Kink Meme - Assassin's Creed pt. 4

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Assassin's Creed Kink Meme pt.4

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Clear Skies 5/?

[(Anonymous)]

By now, Becca and Shaun would know something had happened. It was important that Desmond believed they were still free. They knew how and when to run. They'd've taken one look at the empty warehouse and know, and gone to find help from other corners of the underworld. There were more. Becca had told him as much, before saying, with a hint of apology, that they couldn't let any names or details be known to an untested new member.

In case of capture.

It was like red warning letters painted on a glass box with nothing inside. What could they do? He was beginning to understand how small they were, how undermanned and unprepared. The Templars were the people who kept nations in motion. The insurgent cell was a few oddities who could jump from high places and do acrobatics.

Time existed at an adjacent space. At some point, a man in the ubiquitous nondescript uniform of minor government employees opened the door, bearing food and a change of clothes for Desmond in his left hand. Desmond was poised to attack until the man made an admonishing gesture with the tazer in his right.

"Been warned about you," he muttered.

He left. Desmond ate. He watched the sky over the city become stained with orange. He wondered if he had been wrong entirely about what they wanted, and if he would instead be left alone and forgotten here, a relic of an old style of humanity that was no longer relevant. At some point, he must have slept.

Robert was as good as his word.

When he came in the next day, Desmond was leaning his forehead against the cool glass of the window. Cars the size of toys moved silently on the street below. To one side other buildings stood in close, but to the other there was open sky and city, with a distant glint of the bay. He remembered hauling himself up fire escapes, the crunch of gravel under his feet, slamming his elbow into a security guard's face and fleeing with nothing left to stop him.

"You're not trying," Lucy said as she dropped her hands.

"Sure I am."

"Try again." She gestured toward herself. "Come on."

He did. Within fifteen seconds he was facedown on the mat spread out in the center of the warehouse. Lucy extended a hand and helped him up.

"You can't just go through the motions. You have to really try to hit me."

Desmond tried to imagine his fist smashing into her serious, pretty face. He looked down. "I just can't do it."

"You can. For us, the only block is mental."

"What does that mean?"

Shaun answered from by the table they'd pushed off to the side, where he was drinking tea and pretending to read something while he watched them. "It means you've got no excuse for being a pansy."

"Yeah, thanks. That helps a lot."

"We're conditioned from birth never to hurt anyone," said Lucy, ignoring the interruption. "But sometimes it's necessary, and you need to know how."

Desmond shook his head. "I don't know. It doesn't feel right to try to hit a woman."

Shaun's eyes rolled. "I'm sure your chivalry is appreciated by the woman who's been effortlessly kicking your arse for the past half hour."

"I have an idea." Lucy's face brightened. "Try hitting Shaun."

"Me? Why not Clay? He's a man!"

"What are you so worried about?" said Clay, who was sprawled over a crate and usually listening when you thought he wasn't. "He's just a pansy."

After the show of reluctance, Shaun got invested into the effort, coming out with strings of increasingly colorful invective. It was a particularly creative one about his parentage that finally inspired Desmond to swing for his face with full commitment.

Clay crowed, and Lucy gave a nod of approval. Shaun levered himself up from the mat and gingerly touched his jaw.

"Not bad," he admitted. "For a novice."

Then they really got started.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" said Robert from behind him.

Desmond didn't turn around. He knew what he'd see. The same black suit, tie, earpiece, fucking red and white fucking pin. His breath fogged the glass, cleared, and fogged it again.

"Before the revolution, every year five hundred people were murdered here. That was less than many places. They bled their lives out, alone, on those streets. Now, if you see a woman walking through Brooklyn in the middle of the night and ask her if she is afraid, she will say, 'Of what?'"

"Because there's nobody left," said Desmond. A traffic light turned red at the corner below. "They're as safe as anybody who's kept locked up. They're all prisoners, and you don't even have the decency to let them know it."

"Would they be happier to know?"

"You can't just make that decision for everyone!" Desmond's fist pounded on the glass with a hollow sound. "What gives you the right?"

"Desmond." Robert waited until Desmond looked at him. "When you were captured, what did you think would happen to you here?"

Desmond's neck stiffened and he turned his head to stare at the sky. "I don't know."

"You're lying."

His voice had neither anger or surprise, as though they spoke a script, and Desmond was following his part to the letter. He felt a sudden, heady rush of hatred for this cold, clockwork enforcer.

Robert went on, "You expected to be tortured for information on your co-conspirators, then either killed out of hand or tortured further until your mind broke. Am I wrong?"

Desmond said nothing.

"That isn't going to happen. Because-"

"Because you're the good guys," Desmond cut in venomously.

"Because it doesn't work." The bluntness was as unbalancing as a rug pulled from beneath his feet. "A man under torture will say anything to stop the pain, and that is only useful in the rare case that you can immediately verify the information. It also becomes out of date very quickly. For example, your friends will have moved or changed anything you know about as soon as they learned you were compromised."

That could have meant a lot of things. Desmond's mind latched to one and would not let go.

Shaun and Becca were still free. The Templars were not omniscient, and they were not invincible.

Desmond forced his face to show nothing as he watched the cars threading through the distant streets and vanishing around promontories of glass and steel.

"Thirty years ago," Robert said, "you would have been right. Though it was proved ineffective again and again, people clung to the myth, because it was an illusion that they loved. Human history is a catalogue of the failures of brutality. But they never stopped trying. There is a part of us too deep for reason to reach that loves force for its own sake. There could never be peace until it was quieted."

"You didn't like what people were doing, so you gave the whole species a lobotomy."

Desmond thought he caught a mote of frustration tightening the corner of Robert's eye. It gave him a bite of satisfaction to make a mark on the man's implacability.

"What do you imagine the world was like before, Desmond?"

"Better," he answered recklessly. "Free."

"In that world, if you were caught by the totalitarian regime you imagine us to be, right now your friend would be having his fingernails torn out one by one."

Desmond punched him in the stomach.

It was like hitting a pile of bricks. Robert was a walking wall of muscle. He barely looked surprised. Desmond swung for his face, was blocked, and kept attacking, driving him away from the window.

"Fight back!" he shouted, burning all the dread and confusion of the past days in a burst. "Do something!"

"Calm down," said Robert, blocking each blow and stepping back in measured paces. "There's no point to this."

"You're just one of them, aren't you?" Desmond tried to shatter his kneecap with a stomping kick and was deflected. "You could have a choice, but you gave it up cause it's easier to be a fucking puppet!"

He barely saw Robert's fist before it smashed into his jaw. The floor leapt out from beneath him, then rose up to strike him in the back. Desmond lay there for a minute, staring dizzily up at the ceiling. There was only the sound of his rough breathing and Robert's slow footsteps. The man in the black suit knelt by him.

"Woah," said Desmond, floating somewhere, impressed. "Damn."

"You're going to need to see it for yourself, aren't you. The old world."

"Yeah," said Desmond.

Robert grasped his hand. His was warm and dry.

"Then you'll see."