands to the paper. He flips to the next page—he’d deal with the entry later—and pulls a random pen out from the bundle of them he shoved between his thigh and the seat. 

Uncapping the implement, Desmond draws a bullet point in the first line and taps the pen on it for a moment. He stares at the ink dot for what feels like a few minutes, before finally starting to write. 

When he finishes, it’s dark outside, and he’s got close to twenty-six pages full of crammed lists and notes detailing what he can recall of future events, from a general timeline of what to expect in the coming years, to short, to-the-point profiles of key people that had affected it along the way. Or had been affected by it. Like Cross, or Lucy, or Subject Sixteen - Clay - to name a few. Unlike the entry on the page before it all, Desmond had written his notes in a code created by assassins for reports within the Brotherhood. Seeing as how it had been written close to eight years from Desmond’s current place in time, he supposes that he’s really the only one who knows it now. 

“Where you from?”

Desmond blinks rather blearily, pulled out of his memories. He glances over to find Raoul raising a curious eyebrow at him, one eye on the road and the other on the notebook in Desmond’s lap. 

The assassin angles it away from the older man’s view. 

“Lots of places, I guess,” he says. “Been moving around my entire life.”

“Internationally?” 

“What?”

“Well,” Raoul nods to his notebook, “you’ve probably been to more places and heard more words than I ever have. How many do you speak?”

Desmond stares dumbly at him for a moment, bewildered and not really understanding what the trucker is asking, before he turns his gaze down at his notebook, and blinks. He flips through the pages he’s written during the ride and realizes they’re all written in an unholy farrago of Arabic and Italian. He even finds a few lines of written Kanien'kéha jumbled throughout the patchwork collage of languages, and that note there looks rather suspiciously French. He can’t spot a single word of English as he numbly flips back through the pages. 

Seeing it like this now… perhaps writing it in a code outside of time had been overkill. Maybe. 

“Uh,” he says, for lack of anything else. “A few, I guess?”

Raoul snorts. 

There’s a slightly awkward silence, in which Desmond takes the chance to close his notebook and stash it and the pens away in his backpack once more. As he tosses the pack down onto the floor of the cabin and sits back, Raoul asks again.

“So, got a place of origin, or anything? I’m always psyched to be meeting people from different countries. You wouldn’t think so, but I run into folks from all over in this sort of job.”

Desmond blinks at him. 

“America?” He tries, though it comes out as more of a question. It’s the truth though, and he wonders why Raoul would think otherwise. 

“Not with that accent,” Raoul chuckles at him like he thinks Desmond is joking. He isn’t. 

Desmond brings a hand to his mouth, fingers finding his scar that wasn’t even a scar yet, and is stumped. If Raoul is to be believed — and Desmond didn’t exactly see why the man would lie about this — he had been speaking with an accent this entire time.

The only question left is, uh, which one ?

Desmond misses the previous indifference Raoul had been sticking with for the past several hours. 

“… Around,” he says, thoughtfully, like he is thinking about it and not internally freaking out, which, in all honesty, he is thinking about it, too. “My dad, he’s from the Middle East, and mom is Italian. And we travel a lot, so…”

He turns and gives the amused looking trucker a somewhat helpless look. “I didn’t even know I had an accent?”

The man laughs at him. Desmond feels like he’s being teased. He totally doesn’t pout about it. He doesn’t . 

Chapter 2

Desmond sucks in a trembling breath, ducking his head down until his shoulders are up in his ears.  He’s stiff as a board and trembling worse than an open screen door in a hurricane.

The  man who’d just murdered the Templars and rescued him from what would have been his second stint in Abstergo confinement wastes no time in dragging him down stone-paved, heat permeated corridors that are so painfully familiar Desmond can feel hot tears stabbing at the corners of his eyes. He hiccups. 

A hand, big and warm, comes up to press his hair flat against his head, soothing murmurs in a language Desmond, for all his inherited linguistic memories, doesn’t recognize. The hand runs down the back of his scalp and comes to rest right at his neck, and Desmond shudders again. 

For now, he ignores the scenery around him—the sandy cobblestone and warm winds and desert shrubs, the piercing stares of age-old assassins whom he’d once known (Desmond, Desmond had never met in his life— either of his lives—)

He hiccups again, and this time he can’t really pass it off as anything other than a sob.

This is it, isn’t it? He’s Bleeding again.

He’d thought he’d been doing so well, too, in staving off the familiar, gut wrenchingly terrifying episodes of not knowing who he even is anymore. Except, it seems that all it took was one interference from the fucking Templars, from goddamn Abstergo, for all his carefully cultivated self-control and meditation to crumble like ash in the remnants of a campfire. 

He feels his legs buckle underneath him, and he doesn’t even care anymore—he’s too tired of all of this, and he just wants to be done.

He’d gone and died, and what did he get for that? Had to restart the entire fucking game from the beginning, except this time he gets the trauma and the nightmares and the hallucinations all right from the get-go, huh?

No fucking rest for the wicked. 

The man barely pauses in stride, reaching down to scoop Desmond’s much smaller frame into his arms and stalking even faster down the winding, high vaulted hallways of the place Desmond has only ever seen in his dreams—nightmares.

Because this is a nightmare. Desmond curls in on himself and shakes. A keening sound erupts from his throat and he doesn’t even have the energy to feel embarrassed about it. 

He’s so fucking done. He doesn’t deserve this.

Desmond has done many  less-than-wholesome things in his life, pulled a lot of shit, sure, but when it really comes down to it —and he considers it all tit-for-tat — he doesn’t fucking deserves this.

He just wants some rest. Just let him sleep, please ? He just wants—

He presses the palms of his hands over his eye and makes that desperate  sound low in his throat again. His chest shutters unevenly with every breath he takes.

His lungs are on fire, that was a bit strange. 

He doesn’t—

He doesn’t think he can breathe.

His center of gravity shifts abruptly, and Desmond feels nausea build within his stomach. It climbs slimily up his throat. 

He’s being — he’s being handed off — to who—?

He chokes. Warm arms come up to encircle him, and a familiar voice murmuring soft reassurances into his ear.

It’s a voice Desmond always wants to hear.

He can’t help it. He can’t stop him body from the instinctual reaction of pressing in closer to the larger, warmer body and whines lowly, wrapping his arms around the person’s neck. The grip on him tightens, and he’s tucked down against a chest, under a chin. 

“ Desmond ,” his ancestor breathes, sounding relieved and concerned and rock solid all at once.

It makes Desmond go nearly boneless, and for once it’s okay because there’s someone there to catch him and hold him up. 

“It’s alright.” 

Of course it is. He is here. How could it not be alright? 

Altaïr curls in over him and presses their foreheads together. A hand runs up the back of his head, through his hair soothingly, as Desmond gasps for breath and struggles. 

“I have you now.” His ancestor murmurs against his temple, hold tight around him.

Desmond wants to melt into his arms and never, ever leave.

“They will never take you again. They will never harm you again. I will destroy them before they can even think of it.”

There’s muffled whispering in the nearby distance. Desmond can’t make out the words but it causes his anxiety to mount back up to higher levels again, because that, that’s other people, he doesn’t know them, can’t remember them, but they’re here . 

Altaïr tenses around him, and then climbs to his feet. 

“This way,” he mutters to the tall man who’d brought Desmond here to him. To Masyaf? 

If this was a hallucination brought on by the Bleeding Effect then Desmond isn’t sure his mind will ever escape it again after this. This is all just—too detailed.

A helpless feeling climbs up his chest, and he coughs, hacks, tries to breathe with even less success than before. 

Altaïr and the man pause in stride. Then they’re moving even faster, and when Desmond opens his eyes again the three of them are shut away in a smaller room, on a pile of decorative Syrian floor pillows.

He’s still safely tucked away in Altair’s hold, and the man doesn’t seem to be keen on letting go any time soon. 

It makes Desmond relax.

With Altaïr, he’d be safe.

Even if it’s only from his own mind. 

Notes:

I’m changing this to a drabble collection. It’s all gonna be the same story, but trying to keep chronologically writing in a structured and cohesive plot line just wasn’t working for this one. So now y’all are just gonna get in-universe snapshots, hopefully you’ll still enjoy lol

Notes:

Wrote this ages ago, figured I should post it. No use for it to gather dust unread by anyone but me in my Google docs. Maybe I’ll even write more for it… who knows lol