Bring You Down

[madimpossibledreamer]

Note: because the next two-three weeks are going to majorly suck, I am planning on posting a few extras including lore entries before we get going to Solomon Island. I have part of the first chapter already written, but will probably not have time to pull that together into a full chapter during that time. (I also might disappear entirely, and if so, know that it’s just a temporary blip in the schedule.)
Also, we have made it to the end of the prologue!  Thanks for sticking with me, and stay tuned for Echoes from an Endless Night, the next installment.

Main Points:
Assassin's Creed/The Secret World
Summary: Desmond finds out even Agartha isn't entirely safe.
Word Count: 1520
Rating: Teen

 

         It’d be easy to lie, say he’s not pretty much full-on sulking, but he is. The thing is, Shaun had a point. The generational war had been pretty much baked into the Templars and Assassins and so at some point it’d become easy to generalize, to start blaming them all for things done hundreds of years ago, but he’s gotta remember ones like Maria. It’s not everyone, and yeah, he can imagine Shaun way back then, arguing against it until hoarse. If he was overridden, yeah, he’d probably go along with it, but he wouldn’t back down until the very end and then be there with a hundred smug ‘I told you so’ variations the moment something went wrong. Sure, it’d also be easy to say he didn’t have to be such an asshole about it, but—y’know, whatever, this is Shaun, what had he been expecting?
         And then there’s the realization that Shaun liked him, and probably in more than just a one-night stand kinda way or he totally would have gone for it. Desmond had been hung up on Lucy, and then she died, and it’s hard to say whether Shaun being into guys in this world is a new thing or whether they’d both been a big complicated bundle of issues, anxiety, and sarcasm. There’d been hints, but he hadn’t been kidding to Rebecca. He’d had one instance of reading the room wrong at his first job, and the woman had been so upset that he’d resolved never to make someone feel like that again even if it cost him, because that sucked. Learning that he was right, at least about this one, that Shaun liked him, it’s an ego boost for sure. He likes Shaun and Rebecca, had back then too. Though he gets the feeling, and this is a weird one, that Rebecca’s actually a lesbian or at least leans toward women here, when back—he’s gotta figure out a better phrase than ‘in the world he came from’, but doesn’t have any bright ideas, here—they’d had a conversation in which Rebecca was pointedly loud about being really enthusiastic about discovering he was bi, just like her. Thinking back it was probably directly pointed at Shaun and she was playing wingwoman, but there’s no way to confirm that, now. But he’s probably not getting that threesome, which is fine. It’d been more of a fantasy than anything anyway, and he probably would’ve been running away from his problems trying to forget the pain of losing Lucy, never mind how she died. It hadn’t been his fault, but kinda hard not to feel responsible when it was your hand and your blade that killed her. He wasn’t going to screw up saving the world just ‘cause he couldn’t keep it in his pants.
         Maybe he’s cockblocked himself, with the argument they'd just had. Probably not; Shaun seems like the kind of guy who’d at least have come to expect disagreements with anyone he started dating. The Brit really liked to debate, and yeah, he could be an asshole, and just because Desmond likes that, most of the time, doesn’t mean there aren’t occasions where that could rub him the wrong way, case in point, so yeah, pretty much inevitable and probably not too big of an issue. At the same time, though, he’s suddenly realizing it’d be really complicated to get into a relationship now, especially with someone as bright as Shaun. Sure, he and Rebecca have been really good so far at writing off anything weird as ‘oh hey there’s more of that Weird Dragon Experiment stuff’ or maybe ‘Cultist Experimentation’, but if he got into a relationship, there would be more that he couldn’t say, and he’d feel guilty, and Shaun’s a bright guy and would notice at some point. It’d be nice and he won’t say he isn’t appreciating unexpectedly supportive Shaun, but he’s trying to keep his expectations low, because it’s really hard to guess how this one is gonna work out and there are probably about a million ways this can go wrong.
         And then there’s also the fact that he’s kind of a people person. Sure, there’s tons of Bees everywhere, but he doesn’t particularly want to talk to them, because he doesn’t know where he stands. It hasn’t been too long and already he’s missing just being able to talk about music with Rebecca and history with Shaun.
         He’s walking around the edge of one of the platforms, hood up for ‘a proper sulk’, as Shaun would put it, when he notices something far below that captures his attention, and he squints.
         Agartha is big and gold and hurts the eyes in Eagle Vision. Yeah, so far good with the basics. But there’s a section down there nearly out of sight that isn’t doing that, which instantly gives him a bad feeling.
         From what people have said, this is basically the World Tree, so if there’s a section that looks like it’s not doing too good, that doesn’t bode well. He leans forward, trying to get a better look, turning on Eagle Vision even though it’s absolutely going to give him a headache later—
         He’s falling. A flash of red. There’s no platform below him, not for thousands of miles, and by that point he’ll be dead when he hits the ground, and he really, really doesn’t want to figure out if he can come back or this was all just a cosmic joke, just to bring him back to kill him again.
         I don’t want to die!
         And then a voice in his ear even as he falls. “Then don’t.”
         ...Altaïr?
         His arm flares, burning—it actually hurts, this time, though it’s got nothing on when he’d actually died, and his anchor-thing is glowing through his pocket, and suddenly he’s stumbling back onto the platform, probably slightly visibly panicked. The blue-haired Illuminati walking up to the portal to New York just raises an eyebrow at him and continues on with her day.
         Well. Okay. That confirms a few things.
         One, he had been trying, really, really hard not to think about it, but this basically confirms that he has been messing around with the Calculations all this time. His new power? It’s all the Calculations. That’s why ‘going invisible’ works like the Apple, that’s why Shaun’s expert analysis was that he’d been asking the world to give him things, because, fundamentally, that’s what he’d been doing. Sure, he doesn’t have the fine control he did when actually connected to the system before dying, but it’s not just like he’s got an Apple fused into his arm, or something, it’s Isu tech all the way down.  Though he's not sure what the thing with Altaïr's voice was about.
         He concentrates. A God-Killer weapon doesn’t appear in his hand. So it isn’t going to be that easy, figures. So he can’t do anything too complicated, probably because it’d make his brain explode or something actually trying to get it to work.
         Two, well, he’s probably not fully human anymore any more than the Bees are. Well, he’d kinda known that before. Eagle Vision is Isu genetics. But dying had...activated it, or something, or being connected to the system had, whatever.
         And it’s not like he can confirm this either way. He still doesn’t know if he’ll survive being killed again. But he can teleport away right before a lethal blow, which is something the Bees can’t do, and most probably wouldn’t bother to do anyway, given their kind of lackadaisical attitude toward dying.
         Third, his feeling that he’d be attacked again the second he left London? He’d been slightly off, but he hadn’t been wrong, either. The red had confirmed this had been a murder attempt, and, again, he’s got to wonder why. If they knew he wasn’t a normal Bee, maybe they’d think they could pull it off, but most Bees would just die and walk it off, and apparently it can pull even the body back to the Anima Well, somehow, though that seems like it takes more effort or everyone would be doing it. He’s seen some of the younger Bees making a game of jumping off, and despite the fact he’s not sure if there even is a platform or branch below them anywhere, they do come out of the Anima Well, seemingly no worse for wear.
         Fourth—okay, yep, his head is going to absolutely murder him for this, but no red is visible anywhere in Agartha he can see, so he’s still standing behind his ‘regular hitman’ theory.
         Fifth, he’s going to seek out some ibuprofin or something even if he’ll probably get some weird looks for being a Bee trying to find such things, because why not just ‘die and respawn’. It’s...not even as if he doesn’t get it; he absolutely has done it on purpose just to reset some things because they were being aggravating in the Animus, but still, it starts getting really weird when you’re applying it to the real world.
         Sixth, Solomon Island sounds lovely this time of year.