APHELION

[warcode]

Desmond woke up gasping.

The light that had drowned him in the Grand Temple faded slowly, leaving dancing sunspots over an awful gray blankness that reminded him far too intensely of the gray tones of the Animus. His breath rattled hard against teeth still clenched (a death rictus from electric shock, his subconscious noted helpfully, sounding exactly like Shaun) and he coughed, a terrible wracking sound, before curling up on his side like a dying bug as residual pain tears threaded down his cheeks. If there was an inch of him that didn't pound and ache like someone had hit him with a truck he certainly couldn't feel it. Even his teeth hurt, every nerve ending raw and stinging. His heart was still pounding wildly and sweat had made a damp mess of his clothes, sticking to his back and sides and plastering his hair to his temples in a way he knew made him look like a half-drowned rat.

(Nevermind that. Get up. Get up, now.)

And that didn't sound like Shaun at all. A groan forced its way out of his abused throat but he obeyed, pushing himself up against his better judgement, vision still fuzzy and unfocused, his voice a battered croak, reaching out blindly for the pillar that had been in front of him.

"Did it work? Guys? What happened--"

Someone grabbed his searching hand in a bruising grip, and Desmond found himself staring up at the blurry but unmistakable face of Lucy Stillman, her blue eyes wide and expression blank with surprise and horror.

He froze.

Details began to trickle in at the edges. The white ceiling, the walls, the curving steel and plastic bed underneath him. The quiet beep of a heartrate monitor. The clothes clinging to his fear slick skin were not the ones he'd been wearing in the Temple, but the too-loose gray sweats he'd been given at Abstergo. A prisoner's uniform.

Lucy was wearing the white shirt she'd died in, keycard on a lanyard around her neck dangling down, close enough for Desmond to grab it and pull if he so chose (to wind around her neck and squeeze, something in him whispered, Templar, traitor, chasing the Pieces, kill her, kill her)--

(Calm down,) another voice interjected, sharp and commanding. (Wait.)

--and his fingers twitched in subconscious reaction. Her eyes jerked to the motion as if she knew, as if she'd heard, and she pulled away from him abruptly, fist curling around the keycard protectively.

"Lucy," he heard himself say, through the fog of shock. He watched her throat work.

"Subject 17."

It was the flat tone one would use with a stranger or an enemy, deliberately cold and controlled, and Desmond abruptly felt sick. He pushed himself up the rest of the way too quickly, pulling loose of the wires and patches of the Animus (had there always been so many?) and welcomed the sudden rush of vertigo announcing that consciousness was about to vacate the premises as he got to his feet. He'd already had this dream before, that he'd wake up back at Abstergo and find out he'd never escaped at all, or Lucy staring down at him with hostility and fear or betrayal, his hidden blade lodged deep in her belly.

He held out both arms and turned them over to show his bare wrists nonetheless, like a prisoner offering to be shackled. "It's okay," he said thickly, tongue numb in his mouth. "I don't have one." She continued staring at him like he'd grown a second head, mouth set and weight balanced in expectation of a lunge that he certainly wasn't capable of, and he tried again. "I'm so sorry, Lucy. I never wanted it to happen."

She blinked.

There was something wrong with her face. Desmond squinted, blackness nibbling away at the edges of his vision. There was something... her hair was the same shining gold he remembered, but as she turned to the side to push the comm button and bark for a security detail, he saw that it was not pulled back with the practical clip she always wore. There was nothing to pull back. Her hair had been cut short but raggedly, as if with the blade of a knife, and there was an angry red line of flesh running just behind her ear. Someone had tried to cave her skull in, and recently from the rawness of the scar.

"What happened?" he demanded, or tried to, as one of his knees chose that moment to buckle underneath his weight and he barely caught himself on the edge of a desk. "Lucy, what happened to--"

"Sit down, 17." She didn't sound quite so cold this time, some of the tension bleeding out of her stance as he continued to wobble alarmingly on his feet and not lunge for her throat, but there was still suspicion and bewilderment in her face. "Before you fall down. The medical team will be here soon."

"Don't call me that." He tried to sound authoritative instead of pleading, tried to straighten up again but his muscles were busy staging a gleeful mutiny. "I'm not-- I have a name."

"So do I," she snapped, taking a step back as the doors on the far wall slid open and a group of uniforms armed with tazers and Abstergo hyposprays rushed in. "And it's not 'Lucy.'"

"Commander Steinmann." One of the uniforms gripped her shoulder to try and pull her back as the rest of his men quickly surrounded Desmond. She smacked his gloved hand off impatiently, eyes still boring into Desmond's.

Only one of them was the sky blue that Desmond remembered. The other was green as sea glass.

That was enough for Desmond's overwhelmed mind. His death grip on the desk loosened and he was falling, sinking backwards into blackness before the first hypospray could touch his skin. The last thing he saw before the waters closed over his head was a burst of second sight, and a single pillar of blue amidst a small ocean of red.










****












Consciousness slunk back like a whipped dog. Desmond didn't need to open his aching eyes to guess where he was, pushing his face further into the lumpy Abstergo pillows with a muffled groan. He'd know the scent and feel of his bed in his quarters-cum-cell anywhere.

(Took you long enough,) the flat, dry voice noted.

"Shut up," Desmond mumbled, pushing away faint impressions of sand and hot wind and the long echoing cry of a hunting eagle overhead, and also forgetting too late his own personal rule about not talking back to the things he heard sometimes during Bleeds. It scared the others, listening to him ramble back responses to ghosts in snatches of other languages or watching him react to things they couldn't see.

Not that there was anyone here to care, now.

(Now that you're awake.) Barred shadows across narrow streets. Silk and tassels, palm fronds, the whisper of robes. The sound of bells echoing out over the rooftops.

Desmond, he mouthed into his pillow, inhaling deeply to get the phantom scents of dust and spice out of his lungs. I'm Desmond Miles, I'm a bartender, I grew up in South Dakota, I hitchhiked across half the country, I had a shitty studio apartment in New York City with peeling paint and no cable, I have all my fingers, thank you.

The voice didn't speak again. When Desmond finally lifted his head enough to crack one eye open, he saw color slowly but surely oozing back into his surroundings and the telltale fading silvery glow of insubstantial silhouettes. There was a rustling sound at his back like the flip of a bird's wings and a flash of white out of the corner of his eye, but he didn't turn his head. He didn't want to see.

My name is Desmond Miles, he repeated again, over and over until the world had gone back to normal.

The layout of Abstergo's guest rooms hadn't changed very much in his apparent absence. He prowled the confines after doing a quick field check (bandaged burns on both hands and forearms, worse on his right than his left, a knot on his head where he'd smacked it against the floor when he passed out, lingering soreness everywhere and a riotous headache, no danger signs of concussion or hallucination otherwise, a few red needle marks further up his arms that had probably been sedatives) and found everything more or less as expected, although that meant nothing when Abstergo could have a dozen rooms exactly like this in a dozen compounds across the world. They seemed to have been doing some remodeling, though, there were a lot of ornate little flourishes in gold and bronze that didn't quite fit in with the white and gray minimalist thing Abstergo seemed to favor. Even the folded piles of plush towels and robes and the whole dresser full of identical gray clothes had a fanciful crest embroidered somewhere on them, a design he'd swear he'd seen before but couldn't quite place.

There were no cameras that he could see, although he didn't doubt their presence. The ceiling was too high to reach, barring any kind of access to air vents, and every piece of furniture was nailed down, blunt-edged, and made of plastic where possible, denying him the chance to even bash someone's head solidly against anything. The walls had been covered with a layer of spongy white material that gave when he pressed against it. Great for muffling screams, he thought dourly.

"Okay," he said aloud to the bathroom mirror after the fourth failed attempt to use his second sight on the locked door. There wasn't a keypad anymore, just a hand sized rectangle set into the wall, possibly for fingerprints. Apparently security had been upgraded. "Okay. One thing at a time."

(Escape.)

Goddammit. Desmond clenched his bandaged fists, waiting for the color to wash out of the room and ghost horses to start galloping through the walls, but nothing happened. He exhaled slowly. Just voices, apparently. Just voices in his head, having perfectly coherent conversations with him.

Ignore them, Lucy had told him. Just hold on to who you are.

This voice was different, lighter and less demanding. It reminded him of sunlight and cobblestones, masks and silks and the snapping of pennants in a stiff breeze. A vague fruity taste lingered on the edge of his tongue, like a good wine tasted several hours ago.

Desmond shook his head and waited another minute to let the steam rise. The shower and sink were both running full bore, cranked up to their hottest setting. He could only assume that there were cameras and/or bugs in every room (and god, wasn't that a comforting thought, that every moment of his initial captivity was probably committed to film somewhere) and the noise and steam might at least obscure some of their surveillance.

Once the silver surface of the mirror had completely fogged over, he started writing.

"Can't escape if I don't know where I am," he muttered, quiet enough that it might be covered by the running water, trying very hard not to think of Clay locked away in a room very like this one, mumbling to the ghosts in his head and painting the walls scarlet.

Abstergo, he wrote on the mirror, and then a question mark. One step at a time. He remembered the Grand Temple. He remembered the light burning him out, the pain and awful sound of sizzling flesh. The fingers of that hand clenched spasmodically as he wrote out the words tracing his steps. He'd done as Juno asked. He'd blacked out, obviously.

(Obviously.)

The dry voice from earlier. He took a slow breath, in and out. Desmond Miles. Born in 1987. Son of William Miles. The Farm. His mother's bedtime stories, his father's silent disappointment. The pavement stretching out endlessly before him until the first trucker picked him up. The tattoo he'd gotten with his first paycheck to celebrate, he was out of it, he was free and clear, he was going to be okay.

Moisture soaked into the tip of his bandage where his finger still hovered at the glass. After another moment, he started writing again.

He'd blacked out. The world still existed around him, apparently, so the Temple must have done what it was meant to do and stopped the cataclysm as Juno had promised. Then... his team must have come back for him. Probably. Found him lying on the ground with his burned hands and it would have been the smart thing to vacate the premises, find some safer hiding spot that wasn't a Precursor site.

Right?

(They would not have left you.)

No, Desmond seethed silently, that's just my own conscience talking, because I don't want to think that they'd all take off the moment I hit the ground. They stayed with me after Lucy. They wouldn't just leave. His father was a stubborn asshole, he wouldn't just leave.





































































































Your team-- your family would not have left you,) the second voice affirmed, even as the first one snorted at this optimism. Desmond's mouth quirked despite himself, despite everything.

"Yeah."

So they would have tried to move him. Not the first time they'd lugged his unconscious ass somewhere. And then?

(And then you were captured by Templars,) the dry voice said, and Desmond could only reluctantly agree, adding that to the written chain of events. There was no other explanation for waking up in an Abstergo facility, and he had been making himself conspicuous all over the world before the final hours in the Temple. Perhaps they'd caught his team while on the move when they were vulnerable. Perhaps they'd been laying in wait outside the Temple.

(Perhaps your father told them--)

"Shut up," Desmond and the second voice snapped in tandem, and this time, this time he could feel the grip of a strong hand descending on his shoulder, squeezing once, although there was nothing to see in the cloudy surface of the mirror but beads of condensation slipping down through the words he'd written.

(He would have said so, if he had broken. It would have been his duty to tell you,) the second voice said, quiet but very final, making Desmond shiver even in the warm muggy air. He closed his eyes before the Bleed could start, not wanting to see what was standing behind him, breath at his ear, heat that had nothing to do with the running water radiating at his back.

They don't know what they've caught, he told himself silently. The scar at his lip pulled and stretched with the face he made, more grimace than smile. He wasn't Desmond Miles, half-trained amateur schmuck anymore. His brain was full of memories that didn't belong to him and his body did things without his permission, like kill guards and automatically pick out exit routes and fly, and he'd held the Pieces of Eden in his hands and bent them to his will.

His head ached fiercely. The air wafting past his ear was full of whispers and he felt dizzy in the heat, forced to reach down and grip the edge of the countertop for balance. His timeline on the mirror was already running with condensation, turning the words into a horror movie font. He reached out unsteadily to wipe it all away, erase the evidence, the glass warm and slick under his fingertips, and in the cleared reflection behind him he saw--

His bandaged hand came away red with blood.

"Go away." He sank to his knees and pressed both hands to his temples, eyes squeezed tightly shut against the images crawling through his brain unbidden. "Go away, go away, go away."

Sunlight, cobblestones, lace, gilt and dark wood, silver filigree, a young woman's smile, his father's hands on his shoulders, the swinging of the hangman's rope, he was too far to make it, shoving aside the crowd in his desperation, fear like molten metal poured down his throat and pooling in his belly, curdling there, turning to poison, and he hated, he hated, he exulted in the hot spray of blood across his face when he stabbed down again and again and again and it was not enough, it would never be enough, nothing would ever be enough, god help him--

Desmond could hear himself hyperventilating past the rushing in his ears, sucking air like a drowning man, and against every instinct he held the last breath the way someone had dared him to as a teenager.

If someone or something caught him before he could crack his skull again on tile as he tipped, he was already past caring.






******






































































(You're standing in a prison cell talking to yourself and writing upon mirrors,) the dry voice said tartly. (And you will stay here until you take action.)

Desmond abruptly and spitefully dubbed him Thing 1.

"Oh, yeah, I'll just punch my way through the walls like the Hulk, howabout? I am taking action by figuring out what the fuck actually happened. Now shut up if you're not going to help, I need to think."

There was a long moment of silence, and then the voice spoke again, mulish. (Look to your burns. You cannot have been captured long, or they would be better healed than they are.)

"Fine. Great. So I've been here, what, a couple days? A week?"

(Less than a week,) Thing 2 chimed in helpfully. (They're sticky.)

Which would make free running or fighting his way out complicated and interesting. He'd have to wait until he was healed enough to hold onto anything he needed to climb-- or he'd have to find another way.

Like the first time he'd escaped.

(You did not see her die.) Thing 2-- no, Tweedle-dum-- offered it cautiously. (You saw only the injury. Could she have survived?)

He shook his head mutely, swallowing down the lump trying to rise in his throat. There had been so much blood... and Shaun had spoken of her burial. Unless Desmond had hallucinated all that, lost within the Animus.

(Your companions might have lied. Nor would the 'goddess' have wanted your loyalties divided by a surviving enemy.) Tweedle-dee sounded tense, as though wary of offering anything that might seem like optimism or simply reliving a bad memory of his own. (You can be sure of nothing without the corpse.)

Desmond wrote out 'Steinmann' on the mirror pointedly.

(Would you not have taken an alias yourself, for such work?)

"Someone hurt her." It had to the least of his concerns right now but he still couldn't get the image out of his mind. A scar like that had to have come from behind, or from the side. Punishment for a failed mission? Or something unrelated? He'd killed Templars on his missions, stabbed and shot at them and left explosions in his wake. If Lucy had been there...