“The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.” – Che Guevara
~ ~ ~
When Desmond wakes, there are three things that he notices immediately. He is no longer by the cave, his head hurts like a son of a bitch, and he is lying on something soft, a little smelly, and somewhat scratchy. Some kind of bedroll, he thinks; made of wool that is a little too new, as it still has a vague smell of lanolin to it.
He blinks his eyes, sits up too fast and immediately grabs his head and groans.
Someone speaks, a soft feminine voice, and then there is a small hand dabbing at his forehead with a wet cloth. Desmond wipes the sand out of his eyes and takes in a deep breath and looks around. There is a native girl, no older than 13 tending to him. She is wearing a simple dress made of deerskin, decorated with glass beads. Beaded moccasins cover her feet, and her long hair has been split and braided.
“Onega Onigiria,” The young girl says, handing him a clay cup filled with water.
Desmond takes it and nods gratefully, downing the contents in one go. The water is lukewarm, but good. She refills his cup with water from a clay bowl, and motions for him to drink more slowly.
A cursory look at his surroundings reveals to him that he is inside one of the Kanien'keha:ka longhouses. There are a handful of other women and children in here with him, some of whom are staring at him, blinking owlishly wide eyes in curiosity. A few of the other women are weaving baskets together in small circles. Others are caring for the youngest of the children in the longhouse.
Noticing that he is awake now, some of the other youth come closer. One of the boys is bold enough to touch the sole of his sneaker, yet backs away quickly when Desmond pulls his foot back and slides it underneath his leg. He is suddenly very aware of how anachronistic everything about him is, and he's not really sure what to do about it. Best to inventory everything, and worry about it later.
He takes stock of himself, much to the curiosity of his growing audience. He didn't have much with him when they placed the key in the wall and opened the inner room of the precursor temple, but there were many things that a modern assassin kept on his body at all times. For example his watch; at first appearance it appears just to be a simple, solar powered digital watch. A Casio. A more thorough look would reveal a tiny transmitter, and GPS locator chip, neither of which would be any use to him in his current predicament; it wasn't as if dad would be able to send an evac team to pull his ass out of this particular fire.
Desmond takes the watch off of his wrist and shoves it in the left pocket of his hoodie, which also contains his iphone and ear buds. The iphone is fully charged.
'Yeah. Gonna shut that puppy off right now.'
The phone makes a trilling sound as he shuts it off, and most of the kids make a squeaking noise and scatter, except for the girl who had given him water. She looks very uneasy, however, so Desmond smiles at her, as he continues to take stock of his belongings. In his right hoodie pocket there is a small Glock 23; lightweight and easily concealed, and has stopping power, but you'd need to put a bullet through someone's eye to actually kill them. For a well-trained assassin like Desmond, that was a non-issue. He leaves the gun alone and moves to his jeans.
He has a ceramic switchblade in his front jean pocket that, under casual observance under an airport x-ray, appears to be a pack of gum. There is even a fake label attached to it. The blade itself is released on a trigger mechanism, and there are no metal parts. It is weapon that could be easily carried onto an airplane, and one that is sharp enough to sever a carotid artery in a pinch. He doesn't know how much use he is going to get out of it here, but he takes stock of it anyway and puts it back.
He pulls his wallet out of his back pocket, and flips through it. He has a few fake ID cards, a platinum Visa in the name of “Noah Fence” – evidence of Shawn's very regrettable British sense of humor – and a total of seven dollars and thirty seven cents. He takes one of the dollar bills out, frowns at the picture of George Washington as if his current predicament was all his fault, then shoves the whole lot back into his jeans.
He then checks his hidden blades to ensure that they are still functional. The young girl who is minding him takes great interest in this, tilting her head to watch as he actives the spring release mechanism. She seems surprised when the blade appears, leaving Desmond to wonder for a moment if 'ole Ratonhnhaké:ton ever bothered to show his old friends some of his new toys.
“Á:share!” The young girl says, pointing to his blade.
Desmond tries to repeat the word, fails miserably, and the girl giggles. He smiles, retracts his blades, and slowly gets to his feet.
“Desmond,” he says, pointing to himself.
“Desmond,” the girl repeats perfectly. “Desmond... come.”
“You understand English?” He asks, but the girl just tugs at his sleeve and motions for him to follow. She leads him out of the longhouse, where a cacophony of sounds and smells assail his senses, and the glare of the sun is too bright in his eyes. For the first time, he sees some of the men of the tribe, and they are fierce and imposing in a way he never experienced while in the animus.
And, also, they smell. Every single one of them. He can't walk by anyone without getting a strong odor of human sweat, and it takes everything he has not to gag. His mind reminds him that this is the 1700s, Axe body wash and deodorant doesn't yet exist, and what did you expect?
His inner monologue sounds British and distinctly like Shawn. So he doesn't feel any guilt when he quietly tells his inner monologue to shut the hell up.
The girl leads him to a fire pit, before taking off to who knows where. Ezio is already there, deep in conversation with a young Mohawk woman, much to the consternation of a couple of nearby young Mohawk men. Desmond's not sure what he is saying, but it's enough to have the girl giggling and blushing, and the Mohawk warriors gripping their tomahawks a bit too tightly.
Desmond clears his throat, and Ezio looks up.
“Ah, Desmond. Finished with your beauty sleep, then?”
Desmond blinks, because –what?
“You understand English now?”
The corners of Ezio's mouth pull into a frown as the Italian shakes his head.
“Yes... I took it from you, but... it was already there.”
Huh?
“But --”
“Don't ask me to explain, brother. I cannot. There is a consort of musicians in my head, and they are all out of tune.” Ezio places a hand against his forehead and winces.
Desmond can relate. His own head is still throbbing and pulsing. He sighs, and sits across from the other assassin. But he can't relax, and the questions start rolling out of him, almost on their own.
“How did we get here? How long have I been out? What do you know? What do you remember?”
“Easy, my friend,” Ezio laughs, moving to sit next to him. The native girl sighs in disappointment, and Ezio winks at her.
“My dear, could you inform your clan mother that my friend is awake?” Ezio asks her, charm dripping from every syllable.
“Of course,” the girl responds, a fierce blush covering her dark neck and cheeks, and then they are alone.
“Do they all understand English?” Desmond asks curiously.
“I have only spoken with the Clan Mother and some of the young ladies,” Ezio answers, smirking. “For some reason, the men seem wary of me.”
“I can't imagine why,” Desmond deadpans.
“Most of them understand some,” Ezio continues as if he hadn't spoken, “but one does not need to speak the same language to talk to a woman.”
“I bet,” Desmond responds, idly taking a stick and poking at the fire, and pointedly looking away from Ezio.
Trying to make his mind accept that he is really sitting in the middle of the frontier with his centuries dead ancestor is making his headache worse. The reality he has awoken in is so surreal, he can't make sense of it. He always fantasized about meeting one of his ancestors in person. Had always admired Ezio in particular, had even dreamt of him on occasion, and here he was, every bit as suave and charming in real life as in the animus.
Everything that Desmond was not.
Desmond flushes, clears his throat, and tries to ignore the curious look directed towards him.
“So... uhh... how long was I out?”
“Three days. I was out for two. I woke up here, as did you. The cave outside of where we were discovered is considered a holy place to these people. They came investigating after cave collapsed, found us and brought us here. Their Clan Mother believes that we were sent by the spirits.”
“One of them, at any rate,” Desmond replies with a snort. “I still can't believe that this is real... I feel like I am going to wake up in the animus at any moment.”
Ezio clasps his shoulder.
“And I feel as if I am going to open my eyes and find myself deep in the heart of the Vatican.”
“So, what do you remember?” Desmond asks again, curious. Mostly because he's not sure exactly what Ezio actually is, or what he himself is for that matter. Are they still human? Constructs of the first civilization? His head hurts, and he is starting to get a little rank, all human enough, he supposes.
Still, he doesn't kid himself, knows he can't even begin to comprehend the technology of Minerva's race. They had the ability to reach through time itself, and yet not a one of them went back.
Except him and... whatever Ezio was. A copy, he thinks. He knows the apple was capable of producing clones. Ezio had used that technique himself when fighting against Borgio.
Minerva had asked to see the apple after Ezio's fight. She claimed that she had 'borrowed' something, stored it in the Tree, and it found its way into the precursor network, and eventually, Abstergos.
Desmond is not a thinker, not like Shawn and Rebecca and even his father, but he can put two and two together to realize that Abstergo most likely knew the location of at least one of the lesser temples; enough to interface their own systems with precursor technology. Enough for the copy of Ezio – Erudito– to get loose amongst Abstergo's own network and wreck havoc.
And that was a terrifying thought, because he had almost set Juno loose upon the world. What if she had had the same ability – and she was learning, wasn't she, to network with their own systems? Had sent emails, even?
No. That's not the future anymore, he put paid to all that – inadvertently or not – when he touched the Tree and wished for change. And now there is no more Tree and no more Juno, and the world is well and truly fucked if he can't find a way to make peace amongst the Templars and the Assassins, so that they could combine their resources to create a solution in only a few centuries that a race, thousands of years ahead of his own time technologically, could not.
No pressure, Desmond. None at all.
Ezio doesn't speak for sometime, and when he does, his voice is heavy with emotion.
“What do I remember? That's an interesting question, Desmond. And not easy to answer.
Ezio takes a deep breath before continuing.
“I remember everything of my life up until meeting Minerva. I have memories past that, but they are as if I were viewing them through glass. It is not easy to explain. I have memories of being an old man. Of marriage and children. I have memories of finding the bones of the great eagle of Masyaf, of laying them to rest, and of speaking to you, though I could not see you – but those memories are disconnected; unclear. There are even periods of my life in which I must have lived, yet of which I have no memories of at all”
“From the animus,” Desmond interjects. “You remember my experiences of your memories.”
Ezio nods and continues.
“That would appear to be so. I also have some memories which appear to be yours, some of this assassin that we are to find, some of his father's, and some of Altair's.”
Ezio sighs and squeezes his arm, before continuing.
“I do not understand half of the memories I have, Desmond. And I do not wish to dwell on them either, they raise some... uncomfortable questions that I cannot answer.”
Ezio grabs both of his shoulders and forces Desmond to face him.
“I know that I am here for a reason, as are you. I know that my whole life was spent seeking answers; seeking a reason for the conflicts in which I found always found myself the center of. But I am just one man, and I have always known that I would never be able to answer those questions on my own. Fate has seemed fit to put me with you, however, and you will do what I could not.”
Desmond swallows, feels Ezio's breath ghost against the side of his face, as Ezio's eyes glow with a fierce intensity.
“I am your blade, Desmond Miles. Wield me as you see fit.”
Fill: Every hour God sends, part 3
~ ~ ~
When Desmond wakes, there are three things that he notices immediately. He is no longer by the cave, his head hurts like a son of a bitch, and he is lying on something soft, a little smelly, and somewhat scratchy. Some kind of bedroll, he thinks; made of wool that is a little too new, as it still has a vague smell of lanolin to it.
He blinks his eyes, sits up too fast and immediately grabs his head and groans.
Someone speaks, a soft feminine voice, and then there is a small hand dabbing at his forehead with a wet cloth. Desmond wipes the sand out of his eyes and takes in a deep breath and looks around. There is a native girl, no older than 13 tending to him. She is wearing a simple dress made of deerskin, decorated with glass beads. Beaded moccasins cover her feet, and her long hair has been split and braided.
“Onega Onigiria,” The young girl says, handing him a clay cup filled with water.
Desmond takes it and nods gratefully, downing the contents in one go. The water is lukewarm, but good. She refills his cup with water from a clay bowl, and motions for him to drink more slowly.
A cursory look at his surroundings reveals to him that he is inside one of the Kanien'keha:ka longhouses. There are a handful of other women and children in here with him, some of whom are staring at him, blinking owlishly wide eyes in curiosity. A few of the other women are weaving baskets together in small circles. Others are caring for the youngest of the children in the longhouse.
Noticing that he is awake now, some of the other youth come closer. One of the boys is bold enough to touch the sole of his sneaker, yet backs away quickly when Desmond pulls his foot back and slides it underneath his leg. He is suddenly very aware of how anachronistic everything about him is, and he's not really sure what to do about it. Best to inventory everything, and worry about it later.
He takes stock of himself, much to the curiosity of his growing audience. He didn't have much with him when they placed the key in the wall and opened the inner room of the precursor temple, but there were many things that a modern assassin kept on his body at all times. For example his watch; at first appearance it appears just to be a simple, solar powered digital watch. A Casio. A more thorough look would reveal a tiny transmitter, and GPS locator chip, neither of which would be any use to him in his current predicament; it wasn't as if dad would be able to send an evac team to pull his ass out of this particular fire.
Desmond takes the watch off of his wrist and shoves it in the left pocket of his hoodie, which also contains his iphone and ear buds. The iphone is fully charged.
'Yeah. Gonna shut that puppy off right now.'
The phone makes a trilling sound as he shuts it off, and most of the kids make a squeaking noise and scatter, except for the girl who had given him water. She looks very uneasy, however, so Desmond smiles at her, as he continues to take stock of his belongings. In his right hoodie pocket there is a small Glock 23; lightweight and easily concealed, and has stopping power, but you'd need to put a bullet through someone's eye to actually kill them. For a well-trained assassin like Desmond, that was a non-issue. He leaves the gun alone and moves to his jeans.
He has a ceramic switchblade in his front jean pocket that, under casual observance under an airport x-ray, appears to be a pack of gum. There is even a fake label attached to it. The blade itself is released on a trigger mechanism, and there are no metal parts. It is weapon that could be easily carried onto an airplane, and one that is sharp enough to sever a carotid artery in a pinch. He doesn't know how much use he is going to get out of it here, but he takes stock of it anyway and puts it back.
He pulls his wallet out of his back pocket, and flips through it. He has a few fake ID cards, a platinum Visa in the name of “Noah Fence” – evidence of Shawn's very regrettable British sense of humor – and a total of seven dollars and thirty seven cents. He takes one of the dollar bills out, frowns at the picture of George Washington as if his current predicament was all his fault, then shoves the whole lot back into his jeans.
He then checks his hidden blades to ensure that they are still functional. The young girl who is minding him takes great interest in this, tilting her head to watch as he actives the spring release mechanism. She seems surprised when the blade appears, leaving Desmond to wonder for a moment if 'ole Ratonhnhaké:ton ever bothered to show his old friends some of his new toys.
“Á:share!” The young girl says, pointing to his blade.
Desmond tries to repeat the word, fails miserably, and the girl giggles. He smiles, retracts his blades, and slowly gets to his feet.
“Desmond,” he says, pointing to himself.
“Desmond,” the girl repeats perfectly. “Desmond... come.”
“You understand English?” He asks, but the girl just tugs at his sleeve and motions for him to follow. She leads him out of the longhouse, where a cacophony of sounds and smells assail his senses, and the glare of the sun is too bright in his eyes. For the first time, he sees some of the men of the tribe, and they are fierce and imposing in a way he never experienced while in the animus.
And, also, they smell. Every single one of them. He can't walk by anyone without getting a strong odor of human sweat, and it takes everything he has not to gag. His mind reminds him that this is the 1700s, Axe body wash and deodorant doesn't yet exist, and what did you expect?
His inner monologue sounds British and distinctly like Shawn. So he doesn't feel any guilt when he quietly tells his inner monologue to shut the hell up.
The girl leads him to a fire pit, before taking off to who knows where. Ezio is already there, deep in conversation with a young Mohawk woman, much to the consternation of a couple of nearby young Mohawk men. Desmond's not sure what he is saying, but it's enough to have the girl giggling and blushing, and the Mohawk warriors gripping their tomahawks a bit too tightly.
Desmond clears his throat, and Ezio looks up.
“Ah, Desmond. Finished with your beauty sleep, then?”
Desmond blinks, because –what?
“You understand English now?”
The corners of Ezio's mouth pull into a frown as the Italian shakes his head.
“Yes... I took it from you, but... it was already there.”
Huh?
“But --”
“Don't ask me to explain, brother. I cannot. There is a consort of musicians in my head, and they are all out of tune.” Ezio places a hand against his forehead and winces.
Desmond can relate. His own head is still throbbing and pulsing. He sighs, and sits across from the other assassin. But he can't relax, and the questions start rolling out of him, almost on their own.
“How did we get here? How long have I been out? What do you know? What do you remember?”
“Easy, my friend,” Ezio laughs, moving to sit next to him. The native girl sighs in disappointment, and Ezio winks at her.
“My dear, could you inform your clan mother that my friend is awake?” Ezio asks her, charm dripping from every syllable.
“Of course,” the girl responds, a fierce blush covering her dark neck and cheeks, and then they are alone.
“Do they all understand English?” Desmond asks curiously.
“I have only spoken with the Clan Mother and some of the young ladies,” Ezio answers, smirking. “For some reason, the men seem wary of me.”
“I can't imagine why,” Desmond deadpans.
“Most of them understand some,” Ezio continues as if he hadn't spoken, “but one does not need to speak the same language to talk to a woman.”
“I bet,” Desmond responds, idly taking a stick and poking at the fire, and pointedly looking away from Ezio.
Trying to make his mind accept that he is really sitting in the middle of the frontier with his centuries dead ancestor is making his headache worse. The reality he has awoken in is so surreal, he can't make sense of it. He always fantasized about meeting one of his ancestors in person. Had always admired Ezio in particular, had even dreamt of him on occasion, and here he was, every bit as suave and charming in real life as in the animus.
Everything that Desmond was not.
Desmond flushes, clears his throat, and tries to ignore the curious look directed towards him.
“So... uhh... how long was I out?”
“Three days. I was out for two. I woke up here, as did you. The cave outside of where we were discovered is considered a holy place to these people. They came investigating after cave collapsed, found us and brought us here. Their Clan Mother believes that we were sent by the spirits.”
“One of them, at any rate,” Desmond replies with a snort. “I still can't believe that this is real... I feel like I am going to wake up in the animus at any moment.”
Ezio clasps his shoulder.
“And I feel as if I am going to open my eyes and find myself deep in the heart of the Vatican.”
“So, what do you remember?” Desmond asks again, curious. Mostly because he's not sure exactly what Ezio actually is, or what he himself is for that matter. Are they still human? Constructs of the first civilization? His head hurts, and he is starting to get a little rank, all human enough, he supposes.
Still, he doesn't kid himself, knows he can't even begin to comprehend the technology of Minerva's race. They had the ability to reach through time itself, and yet not a one of them went back.
Except him and... whatever Ezio was. A copy, he thinks. He knows the apple was capable of producing clones. Ezio had used that technique himself when fighting against Borgio.
Minerva had asked to see the apple after Ezio's fight. She claimed that she had 'borrowed' something, stored it in the Tree, and it found its way into the precursor network, and eventually, Abstergos.
Desmond is not a thinker, not like Shawn and Rebecca and even his father, but he can put two and two together to realize that Abstergo most likely knew the location of at least one of the lesser temples; enough to interface their own systems with precursor technology. Enough for the copy of Ezio – Erudito– to get loose amongst Abstergo's own network and wreck havoc.
And that was a terrifying thought, because he had almost set Juno loose upon the world. What if she had had the same ability – and she was learning, wasn't she, to network with their own systems? Had sent emails, even?
No. That's not the future anymore, he put paid to all that – inadvertently or not – when he touched the Tree and wished for change. And now there is no more Tree and no more Juno, and the world is well and truly fucked if he can't find a way to make peace amongst the Templars and the Assassins, so that they could combine their resources to create a solution in only a few centuries that a race, thousands of years ahead of his own time technologically, could not.
No pressure, Desmond. None at all.
Ezio doesn't speak for sometime, and when he does, his voice is heavy with emotion.
“What do I remember? That's an interesting question, Desmond. And not easy to answer.
Ezio takes a deep breath before continuing.
“I remember everything of my life up until meeting Minerva. I have memories past that, but they are as if I were viewing them through glass. It is not easy to explain. I have memories of being an old man. Of marriage and children. I have memories of finding the bones of the great eagle of Masyaf, of laying them to rest, and of speaking to you, though I could not see you – but those memories are disconnected; unclear. There are even periods of my life in which I must have lived, yet of which I have no memories of at all”
“From the animus,” Desmond interjects. “You remember my experiences of your memories.”
Ezio nods and continues.
“That would appear to be so. I also have some memories which appear to be yours, some of this assassin that we are to find, some of his father's, and some of Altair's.”
Ezio sighs and squeezes his arm, before continuing.
“I do not understand half of the memories I have, Desmond. And I do not wish to dwell on them either, they raise some... uncomfortable questions that I cannot answer.”
Ezio grabs both of his shoulders and forces Desmond to face him.
“I know that I am here for a reason, as are you. I know that my whole life was spent seeking answers; seeking a reason for the conflicts in which I found always found myself the center of. But I am just one man, and I have always known that I would never be able to answer those questions on my own. Fate has seemed fit to put me with you, however, and you will do what I could not.”
Desmond swallows, feels Ezio's breath ghost against the side of his face, as Ezio's eyes glow with a fierce intensity.
“I am your blade, Desmond Miles. Wield me as you see fit.”