madimpossibledreamer | The Embedded Narrative

After Desmond finished his speech, I went “wait a minute, that sounds familiar”. There’s a lot of similarity there with Glenn Yarbrough’s It’s So Easy Not to Try.
Chapter title from Beta-senpai (who is still not beta’ing this whole story as he’s not familiar with Assassin’s Creed but is lending a hand here and there). I also sent him part of the speech and he went “I’m sensing some well-earned hostility there...”
compilation of weirdly 10x more relevant to Desmond than your average TSW character dialogue from Krieg:
“Are you here for a signature? I'll make it out to "Christ almighty," since you're so intent on dying for our sins.”
(He did also mention ‘the buzz fades’. That’s less Desmond-specific, though.)
“I’m a writer. I make millions repeating myself. What’s your excuse?”
“Who would you be, what would you be, without this, without your precious war on evil, without your secret world, your sacred brotherhoods, your ranks and titles and rituals. You’d be just another rat stuck in the race with a dead-end job, living for a paycheck and the weekends.” (...not that Desmond would think that was a bad thing.)
“You soak in it so others don’t have to. You take one for the team.”
“Maybe it’ll be different this time. Maybe you’ll save everyone.”

Main Points: Assassin's Creed/The Secret World
Summary: Desmond finds the clue he needed for Rogêt's vision.
Word Count: 2114
Rating: Teen

“You’re Sam Krieg, right?” Desmond asks, after the man doesn’t make a move to talk, just scribbles a bit in a notebook. He’s purposefully trying to ignore them rather than needle them, which is a little weird. In Desmond’s experience, anyway. Anybody starting off that hostile usually likes to keep it up. Or. Well. Whatever John’s doing. Not that he’s not hostile, but he’s also specifically trying not to be an enemy for some reason.
Krieg could be feeling trapped, or he could be feeling less confident. Not that he probably would leave or kick them out, but now that the options to do either are gone he’s freaking out a little. Desmond would almost say like Malik, but Malik had a good reason to have a grudge, and as far as he knows this guy doesn’t.
“I don’t want your name,” the author retorts, probably just intending to keep calling him Protagonist or something, and that—
That feels like the Isu. Honestly, who’s to say it isn’t, if he’d used an Artifact, if something like Juno was still around, whispering in people’s ears, trying to get them to see humanity the way she does. Though hating humankind isn’t always something that needs a nudge, either. He’s vaguely curious what would happen if he could throw this guy and Machiavelli in a room. It’s not happening, obviously. There’s nothing like Animuses—he still hadn’t learned the plural, had he?—here, as far as he knows, and he’s also fairly sure time travel isn’t a thing. But he still wonders.
Here and now, though, he refuses to let somebody else reduce him down. ‘Cipher.’ ‘Seventeen.’ And now ‘Protagonist’. He’s having none of that. “It’s Desmond,” he insists, getting an irritated look in response.
Antagonizing people is practically Lydia’s favorite hobby, so she quickly follows that up with a cheerful, “Lydia.” Alice is content to just keep staring holes into the back of Krieg’s head, unblinking. Sooner or later even the most unfazed person in the world would probably crack under that kind of pressure.
That doesn’t get a reply, though, so he continues. “So, uh, what brings you to this Maine Island, Krieg?” he continues, only to have the man laugh in response, cold and cruel.
“Same thing that brought you, I’d guess. You’re the adrenaline junkie storm chaser, and I’m the fool journalist with the pen.” It’s interesting that he doesn’t see his writing fiction as anything more than recording events that are actually happening.
Desmond’s not going to dwell on that too much, though. Because there’s something more important there underneath the barbs. “You knew about the fog?” Before it happened, because after there was a pretty quick window before no one was going anywhere after which the Orochi set up their barricade and boats were getting lost trying to come here or to leave.
Krieg takes a quick swig from the bourbon. “I wrote something like that. I don’t remember writing it, but the audiences ate it up.” He tosses a crumpled up piece of paper into the trash can, and as Desmond’s eyes follow the motion, he spots something glowing gold. He leans forward to take a look, trying to see, and the man grabs a different crumpled piece of paper, tossing it to Desmond. “I made a rubbing, before those teens stole it while I was sleeping. Probably just to sell it for booze. They were partying at one of the tourist houses you could rent, near the ocean.” It’s—yeah, it’s a rubbing of a piece of the egg Artifact, now that Desmond’s unfolding it. “Got burned by one of those things once and you just can’t stop collecting them, can you? That’s addiction for you. Trying to hoard misery like there’s a finite amount in the world and it can’t manufacture more.”
“You’re a real downer,” Lydia observes. She’s having fun, and while maybe that kind of detachment isn’t too helpful, she is getting the occasional results, so he’ll let her keep at it. Maybe give her some tips about interrogations later.
He shrugs, not caring about that either. “I’m a former history professor. I come by my cynicism honestly.”
Desmond hates to admit it. “...I actually know a guy that would agree with you.” Though that’s maybe being a bit unfair to Shaun. He’s not this bad, though maybe that’s just familiarity, rather than anything specific about Shaun’s behavior?
Krieg turns his chair to actually face them—just like Shaun, taking the bait and warming to the theme. “Well, my specialty is American history, and take a look around. You’re living in it. The shadows of the past casting a pall over the future. I wasn’t expecting any of this, but I’m not surprised by it either. The zombies, the fog, anything worse, lurking out there. They had it coming.”
Somehow that strikes a nerve for Lydia, because she stops having fun and grows cold, to the point that even with the rain it feels like the temperatures drop a couple degrees. Something with her grandma, maybe, or her parents? Desmond makes a mental note to ask later—not in front of this guy. “No one ‘has it coming’.”
Is being unable to leave a debate alone a professor thing? “It’s human nature. The call of the void. We’re drawn to destruction, like moths to a flame. You got any idea of the history behind Columbus Day? Sure, it’s racist, whitewashes that pretty picket fence behind every picture-perfect house, but you know what’s the real kicker here? It’d been a measure to cut down on racism, get all that anti-Italian nonsense out of our oh-so-perfect nation. We just traded one downtrodden group for another. Prejudice lives in our very blood. Seems like the Morninglight’s moved out here, and I don’t trust them, because you sell someone on an idea and you can convince them the sky is red. Almost-cults are a dime a dozen, built on the pillars of the Puritan ideal of suffering and the American Dream. Endure a little pain now, and your future will be brighter. We’re all either manipulators or pawns, getting someone else to sacrifice themselves for our own well-being or playing hero. MLMs, corporations, the institutions of family, prison, and slavery, all very American. How about another favorite of the horror genre? Indian burial mounds are catharsis and excuse, all rolled into one. A curse is undeserved, because they’re not rolling over and spreading ‘em, like they should, but actually daring to attack their betters. If they wanted us to know where not to trespass, they should have marked it with a cross like God intended. Any damage done after the fact is just self defense, justified in the court of public opinion.”
Alice actually says something—if she’s actually accepting all of this as true, that’s not so good. “The war never ends?” It’s hard to tell from her tone.
Krieg shakes his head. “The war ends when the Hatfields and McCoys are dead.”
Desmond has to step in, now, before Alice just absorbs anything else. “I don’t believe that.”
He manages to be firm enough Krieg doesn’t question it. “Then you’re worse than a protagonist. You’re a goddamn revolutionary, with an animal to show you’re not completely broken and closed off to the world.” Now he’s having to withstand Alice’s and Rukh’s glares. “Got delusions that you can save more than just this little patch of Maine, just stroll up and save the entire world, just like that.”
“We’ll see.” He considers not mentioning it, but with the rain pattering against the roof it just feels right. “You do know trying to shock me isn’t going to work. I was a bartender in New York, for fuck’s sake.”
Sure, Krieg’s a little better with his words than most of the philosophical, mean drunks, but if they’re reducing people down to stereotypes then that’s the right approach. Maybe it is. He’s a little quieter, a little less heated, when he responds this time. “Well, I’ll give you this. I’ve never had a protagonist talk back.”
“I don’t believe that either.” Maybe he’s wrong and seeing things that aren’t there, just because he’d felt a connection to that one book of Krieg’s, but. “Anne did, didn’t she? That’s why you wrote a sequel. She didn’t like her ending any better than I liked mine.”
Krieg looks away. “Well, she was based on my ex-wife. Of course she liked to argue with me.”
He’s curious, Desmond can tell, but he also isn’t going to ask, so Desmond does the honors for him. “Do you want to hear what else I think about you?”
“Go ahead,” the author sneers, like none of this matters. The Borgia had acted the same way, before the end.
So Desmond continues, not bothering to soften his words. “You’re a coward.”
“Excuse me?” The man’s hand is on the gun. An empty threat.
“If you don’t care about other people, if you act like nothing matters, you don’t have to do anything. You can sit here in your ivory tower and let the world rot without lifting a damn finger to do anything more than an empty gesture to make you feel a little better about yourself. You can’t improve anything if you don’t care, and it’s the easy way out.”
Krieg doesn’t just admit defeat there, though. “Would your historian friend agree with you?”
That could hurt. Maybe. If he’d been right. They did have a lot of similarities.
But he’s not, actually, and that realization means so much. “Yeah. He would. Okay, he’d agree with you mostly—bad things happen, humans can be terrible, whatever. He’s terrible with socialization and thinks most other people are a waste of time, partly because he doesn’t think he’s interesting or nice to talk to. And for all that he’s still a thousand times braver than you’ll ever be, because he still dares to think that the world can get better, that he can make a difference. He still dares to make friends and even fall in love. He’s made that choice to be cynical in a way that isn’t easy for him.”
The calculating look on Krieg’s face becomes a little bemused. “Does he know you’re in love with him?”
Christ. He might. Desmond realizes very suddenly how the food he’d asked Chelsea to get could be read, and he’s pretty sure that part of him even intended that. Usually he’s better about flirting intentionally, but he’s been really, really off balance when interacting with Shaun because of completely unrelated things like mind control and nearly dying, so while he still doesn’t want to get into anything under false pretenses until he’s figured out how to tell Shaun he’s not actually from this world and already knew him before this, his subconscious has been making a whole lot of these decisions without him. His throat is suddenly dry. “Who says I’m not a coward?”
“Well, a revolutionary sure isn’t, and you’re fixing to change the world, aren’t you? Make it all better for us poor suffering folks.” For the first time, Krieg’s voice doesn’t sound judgmental. Just thoughtful. “Though maybe that’s something bound up in the revolutionary archetype. You’re so courageous in public life because you don’t think you have anything to lose. That’s how come you could come at me so strongly. It takes one to know one. No one’s ever taught you how to dream for yourself, have they? Poor bastard. Well, take it from an ex-husband—tell him sooner rather than later. Wring every last drop out of that teat of happiness, because it always runs dry before you’re ready to go sober.” He grabs two books from the stack next to the desk and a pen. “To the finest coward and lousiest bartender I’ve had the chance to meet,” he narrates, finishing it off with a flourish of a signature.
He’s trying to help, in his own way. Maybe. It’s hard to tell. Desmond did notice which two he’d grabbed.
“Next time I save the world, I’m sending you a postcard saying ‘I told you so’,” he decides. It sounds like the rain might let up soon. In the meantime, he spots something else. Not quite as Eagle Vision shiny, but he knows someone who would really be happy about it. “Are you using that knife?”
Krieg shrugs. “It’s not mine. Help yourself.” Anybody actually coming out here to work at the lighthouse after everything would probably come prepared, Desmond decides, and anyway Alice leans forward so far in her excitement that she almost falls off the table, so that was probably a good choice.