Walk Into Empty

[madimpossibledreamer]

Happy New Year!
(Notes are in no particular order)
Tyler’s line about having it figured out is also verbatim.
I can promise I’ll put Alice back. I can’t promise she’ll be completely unscathed, but it’s pretty much the same promise I’ve given for Rukh. (Also, you all are very, very lucky the last chapter got into proper Assassin stuff, because her going off on her own was very nearly an 8-day cliffhanger. It’s still kind of a cliffhanger, but. You know. Not quite as bad.)
Desmond is falling back into bad habits. He is actually learning to deal with his panic attacks/flashbacks and is actually honest to himself about the fact that he has trauma now, but he’s going back to the pushing people away to protect them routine because Chandra genuinely spooked him.
Would you look at that, I managed to figure out a way to actually pull in Chen. Even if they’re not taking any of her missions.
Desmond that is how you get a bunch of dead mice on your doorstep...

Main Points: Assassin's Creed/The Secret World

Summary: Desmond makes a decision about pursuing Tyler Freeborn with consequences.
Word Count: 3088
Rating: Teen

 

        The infected CDC members around the house in question are easy enough to clear up. Once they’re inside, Bob seems to be trying to help by investigating every single nook and cranny in the house. At some point, he finds a mouse and then proceeds to chase it around everywhere until he finally manages to catch it against a wall. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with it once it’s dead, though, but he enjoys the pats for being a successful hunter anyway.
        If not for Eagle Vision, Desmond would have been just about as productive, but instead he finds the false bottom to a drawer with another SD card. Actual effort was put into hiding this, for once, though Desmond’s going to guess that’s more with local Illuminati trying to hide secrets than anything recent the Orochi or Tyler pulled—they probably didn’t have too much in the way of resources to add stuff like secret panels after the fact. He’s not too surprised to find that the card is Tyler’s. He’d wonder why the guy had so many if it didn’t seem like he was used to the government or Orochi showing up and taking down blog entries or files, so most likely in completely justified paranoia the man had a bunch of them around to make sure some of the information is likely to survive or go unnoticed. (Desmond’s using Van Wieren’s burner phone to check what’s on it, though; he wasn’t putting a strange SD card into his own phone even though he was pretty sure what he was going to find on it. He’s pretty sure there are ways to put viruses on them, even if Desmond doesn’t know the specifics, and he’s definitely not putting anything past Orochi at this point.)
        Tyler definitely had been following around the ‘guardian hound’, filming a couple dead Draug on the way from a far too close distance. Either the fog is getting to him or he’s been a little too into his work, even compared to Shaun, because compared to the first videos on his blog he’s sounding a little feverish, a little too excited about the existence of the Filth creatures proving himself and his grandfather correct. Which is worrying. He’s still keeping a safe distance at the moment, but combined with Van Wieren’s texts, Desmond’s really concerned.
        In another clip he clarifies that he won’t stop seeking the truth or attempting to share it with the world, even if the army had confiscated a bunch of his notes and equipment from his hideout near the mine. “The people have a right to know,” he states, with the kind of conviction that says he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that it’s a cliché. He’s worked out most of it, the Draug and the fog and the Siren Song and the zombies. It all tallies with what Desmond himself had figured out so far.
        And then one final clip, the one on the SD card Van Wieren took. Her description had been pretty accurate, but then, she’d probably watched the video herself. Tyler himself is calmer, “I’m going on. I think I’ve got it figured out. I think I’ll be okay.” He was wearing a gas mask, earplugs. Thought that would be enough to keep him safe against all of that. That there’s something on the other side of the fog. Desmond has an awful, sinking feeling that it doesn’t matter how confident he’d been, how many precautions he’d taken. Tyler isn’t walking back out of that fog. Not without help, and maybe not even then.
        “We’re going after him, right?” Lydia asks, and if that whole video was a bucket of cold water this is ice. If he goes in after Tyler, the others will come after him, even if he tells them to stay behind, and while the Calculations themselves don’t have limits, he might, particularly if he’s not just protecting himself.
        They’re too late, and worse than that, they’re barely too late, since Van Wieren saw Tyler leave. True, time’s distorted inside the fog. Nothing on Solomon Island works quite right. But any of that should be affecting all of them equally, so the fact that they still hadn’t managed to catch up in time is devastating. Desmond can feel, pushing with his consciousness, hand on Shaun’s amulet, that Tyler is still alive, is still out there, but whatever walks back out of that fog won’t fully be him anymore. Desmond could go after him, but it won’t bring him back. And while he might be able to replicate what he’d done with the janitor, he still has no idea if that saved the guy or if he’d even be able to pull it off without getting all of them lost in, or, well, to the fog. God, Desmond hates this. The idea that if he’d been a little faster—if he hadn’t just stopped at the mansion, or… “We’re going to go back to the CDC camp. Regroup.” His voice is shaking. There’s no point in trying to get through, not while the fog is still there.
        “Maybe...after the fog’s gone?” Lydia asks. The hope in her voice is forced. She’s just hoping that Desmond will tell her that everything’s going to be all right.
        And as much as he doesn’t want to kill their hope, he also doesn’t want to lie to them. “I don’t know that anyone knows what that will look like, but…” He shrugs helplessly. He doesn’t want to leave anyone behind, much less to die, or worse, but pushing the Calculations to try to read closer, to figure out for sure what’s happened to Tyler—
        “Stop, stop!” Nate grabs his shoulders and shakes him. Desmond nearly asks him what’s wrong, but the blood drips into his mouth when he opens it to ask, and Nate’s grip changes to supportive to try to keep him upright. Time feels like it’s missing, just a little. It’s probably more that his perceptions are missing a bit of time, like his brain just whited out under the stress, but that awful certainty is just worse. Desmond doesn’t need to say that out loud for ‘his Agent’ to have gotten the idea, though. “I think that you’re right. We need to go back.”
        Rukh lands on his shoulder again. Desmond hadn’t even felt him taking off. He actually shakes his head like a human in response to a silent inquiry, and if he agrees that there’s no point in going after Tyler, they really should just walk away. Alice grabs his hand again, but this time her grip is a lot tighter. It’s progress in a way; she’s finally starting to care about more than a few, but it’s clearly hurting her, too. Even empathy has its price.
        Marianne Chen obviously is more than a little lonely, because she actually comes running to meet them as fast as she can in her full hazmat suit, babbling on about not expecting to see any of them again and bending down a little slowly to greet Bob, who’s rushing her excitedly. She lets them use one of the tents after Desmond, feeling absolutely exhausted by this point, removes the Filth from one of the corners, as she keeps watching in complete disbelief all the while, before she heads back out to take a few more readings. Nate heads out to discuss a few more things with Marianne—trying to get her to talk about her orders and what the Orochi Group is up to, by the sounds of it; it’s not like the tents are soundproof or anything. Lydia actually manages to fall asleep, even by the look of it, she falls into nightmares pretty quickly. Alice, however, joins Desmond in catching a bite to eat, even if she’s just picking at the energy bar. Rukh already finished his and has started eyeing Alice’s, even though by the look of things Desmond isn’t entirely certain she’d care if he did steal it.
        “What use is free will if it lets innocents die?” Alice’s troubled question isn’t an accusation, but it feels almost as bad as if it were.
        He flinches, but it’s a good question they had to talk about at some point. “I don’t know if you’ve heard ‘nothing is true; everything is permitted’.”
        She shakes her head. So she hadn’t seen everything. Maybe someday she’ll tell him what she did see.
        “It’s an Assassin thing. We’re free to choose our actions, but those consequences are ours, too. The world is imperfect, and so are we. Everything is a choice—following orders or refusing to take action included. The world is full of a lot of things that are done a certain way just because that’s how they’ve been done, but if that gets disrupted…” He suddenly thinks of this whole island, how fast it had gone from at least the appearance of normal life to anything but. “Sometimes there’s no good choice, only a decision between bad and worse.”
        Alice is frowning, absent-mindedly putting her head on her hand. “I...will try to understand.” She pats his arm, grabbing a sleeping bag from the pile. “Good night, Desmond.”
        “Good night,” he responds, feeling more than ever how empty the words are.

        Marianne actually tries to talk to him the next morning when he’s having breakfast and trying to figure out the next step. Maybe the trailer park? He probably should head there sooner or later. “It was actually worse under the last President.”
        Desmond eyes her skeptically. He’s had a chance to look at the files on one of the laptops lying around. “How does it get worse than ‘abandon the civilians to their fate’?”
        “Well, um, they weren’t so explicit about it. More conservative administrations tend to be more, you know, ‘what’s in it for me’ rather than ‘power to the people’. Based on my own limited data of my own career, of course, but I’m not new at this! I actually have a theory about that—it’s what we do, you know, when we’re not gathering data. Two theories, really. See, I can’t show you the original orders, but they were...replaced. A couple days after everyone else went to go gather data from the house over there, or from the swamp behind me, or go coordinate with Orochi, and...none of them came back.” She’s obviously in some kind of shock, though from how carefully Nate and Lydia had been treating her to start with before loosening up, she might be at least starting to get used to her position. “It could be Orochi. They’re capable of it, for sure, but I don’t know why they’d even go the stealth route. We’re supposed to be supporting Orochi operations to quarantine the island, not the other way around, so there’s no real reason for them to not just order us around. They haven’t been doing that the entire time we’ve been here, but I figured...they’d start eventually, right? More to the point, though, I—didn’t leave the camp, but—the infection, it hit the Orochi camp, right?”
        It’s not like he’s under any obligation to keep secrets. Sure, maybe Chandra would want him not to mention this, but he’s already writing off the camp and it’s not like Marianne is likely to leak any of this, either. If anything, she’s the kind of person to fold under blackmail or even the hint of blackmail, even if she wants the truth to get out. “Some parts of it, yeah. Everyone that wasn’t infected hunkered down, it looked like.”
        “See, and they thought that just...shutting us off when everything went wrong would help.” Marianne shivers. “We were all deployed days before any of this went down. Do you know what it’s like to look for an outbreak that hasn’t even started yet? I bet they’re telling anyone they actually bother to talk to that they’re working with the CDC, though. That they’re here under government orders. I don’t even know if anyone planned on us making it through, given how little concern anyone has for us when I try to report in.
        That’s something Desmond hadn’t known, but at the same time, he can’t picture Beaumont working with the government, or, probably, Orochi. “They’re definitely trying to throw around their authority as helping out the CDC, yeah. How do you think they knew?”
        “My guess—they brought in one of those Filth-infected people in a helicopter. Started experimenting on them, and there’s activity going down at the mine, too, and that swamp over there, between us and the Franklin Mansion? That’s from the mine. And it clearly has high levels of Filth contamination. The mine’s not supposed to be active right now. I think they knew there was a high chance of a Filth breakout because they thought they might cause it, but to suppress anyone from figuring out the truth, they’re using us.” So they’d been expecting the Filth zombies, but the fog probably caught them by surprise, because that part wasn’t them. Assuming her guess is correct. She gets up and starts pacing nervously. “Filth is...tricky. Everything we’ve learned before this suggests that the only cure is prevention. You can halt an infection for a while; we have supplies for that—”
        “Maybe we should get those to the Sheriff’s Department,” Nate suggests, glancing in and then ducking back out before he even gets an answer.
        She responds anyway, but she directs all of that to Desmond. “Maybe. I mean, it’s against orders, but at this point when I get back I could probably tell them everything was lost with the Filth, or maybe one of those weird big blue lobstermen attacking, and they’d have trouble proving otherwise. I don’t think the townspeople would talk.” If not for the circumstances, Desmond would find it funnier that he’s not the only one calling them blue lobster people. “...Assuming I get back. But it’s just...you’re buying time, like a particularly aggressive cancer. Sooner or later, it’ll come back. It doesn’t even just affect organics. We got some on some of our equipment and it started acting funny, so we threw that into the swamp too. So yeah, those are my theories: either some computer on our network got infected, or one of the infected team members entered it themselves.”
        But it’s not like it’s corrupting the data at random. What Desmond had seen was actual coherent sentences. He’d like to say that actual humans wouldn’t write them, but he’s seen Abstergo. “That assumes some sort of intelligence.”
        “That’s actually one of the more fascinating things with the Filth, too—it doesn’t affect everybody in the same way. You’ve heard some of them out there, haven’t you, yelling about the most mundane stuff, like shopping lists, in the creepiest voices? Lost to ordinary concerns. There’s definitely a psychological component to the infections—there always is, you ever hear of people giving up in the hospital and just going poof—but from what we can tell it amplifies those dark thoughts, drowns them out.” Which...might actually mean the Park and Winter were using the Filth in a limited way. Given that he’d probably been tapping into the Filth to power his machine, that makes sense. “Most of the infected don’t tend to be too intelligent, but that can be tailored. The biggest ones, for example, actually lose mass in their brain and gain a whole lot in muscle. It’s like it’s...experimenting. That could just be me ascribing intelligence to something inanimate and it’s really a matter of specific material factors we haven’t managed to track down yet, but...it feels malicious.” Desmond’s felt that too, and—yeah, okay, maybe John could direct it somehow. The change in orders specifically could be a particularly sinister prank, not really meant to be taken seriously. Before he can voice that possibility, though, Nate opens the tent flaps again, this time a lot harsher.
        “You haven’t seen Alice, have you?” Nate asks, trying not to sound like he’s panicking. Desmond’s stomach sinks.
        Marianne gasps. “I’d...actually been looking for one of my gas masks all morning, one of the smallest ones. I think they packed in a child’s one by mistake, since it’s not like we were supposed to be issuing any of our equipment to civilians...I’d just been looking for it when...”
        Desmond tunes her out. The news about Tyler Freeborn had been bad enough, but the chance of getting him back alive was pretty low. Alice hasn’t been gone for that long. Desmond could deny it, could try to tell himself that she wasn’t trying to be helpful, trying to prove herself, trying to make up for missing the cameras like he had or that she was useful and didn’t deserve to be shut out like he’d been doing, but he’d be lying to himself and wasting precious time they don’t have. They don’t have time for blame. “You’re going to be missing another one, but we’ll be returning both if we can help it.” Rukh flies to his shoulder immediately, refusing to be left behind again. “Only if you’re confident you’ll be fine with the fog, buddy,” he insists, and Rukh cocks his head before croaking once, bobbing his head in a nod.
        “But going into the fog out there, it’s…” Marianne begins, and then at just a look swallows the rest of her sentence. “I guess if anyone can do it, the guy who can make the Filth go away as a party trick can. I’ll grab you a mask, and one of the injections, but, um. Be careful and be quick. It’s supposed to last for 48 hours but I don’t know what will happen on exposure to such high concentrations of Filth.” She pauses and then adds, “...We’ve also tested these on animals. Dosing is tricky and we don’t have time for anything too thorough, but we can at least weigh him and do a quick calculation based on that.”
        It doesn’t take too long, and Rukh is relatively cooperative, though it’s clear he’s a little impatient. Desmond gets that.
        Desmond takes a breath through the mask, hand feeling cold and empty, reaches out for the distant, slightly muffled feeling of Alice (but she’s still there, she’s still alive, and she’ll stay that way), and anchors that feeling like a beacon, following the slope down to the river, which he follows out underneath the bridge and then steps out into the clammy fog.