Someone wrote in [personal profile] asscreedkinkmeme 2012-03-27 03:38 am (UTC)

Fill: These Fishes in the Sea, 1/3

Pairings: Ezio/Desmond, Subject 16/Desmond, implied Altair/Malik

These Fishes in the Sea

The world is a vice closing in around him and it is the only thing he knows. It is a pressure all around him, like walls shrinking in on themselves, and it makes everything else seem distant and unreachable; Rebecca and Shaun's voices are distant, a reminder of where – who – he is, but their voices are faint and they get easily lost in the static that is Desmond's mind.

Ezio is easy to become trapped within, easy to lose time in, through missions and assassinations as though they are one. When he stops being able to wake up, when it becomes impossible to open his eyes and step out of the Animus, it becomes harder and harder to distinguish himself from Ezio. There are times when he can't tell which are his memories and which are Ezio's. It starts as something completely underneath their control, and it transforms into something that takes its hold on him and won't let him go.

He has felt this way before. He has gone through these motions before. The first time he had stepped into the Animus, the first time he had looked through Altair's eyes, the confusion and difficulty in separating their lives had been immediate. This feels the same, but he doesn't have an end to help him focus on what is his own life; he can't wake up, can't get out of this dream world, and everything is starting to blend together.

The descent into Altair had been slow, like a dead weight sinking underwater. It had been subtle and controllable and he had never been worried about impossible things happening. He had never had to worry about the impossibility of a memory – of data and numbers and nothing – taking notice of him. There should be nothing that gives him away, nothing that is any different, but there is something unfamiliar underneath his skin and bones that Ezio is starting to notice.

Malik had not noticed – had wrapped himself so wholly around a single person and still had not even seen so much as a glimpse of Desmond. Malik had loved a memory, one that could do nothing but accept, and it had all been in the programming; it is nothing but data. He is a memory that plays out like a recording, over and over again until Desmond forces Altair to do the right things, to put him in the right place so that he will say the right thing.

The Animus is strange though, and it warps memories into something real enough that Desmond feels as though he can reach out and touch them. It burns like something that should remain hidden, like something that should have never been discovered, and it burns, and burns, and burns. The truth is there, just out of Malik's reach – just beyond what he is capable of seeing – and he may recognize that there is something different about Altair, but he cannot voice his concerns; he is only data, only programming from a memory that is just so and cannot change. The Animus is intricate, is a mess of numbers that are impossible to decipher, and Malik may have sensed something was wrong – maybe have sensed something amiss – but there had never been enough to grab hold of.

Ezio is just a memory, but he does not listen to the Animus' programming. He takes the memory apart piece by piece and, when it lays out before him, he sees a glimpse of something that shouldn't have been able to be seen. Ezio had seen a piece of Desmond that shouldn't have been seen and it had caused turmoil – had caused a rift – in the system that had never truly repaired. Him knowing is worse than the burn, worse than anything else, and it is inescapable.

Ezio is learning. He notices that there is something amiss, that there is something there that doesn't belong, and it's been this way since the first time he heard the name 'Desmond.' It is terrifying. They shouldn't know that Desmond is there, they are memories, and they shouldn't-

They're not real.

“How do you know you're real?” Sixteen asks him. He sits on a rock and watches Desmond pace like a cat might watch a mouse. His lips are curled into a smirk that makes Desmond feel uneasy, makes him feel his skin crawl, but he can't really explain why. “What if you are just a corrupted memory, lost in a data stream that someone else is accessing?”



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