Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

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 Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad. First. Oldest. Architect of all that was to come, he had no easy life and all the regrets a man could bear carrying to his death. A death he faced alone. In a tomb he once called home. After losing almost everything he learned and loved in life, everything he had fought for, everything he had urged to grow. The death of a man, the birth of a legend, the Eagle of Masyaf who was flightless in the end and oh-so tired. 

 Oh-so old.

 Ready to go.

 Finally, finally, accepting that he had seen enough for one life. Finally. Decades and decades too late.

 And yet. The Apple whirred and glowed one last time for him. Warm under his palm, like nothing had felt in seemingly so, so long. Decades. Before his death, Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad stared into the golden glow of his Apple that one last time and was shown a promise. Of the future. Of all that would come from him; a legacy that would withstand generations - 

 A generational line that would end with a man, standing alone against flames that would consume the world. Deciding at just twenty-five years old that he had seen enough.

 And an old man jolted in protest as the Apple tried to cease glowing, reaching out and grabbing and saying, “No.” 

-----

 Ezio Auditore. Second. Dearest. Prophet of the Isu’s will, he had no easy life and all the questions a man could bear carrying to his death. A death he did not face alone. In a plaza where he had once watched all the other men of his family hang, decades before. He had been vengeance - and a lover, and a charmer, and a father a brother a son. He lived a life beloved. He died beloved too. Too soon.

 Still with too many questions.

 But he had love, and he knew it.

 He was willing to accept it was his time.

 Except, where there was once so much death, there was a golden tree. And a golden figure. And the offer of answers, extended with a glowing hand. Which Ezio took. Because if it was a last reward, he would be a fool to refuse and he was too old to be that fool. He was shown future and past. A promise that it was all working towards something, in that future. It wasn’t for nothing. His family would live, survive, thrive -

 A descendant of his daughter, his sweet Flavia, would one day stand at a pedestal with his hand hovering there, unflinching. Ready to die far too young and far too old and with far too much of this world’s weight resting on his shoulders.

 With no Brotherhood at his back.

 And an old man lurched forward in protest as the tree ceased glowing, reaching out and grabbing and saying, “No!” 

 
-----

 Ratonhnhaké:ton. Last. Wariest. He who fought for liberty, for freedom, who died too soon after being able to yank that hatchet from the post it had been embedded in for years. Who died seeing another home burn, another Mohawk child - his daughter - kneeling in his blood and begging him not to die. Like him, with his mother. He died the youngest. With some of the deepest wounds. And the deepest distrust. 

 He died cursing a fight he’d been a part of that he’d never understood.

 He died unaware of the Isu and their plots, just a pawn they pushed around their board.

 It was time for this pawn to turn to smoke in the flames that were to come.

 But no, because spirits ran beside him. He heard the howling, the snarls, the cries, the whistles of a wind through those woods he had hunted in. Called his. His home. He followed them, running like said wind, so brisk and so strong. Letting the spirits lead him to a place of mist and souls. There was a promise to be found in those mists. That his daughter would live, would learn, would continue - 

 That a few generations after him would come another child, even more horribly wary than him and hurt by a father worse than Haytham, standing over his grave and shedding the precious few tears he would allow himself to before turning and walking so easily to his death.

 With no love for life left in him.

 And a wary man would charge forward in protest as the mists faded, reaching out and grabbing and saying, “No - ” 

 -----

 Desmond Miles stood before the Eye. Palm hovering over its surface, with its glowing lines, reminiscent of so many other Pieces of Eden he had held in his hands and in his ancestors’ hands. He let it hover. He’d gotten a grand total of a whole minute to come to terms with his choice, and he’d even been left alone to for it. Him? Or the Earth. It wasn’t really a question. Not to this Assassin. He’d literally been born for this.

To die.

At this exact time, on this exact day, for this exact goal. Die, so millions survive. Billions. Trillions. All the world…aside from one. Him. A small price to pay, right? 

Maybe he didn’t need the full minute. Desmond had accepted he was going to die a while ago. Somewhere between being drugged in that back alley behind Bad Weather and now - or between then and Clay ceasing to exist. Subject Sixteen. The only one that understood him, this, everything about what Desmond Miles was, and about the cross he was carefully created to bear.

 Somewhere between opening his eyes with the Sight for the very first time, and synchronizing with Ratonhnhaké:ton for the last time. Somewhere between there, Desmond had accepted there wasn’t just going to be an ‘end’ to this. There wasn’t going to be him, going home to that crappy New York apartment that was sparse but was his. And there wasn’t going to be him buying that new bike, because he definitely deserved it after all the shit he’d been through. And there wasn’t going to be him visiting Monterrigioni just one more time, because it was the closest thing he’d ever come to feeling fully at home somewhere in his life.

 He’d never seek out Masyaf, to discover if Altaïr was given a proper burial.

 He’d never visit Tiber Island, that villa Ezio called home for decades while rebuilding the Assassins and carving out a family for himself once more in the people he charmed into wearing hidden blades.

 He’d never run the woods around the Grand Temple, listening to wolves howl at bright moons and eagles cry as they plucked fish from the rivers.

 All those small things he’d dangerously hoped he might be able to do one day, were hopeless now. Because his palm was hovering over the Eye. And the sun’s flares were about to burn the whole world. And trillions would die, if he didn’t die in their place. And he’d been left there, all alone, to come to terms with what he had to do after nearly a year of running for his life - only to face death anyways. 

 But this was always where he was meant to wind up.

 Juno promised it would be painless, but he doubted she cared at all. Desmond could already feel the prickle of needles on the skin of his palm. He was way too pale, and bony now, after so long in a coma. In the Animus. The prickling made him feel almost numb. He was starting to doubt it would be painless too, but did it matter? Did it change anything? He’d come here to die, in exchange for trillions to live, so why even pretend it made a difference? 

 The hum of the Eye grew louder.

 Desmond closed his eyes.

 He’d come here to die. To end centuries of planning put into motion. To make their lives worth something. 

 Altaïr.

 Ezio.
 
 Ratonhnhaké:ton.

 For them, Desmond Miles thought as he lowered his hand steadily to the surface of the Eye, he was doing this for them.

 One hand intertwined their fingers.

 One wrapped around his wrist.

 One gripped his forearm.

 Three voices said as one, “No - !” 

 And so, the Cipher was overruled.

-----

 Desmond had his hands on his hips, and his foot tapping, and it’d be a hilarious sight if the situation wasn’t what it was. If they weren’t in the Grand Temple. If they weren’t standing next to a pedestal that had just been aglow with the ultimate Isu power. If the sun hadn’t just been about to burn the world’s surface to ash. If he didn’t have three of his ancestors standing in front of him, staring at their own hands and taking in the strange Isu architecture of the temple like they weren’t sure where they were - 

 Oh, and if Desmond wasn’t currently fifteen years old with a sore lip.

 The soreness was a phantom pain he was used to. Except now it wasn’t a phantom pain. It was a real, there pain. One he’d felt before and healed from before. The pain of when Bill took a knife to his face because he just wasn’t the perfect prodigy of a son that man wanted, and no amount of regret from him was able to take back all the blood Desmond had spilled on bathroom tiles that day, sewing his own mouth back together. But that had been a decade ago - except no. 

 He was 5’6, bitter, baring his teeth, and full of teenage hormones he had been so happy to survive the first time around. 

 His clothes were too big on him, his head ached, his whole body felt like he’d pulled every muscle that even existed - and here he was. Standing in front of three men he hated and respected and loved more than he could ever articulate, and his lips felt like they were only recently stitched together. 

 And the temple’s glow - in its walls, in the Eye - was steadily fading away the longer they all stood there. 

 And he had no answers, and it was just a lot and he didn’t - 

 “Breathe, mio caro,” Ezio told him, taking a step towards the again-teenager with a hand outstretched, which pissed Desmond off in a way he didn’t even have the words for and it was Ezio’s voice and Florentine-accented Italian and home, and family, and he sounded so gentle that Desmond just burst into frustrated tears in an instant.

 “What the fuck did you do?!” He shouted in a blend of three, four, five maybe languages, sobbing and confused. Deaged. In pain. Alone, but not, but what if they’re just Bleeds, what if his mind had completely broken down now - ?!

 What if this was the death he’d walked willingly into?

 His shout brought all of Altaïr and Ratonhnhaké:ton’s attentions his way too. Making him more important than the temple’s strangeness in their eyes. Why? He had no idea. He had no idea about any of this. He just hugged his own arms and hated how young he had to feel right now, how emotional and so much like a dumb teenager he’d swore he’d never be again and - 

 Ezio darted forward. To close the steps of distance between them and wrap him up in his arms. His Assassin regalia. That cape that hung off of one of the Mentore’s shoulders draping over Desmond with the new inch shorter that he was than Ezio, and it was nice. Warm. He hated it. 

 He hated that his hoodie hung off of him like he hadn’t been eating enough, and he hated that he had to reach down to hold up his own jeans because his belt was suddenly so loose -

 And he hated how nice it really did feel to bury his sore, bruised face in the softer fabric of Ezio’s robes. 

 How nice it felt when worn fingers ran through his buzzed hair. When Ezio rocked him slowly, mumbling little Italian reassurances into the crown of his head.

 He hated how Altaïr came over with a serious, angry stare to his golden eyes to tip his head back away from the robes’ softness and brush a thumb under his stitched lip.

 He hated how Ratonhnhaké:ton came over to dwarf them all and rumble soothingly, looking like a disgruntled stormcloud in the new dimness of a dying temple.

 He hated how much they suddenly cared, when they couldn’t possibly be real. Even if they felt real. Even if they sounded real. Even if they were all so there, and so present, and comforting to him in a way their Bleeds had never been before. Was this his death? Was his death one shared with the ancestors he’d walked in the shoes of? Worn the hidden blades of? Was that Juno’s final gift to him, that bitch?

 Why make him a teenager though? Why put him back into the most distressing years of his life? Why make him relive so many things he’d thought he’d worked past, or at least shoved down deep enough he’d never have to think about them again? 

 Was it a punishment? 

 Was it a thank you? 

 “Wha-What the fuck!” Desmond sobbed, yanking his face from Altaïr’s careful but firm touch, tears streaming down it as he started hiccupping, “What the fuck!!!” 

 He’d been ready to die.

 So why did he suddenly have to feel so alive? 

 It hurt. 

-----

 Quite a bit of time passed before Desmond’s - Desmond’s! - tears trickled to a halt. And his sobs turned to sniffles. And his mutterings in multiple languages turned to quiet. Ezio was still in awe, holding the newly quiet boy. To finally be faced with the Desmond he had spent decades searching for. To finally have some of his answers. He was in awe, and holding him with all the precious care he deserved. A child so scarred. For who else but a child scarred would break apart the way he had to be cared for? 

 Ezio kept threading his fingers through the boy’s hair, dark and shorn short. Humming a lullaby his darling Sofia had taught him to sing to their children, low in his throat. 

 Desmond wasn’t cursing anymore. Was barely twitching. He seemed to have no more answers to their situation than Ezio or his fellow Mentors did. He seemed tired, in a soul-deep way that made Ezio want to shelter him from all the world.

 In a way that reminded him of too many of his most hurt Novices, who had come to him to heal themselves and learn to fight back.

 This turn of events was surprising. As was expecting a man in his twenties to be his answer, and instead seeing when the blinding light faded a boy. Barely older than Petruccio was when he hanged. A boy so distressed. So confused, and so world-weary Ezio mourned whatever his life had been that he’d turned out such a way.

 To realize he was once again younger, to realize he was once again in his thirties instead of sixty-five as he’d been at the time of his death - ? That had also been a surprise.

 Altaïr - well. Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad’s presence there went beyond surprising.

 As did the presence of another Assassin, another Mentor according to his curt introduction; Connor.

 Ezio wondered just what grand scheme Those Who Came Before had thought up now. To join together three Mentors of the Assassin Brotherhood. To turn a man young again, and allow him to live where they’d planned for him to die before. Ezio wondered just what they had done, to deserve an existence beyond life that seemed to be neither an afterlife nor an absence of one.

 He wondered many things, but for now he simply leaned back against the lifeless, glowless pedestal that had nearly claimed a man’s - a boy’s - life such a short while ago. 

 His own scarred lips stung in a sympathetic way, when he saw the fresh slit across Desmond’s lips. Deeper than his own had been. Harsher. It was recently stitched, and raised further questions considering it had been a fully healed wound when he first saw his descendant’s face in the surface of a glowing tree. Just what was this? How he wished he had Leonardo here, to bounce ideas off of as they once would have in their youths.

 What he had was a terribly quiet boy now.

 A tall, bear of a man standing closeby with his arms crossed and watching even closer.

 And the legendary Altaïr himself, who had disappeared between one blink and another on entirely silent feet. To explore the temple? To look for more clues? Ezio did not know for sure for he had not been told. Had no further goals for himself other than to continue comforting Desmond. The one he was named a prophet for. The one he had spent decades remembering the name for. Desmond.

 Just a boy.

 A scarred, thin, tired boy. Yet to hit his growth spurt, and with a cracking voice, and full of so much frustration that he’d buried that it had all burst from him like a dam broken.

At the very first chance he had to let it out. 

 “...You’re gonna make me fall asleep,” Desmond mumbled, barely audibly, into his robes. Which Ezio chuckled at. Rubbing a palm across the boy’s nape to urge a shudder and small stretch from him; a trick years of teaching tired Novices had taught him, “H-Hey! I’m not one of your trainees!” 

 “Yes yes,” Ezio Auditore hummed, ignoring the halfhearted glare shot up at him with ease after an equal amount of years of receiving them from tired Novices as well.

 Oh dear, he thought as fingers curled tighter into his robes, he was already growing so dangerously fond.

 Desmond let out a tiny noise, that was nearly silent compared to his earlier sobbing shouts, so the Mentore was going to take that as an improvement. Who were they, to be so blessed in this way? Ah, but it wasn’t the first time Ezio had thought on such matters. There was that time. In Masyaf. The closest he’d ever come in life to grabbing hold of his answers and refusing to let go…but he had learned. By another’s example.

 That he had seen enough for his life already.

 He remembered the awe of that moment, for all that he’d walked away from it. Knowing the one he was a prophet for was there. Watching. Seeing his shape take form from the glow of the Apple, the weave of pure power from Those Who Came Before. The warmth beneath his palm when he laid a hand on a young man’s shoulder.

 The grief he felt seeing that young man again, ready to die too young.

 The grief and relief he felt now, holding Desmond with his own two hands. Alive. Whole. Hurting, perhaps, but it was nothing the Florentine man didn’t intend to fix. He’d put his family back together best he could after the hanging. Madre. Claudia. What was one more? A young man, a Novice, a Brother - a son?

 A descendant. They’d start there.

 Their third returned.

 There was no sound to announce the Eagle’s return to their surprising nest of rebirth. There was barely even the swish of white robes, simple and modest as those from the Levantine Brotherhood often were during the legendary man’s time. Ezio knew, lifting his head, that he only noticed Altaïr’s return because he was intended to. And he fought down the old flutter of awe he’d held as a young man for that statue in the Sanctuary.

 It was easier, seeing the stony-faced reality of Altaïr himself. Golden eyes unnervingly natural. Almost as if he kept his special sight activated at all times, peering at the world through its filter under the rim of his hood.

 He looked a bit like Desmond, Ezio had already noted.

 The same brown skin, the same facial structure, nose, brow. 

 The same scar to his lips, their lips; Ezio shared it with the both of them.

 Not the same sternness, that Altaïr turned towards the Italian Mentor for all his staring with a light harrumph. Prowling over to the pedestal and them still on the most silent of feet. The only time his expression even slightly softened was when it brushed over the boy Ezio was holding in his arms, and even then the softness was pushed away quickly by pragmatism. 

 It was irritatingly like the stories said. That Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad was a no nonsense sort of Mentor. Ezio idly wondered just what it would take to charm him away from such ways.

 “This temple’s life is fading,” the great Mentor told the three of them without hesitation, motioning, “Its light grows dimmer and dimmer, with each moment that passes. Spreading outward from here. This,” he pointed at the pedestal, “source. The entrance yet lays open, but we cannot know that it will stay that way. We leave now.” 

 Ezio would’ve arched a brow, used to being in charge as a retired Mentor or no -

 But the broad-shouldered man who preferred to stand around in silence and brood, Connor, was already stalking in the direction Altaïr had come from.

 Well.

 Obedience wasn’t the worst thing to learn in his sixties, hm? 

 “Is it safe?” He asked distantly, not truly concerned when they were all armed to the fullest of their kits - and Ezio suspected they had both been deaged as he had been, as Desmond had been - but he had an unarmed child holding onto him and dozing. He would not be taking a step into any part of this temple unless he knew there was no danger to him. 

 “I encountered no adversaries, nor traps, nor signs of the ‘Isu’,” and mayhaps he was somewhat surprised about the fact that Altaïr actually took the time to answer his concerns, but he was also thankful, “There is a strange…contraption, beyond the entrance of this temple, but I have never seen its like before. A box made of metal, suspended on wheels. A wagon of some design, if I am to guess.” 

 The head pressed into Ezio’s robes shifted.

 And Desmond peeled himself away just far enough to shoot the great Mentor an amused look and a, “You mean the car?”

 That great Mentor glanced down at the boy barely an inch shorter than him, so not far down at all, said nothing for a long moment, then flattened his lips together. 

 And reached out to pat Desmond’s head exactly three times before returning his hand to his side.

 “Tell me about this ‘car’.” 

 Desmond blinked. Once. Twice. Three times. For each pat on his head. And Ezio’s lips pursed when he felt a tenseness run through the young-again boy. That faded into surprised looseness after the Syrian man’s hand returned to his side. Oh, he did not like that. He did not like that at all. But he showed none of his new guesses about the boy as he unwound his arms from Ezio’s robes.

 And darted around Altaïr with a bit of a lingering stare.

 “It’s…a car,” he muttered, speeding up once he’d faced forward again, missing the look two Mentors shared behind his back. A shared notice too. And a shared guess. And the shared concern of fathers, that turned awkward when the look dragged on. 

 Before they broke it off, Ezio clearing his throat, and hurried after Desmond step in step.

 Dios mio, he could move quickly, couldn’t he?

-----

 The Grand Temple was grand. Cavolo. Leonardo would’ve laughed grandly reading such a description from one of his letters, a decade ago. But it was certainly a feat. Reminiscent of the temple beneath Roma’s colosseum. The ruins he found beneath Masyaf. Isu. Those Who Came Before. Their designs were flat, smooth, and full of circuits. Leonardo had never - ah. 

 Ezio sighed while behind the speedy boy he and another old man were following. Such designs. They always made him think of his old friend.

 The temple did not seem to have purpose, aside from the pedestal they had left behind. There were no obvious utilities to each space. Just grandness. Flat. Smooth. Circuits. They passed a space that had some use, it must; there were tables and flat slabs that glowed, and strange lengths along the ground that looked like snakes but weren’t alive. Were leading from the glowing slabs and such to big boxes that were…humming? Loudly. 

 He was glad Altaïr pointed them out, so he wouldn’t need to be the one asking so many questions. 

 But all Desmond responded with was a quick, quiet, “Generator. Generates power.” 

 Sideying a strange, also smooth chair. That seemed permanently reclined, with what appeared to be restraints on each arm.

 “He was hurt here,” il Mentore’s voice, low and not meant to be overheard by another, made Ezio frown at the man who was a legend to him.

 “What makes you think so?” 

 Altaïr paused. Just for a moment. To turn and stare at that space of use, unlike so much else in this temple to Those Who Came Before. His golden irises seemed eerie in the dying glow of this place. Seemed to see more than even Ezio’s Sight allowed, saying, “He was hurt here by people he thought he could trust.” 

 There was the known in those golden irises.

 Knowing what it was like to be betrayed, and the ability borne of that to recognize it in another.

 Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad turned to continue walking, and Ezio fell in beside him seamlessly. Able to see more of the man than the legend now. He would have assumed it would take longer than this last hour, but it seemed not. 

 In the end, even myths were just men once. Altaïr was no different. Talking to him made that more than obvious.

 It was a wonder. That all of them were from different places, different times, and yet they were communicating with ease. Was it the Apple? A blessing from above? Ezio had no idea, no guess even, but he was grateful. He could just imagine how much harder this situation would be on them if they’d been stuck trying to communicate with three different languages between them. 

 He’d worked with Branches that required translation in the past, and it always drastically hindered their work.

 This? This was manageable. 

 And whatever happened, Ezio Auditore could not imagine that it would be as bad as the time his Novices blew up the Vatican.

…

 Nearly out of the Grand Temple - stairs upwards turning into far more common stone stairs - there was light ahead. And the faintest hint of birdsong. And the barest breeze, that smelled like fresh air, grazie a Dio. No matter the number of tombs he had ended up exploring in his youth, Ezio had never appreciated the constant, pressing awareness of stale air underground. 

 Their third, their most quiet, Connor was paused at the top of the staircase. Waiting for them. Beyond him was an entrance of an almost cave-like appearance, with a woods beyond that that Ezio was grateful to see. Silly, though that probably was. 

 It was the reassurance he needed that this future was not entirely unfamiliar to him.

 The beauty of nature remained.

 “You’re all too normal.” 

 Three ancestors turned their eyes to their youngest. Their descendant. Who was frowning at them all. Like their normalness had offended the child. Claudia had made many similar faces to Ezio in their youth; usually because he deserved it though. 

 “In what way?” The Mentor asked, and he was grateful to Altaïr for doing so. 

 “You’re all acting like this is normal! And like…well - Ezio’s being a mother hen, Altaïr - you’re being emotionally constipated,” turning towards the last of his ancestors, crossing his arms huffily, Desmond bit out, “and what are you being, Ratonhnhaké:ton?” 

 Tipping his head curiously at the use of a different name for said ancestor than how he’d introduced himself, Ezio noted a sort of surprise flit across the man’s face too. 

 And then broke into the amused smile of an older brother at the sight of Connor coming right up to Desmond to pat him on the head.

 “Your soul is a tired one,” the man declared solemnly, at odds with his small but real smile as he kept patting Desmond’s head, “but it is bright still. That is good.” 

 That look positively promised murder.

 “Right, so life coach,” their descendent snarked, though they didn’t know what that was. Dodging away from the head pats to stalk out of the temple’s entrance with some grumbling of, “This is insane. I was promised retirement, not babysitting duty.” 

 With nothing else to do, the three Assassins followed him to the ‘contraption’ Altaïr had made note of earlier.

 It was…certainly something of a contraption.

 “It is a car,” Desmond was kind enough to inform the three staring Mentors, enunciating each word carefully in a way familiar to Ezio. Familiar enough to his own antics at his age. Familiar enough to hear the underlying, ‘Idiots,’ to it. The boy walked right over the enclosed wagon and tugged on a metal slab on its side. Which pulled outward and made a noise like gears clicking into place, and one of the ‘car’ doors popped right open. There were four of these doors.

 Inside there were benches made of strange, glossy materials. And a circular, wheel-like shape that past experiences with boats and Leonardo’s inventions had Ezio guessing was how it was steered.

 No horses. Mechanics.

 An engine invention.

 Leonardo would’ve been delighted to see the sorts of creations mankind had made commonplace, five hundreds years after their drunken nights spread out for decades in his workshops all across Italia. Ezio acknowledged that pang. Of regret. Of care. Of his oldest, his dearest friend being so, so far away from him now even when they were both in death’s sweet embrace. And then he let the pang go.

 Altaïr was opening and shutting a round cover of metal attached to the car by hinges, frowning down into the nozzle it concealed. Sniffing it, and then reeling back with a wrinkled nose.

 “That’s the gas tank,” Desmond told him without even looking from where he’d slid in behind that wheel meant to steer the car, “Gas is how we power a lot of machinery in this day and age. It’s created from fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are mined from the earth. Fossils are - “

 “I know what fossils are,” the legendary Assassin cut him off. Neither in an unkind or impatient way - just, interrupted and went on to circle the car with assessing eyes. Desmond didn’t seem offended, so Ezio joined him. Came over to kick one of the car’s wheels that seemed to be made of the strangest black material - his foot bounced off of it.

 Ezio stared down at his foot, offended almost by how lost he was.

 Five hundred years was a long time, si, but so many advancements? Even to wheels?

 “Those are tires,” Desmond said boredly, leaning underneath the wheel and doing something and still not looking their way, “They’re made of rubber and a bunch of other science-y stuffs I have no idea about. Really bouncy. Full of air. Help vehicles drive on pavement, I guess.” 

 “‘You guess’?” Ezio asked, curious. Coming around to lean into the car that smelled very strange to his nose, and trying to see just what the boy was doing with all those colorful threads underneath the wheel.

 “Things are complicated, even tires,” Desmond tapped two of the colorful threads together, and a spark buzzed to life between them so suddenly Ezio leaned back. He had to fight the instinct to drag Desmond back too, “I might know what they’re called and what they’re supposed to do, but it’s not my profession. I don’t make tires. So I don’t know everything about the science of how they work, or even how they’re made, you know? I - shit.” 

 He thumped his forehead against the bottom of the steering…wheel, thing, letting out a long sigh that sounded all sorts of tired again.

 “I’m going to have to explain so many things to you guys.” 

 “For now our priorities should be supplies and sanctuary,” Altaïr’s sudden address made Ezio straighten up, turning to the Levantine Mentor who was staring curiously into a small mirror mounted onto the side of the car, frowning at the reflection of himself, “All else will be a waste of time and energy until we are settled. And caught up on the situation.” 

 “I don’t know the situation, so don’t know how you’re going to do that,” Desmond muttered, then tapped two of the colorful threads together again with a sigh -

 And the whole car roared.

 Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad leapt away like a startled cat, a throwing knife instantly clutched tight between two fingers.

 The silent, brooding Mentor who’d just been standing around had an axe hefted.

 And Ezio’s fingers cramped from how tightly he’d curled them into Desmond’s strange, white doublet. All but about to drag the child from the car, that was now trembling and rumbling and growling like some sort of mechanical beast. Desmond, who had grabbed onto the steering wheel stubbornly and was refusing to be moved.

 He looked supremely unimpressed by them all.

 “Coming?” 

 How loud the car was, was disturbing. The hairs on the back of Ezio’s neck stood on end, and he felt almost as though he could feel the vibrations of it down to his bones, but he slowly, delicately, gingerly - released Desmond. And did the brave thing of then - also gingerly - opening one of the rear doors. And sliding in. And sitting stiffly on the seats that were weirdly glossy and smelled weirder. 

 He had the very unfortunate feeling that Desmond was one willing to leave them behind if they forced him to stop and think and feel, any of those emotions he’d buried down far too well.

 “Where to?” He checked curiously, wincing at how low Connor had to duck his head to fit in the seat beside him, and frowning at how smoothly Altaïr slid into the seat beside Desmond. At the front of the car. Looking unruffled, as if he’d never been startled at all. 

 “A city, I guess,” the boy muttered, closing his own door so they all followed suit, sealing themselves inside the loud, vibrating, rumbling car that smelled like weird things, “Considering we don’t even know what’s happening, I’m not sure it’s a good idea to go back to the Assassins at the moment - so why not go back to the streets? Wouldn’t be the first time. Probably be safer there.” 

 All three Mentores scowled at the idea of an Assassin child being safer on the streets than with their Brotherhood.

 But then all they could do was grab onto whatever withstood their grip, as the car roared and started moving because Desmond had put the pedal to the floor.

 Despite what was said later, Ezio did not scream.

-----

 There wasn’t much said during the ride. The car…ride? Truly, there was so much they didn’t yet know about this time period. Desmond had been right about that. But Desmond was the reason it was a mostly quiet ride. When they asked him questions, he mostly responded with a single word for an answer, or even noises instead of words, and all of them understood. So they left him be.

 It had to be so terrifying; to go from being ready to die, to having to live. When you didn’t even understand how or why.

 Desmond drove them through a place with many buildings, tall and flat-looking and more like Isu architecture than Ezio was expecting, with many people walking along the road of black stone they were driving on.

 He skipped that city.

 And the next.

 And then, they were driving on the road of black stone between two great fields of harvest that stretched on so far - further than many farming lands that Ezio had seen in his life. And Desmond let out a long, weary sigh. Saying, “Gonna need to get gas in the next town. No money though. Any ideas?” 

 Addressing all of them for once, though without looking any of their ways. Which Ezio was grateful for. Considering how horribly fast the car had proven itself to be.

 Money, though? 

 Money, Ezio knew.

-----

 Desmond scowled. Kicked the tire of the car, just to work out some of the frustrated energy he was feeling. Which left him feeling tired. Just tired. Super tired. It was getting late; it’d be sunset in an hour or two. He hated that he was left there, at the gas station, with the car. He wasn’t actually a kid, no matter how he looked! And he was sure somebody was going to get it in their head soon to be a ‘good bystander’ and call the police.

 The amount of looks they’d gotten just for Desmond being the one in the driving seat, when he had a car full of three fully grown men? That was already bad enough.

 But then Altaïr and Ezio had slipped off onto modern-day streets they knew nothing about, promising to get him money somehow, so they could refill the gas tank - 

 And Ratonhnhaké:ton deciding to perch himself on the corner of the gas station’s garage’s roof, like a very strangely dressed gargoyle - ? Was going to be noticed sooner or later, and then there’d be an even bigger reason for somebody to call the police.

 He hated this whole situation. 

 He hated Juno.

 And Minerva.

 And Shaun.

 And Rebecca.

 And Bill -

 “Is this enough, Desmond?” His lip hurt, when he whirled around on a pleasantly smiling Ezio to give him a scowl. Had he been biting at it? Probably. It was part of the reason it healed so awfully the first time around. Nerve damage was a hell of a thing. Pain too. Pain like now, that made Desmond prickly and angry and he hated how easily he used to cry - 

 Seeing Ezio’s face fall made him feel like he’d kicked a chocolate labrador puppy. 

 “Mio caro, it is alright,” Ezio immediately soothed him, lowering the handful of money bills he had offered up to Desmond so proudly, “If it is not enough, I can go procure more, va bene. Non piangere.” 

 “I’m not gonna cry,” the boy argued, ignoring the way his voice broke because he did not have the mental capabilities to deal with that right now, please and thank you, “You just - you! Ugh! Give me that.” 

 He swiped the bills from the Florentine man who looked very apologetic now, which made him feel like he’d kept kicking the poor puppy, and Desmond twisted around to get back in the car. Get it pulled up to the gas pump. And get that gas pumping while frantically wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his hoodie. He wasn’t going to cry. He wasn’t.

 More importantly, how did Ezio manage to get two thousand dollars in less than an hour?

 “You pickpocket,” he hissed accusingly, to which the shameless Assassin just lifted his lips a little and rubbed at the back of his neck, “You better have been careful. There are a lot more ways to get caught stealing nowadays.” 

 “Si, Desmond, I was careful,” Ezio nodded, motioning, “There are simply many people who walk these streets with their money…pouches? Unsecured. I do not know the exact worth of this paper money, but I only took a handful from each before returning the pouches to them unnoticed.” 

 “Wallets,” Desmond told him, still muttering, watching the pump price per gallon climb, “They’re called wallets. And each bill you’ll notice looks a little different, because they’re worth different amounts.”

 Ratonhnhaké:ton rejoined them with a nod, and it was annoying that he’d managed to leave his gargoyle position without even being noticed.

 Especially when their robes - all of theirs - weren’t discreet at all.

 He didn’t stop Ratonhnhaké:ton from curiously taking some of the bills Ezio had pickpocketed, flipping through them. Examining them. Stopping on one, with his brows furrowing together in a small tell of him being surprised as he said, “Washington?” 

 “First President of the United States,” Desmond confirmed, grabbing the gas pump’s handle and removing it now that the tank was full, “That’s a bill worth one dollar. It’s the smallest bill currency we have, but the most common.” 

 He didn’t elaborate. Well aware that Ratonhnhaké:ton’s relationship with Washington had been beyond complicated by the end of the Revolutionary War.

 Maybe he watched from the corner of his eye as Ezio leaned over Ratonhnhaké:ton’s arm, murmuring questions too low to hear as they both took turns passing bills between one another like the most suspicious guys any normal civilian had ever seen. Somebody was going to call the cops. Desmond just fucking knew it. 

 He promises they aren’t extraterrestrials, Officer, they’re just his emotional support time-traveling ancestors, here to be babysat by a fifteen-year old deaged man because their creators from thousands of years wanted to fuck with him -

 Desmond felt a bit like he was thinking up his last will and testament, to be honest.

 That third ancestor of his appeared silently, suddenly there, distracting him. And he wasn’t impressed.

 “Hope you didn’t kill anyone,” he told him blankly, not even surprised by the even bigger wad of bills Altaïr had fisted in his hand. Or the fact that all the bills he could see were hundreds, “Or got chased by the police. Or ran into traffic. How’d you know hundreds were worth so much more?” 

 “Do you take me for a child?” Altaïr asked calmly, no bite whatsoever, while Ezio was looking somewhat disheartened behind him as he realized how much more his idol had brought back - and yes, Desmond remembered how much Ezio had idolized Altaïr. And how many times he had stood in front of that statue in the Sanctuary, to ‘talk’ to his idol as a young man.

 Maybe he’d keep that information in his back pocket. For future blackmail purposes.

 “I take you for somebody new to this time period.” 

 “True,” and despite his appearance as a man in his early thirties, there was at least an age to Altaïr that made Desmond really glad he’d gotten his ancestors after they had already lived their lives, instead of the arrogant younger man Altaïr had been, “All I did was follow the wealthiest looking civilians. And then I listened in on their purchases in the market district, to find out what their most expensive purchases were. I then figured out which…bills, were valued the most by how many of each they gave to the merchants.” 

 So Altaïr had gone to a mall, cased the shoppers, and then targeted hundred dollar bills specifically.

 Desmond was impressed and so annoyed that he was impressed.
 
 “Good enough,” he sighed, starting to count out the thousands of dollars the Eagle had brought back to them, “...Probably good enough to get us an apartment downpayment too, actually. Damn it. You did too good, Altaïr. We’re going to have the cops on us whatever way we swing this.” 

 The man just blinked at him, opening and shutting his mouth without a word, like he wasn’t sure how to handle being told he’d done too good of a job.

 “What precisely is an apartment, tesoro?” Ezio interjected.

 “A place to live, set inside a building where other people live too. Usually not all that spacious, and we’ll probably be sharing rooms, but I’m not risking an Assassin safehouse right now,” the Italian wrinkled his nose at Desmond’s explanation, and he wanted to laugh. Knowing Ezio was used to richness and luxury, even during some of his rougher years. He didn’t voice any complaints though. 

 Just listened when Desmond herded the three back into the car so they could peel out of there - preferably before those cops that the gas station employee had definitely called by now showed up.

 It was nice. Being listened to for once.

 Yeah, it was late. And yeah, Desmond wasn’t exactly familiar with these parts of New York. And yeah, moving around meant spreading out the number of witnesses to him. To them. Because they were noticeable. Which was exactly why they had to skip town. Too many people had taken note of them, with their very much out of place robes, and also how was their language barrier working exactly? Because if each of the four of them were speaking wildly different languages but communicating anyways, that would be memorable to civilians. 

 Did they all just sound like they were speaking English? Had the Eye downloaded translation hardware into their brains? Desmond didn’t know, didn’t really want to dig into it at the moment, so.

 They skipped town.

 He really hoped they didn’t get pulled over. Maybe how dark the sky was turning would make it harder for cops to notice he was a little young to be driving like this? 

 Who knew his biggest concern after death would be getting a ticket for underage driving. He was a twenty-five years old man. This was so ridiculous.

 “What?” He asked when it was just them and the highway lit by the car’s headlights and fields of corn stretched out in every other direction, and Altaïr’s lips were curling downward.

 “We should not venture too far from the temple,” the Levantine Mentor told him, hesitating, then reaching across the center console to lightly rest a hand on Desmond’s elbow, “We do not have any answers. Only questions. Should time prove we have to return there for our answers, the less distance we have to travel, the more convenient things will be for us.” 

 Desmond hated that that made sense.

 And that it was this version of Altaïr telling him that.

 “...We’ll find someplace to stay in the next town.” 

 Altaïr released his elbow, satisfied. And Desmond released a long breath he hadn’t realized he was holding in. 

-----

 The next town was smaller than the last, but still more urban than suburban. It had a shady side of town over the railroad tracks, and a fancy mall probably only built there because of fancy-pants investors looking to make money. Or because of money laundering. There were way too many signs for mattress stores on that place for Desmond to trust it. 

 Whatever the case, it was the perfect place for them to disappear for a while. 

 And the shady side of town also had shady apartment buildings. Score. The other three had gone all tense and flinty-eyed around the time the car bounced over the railroad tracks, sensing a change in the atmosphere of the town the way Assassins could. Desmond didn’t say anything. Just pulled on up to an apartment building with a few less broken windows than the others, and then pulled the car onto the curb just down the street. 

 “Desmond?” Ezio spoke up, sounding warier than before, “Do you intend to…acquire accommodations here?” 

 “Yep,” the boy said easily, pronouncing it extra sarcastically as he counted out the hundreds Altaïr had stolen earlier, “I know it’s not as fancy or clean as you’re used to, Ezio, but we can’t exactly afford much else. Besides, people don’t ask as many questions around here.” 

 “I…suppose,” there was a note to the man’s voice that was odd, “But, I mean, mio caro - “

 Desmond glanced into the backseat as he realized that tone wasn’t wary, but concerned. And Ezio motioned discreetly out the window. So he followed the movement. To the other side of the street. Where a group of women were dressed in less layers than they should’ve been for a chilly night like this, gathered around a man counting money and making agitated movements at the women that had them flinching. A few more guys were hanging around the edges of nearby alleyways too. Watching. 

 Like he said, shady.

 “Just keep your head down,” Desmond told all three of them, who looked more than mildly offended when the man counting money raised his voice enough they could hear it, even muffled by the car, “We can’t go causing trouble around here. And killing people is a lot harder nowadays. People don’t just die out of the blue anymore, or get their throats slit in the street - not without, like, the F.B.I. coming down on our heads.” 

 None of them knew what he was talking about, he knew the moment he looked at each of them in their eyes and they just looked confused.

 But Desmond knew them.

 He had been them.

 He loved them.

 He knew they would want to help if they saw injustice, and that they would obey the Creed a hell lot of a more than somebody like him would if the situation turned bad. But that wasn’t what would help them survive right now. Wasn’t what would get them a roof over their heads, and food on some sort of table, and a chance to figure out what the fuck the Isu were up to now.

 Desmond frowned at his three ancestors.

 And stretched out an arm, pointing at each of them one by one.

 “Stay. Put.” 

 And with that order given, he went off to be the ‘normal-totally-not-an-alien’ one out of the four of them, and get them an apartment to call their own. Did he ever think he’d end up becoming a teenager for a second go in the battle that is teenage acne, living with three of his most legendary ancestors in a shoddy city apartment? No. No, who would?!
 
 But Isu bullshit happened, and now that’s exactly the situation he’d found himself in.

 As Desmond handed over a wad of bills to the half-deaf, short and plump, little old lady landlady with the practiced smile of a kid doing some favor for his parents?

 He started counting down the days.

 Because it was only a matter of time until his ancestors drove him to jump off one of these apartment buildings, he just knew it.

~>-----<~

Chapter Text

~>-----<~

Was the apartment fancy? Absolutely not. Was it cheap? Also not really. Was it better than being on the streets? Within thirty seconds of them walking into the place, a rat scurried across the floor to a hole in the wall, so…maybe. What it was, was a roof over their heads, a door between them and the outside world, and not the worst place Desmond had called his own in the past.

So it wasn't anything fancy. It was convenient. And open for them to move into straight away; no questions asked or IDs needed. 

It was a third-floor apartment. Two bedrooms. One bathroom. One kitchen with a fridge, a finicky stove, and very little else. Some furniture, left behind by the last tenant. Most of it broken. The landlady had dismissively told him they were welcome to it. Though she’d recommended a 'good cleaning' before getting too comfy. Eh. Again, not the worst place Desmond had called his own. But saying as much just seemed to make all of his ancestors go tense and frowny.

 So he shut up a bit after that, parking the car where their new landlady had told him to. 

 It wasn’t like they had belongings. So it was just them, with their little apartment key, walking into the place. And taking in the stained walls, the chipped floors, the smoke-stained ceilings and curtains, broken furniture; otherwise known as their new home. 

 Ezio looked as if he were on the verge of fainting.

 Altaïr and Ratonhnhaké:ton looked as if they were on the verge of going to find a rooftop and a tree respectively to sleep in for the night. 

 But all three of them stayed.

 Let the door be shut behind them.

 Didn’t complain.

 Damn. Some small part of Desmond Miles - the older Desmond Miles - had thought he’d never go back to these sorts of times again. But here he was. In a shady apartment, dim and late at night. Lacking most modern comforts. Lacking a clean space, which wasn’t a big thing, was a luxury, but he’d come to really, really take pride in neatness after getting his own apartments that weren’t complete holes-in-the-walls.

 There was something delicate behind his ribs. It had him taking a deep breath before anything else.

 Then making for one of the doorways to a bedroom. The landlady had said there were box springs if nothing else, so - “Welp. Goodnight,” he shot over his shoulder.

 Altaïr immediately was at his heels, expression stern, voice firm, dang it, “I’ll bed with you, Desmond.” 

 There weren’t any real complaints he had to that. Altaïr was Altaïr. Why would he complain? But he wanted to. It made as much sense as anything a teenager felt would. The urge to hurry ahead and slam the door in the man’s face was just immature. He didn’t do that. He was better than that, and he didn’t mind Altaïr sharing a bed with him. Box spring. Whatever. 

 What they all needed right now was sleep.

 “I suppose that leaves us to share, my friend?” He heard Ezio say to Ratonhnhaké:ton behind him, fading as he left the room, but he crossed his fingers with the hope that the flirty Florentine Assassin wouldn’t scandalize poor Raton too much. 

 Following the boy into the bedroom he’d picked at random, Altaïr managed to avoid running into him when Desmond stopped suddenly without a word. Huffing at the sight of an entirely empty room aside from a box spring set crooked on the floor. Well. Still wasn’t the worst. Maybe if he kept repeating that, he wouldn’t feel so hollow about the situation. 

 “Is it normal for homes to be so sparse here?” Altaïr spoke up, carefully hidden judgment in his tone as he scanned the room, eyes golden and glowing in the dark, “And so…unclean?” 

 “No, Altaïr, we’re just poor.” 

 He was frowned at for that one. Didn’t have the energy to care though. Didn’t bother kicking his shoes off either, before flopping down face-first onto the box spring. Which, ouch. He heard the door’s hinges squeak noisily as it was shut - just for a second. Before it was silent again, because of course a Master Assassin could silence squeaky hinges with just a glare. 

 Maybe a bit of skill, but mostly a glare.

 The Eagle of Masyaf joined him on their lovely, luxurious box spring much more calmly. Thankfully not making mention of the lack of sheets, or blankets, or even pillows. Or the both of them being fully dressed. Desmond sort of knew it was because of his training; his ability to sleep anywhere, in any situation as needed…but he would’ve felt like shit if Altaïr had asked for basic necessities he couldn’t provide.

 Well, he already felt like shit, so he’d just feel worse.

 Wouldn’t take much to get him there. 

 “Maybe I’ll go to sleep,” Desmond wasn’t sure why he whispered into the baggy sleeves of his hoodie, sensing how Altaïr stilled next to him, “and I’ll wake up…and all of this will have just been a weird dream before I die.”

 “Would you prefer that?” The first ancestor he’d learned from asked him, tone even. 

 And Desmond didn’t think he had an answer for him.

 “It’d be easier,” he mumbled, pressing his whole face into the spare fabric of his hoodie now, to hide the shakiness. In his voice, in him. The shuddering. Up the length of his spine, when Altaïr’s hand with only four fingers came to rest on the small of his back. Such a faint thing. But there. And so real. And Desmond really didn’t have an answer for him.

 “This is real, Desmond. I am here. We are here. And you are alive. Rest as much as you need. We will still be here.” 

 So he closed his eyes, unwilling to admit that he trusted Altaïr.

 He fell asleep.

-----

 Sharing an apartment with three Assassin Mentors from centuries ago was a wild experience. Desmond woke up with Altaïr sharpening a ridiculous amount of pointy weapons inches away from his face - a face resting on the Mentor’s lap, cheek squished into his thigh and drool on the edge of his robes, which - ?

 Desmond was mortified over.

 He fled the bedroom, scoffing and red-faced, and went into the living space to find poor Raton turning the kitchen facet on and off. And on again. And off again. Absolutely baffled with his brows furrowed together in concentration. Ah, the wonders of plumbing. He turned to look at Desmond, and pointed helplessly at the facet, and he leapt back like he’d seen witchcraft when the teenager came over and turned on the hot water side of the facet.

 Seriously, poor guy. He looked like he was about to go on a spiritual journey over the whole thing.

 Ezio he caught still in his bedroom, because he was suspicious over the lack of chaos being committed, rubbing at his eyes sleepily. And stopping. And staring. At the shirtless Mentor of Roma, leaning out his bedroom window to wink and flirt with passerby women below who were catcalling him back happily. 

 Viva la decency - Desmond snuck up on the hopeless flirt and slammed the window shut. Ezio barely ducked his head back in time. 

 It was all charm and boyish, “Oh, but they were enjoying the attention, mio caro!” 

 And then it was the dreaded conversation of, ‘How does the bathroom work?’

 Desmond swore he was going to give one of the old men - excluding Raton - a heartattack if he kept showing them things like running water and heaven forbid a shower. Oh yes. Clearly, it was witchcraft. Crime! Crime of the highest degree! Incomprehendable! He just sighed and left them to flush the toilet again and again and again. Wishing more than anything that they had a coffeemaker.

 He was too old to be dealing with this shit.

 He was figuring out what he should do with the day when Altaïr left the bathroom. Looking faintly troubled by technology, like the old man he was. He was in his nineties. Desmond had always found that…okay, not hilarious. He was glad Altaïr lived a long life, he just wished he’d also lived a happier one. 

 Thinking that, he couldn’t help being a little fonder of watching Altaïr investigate the kitchen like it was a foreign land. And when he found the fridge? Desmond wished he had a camera.

 The legendary Mentor stuck his hand into the fridge, and pulled it back out. Staring at his fingers in as much surprise as he ever showed with his miniscule facial expression. Clearly confused about the cold. He stuck his hand in it again. And pulled it back out. Again. Then again. And one more time. Desmond had never seen him look so mystified by the end of it. 

 “What sorcery?” He muttered, a man from a time where water was precious and sugar was one of the most expensive ingredients in Syria.

 “It’s a fridge, Altaïr,” Desmond deadpanned. Getting the mystified Assassin to turn completely towards him with a nearly manic need to know in those golden orbs of his.

 “Explain it to me.” 

 “You’re gonna go fucking wild when we get a toaster,” Desmond just said blandly, and went through the motions of low-effort annoying the poor guy by wandering back to the living space. To open a few of those windows and air out the smoky, stuffy apartment they were now recalling theirs. The whole time, Altaïr followed him like a lost and spoiled cat, staring into the back of his head like he could mentally pull the explanations from his brain. 

 Sorry, but he didn’t work like the Apple of Eden. Nope!

 It was hopeless, but Altaïr wasn’t a Master Assassin known for surrendering easily. It became a game of ring around the rosie, with a wobbly coffee table between them.

 Lasting for a honestly funny amount of time. 

-----

 In the middle of mentally making a list of things they’d need to buy for the apartment after escaping Altaïr - including cleaning supplies because Desmond was determined - he caught a certain Italian busybody by the living room windows. The boy added blinds to that mental list of his, debated whether or not he wanted to get involved, and then ended up slinking up to Ezio anyways after his shirtless antics that morning.

 Ezio, who was peeking out of the windows through smoke-stinking curtains, mouth creased downward. 

 Who barely even glanced down when Desmond wedged his smaller body up against his, and shoved his head under the Mentore’s armpit. To peek outside too. 

 And poke Ezio hard when he saw what had snared his attention. 

 “They are whores?” The Italian busybody asked, pointing to a handful of women walking the street. Like those they’d seen when they first arrived at the apartment. In clothing meant to catch eyes, and watched by men from the alleyways meant to keep their eyes on the merchandise. 

 “Prostitutes,” Desmond both agreed and corrected this man who had frequented brothels plenty in his youth, back in the fourteen and fifteen-hundreds, “Don’t call them whores, Ezio. Nowadays, that’s considered a pretty big insult to women, even women in sex work.” 

 “Do they have a brothel nearby? Perhaps I can use my charm now that I’m once more a younger man to - “

 “Nope,” Desmond put a stop to that line of thought, pulling himself free to avoid having his hair stupidly ruffled by the smiling man from Florence, idiota, “There aren’t brothels anymore, Ezio. They’re illegal. So is sex work, technically, for the most part. And you can’t just invest in businesses at random anymore too, Ezio. The government doesn’t like that.” 

 To an older Desmond, it was a hilarious sight to see Ezio’s face fall into one of abject horror at being told that brothels didn’t exist anymore.

 To this teenager version of himself, it just made him feel weird about how sex-positive this ancestor of his was. Which was weird itself, because he’d fucked around plenty in his early twenties! But now…he felt like he was all limbs and crooked teeth and acne - even though he knew he wasn’t that bad. It just wasn’t a nice feeling.

 “I don’t like this government,” Ezio Auditore declared, to which his descendant just snorted humorlessly.

 “Join the club, fratello.” 

 He realized his mistake when Ezio lit up like the Apple of Eden itself, cazzo, just great. Desmond had slipped up and said that without thought, but now he had a chocolate labrador pushing the hood of his robes down so he could melt under the full force of an Auditore smile as he spread his arms wide. Laughing and sweeping the teenager up like they weren’t only an inch apart in height.

 “Fratellino. Così dolce e così ardente!”

 “Ack - ! Ezio Auditore, put me down!” 

 Ezio simply laughed like a carefree man, spinning the both of them with an amused, “You sound like my mother and Claudia, fratellino.” 

 “I can smack you like them too!” 

-----

 A plan was made.

 “First, money. Then clothes.”

 “Clothes?” Ratonhnhaké:ton repeated, leading to Desmond nodding solemnly.

 “You all look completely out of place in your robes, so we need to buy you something else to wear.” 

They looked like historical reenactors who had confused a video game’s artbook for the actual style of certain centuries. And also their robes were dead giveaways if Abstergo caught wind of them, which Desmond very carefully wasn’t going to think about considering how easily they’d found him thanks to a stupid motorcycle -

 “Actually…” Desmond amended, just a young-again teenager but feeling so much older than that or them with his hands on his hips and exasperated like he was. Taking in their full Assassin regalia. Hoods and sharp objects and all. Including the Brotherhood’s insignia on multiple parts of themselves. No matter how giddy Desmond was to see their gear in person, it stood out, “I’ll be going out to buy you clothes. You’re all staying here.” 

 Three of history’s most famous Assassins frowned, hearing that.

 “Not alone,” Altaïr told him, in a tone that said he wouldn’t take being questioned lightly. To which Desmond crossed his arms with all the attitude a fifteen-year old could summon and pointedly looked him up and down. With his robes. And his very vibrant red sash. And his throwing knives, not to mention greaves and armor plating and hidden blade and all that. His clothes were more Assassin-y than even the other two.

 To which -

 Altaïr reached up and pulled back his hood, which made Desmond drop his arms.

 Because there was something very important about Altaïr he had never forgotten. Not in the last year since he was ‘rescued’ from Abstergo and stopped living out his memories in the Animus. 

Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad hated having his hood down. 

 He hadn’t lowered it once since this whole fiasco began, not even to sleep next to Desmond the night before, and now? He was just existing. With his hood down, in a random living room. Being subtly stared at by Ezio, as he continued past that and started loosening bits of his regalia, removing weapons and anything bearing the insignia of the Brotherhood. Piling weapons one by one on the wobbly coffee table sitting crooked in front of him. More weapons. And more weapons. And more - holy shit, where was he hiding a gun - ?

 A makeshift, first attempt at a gun maybe, but still.

 Altaïr tugged at his outer robes even, once he’d removed everything else. Shouldered off the white fabric, and folding it neatly into a tiny pile that he set next to all his weapons on that coffee table - which, he’d actually organized all his weapons by size and type, hadn’t he? - leaving him, the Eagle of Masyaf himself, looking…so…remarkably bare.

 Like a man.

 Just a man.

 In a simple undershirt with rather short sleeves, white as his robes, and the harem pants he always wore beneath them. Plus his simpler boots that worked best with running on loose sand dunes and smoother rooftops. He looked so normal. Almost passable as a modern man, wearing loungewear. 

 The missing finger, the scar across his lips; the only two marks of past pain on him. Altaïr had no other scars, and Desmond felt almost uncomfortable faced with that. Knowing one was a scar Altaïr had chosen to take on, and the other was one given to him by a person he’d wrongly trusted. Seeing those golden eyes. So gold. So, gold, it was unnatural. And it made the boy wonder just how thickly the Isu genes ran in this ancestor of his.

 This ancestor of his who shifted just faintly, almost unnoticeably, then reached up. Running his five-fingered hand through his sandy-gold hair, shorn short like Desmond’s was. And clearly a surprise to Ezio too, who’d lost his subtlety and simply seemed confused by it. Fair enough.

 That sort of hair color wasn’t exactly normal in the Levant during the twelve-hundredth century. 

 But considering Altaïr’s mother had been a foreigner, it was normal for him.

 “Now do I meet your standards for blending in with the locals of this age?” The legendary Mentore asked, with a tiny motion of his hands to indicate Desmond should evaluate him and make his decision, never losing the easy calmness he kept more often than not, and…yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

 “Fine. You can come,” Desmond pushed past his teeth, averting his eyes and walking on past them all - giving Ezio a swift kick to his shin to make him stop staring, and sending the fanboy hopping out of range with a hiss of pained surprise - this was not how he wanted today to go, “Just remember, no killing. No stealing. No getting caught doing anything I say is illegal. And don’t act weird,” he paused, “Don’t, like, tell anyone anything about yourself, even your name,” he paused again, and this time just turned around with soul-deep exhaustion behind his eyes as he muttered to the ancestor now following him like Altaïr was the Novice here, “Actually, just don’t talk. At all. Or leave my side.” 

 “If you think it best.” 

 “I do.” 

 “You…” Altaïr actually hesitated there, with Desmond’s hand on the doorknob to the apartment’s front door, and he peeked back at the older man. Who averted his golden eyes quickly before he could catch them. Clearing his throat, which was so weird to hear from Altaïr of all people. Still, he looked back long enough to finish what he’d been about to say with a slight tilt of his head, “You remind me of Malik Al-Sayf.” 

 His descendant paused for a moment.

 Altaïr momentarily also wondered if the boy knew who he meant, feeling…uneasy, without his robes and gear and hood.

 And then his descendant, Desmond, actually grinned at him.

 “Thanks!” He laughed, flashing Altaïr that grin that made him want to say more things that would bring it into the light often from now on, “I've always thought Malik was awesome!” 

 “He…was,” Altaïr agreed. Then nodded. Then nodded again. Then followed their Desmond out of this apartment of theirs that was quite rundown, shutting the door carefully and silently behind him. Leaving that space where it was just them put a whole new weight on him about not having his regalia, a way to cover himself, to identify himself, but Altaïr shouldered that awareness off into the shadows. Deciding it best to think of this as a mission. 

 They would procure money, procure supplies and furnishings, and they would set up what was essentially a bureau in this strange city they’d come to.

 He had done this many times before.

 He would do it again. 

 And he would keep their Desmond safe while he was at it.

-----

 There were too many colors.

 Altaïr…had wrongly not considered that would be an issue.
 
 It had been hard to miss how colorful the markets were when he had gone to procure money before. There had been many floors to the market. And loud ‘machines’ carrying customers between them. And these big screens, as Desmond described them, playing moving pictures, videos, at loud volumes. And it seemed the dyes of today were commonplace, considering how many people wore the brilliant colors only the rich could afford in Altaïr’s life. 

 There were also more people in these markets than there had been in Altaïr’s life. Many of them loud. It was difficult to not see a flash of bright, bright red out of the corner of his eye and react as if a threat was approaching him. 

 It was difficult to not be able to hide under his hood.

 It was difficult to catch his breath when he felt so exposed and surrounded.

 But Desmond, the boy, he moved so assuredly. Shifting side to side and blending into the crowds with all the skill of a Master Assassin despite his young-again state. And it seemed to be a comfort to him. To be surrounded by people he could hide within. People who would shield him in an emergency. People he could slip through if they were attacked. None of the colors-noise-everything seemed to stun him the way it did Altaïr.

 So the Eagle followed.

 And followed.

 And followed.

 Grabbing the wallets Desmond had missed ahead of him, taking small feathers of money before slipping them back into pockets and bags. Before they could be missed. That was simple. As simple as using his Sight. He barely had to put thought into it. Putting all of his thought instead onto the head of bobbing, dark hair ahead of him. Following it and following it and following -

 The head paused. Stopped moving.

 Altaïr blinked, then glanced down at the feel of something tugging on his shirt. Fingers curled into the common fabric. Desmond’s fingers. He glanced back up at the child not looking his way, tilting his head. Then found himself being tugged out of the crowd they’d been pickpocketing their way through, as if he hadn’t been following. He wondered if Desmond doubted him in some way. He wondered if he wasn’t doing good enough.

 He clicked his tongue, despising those old insecurities from when he was actually in his thirties coming through. He was over ninety years old. He would not fold to them.

 His descendant tugged him straight into a store. Full of many, many racks of clothes. And much color. So much. The Syrian man dropped his chin, only to remember with an uncomfortable shift that he wasn’t wearing his hood. It made him click his tongue again. 

 Oh, there was less color here.

 Desmond dropped his shirt’s fabric from his fingers, having brought his ancestor to a small corner of the store where the darker racks of clothes hid them from sight. And where they were just slightly out of sight of the security cameras, not that Altaïr was fully conscious of that need in the modern-day just yet. And he peeked around, then turned to this ancestor of his.

 His first.

 Who stared at him silently with his golden eyes.

 “Altaïr, take a moment to…do whatever you need to,” and there, there was the maturity the boy held that no boy should. The maturity of a young man who had been ready to die for what was needed to be done. Though how he knew - ? Altaïr tilted his head further than all the other times, and Desmond gave him a small frown in response.

 Motioned to his sides.

 Where Altaïr was opening and closing his palms in a rhythm of quick self-comfort. Fingers curled, fingers flattened, fingers curled - he shook his hands out. Lips flattening together. Malik had also, always, noticed when he was doing that. When he was ‘overwhelmed’ as his best Keeper had been sharp about saying. He’d trained himself out of that after he lost…all of them. It was too well-known a tell of his.

 Now, young-again himself, stuck in a future centuries beyond them, he was falling back into it all over again. Because in his mind?

 He hadn’t lost them yet.

 “Apologies,” he said, recalling how Al Mualim had also been very angered by the tell before he trained himself to not get overwhelmed. 

 It hadn’t been until he had people to feel overwhelmed for that that hadn’t worked any longer, and then he’d trained himself to not react to being overwhelmed.

 “Don’t apologize,” Desmond told him, an inch shorter than him but looking so confident in a way few people had ever been around the Eagle of Masyaf, arms crossed and eyes sharp, like Malik, “It’s normal to be overstimulated by today’s cities. Malls especially. They’re built to do that. Just, catch your breath. This is one of the more affordable places we can buy clothes - we’ll get on it when you’re feeling better, yeah?” 

 “...Yeah?” Altaïr repeated, a bit haltingly, a word he hadn’t really used before they were all suddenly able to understand each other’s different languages.

 Closing his golden eyes.

 Meditating as best he can.

 So he could finish this mission, and then go back to the apartment that was at least quieter and not so horridly colorful.

-----

 Desmond completed the mission mostly on his own. Making use of the money they’d both pickpocketed to buy clothes in the ‘affordable’ store. Altaïr had no frame of reference to know if it was actually affordable in this day and age or not. He just hovered beside Desmond’s shoulders. Watching him pull clothes off the racks and put them back. And check little fabric tags in their collars and put them back. And compare colors. And, honestly, was somewhat surprised by how serious their descendant was about this.

 He was putting together whole outfits for the three ancestors, based on their sizes and color preferences if Altaïr had to draw a conclusion from how picky he was being.

 And money didn’t seem to be much of a factor in Desmond’s mind when they left with bags full of clothing, which Altaïr offered to help carry to give himself a goal.

 Desmond led him to a cordwainer - a shoemaker - afterwards. And seemed a little more unsure about shoe sizes, but he was managing it.

 Altaïr lent him his foot to help with sizing Ezio’s, since they had much the same build, but the man from the Levant had a feeling he’d be sticking to his own boots. They weren’t terribly out of place or noticeable. And they were far more comfortable than all these strange, thick shoes like Desmond seemed to prefer. Strange were the modern-day people.

 And clearly not agile.

 Altaïr was very agile. Particularly when it came time that Desmond said they could leave the market, the mall. He slipped out of that overwhelming place with all the determination of a goose with a goal, and found himself hiding in the shadow of a pillar outside the mall. Waiting for Desmond to catch up with the rest of their bags. Which he did. Eventually.

 A few new bags hooked around his forearms.

 They got out of there by riding the same, longer vehicle they had arrived in. A ‘bus’. There were many other people stuffed inside. They eyed their shopping, some of them clearly debating whether or not they’d be able to grab a few bags and make a run for it - those few Altaïr caught the eye of. And stared them down until they had shrunken deep into their seats and turned away. 

 They couldn’t return to the apartment soon enough.

-----

 Altaïr entered the apartment.

 Set the bags down onto the floor with care.

 And then immediately headed to the bedroom him and Desmond shared, shutting the door firmly behind him. He didn’t slam it. But he definitely gave off a very, ‘Don’t disturb me if you value your lives,’ sort of energy in the way he shut it. Desmond couldn’t really blame the guy. Malls were overwhelming even for him. Throw the most legendary Assassin from the twelve-hundredth century into one? Complete with advertising billboards that screamed in your face, mall performers, and then a long bus ride before and after?

 Yeah. He’d need to meditate privately too.

 Ezio had been in the middle of hanging up curtains in the living room - from where the fuck he got them, Desmond had no clue - and turned to watch Altaïr’s immediate retreat to privacy, and then to stare at the bags and bags they had brought back with them.

 The Italian clapped his hands, smiling in that way that always made Desmond’s stomach flip, “Molto bene! I trust you got what you were looking for, si? And there was no trouble?” 

 It was a smile that made Desmond want to…make him proud, or something.

 “Something like that,” the boy muttered, dropping his head to hide the embarrassed pinkness he could feel crawling up his neck, pointing to the bags he knew held clothes he’d bought for Ezio, “You can try them on. They’re probably different from what you’re used to, sorry, but if they’re seriously uncomfortable to wear just let me know. We can go exchange them for something different, or, something.” 

 He shrugged, then leaned around Ezio kneeling down to check out the bags in question. To, again, investigate those curtains he’d gotten from somewhere. They looked smoke-free. No stains, no wrinkles even. And they were a nice, soft yellow color. 

 He was pretty sure he’d told them to stay in the apartment?

 “Ah, non temere mai, never fear, fratellino,” the Auditore spoke up, noticing where his attention was stuck, and earned himself a tiny kick from Desmond’s sneakers for calling him that yet again as Ezio smiled up at him with a dazzling and disarming expression on his face that would see him mobbed by women if he stepped onto the street, he was sure, “I did not leave the apartment, as promised! Our neighbors simply came to greet us, and a nice young lady from two doors down happened to notice we were lacking in furnishings! She offered the curtains and a few other items to me.”

 Desmond’s eye twitched.

 “Ah, but I only accepted the curtains! And the cleaning supplies,” Ezio motioned, “which I shall return to her as soon as I’ve finished with them!” 

 Now that he mentioned it, the apartment did appear cleaner. Like the floors had been mopped. And the kitchen wiped down. And the walls even slightly scrubbed, with the afterscent of something lemon-y in the air. Well. That saved Desmond his second trip of the day to go look for cleaning supplies, but he’d still have to go grocery shopping -

 “Where’s Ratonhnhaké:ton?” He asked, picking at a different subject so he wouldn’t be picking at the emotional scab that was him feeling he would cry because the apartment was cleaner. And Raton’s absence had been plucking at the back of his head since he’d walked in and only noticed Ezio. 
 
 Who opened his mouth -

 And right on time, there was a dull thwack from the second bedroom his last two ancestors were sharing.

 “There were many pieces of broken and disassembled furniture, si?” Ezio reminded him with a grandiose wave of his hand to bring attention to Desmond that, yes, all those broken bits of furniture aside from the wobbly coffee table still covered with Altaïr’s gear were gone from sight, “It turns out our large friend is something of a carpenter! Since he took it all into our room to make actual, usable furnishings for us!”

 He trusted Ratonhnhaké:ton. Really. He did.

 The man had built so much of Davenport Homestead up from the ground with his own two hands.

 But still, Desmond tip-toed over to the closed door of that second bedroom, and silently opened it. Ha. Master Assassin skill. Anyways, he peeked through the crack he’d made in the door, and found Ratonhnhaké:ton sure enough. Shirtless and with a makeshift workshop surrounding him. Wood scraps and sawdust. Piles of nails and screws. Using the back of his tomahawk to hammer them in - there was already a pretty sturdy-looking table assembled in one corner of the room, and he seemed to be in the middle of making a…bedframe, maybe?

 Desmond silently shut the door, leaving him to it.

 “Well…I have to go grocery shopping,” he told the only ancestor left in the living space, and Ezio raised his head from where he was carefully picking over the clothing bought for him - far different from the hoses and doublets of his day, “Can you tell Raton that those,” he pointed, “are his bags? Whenever he finishes up in there.”

 He probably needed to figure out where to get a pair of mattresses too.

 Blankets too.

 And kitchenware too, he supposed, if he was going to buy food.

 Desmond headed for the door, counting out the money remaining from his and Altaïr’s pickpocketing adventure. Quite a bit. Geeze, that old man seriously knew how to grab only the highest bills. They could just pickpocket more if they needed it, he guessed. Though the fact that they were stealing so much from regular people made Desmond feel a bit guilty. A bit more than ‘a bit’. 

Just as he was heading out, he heard a bedroom door opening. The bedroom on the right side of the apartment. Theirs. And Altaïr padded out to join him with his usual steely expression. He turned to give the Master Assassin, the Mentor, a look. 

 Altaïr just stared down that inch between them.

 So, again, they headed out. Trusting Ezio and Raton not to bring down the apartment while they were gone.

-----

 Altaïr had many, many, many questions about the grocery store. New to almost all the food there. Funny. Desmond hadn’t forgotten how curious his first ancestor was, how prone to questioning he’d become after Al Mualim was deposed, but he hadn’t thought Altaïr would fall back into it so easily. Still. It was sort of nice. Even if he didn’t have all the answers Altaïr clearly wanted, it kept his mind off things as he actually explained the great concept of grocery stores to Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad this time. 

 He’d just have to introduce Altaïr to Google when he got him a phone.

-----

 The apartment wasn’t exactly sparkling when they returned this time. It was still some shady, city apartment on the poorer side of town. Desmond wasn’t expecting a high-rise level of prettiness. But still. He paused a moment there, in the doorway, letting Altaïr go on ahead. Gathering up his gear he’d set on the coffee table earlier after setting down the shopping bags, nodding to his two fellow ancestors who were standing around, and then went and shut himself in the bedroom for a second time that day like a cat that had been pet by too many excitable passerbys.

 Desmond looked at the closed door of the bedroom, looked at all the shopping bags on the floor, looked at the cleaned apartment and missing cleaning supplies that Ezio must’ve returned, and then looked at the kitchen table set out now. That Raton must’ve deemed done.

 He shuffled over to set his own shopping bags on top of said table, after getting Ratonhnhaké:ton’s nod of permission, and tested how wobbly the piece of furniture was by grabbing the edge of the table and wiggling it back and forth. His answer? 

Not wobbly at all.

When he looked back over at them, Ezio was muttering and running a cleaning rag over the coffee table that no longer had weapons neatly organized out across its whole surface, dusting it with an eagerness that said he’d just been waiting to be able to do so. Which. Was a little funny.  

 A lot funny.

 Okay, so maybe Desmond laughed.

 And maybe it was a punched-out, broken sort of laugh that wobbled more than Ratonhnhaké:ton’s table, and maybe he had to turn around and press a palm over his mouth to stop the sound. To contain himself. But still. It happened. It did. And after, all he could do was let out a long, shaky breath as he fixed himself back into the mess of tape and glue and distrust and his hoodie that his teenaged self had been.

 Just, now he had his three ancestors with him for that.

 Two of whom were there and present and quiet, waiting on him. So he lowered his hand and shook it out and asked casually, “So, how many bedframes did you make, Ratonhnhaké:ton?” 

 His answer was, “Two. I also…made this.” 

 Desmond had to turn around to see whatever his Mohawk ancestor was showing to him, which he did, and then he had to laugh again. Because Raton was holding aloft a little birdhouse that was so small compared to the big hands holding it. This laugh wobbled completely apart. Until Desmond had faceplanted on that new kitchen table that smelled like lemon polish.

 And was just sobbing quietly into the arms he’d folded under himself.

 Because he was a mess, and wasn’t that just fun?

 Ratonhnhaké:ton missed birds. And the woods, and the sounds of nature, so he’d made himself a birdhouse for the middle of a city and Desmond was struck by how stupid this whole thing was for the Isu to do to them. To pull three men out of time when they’d already done more than enough to deserve to rest, just to help him. Like he deserved that. Them. 

 He dried his eyes eventually.

 Until then, Ezio cooed at him and carded worn fingers through his hair, and Raton hummed and rubbed at his back.

 And he didn’t deserve them but he couldn’t return them either, so he’d just make do.

…

 Naturally, neither of his two younger ancestors wanted to let him leave after that.

 Desmond really wasn’t all that sure that this was the best idea, but…hey. They had modern clothes? And they weren’t, like, stray puppies who would get lost if he let them leave the apartment on their own. The two of them could find their own way home. All he had to do was give them all the spare money he and Altaïr had politely pickpocketed earlier, and point them towards the mattress store he’d asked a lady at the grocery store about beforehand.

 All they had to do was pop down there, buy two mattresses and sheets, pillows, blankets - the works. Then come back.

 Keeping in mind to not buy the brightest colors for Altaïr’s sake.

 Desmond watched them leave, all cheery smiles on Ezio’s end and quiet determination on Raton’s end.

 Both of them were wearing blue jeans, and Ezio had a nice, simple white shirt with elbow-length sleeves that cut low enough over his chest that Desmond had known he’d feel happily confident in it. Ratonhnhaké:ton was wearing a flannel the color of bluebirds, nice and soft, that he’d rubbed to his cheek curiously before pulling it on. They looked normal. They looked modern. They weren’t acting as much like aliens either…

 Still, when he watched them leave, he felt a little like a mama bird having to watch her baby birds leave the nest.

 He shook that thought off and went about putting groceries away. Organizing what parts of the apartment that he could with what they’d already bought.

 And with Altaïr holding one bedroom captive so he could brood alone.

 Wonderful.

 Seriously. It…wasn’t that bad.

-----

 There was a knock at the door while they were gone.

 Desmond being able to see silhouettes through the walls with his Eagle Vision was how he knew it wasn’t either of his ancestors. And that Altaïr rose from where he’d been kneeling, meditating, to press himself against the bedroom door, listening for trouble. He waved the man off. Overprotective. And for no reason at all. Desmond opened the front door -

 And he presumed this was the lady from two doors down, who Ezio had borrowed cleaning supplies from.

 “Oh!” Who seemed very surprised to see a child alone in the apartment, geeze, that was going to get damn annoying damn fast Desmond knew. And led to him crossing his arms haughtily, frowning up at her, “Sorry, kid! I - is Ezio here?” 

 She was pretty, Desmond would give her that. Really pretty for this part of town. And in her early twenties.

 Way too young for a man in his sixties like Ezio though. Long, bunny-brunette hair and low-rise jeans and a shirt that ended above her pierced bellybutton. Pretty. But also, he was not letting their apartment turn into a place where Ezio’s many women were welcome, sorry, no-go, nope, he could admire her ambition but he was about to be the ultimate problem for her.

 He grinned all nice-like though, hiding his frown so it wouldn’t come back to bite the Auditore too much in the butt.

 “Sorry, he’s gone out for the night!” The ‘kid’ told her, because he was totally that, yep, wasn’t like he was going to actively be cockblocking his ancestor or anything - nope.

 He loved Ezio, really, he did. But how that man didn’t end up with a thousand S.T.D.s back then, he’d never understand. Shaun had been so sure he had to have at least one or two.

 “Can I leave a message for him from you?” 

 “Oh, uh,” she giggled, like she was embarrassed, and she really did seem like a sweet enough lady. Just bewitched by that Auditore charm that so many throughout history had been taken by, “well, I was wondering if he, um,” she hesitated, peering at him a little more closely, “…sorry, who’re you? His kid brother?” 

 She asked it so politely, so Desmond did not snort over the fact that they were very much different ethnicities and had almost twenty years between their ages. 

 Though, that did beg the question.

 What exactly was their backstory going to be? 

 Before Desmond had the chance to silently toss together a sandwich of excuses and lies, there was the creak of a door opening. Drawing both of their eyes back into the apartment. And it was on purpose because he knew Altaïr was capable of opening that door completely silently. Altaïr, who stepped out of the bedroom, still dressed in his ‘loungewear’ sans his boots. Barefooted. And staring at the young woman in their door.

 Who blushed up to her ears at the sight of him.

 “Oh, hello~!” And twirled a piece of hair around her finger, biting at her lip. Desmond nearly threw his hands up because he did not want to be between these two, “I’m Mckenna. Mckenna Lowl. I live two doors down? Your, uh, roommate? Borrowed cleaning supplies from me earlier.” 

 “Thank you for that,” Altaïr told her with a simple nod, and hey, Desmond hadn’t considered it earlier but this definitely answered the question about their languages being understood by other people too, didn’t it? “We’ve only just moved in, and are lacking much of what we need.” 

 “Yeah! Oh, I feel that,” Mckenna giggled, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, and at least she had some cute earrings on. As somebody who’d pierced his ears for fun in his early twenties, Desmond approved, “When I first moved out on my own, my apartment was practically barren! It took me months to get everything I needed, and even now I’m still buying things bit by bit! Um, sorry, your name - ?” 

 “Altaïr Al-Sayf,” Altaïr introduced himself, and Desmond wanted to giggle. Just a bit. Reminded of that old bet he’d had with Rebecca that Altaïr had to have had a thing with at least one of the Al-Sayf brothers -

Up until a hand rested itself on his head.

And he found himself being introduced to Mckenna too, wide-eyed and taken completely off guard, “And this is Desmond Al-Sayf. It’s nice to meet you.” 

 Mckenna’s lips were curled into a delighted smile, sounding out Altaïr’s name that sounded foreign for sure in the middle of New York of all places. 

 And then her mouth dropped open. The implications hitting her. Their neighbor looked between the two of them, standing side by side with barely an inch of difference in height. With the same brown skin, the same face shape, the same short hair, the same scar on their lips, and even if Desmond clearly still had baby fat and a skinniness to him - ? 

 The two of them looked similar enough for her to come to her own conclusions.

 “Oh!” Mckenna gasped, pointing between them, then getting this look on her face that just crowed - ‘ah-ha!’ - and Desmond would’ve planted his face in his hands if only it wouldn’t seem weird as hell to this lady they’d be living down the hall from for the foreseeable future. 

 Just great.

 “You must’ve been young when you had him!”

 Altaïr paused.

 Considered it like the absolute arrogant asshole he was when he was young, oh, he’d better not, Desmond was going to abandon him at a bus stop if he -

 Then Altaïr nodded, simply saying, “I’m older than I look.”

Oh, the amount of strength Desmond had to summon to smile politely and not go for one of Altaïr’s throwing knives was astronomical. The Isu had better be prepared to hold him back, otherwise he was going to throw their precious ‘Architect’ out a third-story window into the city street below. And there weren’t any fucking haystacks here. Desmond was an orb of rage, he was vibrating with the need to kick something in the shin, he didn’t need or want another father, and was biting so hard at the inside of his lip -

His lip that was still stitched shut, because he was fifteen again, not twenty-five, and it stung.

 Good thing he was good at hiding the pain. His wince was barely perceptible. Except to certain golden-eyed men standing next to his side who happened to be Master Assassins with overprotective streaks because they lost too many of the people they loved. Like, oh look, a certain Ibn-La’Ahad who had suddenly grabbed his chin and gently pressed his thumb under Desmond’s lip to get him to stop biting it.

 “Don’t, you’ll cause permanent damage to yourself,” Altaïr told him, completely ignoring Mckenna now who finally was showing some self-preservation instincts like she’d just realized she was with complete strangers.

 And maybe she seemed a little weirded out by Desmond’s injury too. He kept forgetting it was a way fresher wound now, not scarred like Altaïr and Ezio’s. Complete with stitches and bruising.

 Also, witness, witness, witness - his head screamed at him.

 He scrunched up his nose at Altaïr, this close to starting a gossip train throughout their new apartment building by shouting, ‘You’re not my father!’

 Thank God, Mckenna decided it was too weird now, and giggled. Drawing Altaïr’s attention back to her and away from Desmond - he decided he didn’t mind her after all, go girl - giving a tiny wave of her hand and smiling at him, them, looking a little more sensible and nervous now though.

 “Not that old,” she teased just a tiny bit, looking between the two of them and slowly slinking inch by inch to the side, and out of their doorway as the newly dubbed ‘father and son’ watched her, “Anyways, right, I just came to ask if you could just tell your, uh,” she blinked, then seemed to come to a whole new question as she paused peeking around the doorframe, frowning, “Um, what is Ezio to you two?” 

 Ha.

 Payback time.

 Altaïr didn’t answer quickly enough, so it was his own fault.

 Desmond jammed a thumb at his new ‘father’ with an easy grin - and damn, he actually did beat out Bill as a father, didn’t he? - and answered without a hint of regret but plenty of pettiness, “His boyfriend!” 

 Altaïr went very stiff next to him.

 “They’re very serious,” Desmond went on, nodding, vindicated by how wide Mckenna’s eyes went. And the sound she made like a dog’s squeaky toy. Those wide eyes flicking between the two of them, before she bobbed her head and also squeaked out a hasty goodbye and disappeared around the doorframe fully. Desmond could hear her flipflops flopping against the floor as she fled back to her own apartment and shut the door behind her.

 Well, once news got around that would definitely end up cockblocking Ezio.

 Whatever. The young-again teen closed the door with a small snort of victory.

 And only grew concerned about Altaïr’s silence when he’d half-turned, to find the man staring at him with very, very sharp golden eyes.

 “Um,” Desmond shifted under those, those, eyes. Dropping his head, fidgeting with the sleeves of his hoodie and hating how unsure he sounded, “...Altaïr?”

 “...Considering that that young woman,” Altaïr started slowly, eyes so sharp, “did not immediately call me a sinner despite wearing a rosary around her neck,” oh, was she - ?

 He may have missed the necklace with a cross on it…though he was pretty sure he registered it being silver like her earrings. 

 “Uh, uh,” Desmond wove his fingers together, remembering too late that Altaïr was sort of religious? And came from a time and also a place where men loving men might’ve been - ? He found his tongue stumbling over itself in his own mouth, “Altaïr, it’s not - um, you won’t - ? Be killed for it? Nowadays?” 

 “Is that the standard punishment for men lying with men as you know it?” Altaïr asked calmly.

Altaïr who, Desmond knew, practiced religion for both the Muslim - father - and Catholic - mother - sides of his parents. Even if he wasn’t strictly ‘religious’ in the traditional sense. Fuck. Had he offended him? Was being gay a huge crime as far as Altaïr thought? Worthy of death? Okay, sure, it wasn’t the most accepted thing, even these days sometimes, but Desmond liked to think that 2012 was a way more progressive year than the 1200s!

 An emotion passed Altaïr’s face.

 It said plenty that the expression shift was so visible.

 “Desmond, I am not offended,” this man, this legend, this scion of the Assassin Brotherhood who Desmond was so, so, so often compared to by Bill eased up where Bill never had, “I was taken by surprise. To have that claimed on my behalf, but - “

 “Sorry!” Burst out of the boy who’d already broken down in tears once today. More than enough times. But still felt an ashamed sting at the corner of his eyes as he rubbed at his arms in front of Altaïr’s eyes now, “Sorry, I shouldn’t have…said that. I just didn’t like…you basically deciding I was - you know.” 

 “Using the cover of us being father and son?” 

 Geeze, but didn’t he feel like shit, raising his eyes to meet those golden ones that weren’t nearly so sharp now. The eyes of a father who had lost one of his sons to tragedy. The eyes of a man Desmond respected, liked, loved, and would be honored to call his actual father so why - ? Why did it make him so angry to think about? 

 Why did it make him so upset?

 There was a thud at the door they’d barely had shut for a couple of minutes.

 Desmond recognized the shapes on the other side of it he saw using his Eagle Vision, so he opened the door without preamble, completely cutting Altaïr off.

 In the doorway were Ezio and Raton, each of them with a queen-sized mattress hefted onto their shoulders and beaming with pride. As in, Ezio was genuinely beaming and Raton had a quiet air of pride around him, with a quieter smile. They both waited in the doorway. Staring at Desmond expectedly like puppies waiting for praise. So he nodded once to commend them for getting the mattresses home, and then he caught them up.

 “Altaïr adopted me while you were gone, and I told our neighbor that you and him are fucking, Ezio.” 

 One queen-sized mattress hit the floor with a thump loud enough that somebody down the hall shouted at them to keep it down.

 Ezio looked both pale as a ghost and red as a devoted church boy who was seeing the inside of a brothel for the very first time.

 Desmond’s work was done here. So he turned on his heel, and went to take his turn shutting himself in and brooding in his and Altaïr’s bedroom. 

 Desmond curled his knees up to his chest in the corner of the freshly dusted and cleaned bedroom, dropped his head to his knees, and quietly dissociated because what was his life becoming? It was late. The sunlight in the bedroom was pale gold, and darkening, and he watched it make shapes on the walls as it fell behind the cityscape outside. Listening to the murmur of his ancestors talking out in other parts of the apartment. 

 He fell asleep eventually, even if he had an empty stomach.

 He woke up in a proper bed, mattress atop the box spring they’d slept on that first night, sheets and bedcovers and a soft pillow squished underneath his cheek. There was something medicinal-tasting smeared on his stitched lip, and the pale sunlight of morning and the sounds of the city.

 And there was Altaïr, curled up next to him on the bed, an arm slung loosely over the boy’s hip to keep Desmond close.

 And you know what? 

 Desmond didn’t really mind being adopted all that much in this new life of his.

 He just let his eyes shut and dozed off again.

 In no hurry at all now that he was allowed to live.

~>-----<~

Chapter Text

~>-----<~

 So began Desmond Miles’ new life of living with three of his most infamous ancestors. Because that was a normal situation to find yourself in.

‘Normal’. Like there was ever the possibility of him being that. His existence began with careful breeding among the Assassin Brotherhood, and ended in an ancient race’s secret temple, harnessing a power that scared ‘gods’ to save the whole Earth from destruction, just to then end up fifteen years old all over again and sharing an apartment with three of his ancestors.

 So normal.

 Altaïr was at war with the toaster.

 Ezio was addicted to Italian soap operas.

 And Ratonhnhaké:ton had built ten different birdhouses to sigh longingly at. 

 So they were adapting to modern-day life at their own paces, clearly.

 Now, how does a legendary Assassin remembered after almost a thousand years had passed since his death end up at war with a toaster? Well. They put the bread in said toaster. And then they hold their face directly over it while waiting for said bread to finish toasting.

 And then they leap back when the toaster pops that toasted bread straight up at their face.

 Hypothetically.

 If that were to happen to someone. Say, like Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad. Not that it did. At all. It wasn’t like Desmond witnessed a situation…of that sort, and then was bribed into silence because Altaïr had offered to keep the apartment extra clean that week. Of course not. Nothing like that. That’d just be ridiculous. The Eagle of Masyaf? Offering to become a househusband? Ha. Ha. Ha.

 …As embarrassing as it was that his ancestors had realized he had a fixation on keeping the apartment clean.

 No comment.

 Desmond had shortly after been forced to give all three of them curfews.

And it was all because of Ezio wandering out of their apartment building after dark; having to find him, find the Florentine man four streets away - helping a little old lady cross the road while carrying her grocery bags. Listening to her gush about her favorite soap operas, which was what inspired Ezio to ask for a TV in the first place. Nothing fancy. Just a simple, cheap TV Desmond had found on the curb.

 Which was what then inspired Ezio’s addiction to Italian soap operas.

 That had led to the Florentine man then needing a nice couch for their basically empty living room. Desmond had sighed so much over coming home a day later to find a rather - yes, nice - couch indeed now belonged to them. And Ezio’s charming smile as he told him happily about how a ‘beautiful young lady’ offered it to him from an apartment building down the street after they got to…chatting. 

 Flirty chatting.

 Point is, they had a properly furnished living room within the first week of them living in their apartment.

 And most of the furniture was procured by Ezio and his Auditore charm.

 It wasn’t normal, and Desmond would die on that hill. He swore there was something in Ezio Auditore’s genes that made the man unfairly attractive to anyone and everyone crossing his path. And while he was a bit embarrassed about the whole ‘his ancestor was way hotter than him’ thing while living Ezio’s memories? Now? It was just awkward.

 He was a teenage boy constantly watching his ancestor - parental figure? Absolutely not - being flirted with all the time.

 Raton…well.

 Out of his three ancestors, Desmond maybe felt guiltiest about Ratonhnhaké:ton being dragged into 2012. Maybe it was the fact that even less of Ratonhnhaké:ton’s Mohawk heritage remained than ever. Maybe it was the fact that they’d made their home in a small city, where the forests and fields Raton enjoyed running through most were far away. Maybe it was the fact that there were so few birds.

 Maybe it was the fact that Raton had mounted a pair of his birdhouses outside his and Ezio’s window, and he had so quickly adopted a small flock of pigeons that he was taking care of now. And the sight was so sweet and so heartbreaking at the same time.

 He was the quietest.

 The least settled.

 The least happy.

 But he stayed, even so. Probably because Desmond was the only one left that he could find who spoke his mother language fluently, who knew his time, his traditions, his pursuits. Altaïr, Ezio, both of his fellow ancestors had almost immediately switched from calling him Connor to his preferred, birth name when they realized it was important to him. But it wasn’t the same. 

 It never would be again.

 All three of them. They were so different, and they were so confused by so many things of today. The big things. The small things too. From the microwave that Altaïr watched spin through the door’s window, to Ezio bashing unfaithful men in his soap operas over dinner, to Raton introducing all of his pigeons to Desmond with a small smile. It really wasn’t so bad.

 And wasn’t that just odd?

 Life…really wasn’t so bad.

 There was the next sunrise, and the next and the next. And the war against their toaster continued to be waged, and Desmond settled into their slowly filling apartment. And there was no Abstergo, no Templars, no Animus, no blood spilled - nobody hunting for them. That they knew of. Which was enough for the young-again teenager. 

 More than enough.

 He was good.

 He sat in a little patch of sunlight while Altaïr read a history book they’d thrifted for the curious man, while Ezio whistled cheerily in the kitchen, while Ratonhnhaké:ton silently sat cross-legged in his own patch of sunlight not so far away.

 And he was good.

 Which meant things were going to get flipped sideways sooner than later.

-----

 The chaos of being born again couldn’t distract Desmond from his nightmares forever.

 -----

 So much blood.

 There was so much blood.

 It was everywhere. It was wet, it was warm, it made his stomach squirm. It was. Everywhere. It was all over his hands. Hands left everywhere he touched, prints, smeared across the floor and the walls and the door in a bright, red, scrawling mark that screamed he was hurt. He was hurt, he was bleeding, he needed medical attention. He needed help. He needed an adult, because he was only fifteen years old.

 He was Desmond Miles though, son of the Mentor. Why would he ever ask for help? 

 He was too good for that. He was the best of them. He had the greatest potential out of all of the Novices on the Farm. Why would he need help? Why would he bleed? 

 Why was he locked in the bathroom? 

 Why was he curled against the solid porcelain of the bathtub, knees up to his chest and still trying to crawl further back, further away from the door? Why was the door bending? Why was somebody trying to break it down, why was somebody screaming at him, why was he there, why was there so much blood, drenching his shirt, his knees, his lips were numb in that stinging, empty way that told him the cut had gone deep, too deep, dangerously deep -

 Why was he bleeding in his own home?

 Why was his dad trying to break down the door? 

 “DESMOND, OPEN THIS DOOR! DESMOND! DESMOND! OPEN THIS DOOR, YOU LITTLE - IT ISN’T THAT SERIOUS. YOU SHOULD’VE JUST DODGED LIKE I’VE SHOWN YOU A HUNDRED TIMES BEFORE, WHY COULDN’T YOU JUST - “

 The doors on the Farm were reinforced. Twice over. Because Assassins were a paranoid bunch like that.

 The bathroom door still bowed under the force of William Miles slamming his fist repeatedly against its surface, screaming again and again and again. 

 And Desmond just shrunk back, shivering, in shock, bloody, again and again and again.

 Later, it would all be a blur.

 That moment in the training ring, where Bill got so frustrated with his son because he just hadn’t gotten a certain move down. Even after he’d shown him more than once. What a failure on Desmond’s part. That moment where Bill went from throwing his hands up, went from disappointment-filled exhales, to a knife. Pulled from his pocket. 

 It flashed in the painfully bright lights of the training ring.

 Then, it was the numbness.

 The sting of a wound gone too deep.

 So much red, and so much shock in both of them. He, sort of, remembers seeing that shock on Bill’s face after the blood sprayed through the air. Like he’d honestly thought Desmond would dodge his knife’s swipe, like he’d been taught to. 

 Then it was him scrambling down one hall, and another. He slammed into a wall. Red was smeared across it. 

 Bill was chasing him. Screaming already.

 In the bathroom.

 The door bending - 

 A first aid kit under the sink that he only found after somebody else had shouted at Bill. Uncle Gavin. Maybe. He thought, maybe, he crept from his little curled position against the bathtub’s porcelain to under the sink. He found what he needed. Gauze and disinfectant. A needle and thread. 

 What he remembered most vividly - 

 Was being hunched over the sink. And the white porcelain was smeared. With so much red. The facet was running. The water was freezing. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Somebody was trying to soothe him through the door. Their words, he couldn’t recall them exactly, but he could recall how he kept refusing to leave that bathroom. It was fine. He had it handled. He didn’t need help. He was never supposed to need help. So he didn’t ask for it.

 There was a needle and thread.

 And his lips -

 And pain.

 And he never felt safe at the Farm again.

 And maybe he finally opened the door hours later. Maybe there was red smeared all over the surfaces in that bathroom. Maybe Uncle Gavin was there and looked - and Bill was there behind him and he looked even more - and maybe he was given the next week off from training, maybe Bill was extra quiet around him and moved slower when they were in the same rooms. 

 Maybe he never called Bill ‘Dad’ again after that.

 Maybe, a month later, he was climbing the fences around the Farm’s boundary lines and making a wild, desperate dash for that train running through the wilderness; his only chance.

 Maybe his next stop was New York and he never intended to look back.

 But before that -

 His blood was spilled in his home.

…

 And the red was all he saw when he shot awake, in a bedroom he barely recognized. Red handprints. Red smears. Red sticky on his skin. Red like sucking on metal. Making his stomach squirm, his chest heave for breath, his fingers curl in the sheets and a hidden blade nearly assassinate their mattress as his eyes snapped up -

 His Eagle Vision activated.

 He saw no more red.

 But he saw a very, very deep blue figure. Sitting on the floor. In that little corner by the window with its own patch of sunlight that lasted the longest throughout the day. That little spot Altaïr had claimed. A figure that wasn’t moving, was looking straight at him as he just gasped for his every breath.

 Grasped for his mouth.

 Ran those fingertips over his lips in a shaky, old act of muscle memory.

 There wasn’t the numb pulse of nerve damage…because none of them had been letting Desmond bite at the wound when he was upset. 

 And two of the stitches had even been removed, because it was healing.

 He was healing.

 He wasn’t in a home where he bled anymore.

 “ˁAyuni?” That blue figure called out to him calmly, which - really? 

 Desmond sucked in a sharper, deeper breath than all his others. Steadying his heartbeat, his heaving chest too, placing a hand over his heart. He blinked. His Eagle Vision’s grey world with its splashes of color faded into reality’s rainbow of a spectrum, and the teenager found himself frowning at Altaïr without regard for how the scene probably looked to the Mentor of the Levant Brotherhood.

 “You know that basically can translate to calling me the ‘apple of your eye’, don’t you?” Desmond huffed, each breath a bit easier than the last to get into his lungs. 

 That was, like, so embarrassing to be called by Altaïr of all people.

 Altaïr, who simply blinked slowly at him. Head tilting to one side. He was kneeling in his sunlit corner, weapons arranged around his knees in an array. 

 His golden eyes stared at Desmond.

 Desmond stared back, stubborn.

 No, they weren’t going to address what had just happened. No, he wasn’t going to think about it again. No, this topic wasn’t going to be brought up again. Yes, it was over with. His breathing had steadied out. Good talk? Good talk. Desmond nodded, and Altaïr’s head tilted further to that one side considering not a single word more had been spoken between them.

 Even better!

 “...Desmond,” and even better if Desmond noped out of their bedroom in search of breakfast considering he was so, so hungry! Totally! Skipping out on whatever attempt at emotions Altaïr was trying to pick out of his pocket was just called a two-for-one deal! “Desmond.” 

 “Remember! The toaster is your friend!” The boy yelped, then pointedly pretended he hadn’t almost faceplanted out of bed because the blankets had tangled themselves around his ankles, and scrambled out of the door to the bemusement of that Master Assassin he left behind sorting weapons.

 Yep, no.

 They were taking this whole ‘accidental adoption’ thing slowly. Like, turtle-slow.

 Desmond would appreciate if the process took ten to twenty years, actually? That’d be great!

 Maybe by then he’d stop having these nightmares about his dad going for his throat when he was just fifteen years old.

 Anyways, just his luck, seriously Minerva what the fuck, Ezio was awaiting him in the kitchen! And by that, he meant Ezio was leaning lazily against the countertop wearing only sweats and casually being a woman’s walking wet dream thank you very much, Desmond’s ancestors were stupidly hot and he didn’t understand why he hadn’t inherited that alongside their skills - anyways. Ezio glanced up when Desmond came scrambling out of the bedroom half on his hands and knees and a bit shakier than he should’ve been.

 “What - ?” Ezio tried to ask, just to be met by the teenager they were raising jumping at him like some sort of risen creature from the grave, yelping -

 “Breakfast!!!” 

 To which the Florentine man paused, tipped his chin, and opened his mouth to question which happened to also be his biggest mistake because Desmond just leapt at him fully and grabbed the nearest thing he could get his hand on to shove in Ezio’s mouth while shouting, “Breakfast!!!” Again.

 It was a tomato. 

 Ezio was in the middle of cooking breakfast? Maybe? 

 And Desmond had shoved a whole tomato in the poor Italian’s mouth. Mama mia.

 Such was life with a traumatized teenager though.

-----

 So what if the three ‘adults’ of the apartment had a totally not covert meeting called by Altaïr? Out in the hallway? Under the guise of something, something, something…adult responsibilities? Desmond wasn’t sure. He hadn’t actually asked for a reason why they all filed one by one out of the apartment. They hadn’t offered one either. He just lounged on their rather nice couch that Ezio had flirted out from under a neighbor down the street, reading a random magazine Mckenna had offered him as a peace offering.

 It maybe was all about women’s fashion, the dos and don’ts of being an ‘It Girl, Oh Yeah!’. As the cover clearly stated in bright, bubbly colors.

 But it wasn’t, like, the worst.

 Definitely made men seem overrated. Desmond was totally feeling that right about now, so he was into it.

 Back on track - Altaïr led the other two out of the apartment with that irritatingly expressionless…expression of his. And Desmond definitely fulfilled his role as a teenager by pretending the adults weren’t on the same plane of existence as him and everything. Too cool for parenting, and all that. Normal teenager stuff.

 …Not that Desmond had ever been a normal teenager before. He was pretty sure normal teenagers weren’t taught how to stitch up knife wounds before they had their tenth birthday party. He was pretty sure normal teenagers had had birthday parties, and not just a small evaluation test to see if they were ready to move onto the next level of training.

 Anyways.

 When the three adults came back inside, they seemed perfectly pleasant and normal and not strange whatsoever.

 Which was how Desmond knew they were keeping their eyes on him. All because Altaïr had told them about how he woke up that morning. Which was ridiculous, because he knew all three of them had terrible nightmares too! Altaïr would go all tense in the bed sometimes, freeze, then force himself to relax! Which Desmond knew was him forcing himself to wake up from a nightmare and then trying to act normal!

 Ezio went without saying, considering the guy’s whole life!

 And Raton - of course he had nightmares after how fucked up his relationships were! In every sense of the word, practically every one of them! The only healthy relationships he honestly seemed to maintain at all was with his people who lived on the Davenport Homestead. Relationships that still ended in tragedy due to how his life ended as a whole.

 The three of them had the gall to pretend they could be reasonable, well-adjusted adults?

 To look at him sideways out of the corners of their eyes, which they knew he saw them doing considering they were all highly trained Assassins, and seem worried?

 They had that gall?

 How bold.

 Unfortunately for them, Desmond Miles was very much the master of one thing other than assassinations. He was the master of fucking denial! 

 He and his magazine were perfectly fine, thank you. 

 And he spent the whole morning pointedly avoiding any, all, and every attempt his three ancestors made to try and trick him into a moment of emotional vulnerability. 

 Not today!

 
-----

 There was a padlock on the inside of the rooftop door of the apartment building…not that that was able to stop any one of them in a pinch. 

But Desmond found it to be entirely intact when he went looking for Altaïr. 

 A red herring for sure.

 On the top floor, there was a window at the far end of the apartment’s hallway. A window that opened up onto the fire escape. And therefore, wasn’t locked. Fire escape steps went down, and fire escape steps went - more importantly - up. Desmond casually climbed out said window, and made his way up the steps to the rooftop as the day came to its end. The skies above the city being painted by oranges, yellows, pinks even.

 ‘Pink skies at night, a sailor’s delight,’ some part of Desmond’s brain recited and he waved away the remnants of that Bleed. A Bleed he had no name for.

 A part of him had always suspected one of his ancestors to be a sailor though, just because he had a ridiculous amount of seafaring rhymes in the back of his head. Wouldn’t that have been an interesting life to relive in the Animus? Seas and shanties and firing cannons at the pirates of those seas? 

 Desmond wondered if Shaun had ever finished mapping out that family tree of all of Desmond’s ancestors. It had been an ambitious project.

 Now that he was…’dead’ though, he supposed it didn’t really matter, did it.

 Altaïr was settled on the roof. Legs tucked into a kneeling position, and eyes closed in the direction away from the setting sun. His hood shadowed the top half of his face. His mouth was fixed in a slight frown; his natural, neutral expression. The scene made Desmond hesitate, just a tiny bit. Part of him expected to suddenly see the inner workings of the Animus flicker around him. The grid, the building blocks of this ‘environment’.

 None of it real.

 Against his better judgement, Desmond’s eyes drifted down to the hand held at his side. His left hand. That he spread out. Bending and unbending each finger one at a time, then together, and his little exhale after was one of relief. 

 He wasn’t missing his ring finger.

 This was real.

 He wasn’t Altaïr.

 He was Desmond Miles. He was Desmond Miles. He was Desmond Miles. He was Desmond Miles…son of no one, because he refused to claim Bill as a father after everything that man had done to him. All the scars he had been given in the name of being a good son. He was Desmond Miles. Not Altaïr. Not Ezio. Not Ratonhnhaké:ton. He was -

 “Desmond.” 

 That simple call of his name called his attention away from his hands, that had been opening and closing and opening again - a focus technique the Brotherhood had taught him - and Altaïr’s eyes were open. And so golden.

 And so clearly watching him.

 “Curfew,” Desmond told him calmly, not addressing his momentary freakout. Not even when those gold eyes narrowed a bit and Altaïr clearly wanted him to, “Come on. We should head down,” and be very grateful for the fact that the apartment building was taller than all of the surrounding buildings too, “You know, before Ezio gets all huffy about us missing dinner again.” 

 Turns out Ezio Auditore da Firenze was a big believer in big, proper sitdown family dinners. Desmond really shouldn’t have been surprised the first time the subject came up.

 Considering Ezio had been raised in a household with an older brother, a younger sister, a younger brother, and a set of parents who loved all their children dearly? Yeah. Yeah. Desmond had felt a bit guilty for not realizing that Ezio would have family values in times of peace, times like he hadn’t lived through in his ancestor’s shoes using the Animus.

 After he had realized that, he’d made it a point to gather Altaïr and Raton for dinner whenever they wandered off.

 It was weird.

 But in a nice, weird way.

 No weirder than Altaïr himself. Who, Desmond was realizing more and more thanks to living with the Eagle of Masyaf, was weird. Probably ‘Weird’ with a capital ‘W’ even. Weird. The teen had been joking all those times he compared Altaïr to a bird or cat inside of his head, but, really, the Levantine Assassin showed their traits in a lot of ways. 

 He just verged on full-on hissing at people who did a number of things; getting in his personal space, speaking to him when he wasn’t mentally prepared for other humans to be present around him, made any noises at all because at times noise simply offended the man, couldn’t stand certain foods’ tastes or textures whatsoever, had to take personal time locked in their bedroom away from everyone, tended to pace in repeating, rotating circles, hid from groups, hid colorful objects where nobody could find them, and also did the same sort of breathing exorcise the Farm had taught Desmond when he was young so - okay, maybe that one wasn’t as weird.

 Not that there was anything wrong with the way Altaïr was.

 He just meant, he’d been learning a lot about his ancestors since moving in with them.

 And -

 “Desmond, ạ̉ʿṭny ạntbạhkm,” Altaïr spoke directly at him, in his face, suddenly less than a foot away - and the teenager admittedly spooked. 

 Which for an Assassin meant his left hand was up and jabbing straight at Altaïr’s throat in an instant.

 The familiar hiss of the hidden blade being released from its sheathe knocked his brain back into place, knocked his sense back onto track, made him realize why that was such a bad idea as he inhaled. And the inhale got lodged in his throat. Thick and choking him. And he stared at the blade, reflecting the light of a beautiful sunset, so beautiful for something so undeniably deadly -

 Altaïr’s fingers were like a vice, pressing firmly into the veins of his wrist.

 The hidden blade was an inch from his throat, yet the man barely looked bothered.

 As if he was used to nearly being stabbed by twitchy Assassins on the daily.

 “Your first instinct is to defend yourself,” the Syrian man noted, staring down the scant inch between them, golden irises flicking between Desmond's eyes. Looking for something. He nodded, approving of whatever it was he’d found, “It is a good instinct. Yours borders on paranoia. A dangerous amount of distrust for the world. For people, good or bad or neutral. You view all of them as a threat regardless of alignment…do you not?” 

 “I wasn’t looking for a therapy appointment when I came up here,” Desmond snarked, feeling like a cicada picked apart by a hawk and hating the feeling.

 “Yet you found one,” which was hilarious for Altaïr to say so sharply, sternly, when he obviously didn’t even know what a therapy appointment was.

 It made Desmond snort a little.

 His hidden blade receded back into its sheathe, under his hoodie’s sleeve. 

 “So now you’re a therapist?” Desmond sort of joked, sort of shuffled sideways to try and escape whatever ‘emotional’ conversation Altaïr was angling for - which, he knew meant it was seriously bothering the man. Altaïr didn’t do emotions.

 “...What is a therapist?” Altaïr’s sudden question stopped him and his shuffling though.

 “A therapist…is…” Actually, despite many jokes by Shaun in the past about him needing one, not anything Desmond had ever sought out - despite his belief as a young adult that he’d accidentally escaped a cult, “Like, somebody who helps you understand your emotions? And leads you to be healthier in the way you act, and communicate, and…stuff?” 

 He winced, rubbing at the back of his neck, but Altaïr just tilted his head, thinking for a second. Asking, “So, it is like when a worshiper sought out an imam for help in handling personal matters?” 

 “A little? Yes?” Desmond wasn’t actually sure if there was a therapist-like profession back in 1200s Syria, “I’ve, obviously, never been. But it’s not a bad thing to have nowadays.” 

 “No,” Altaïr agreed, looking down at him thoughtfully, “it isn’t.”

 Desmond met his stare. 

 Altaïr kept staring.

 Desmond frowned.

 Altaïr tilted his head just a bit further to the side, in a very bird-like action he had to say.

 “So, dinner?” The boy tried to urge him, and just succeeded in making Altaïr’s subtle facial expression become less subtle as his mouth turned a bit more downward - great.

 “You are troubled.” 

 “Gee, thanks.” 

 Altaïr’s nose actually wrinkled slightly that time, which was satisfying to see. It wasn’t anything like Desmond being genuinely annoyed by the man’s subtle expressions. No. It was far more juvenile than that. He just felt like he was winning whenever he managed to trouble Altaïr, and, well…actually. That made him a little shit, didn’t it? Made him quickly lose his satisfaction and look away, sniffing. Trying not to appear bothered.

 This was what he meant. Being a teenager was so stupid. He wanted to do all sorts of immature things he’d grown out of years ago. The rebel in him was young and new and highschool-aged, oh no. No, nope, no. 

 He had to get a rein on that side of himself. Before he ended up lashing out at an innocent.

 “...Dinner?” Desmond tried to urge him, again, and got the Mentor of the Assassin Brotherhood to almost frown. Properly frown. 

 “...Your nightmare last night - “

 “And I’m out,” he said, he meant what he said, turning on a heel with all the grace of the multiple Master Assassins of his bloodline. Desmond jogged back towards the fire escape, practically able to hear the completely silent, brooding look Altaïr fixed on the back of his head. Yep. Nope. That conversation wasn’t one they were having today, tomorrow, or ever! If Altaïr thought a pretty sunset and a few pensive, brooding stares was all it would take to unlock his descendant’s tragic backstory then he had another thing coming!

 If nothing else…Desmond had to appreciate that Altaïr didn’t immediately chase him, though.

 He stayed up on the rooftop, at a loss, long enough for the teenager to climb back into the apartment building and continue jogging down the hallway. Down the stairwell one floor. Then another.

 All the way back to their apartment.

 Evasion successful. Nice.

 “Altaïr’s on his way,” Desmond reported dutifully, sticking a thumb back over his shoulder when Ezio glanced up from the busy, busy - and cheap - stove he had working overtime. An apron around his hips that read, ‘Watch out, I cook!’ And a ladle in hand the Florentine man waved about too, to complete the look of - was saying Ezio was a househusband offensive? Nah.

 “Ah, va bene, fetch your other father if you would, mio caro,” the man requested with a charming Auditore smile he only got away with because of the amazing, mouth-watering aroma of a feast drifting through the apartment. 

 Ezio had taken to referring to Altaïr and Raton as his ‘other two fathers’, the tease, and whenever Desmond tried to incite retribution he would be met by excuses of the Mentore simply treating their undercover story seriously. Of him ‘maintaining their cover’. As if. It was just Ezio proving why he had always been seen as the troublemaker out of his three brothers!

 The fact that Desmond headed obediently over to Ezio and Raton’s bedroom to knock on the door meant nothing.

 It was just easier to surrender to being adopted, rather than fight it.

-----

 So there were hiccups.

 But life was…good.

 And being adopted wasn’t so bad, Desmond guessed.

~>-----<~

Chapter Text

~>-----<~

 Being used to living alone meant the first couple of weeks of Desmond sharing an apartment with his three ancestors was strange. And also passed by fastly. Every single day there was work to be done or chaos to reign in. To start with it was mostly the chaos of moving in, and then it was the chaos of teaching three men out of their century how to adapt to the modern-day.

 When Desmond brought home a simple phone he’d bought from an electronics store up the street, he had to sit the three of them down on their couch.

 And make sure they had water.

 And that they didn’t have a clear escape route.

 And then he showed them the wonders of modern technology; a 2012 phone.

 Altaïr called it sorcery. And then he was introduced to Google and Desmond completely lost the Levantine Mentor to his new version of the Apple. If he’d thought the history books he’d brought home from the public library caught Altaïr’s attention, he swore the man was bewitched by Google’s existence.

 Ezio seemed troubled, and awe-struck, and aggrieved all at the same time.

 Desmond checked the phone’s search history later, and the only searches Ezio had done had been on ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ and ‘the Auditore family’.

 Raton went and silently shut himself in his bedroom to spend time with his flock of pigeon friends. 

 So…chaos. In a sense. A contained sense. Contained in the walls of the apartment they shared. And as with everything else, they adapted, because they had no choice. Even if Desmond wished they did, that they had. Even if he wished Minerva, the Isu, whoever - hadn’t forced this on them. Even if he was grateful to have them there with him, they deserved a choice. A choice that had been stolen from them.

 No matter how often they reassured him they didn’t mind, self-consciousness borne of teenage hormones clawed after Desmond’s heels each time. Over and over again. 

 Late in the night, Desmond filled a glass with ice-cold water from the faucet after everyone else was asleep. And it was just him in their kitchen. With their shoddy appliances, that he would’ve never considered acceptable for long-term living but that his three ancestors called sorcery, heavenly, witchcraft. He stared at his glass, cold water, so conveniently just in his home and not water he had to haul from a well or river, and he thought sometimes he understood. Sometimes. Maybe.

 Sometimes he understood why they looked at him like he was something…otherworldly. Not that it happened often.

 But he’d caught Altaïr staring down at him through narrowed eyes, while he napped in a patch of golden light one afternoon. Just dozed more like. He was fully aware he was being watched. And that he was being watched by eyes just as golden as the light he laid in. And the look in those eyes - it was the sort of look the faithful got when they entered a church a hundred years old and more. The sort of look that said they had faith. 

 He’d caught Ezio making the sign of the cross in his direction once or twice, when he was curled up on the couch, staring at nothing, and dang it Ezio, that gave him goosebumps!

 And he’d caught Ratonhnhaké:ton following him from room to room, to hallway, back to their apartment and room to room again. Observing him from several strides away. Like he couldn’t figure Desmond out for some reason.

 All of it.

 He understood a little now.

 Because he had lived in their bodies, their minds, their hearts. Their hands were his hands, their blood was his blood, their Sight was his Sight. Their voices had been his voice, still were in a lot of ways, and he had experienced their homes as if they were his own. Places where convenience was the highest luxury. Privilege equaled so many of the things Desmond took for granted in his own time. He looked at a fridge and saw a chunky rectangle with silly magnets stuck to the outside and a chill on the inside that made him long for his hoodie every time he opened it without long sleeves on -

 But those three looked at it and they saw something beyond their comprehension.

 Desmond drank his water, his convenient water, and licked at the scarring on his lips after swallowing. Minimal scarring. Far less than he remembered there being in the future-past. They had been diligent about not letting him bite at it, and then they had been gentle about removing the last stitches like he hadn’t bothered being with himself all those years ago.

 And it was such a small slit now. It would fade, with time. Far more than Altaïr or Ezio’s scars had ever faded in their lives.

 He put the glass away in the cabinet. He sighed to the ceiling. He scowled when he heard the base of somebody’s music pounding through floors and walls elsewhere in the apartment building, and then he shuffled sleepily back to the bedroom he shared with Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad himself.

 Weeks ago, he’d been considering leaving the three of them in that stupid temple of Juno’s and just going to search for a shallow grave to jump into. Right the wrong of him still being alive after the solar flare like he was.

 Now? 

 He crawled sleepily into the bed he shared with an unmuffled yawn, kicking Altaïr’s leg on purpose because he was a little shit like that and because Altaïr was more of a shit than him - for watching him with his Eagle Vision through the walls the whole time. Of course he wasn’t asleep. The second Desmond shifted ever, he’d always wake up. And watch him. So there was no harm in kicking him as he romped his way back into his cozy indent on the bed.

 Snuggling up in the safety of Altaïr’s personal space. 

 And falling asleep in moments, without any doubt that he was going to wake up without yelling, or pain, or too much grief.

 Because that was just the sort of home his ancestors seemed fixated on building, and that was just the sort of home Desmond was willing to accept.

-----

 Going to check their apartment’s rarely but still sometimes used mailbox - because Ratonhnhaké:ton had unknowingly, somehow, subscribed them to a nature magazine - Desmond ran into Mckenna.

 She was cool, he’d ended up deciding.

 Not only did she share her chick magazines, but she also hadn’t made a massive deal out of the whole, ‘having gay neighbors’ thing. That totally wasn’t a thing. Technically. Either way, that was more than Desmond could say for a neighbor on the fourth floor. Who’d heard through the gossip grapevine, come by to oh-so generously pound on their door, cuss at Ezio who opened it, and then get his ass handed to him so hard he ended up on the opposite end of the apartment’s hallway before having their door slammed in his face.

 Ezio went easy on the guy. He didn’t even end up in the hospital. 

 They still had a visit from their little old landlady though. She was sympathetic and thankfully not prejudiced, but she didn’t want fighting in her building. 

 There was one other neighbor on the second floor too, of the religious sort. Him and his whole family. They’d done little more than hovering around in the hallway though, the kids playing near the stairs to their floor and whispering things their parents had told them to repeat no doubt about certain other religions. 

 Desmond had tossed their toys out the window, into the alley’s dumpster below, when nobody was looking.

 They had no evidence, so he had no reason to admit it was him when those kids came by, crying and looking for their missing toys. Not that his ancestors had approved. At all. Ezio had actually gone and found them in the dumpster, and returned them after a bit of cleaning -

 Only for Desmond’s Eagle Vision to let him watch those moments after they shut the door, smiling, holding the toys. Toys they immediately marched straight over to their kitchen garbage and tossed down into it, even as their child pleaded for them to be returned. The parents called the toys ‘dirty’. And Desmond debated sneaking into their apartment to show them real dirtiness after seeing Ezio return to their apartment with a sad, brave face on.

 In the end, the only thing he got away with doing was sneaking into that damn apartment of theirs and turning all their crosses upside-down.

 He thought their terrified crying later on was worth it. And maybe they ended up calling a priest over for a visit, but that wasn’t any of his business.

 All their neighbors weren’t awful.

 There were just bad apples to be found in every orchard.

 And then there was Mckenna.

 Who Desmond was pretty sure was only lending him her magazines because the first time she came over to offer him one, over his shoulder Ezio was shirtless and doing pull-ups on the doorframe to his bedroom. Even though she thought he was ‘spoken for’ now. She seemed to be of the belief that looking didn’t hurt anybody.

 “You can do better than them,” Desmond told her dryly every time. And she’d just flap her hand around, full of giggles, promising she wasn’t there to steal any of his ‘dads’ from him.

 He seriously wondered what sort of relationship the other tenants thought they had happening there. And where Ratonhnhaké:ton fit into things too.

 Life went on. A few more crosses were turned upside-down. A few more magazines were also shared. Desmond barely believed it when they were coming up on a full month of living in their shared apartment, feeling like no time had passed at all. Feeling like all the time in the world had passed him by too. 

 It made him think, a lot. It made him quieter.

 It made his three ancestors watch him carefully.

 It made for emotions. Ugh.

-----

 Raton wasn’t the sort to make him talk, but he was the sort to herd Desmond into his and Ezio’s shared bedroom, plop him down on their bed, and then set a whole, floofy, doe-eyed pigeon in his cupped hands. It was a form of therapy that made the teenager laugh, if nothing else. They spent the afternoon just sitting together, feeding a flock of friendly pigeons who Raton had built nesting shelves for all along the window.

 Each nest was made by his own hands. So carefully for such big hands.

 And Desmond still felt the most ashamed for taking Raton’s afterlife from him, but at times like this? He was so glad to have his Mohawk ancestor to lean on.

-----

 Most nights, Ezio would raise an eyebrow expectantly at Desmond - in a way that felt decidedly parental but he was steadfast in ignoring that feeling - with a ladle in his hand and an apron around his waist, and the teenager would sigh, would roll his eyes, but still go help his ancestor prepare dinner. 

 Set the table.

 Be a part of…things. Life. Living. Daily meals, like Ezio liked him to be.

 Be a part of the prayers before dinner too, since Altaïr was the only one religious out of their foursome, but they still practiced for him. 

 And be a part of Raton’s woodworking, which had earned a tiny amount of attention from neighbors and the people from other apartment buildings, somehow. Which meant Desmond learning - or rather, relearning, since they’d done their own maintenance at the Farm - how to use tools with steady hands, and create simple wooden things for people willing to pay them some cash in return.

 So.

 Somehow, against all odds, in a month’s time? They’d seriously made a life for themselves in their modest little apartment.

 Desmond had never felt warier.

-----

 Spend so long living life on the run, and you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

 Altaïr said nothing when he found a to-go bag stuffed under their bed, or a varying amount of knives hidden throughout their apartment. He simply checked that the bag was properly packed, added a few more knives of his own to their apartment, and added his own to-go bag right beside Desmond’s. 

 Time had taught him it was better to not simply let the shoes drop and land where they may. 

 So he started thinking about ways to pick where they would land. 

-----

 
 Things were quiet.

Or, as quiet as a small city could ever seem. With car horns being honked somewhere in the distance, on some street out of their sight. With the drunk mumbles of bar-goers stumbling home. With the rumble of car engines even on the street below them; their street. In front of the apartment building. The usual girls walking their usual sidewalks with their usual less-than-concealing clothes, as they swayed their hips and folded their elbows on the sills of opened car windows.

 A john here or there who got their ego - and maybe a little something else - stroked in his car by one of the girls before he stuffed some bills in her bra and drove off.

 The quiet, almost imperceptible buzzing of streetlights with shoddy lightbulbs in them. Brightnesses flickering. 

 Which, the lights -

 The quiet not-quiet of a small city was one thing. The brightness of all its lights? Another.

 “The stars, they are so faint in this time, mio caro,” Ezio Auditore murmured, tipping his head back to these dimmer skies and letting his eyes fall shut, his smile small and there…but undeniably troubled, “What strange skies you have known, Desmond. Would that I could show you mine.” 

 The young-again teenager shifted his weight hip to hip, then nuzzled into his own arms pillowed of the edge of the roof’s half-wall and turned his eyes back to the cityscape that he knew so well and yet not, at the same time, “You already have, Ezio,” he reminded his ancestor, shrugging his shoulders.

 Remembering what it was like to look up, in the Animus, that very first time - and see a night sky touched by a few centuries less of pollution.

 More stars than a million lifetimes would ever let him to count had shone down on him and Jerusalem.

 “Leonardo and I used to spend hours beneath the sky at night,” Ezio recalled, tone dreamy with memories, and Desmond just breathed. Just listened, “He would teach me constellations, and I would invent ridiculous stories for every one, to hear him laugh like he would. After…after his passing, I would sometimes sit in my vineyard, after Sofia had readied for bed, gone to it, and I would speak to the stars. Pretending he could hear me.” 

 He just listened.

 Even though it felt like a gentle, calloused hand was squeezing down on his heart.

 “I would pretend they could all hear me, and I would tell them of my days. My thoughts,” a wistful sort of sigh left the Florentine man, making the teen’s shoulders twitch, “I thought it would save time when we were reunited in whatever afterlife awaited us. I thought I was doing it for them…but looking back, mio caro, I think I was really doing it because it kept me collected throughout the long, long years without them.” 

 Squeezing so hard, it felt as if his heart was a balloon about to pop.

 Ezio Auditore had only lived to be sixty-five years old. Sixty-five. So young, next to Altaïr’s ninety-something years. And sure, Raton had died unfairly young compared to the both of them, but somehow it felt like Ezio was cheated out of more than his Mohawk ancestor had been. Not that it was a competition. Never, it could never be. But squishing his cheek down against his arm, staring at streetlights that stretched the city’s view, Desmond still felt…

 Ezio.

 His ‘Prophet’.

 A legend on the same level as Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad himself, but without the stability of a home that Altaïr had had for decades. Without the long decades with a wife, without the children he had been able to watch grow and watch have children of their own, with an end that came drenched in regret like their hidden blades were so often drenched in blood.

 Rather than a final, peaceful passing, in what remained of one’s home.

 A passing that is drawn out, painful, drowning from the blood in his lungs in the very place where he had once had to watch all the men in his family hang -

 “Mio caro?” 

 Desmond Miles had seen Ezio’s life. From birth until death. His first breath to his last. His everything in-between. He had seen it all. He had been watching. All the struggling, the grieving, the questioning. The regret and those precious few times between, then more regret - there was just always more regret. And more questions. And only barely at the end there was Ezio deciding he had seen enough for one life.

 But still - 

 For so long -

 “Mio caro?” Was repeated for a second time, and Desmond opened eyes he’d not realized he’d let fall shut. Squishing his cheek further into his arms as he tilted his head towards that Italian ancestor of his, who had a hand gently lain on his shoulder and was leaning towards him with a frown on his scarred lips, who was here because of Desmond.

 Who he couldn’t offer all that much to. Except -

 “I’ve always wanted to thank you, Ezio,” the descendant mumbled, mouth half-smooshed against his hoodie sleeves as Ezio’s brows furrowed curiously, “For…everything. Everything you did, just the way you did it.”

 Maybe it was selfish, or self-centered, or self-something. But Desmond would not change a single one of Ezio’s choices, looking back across his whole life.

 “Living my life is not a thing you have to thank me for, Desmond,” Ezio told him in that sure, kind way of his after a small pause, hand lain on the boy’s shoulder squeezing - faintly - making that boy twitch a little.

 Looking satisfied. And sweet as the finest wine his vineyard had ever produced too.

 Content.

 “I know that,” he knew, of course he knew, the Ezio Auditore wasn’t simply living life for his sake, for the sake of carrying those messages, for him. Maybe that was definitely…egotistical to assume, for anyone. But. Still. Desmond also knew there had been times when Ezio had wanted to stop. Wanted it all to just stop. But he’d gone on anyways.

 ‘Please, wait, I have so many questions!’

 “I…wanted to answer your questions,” this descendant told him now, five hundred years too late, in a world completely different than the one the last Auditore son had known, “I wanted to tell you everything. I wanted to talk to you. Just for a while. First in the Vaults, and then later. Under Masyaf. When you could hear me - I wanted to tell you it was all…for something. That you did good, Ezio. You turned the tides, you changed history, we were able to save the world thanks to you - “

 Clenching his hands into fists, brown eyes stared out across a cityscape that had taken his ancestor’s breath away when he first saw it, and he swallowed. Thickly. 

 Turning his head a bit shyly away from the man leaning around one side of him, bending under the hand that was being rubbed up and down his spine through his hoodie.

 “I just…” Licking his lips, even after ‘years’ of memories relived, Desmond didn’t have the exact words he was looking for, “I wanted to say…thank you. And that you were amazing, Ezio. And that you inspired me…and it wasn’t fair to you, but I promise it helped save trillions of lives in the end - “

 A tiny noise left the man next to him. And it was so raw a noise, Desmond had to bury his face completely in his arms before mumbling this next bit. So, so softly it was barely audible even to a Master Assassin.

 “And that I love you.” 

 Ezio Auditore’s entire weight fell upon him. To others it would probably seem like a cage, pressing him down against the roof’s wall, pressing him down against something solid and immovable, but it was Ezio. Which meant Desmond just melted, limp and trusting under him, and his strong arms winding under his body, his tight embrace that seemed not even a storm could shake him loose now.

 His little, helpless noises he made, trying to find the words to say, “I love you too,” right back to him.

 To say -

 “I want to thank you too.” 

 From Desmond to Ezio.

 And from Ezio to Desmond.

 “I do not think I can properly articulate how precious you are to me, fratellino,” still he called him his little brother, “To know you, a descendant of mine, lives five hundred years after I am gone? It means much. In so many ways I expected my family to end with me and Claudia. For her barrenness, for my…you know,” Ezio chuckled, a low sound, a nice sound, draped over Desmond as he was it rumbled through the both of them, it made him feel less alone, “To know our family survives even now?” 

 It made him grin, even as he hid it.

 “It is my miracle. You are my miracle,” it made him feel safe like he’d never felt in his life, “It is my reward, mio caro. You are.”

 To Ezio Auditore da Firenze, he was worth it.

 “...It’s a good life,” Desmond whispered emotionally into his sleeves, pretending his eyes weren’t prickling, pretending the city’s lights weren’t turning blurry and shiny and that Ezio didn’t make him feel unimaginably safe when he folded over the top of him to embrace him, “fratello.” 

 “It will change,” Ezio rasped, no longer able to regret that fact as he pressed his forehead to his descendant’s after coaxing him out of his hiding space in his arms after a few nudges, “And so will we, fratellino. But that is life. That is precisely what we’ve fought for. And I would not alter the path I have walked, not even to save those lost to me, if it would cost me you. Now. Here, and this future, and this wonderful world that still fights in spite of the odds.” 

 Tricked by the vulnerability of the moment -

 Desmond was taken by complete surprise when Ezio decided to be the absolute menace he was and sank all of his weight onto him. All of it. All at once. Without holding himself up at all. He simply sagged, and Desmond squawked, and both of them ended up flopping down onto the rooftop. In a mound of limbs.

 Or a mound of Ezio, with a set of gangly teenager limbs under him, flailing around, completely helpless under him and his belly-deep laughter.

 Desmond had to knee him in a few uncomfortable places to scramble free, and then proceeded to flee down the fire escape cussing and skipping steps while he left his poor, out-of-time ancestor laying there. Still brimming with laughter.

 Si. A quiet night indeed.

 Rolling over, Ezio did not recognize the skyful of stars over his head, but he recognized the happy, content thrum of his heartbeat as he smiled. Both to himself -

 And to another ancestor who stepped out of the shadows of the rooftop to approach him.

“You know, when I was young, Mentore, I admired you more than I can say,” Ezio said, breathless with his laughter, trembling with his mirth, climbing to his feet to meet the white-dressed man in the night, who shown like the star Altair on this simple apartment building, “It felt as though I was always being told that, for every question I struggled with, Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad would have the answer.”  

 The Mentor of the Assassin Brotherhood.

 The Architect, the Eagle of Masyaf, the Altaïr.

 Who shifted his weight awkwardly, and turned away from the awe he was being shown, while his centuries-later successor settled back against the roof’s half-wall once again. Watching him in a lazy slouch that would’ve shown off his chest, thighs, strong jaw, and gotten him a lady clinging to each arm back in his day.

 “I am only a man, Ezio,” Altaïr said.

 “Si,” this other Mentor of the Assassin Brotherhood agreed, grinning shamelessly at the Eagle outlined by city lights, resting his chin on his knuckles with a slant of his head, “And I admire you more for knowing that now, il Mentore.” 

 Altaïr’s muscles twitched. So subtly it would’ve been easy for even somebody watching closely to miss. Ezio didn’t. Nor did he miss the red tinging the Master Assassin’s ears, as he cleared his throat. Adorable. He really was. And what an amazing thing to learn about their Brotherhood’s greatest Mentor. 

 He felt so far removed from that time of being a young man who would stand in the Sanctuary and stare at Altaïr’s statue. So grandiose. So preserved. Something to talk to when it all became too much.

 And yet he wasn’t so removed at all.

 “This is far from a situation I ever imagined finding myself in, il mio mentore,” he professed, but he thought of Desmond’s tiny, annoyed huffs and the rolling eyes of a teenager and the man he had met under Masyaf. Who was thin and sallow and so tired-looking, bathed in the Apple’s light, and he regretted nothing, “but I would be nowhere else, if I could choose.” 

 Golden eyes caught in the skyline’s lights, and he was nodded to.

 “I would be nowhere else either,” Altaïr agreed, casting his eyes and his special sight around the city they could see, before focusing back on Ezio with his usual intensity that could leave lesser men shaken, “This time is…overcoming at times. And its people are not all kind. And the Templars may have gained strength untold, but it is best that we are here. We can help the most, here.” 

 Slanting his head further, nodding against his knuckles, Ezio hummed.

 He thought of golden eyes watching their descendant, from nearby and from afar, so, so closely and yet never making the young-again boy shake.

 “And Desmond?” 

 Golden eyes that narrowed in on him now, and he did not shake either.

 “He is a son of mine,” Altaïr told him firmly, in a way that would not accept being questioned, “as much as Darim and Sef are. As much as they always will be. Desmond may be unwilling to admit as much now, but one day…one day, I hope he will feel safe enough to trust that truth. To lean on me.” 

 “On us,” Ezio interjected smoothly, humming, “He is as much a child of mine as he is yours, my friend. He is family to the Auditore. A son, a brother, a cousin - it matters not which branch he decides he is comfortable claiming in our tree, only that he claims one. I will not allow otherwise.” 

 That exact wording brought a frown of disapproval to Altaïr’s face, or as much as the stoic man ever frowned.

 “It will be his choice.” 

 “Si. And the Vatican wasn’t political.” 

 “Ezio,” Altaïr scolded, straightening to his full height barely a centimeter shorter than the Italian, though height mattered little when Ezio was still lounging against on the roof’s half-wall like he was, “There will be no pressuring him. He has only just begun to relax somewhat in our presence after weeks of adjustment. Any pressure, and I believe he would choose to run rather than be forced into familial dynamics he isn’t comfortable in.” 

 “Some pressure, la mia mela,” the brunette clucked, shooting him a look as lazy as his lounging, a few words as well that were unfortunate in how true they were, “You know as well as I that our Desmond is a martyr, through and through. He will stand in the flames and burn and never ask to be pulled out, if it means relying on others. He will stay in denial of how much we care for him if we do not make it clear.”

 “...Some pressure,” was finally agreed upon, the two of them falling quiet soon after to take in a city after dark. So strange a world, theirs had become. So little to climb. So little space for them, for them to grow from here, but neither of them spoke about backing down.

 They’d made their choices when they took Desmond’s hand.

 They were there to stay. To help. No matter how much their descendant whined.

 He would simply have to learn that family doesn’t give up on you over something as small as that.

~>-----<~

Chapter Text

~>-----<~

 “Behold! Nature!” 

 Okay, so Desmond was a little shit. Sue him. Or don’t. He probably couldn’t retain any kind of lawyer, even if he tried, with the fake IDs he’d gone and gotten from a shady guy under the bridge and no official guardians for him on the legal side of things. Oof. He wondered if the Assassins had lawyers. Assassin lawyers? Now there was an idea Rebecca would’ve loved.

 Anyways.

 Don’t sue him, but he was a little shit. Which was why he’d made every joke in the book when taking his ancestors out of the city for the day, to let them roam and stretch their legs a little. Dog park? How about Assassin park? Hidden blade sanctuary? Mentor petting zoo? He thought he was hilarious.

 Either way, they hopped a bus to get themselves out of the city. Got dropped off at the furthest bus stop from the suburbs, where the highways cut through farmlands and fields and forests more than blocks of developed property. The bus driver gave them a weird look - three adult men of different ethnicities and a random kid, out in the sticks? - but eh. He didn’t ask questions. He got a whole extra twenty bucks for that, plus a promised ‘nother twenty if he came back for them before dark.

 Nobody else got off at their stop.

 It was practically a little bench between fields of wheat and a lush chunk of forest. Nobody around for miles. Probably only used for the farm kids’ school buses. Lucky them.

 Lucky Raton.

 Okay, so Desmond was a little shit, but he honestly grinned when Raton let out a soft whooping noise and booked it into the cover of the trees. His Mohawk ancestor was just gone in less than three seconds. Heck, it barely took him three strides to disappear into the trunks and bushes and long grasses. Yeah. He’d definitely needed this. 

 Birds sing-songed overhead, and the young-again teenager lifted his head to whistle mimics of the songs they were singing. 

 After a full month in the city, in a full apartment building, he’d forgotten how much more quiet nature came across. How the white noise of it would make every ounce of tension drain from his shoulders, as easy as snapping your fingers. Snap. And he was able to close his eyes to the swaying of tree branches and smile. The sun on his face.

 Dang it. Altaïr came from a place where nature was different, and Ezio was a city boy through and through -

 This was the part of Ratonhnhaké:ton’s memories he’d loved. 

 “Should we worry he will not be back, or is it too soon?” Ezio spoke up, which was unfair. Because his accented voice? Mixed with the noises of nature was just beyond soothing. And he was proving those city boy allegations by simply sitting on the grassy hill at the edge of the road, in no hurry to run off into the forest like Raton had been.

 “Ratonhnhaké:ton will return when his heart has eased,” Altaïr responded before Desmond even had the chance to open his mouth, sitting cross-legged on the bench as if he were about to begin meditating. Peering out from under the rim of his hood at everything from horizon to horizon with a curiosity so like him that could not be restrained, “He has missed his time away. From cities. From people. From the bindings of a society. We will not rush him.” 

 “Si, but of course,” Ezio agreed immediately, flitting a hand about, “I only mean, what if he loses his way? Or there is something waiting for him deep in these forests that we know nothing about?” 

 “I don’t think this forest can be called deep,” Desmond jumped in, rocking back and forth on his heels with his face still towards the sun, soaking it up, “It’s probably a pretty small one, actually, considering all the farms around. Raton will come back when he’s run all his energy away.” 

 He hoped he wasn’t making a mistake, bringing the man out here. 

 These weren’t the colonies as he’d known them, weren’t the stretching landscapes of trees and mountains and endless potential, endless building opportunities, endless chances. These weren’t wild frontiers. Not anymore. Maybe they weren’t back then either, but they were different. They were more. They were still held in the arms of that charm that was being untouched, in some sort of sweet way that people had eventually corrupted in the two centuries since.

 Raton had just been so patient this last month, going along with what they wanted, making do in the city…Desmond had felt like he owed at least this much to the Native.

 So he gave it to him.

…

 The run.

 The wind.

 The forest.

 It was what Raton had thought he’d needed. Thought would fix him, and this hole in his chest that seemed more and more like the opening to the birdhouses he’d been building. A place for some creature to build its nest and make him whole. He had not found that creature by the time he burst free of the forest.

 By the time he found himself on a hill, sloping down into farmlands being worked by big, roaring monsters of metal that seemed to be swallowing the fields down.

 By the time he caught his breath, and his Sight saw nothing from there to the horizon that was blue or gold.

 More and more, he found himself wondering…is this it?

 This wasn’t the United States Ratonhnhaké:ton had envisioned he was helping to build, battle by battle, blood shed by blood shed. This wasn’t the land he had buried his people in. This wasn’t what Washington had promised him. This place, these people, their ways, the land. It barely breathed now. What he had found was surmountable to what one would find under the rotting leaves of autumn’s season.

Sweetness, hiding more rot, hiding decomposition if one just dug a little beneath the surface.

He was here for Desmond Miles, who did not like to claim that surname for it was the surname of a father undeserving of the son he had been blessed with. He was here for his family, for that was who Desmond Miles was to him. He was here for him, and he had made sacrifices to be, but.

Still.

Ratonhnhaké:ton found himself at the edge of all he’d ever loved, and he looked out only at…a land no longer loved, no longer for liberty and justice for all. And he folded his legs. He knelt there, under a sapling struggling to lay down its roots. 

 And from his satchel, he pulled a book he had taken from that place Desmond called a ‘public library’. So many books. So much knowledge, so much worth collected in one place, yet his descendant had waved it off as normal and said almost nobody uses such resources nowadays. Because of the technology they now had access to. Making old treasures obsolete. 

 Ratonhnhaké:ton had taken this book in secret, and now he held it. The cover staring up at him in mocking, with its title heartbreaking etched into the cover as though it weren’t a tragedy to just read.

Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation.

 Liberty and justice for all.

 They had not mentioned that ‘all’ meant only ‘white people’. 

 Raton. That was what they called him so affectionately, refusing to call him by the name Achilles had placed on him like a gravestone when he was just a boy. He was grateful. He was irate. He was only, simple, painfully human, and kneeling under a struggling sapling he opened the pages of the book before him.

 The Mentor of the Colonies could not say if it had all been worth it.

 But he had a people gone to mourn. People forgotten. People who had gone without burial. People who had gone without rights, or freedom, or justice. He would know their story, if only to know. 

 And then he would return to Desmond.

 But for now, he read.

-----

 Hours passed before Ratonhnhaké:ton returned to them by the roadside. Hours that they passed by meditating, then by tossing acorns into the air to throw throwing knives at, then Desmond being chased by his troublesome older brother until he was tackled. Grabbed. Held close, and they rolled down a grassy hill together as he shrieked while Ezio laughed while Altaïr watched.

 With a slight curl to the edge of his scarred lips, under that hood of his.

 Raton came padding out of the forest with a frown marring his handsome face, that froze at the sight of Desmond actually laughing all bright and light -

 And the pain seeped deeper, under the surface, where their Desmond would not notice it when he twisted around. Kicking Ezio off of him. Greeting his most recent ancestor with a lopsided grin that was everything they had been trying to give him for the last month.

Everything he had seemingly been denied in childhood. 

 “Let us return now,” Ratonhnhaké:ton told them all, satchel no lighter, heart no lighter neither, but. The boy’s huff was a laughing one, brown eyes far lighter even if he was not, and Raton wouldn’t put that in jeopardy. A child will be a child. A child should be a child. He would allow their descendant every bit of light he could claw together from the shadows.

 For he had asked for none of this.

 Therefore, Desmond Miles was an innocent in the eyes of the Brotherhood.

-----

 Atop their apartment building, they had a whole roost built for all the pigeons Raton had befriended.

 Whenever he found himself a bit too quiet in the head, Desmond made his way up there and let pudgy pigeons sit in his hands. Feeding them birdfeed and straightening out their soft feathers. Maybe his ancestor was onto something with them. It…made his mind a bit noisier. Not too much. But enough. A nice balance.

 They were settling in almost too well now, he couldn’t help but think.

-----

 “Why do you so enjoy watching the streetlamps in the evenings, mio caro?” Ezio Auditore asked when they were lazing together on the couch, watching their shoddy TV and its poor quality - watching the soap opera the Italian was somewhat obsessed with. And Desmond shrugged. Which looked funny, since he was sitting upside-down with his knees hooked over the back of the couch and his head hanging towards the floor.

 Ezio’s hand was wrapped around one of his ankles, his thumb brushed at the skin between his pants and socks, and he squirmed around.

 Humming, not sure what sort of answer was best…but why not honesty? 

 “They remind me of Monteriggioni,” his descendant admitted, thinking of nights he spent at the windowsill staring out at the streetlamps because they were soothing somehow, nights his ancestors had now witnessed for themselves, “There’s something really, I don’t know, relaxing? About that.” 

 “Ah, my memories,” Ezio chuckled, nodding along, and unknowingly the reason Desmond blinked right then and realized, ah. Ah, “Yes, Monteriggioni was…something, was it not?” 

 Staring straight ahead a moment. Squirming around a little. Desmond dropped his jaw towards his chest - or lifted it, maybe, upside-down like he was - to look up at Ezio. Clearly thinking on how to say something. Which made the Florentine man tilt his head, all chuckles and welcome and simple curiosity. 

 And unprepared for what Desmond had to tell him.

 “Yeah. It is. Stayed there for a while when we were hiding from Abstergo, you know.” 

 Stillness ran through Ezio like a bolt of lightning from the blue. Had him straightening up. Had him blinking. All of his attention stolen away from his precious soap opera by Desmond, for Desmond, for Monteriggioni and the memories behind warm, brown eyes that all the Auditore family shared. 

 All those years, before the Borgia’s attack, seemed to jolt through the man sitting next to Desmond as the young-again teenager idly wiggled his feet around. Tilting his head to get more comfortable, upside-down like he still was. 

 Wow. Who knew Ezio Auditore da Firenze could be made speechless? Altaïr would probably pay him to know that.

 He was going to keep this one to himself, though.

 He couldn’t imagine doing anything else when Ezio’s breath caught like hope fluttering in his chest, and his voice came out cracking -

 “Monteriggioni? It…still stands?” 

 “Yeah,” Desmond nodded, upside-down, then paused to think about it for a moment. Think about half-collapsed walls and a villa left untouched for literal centuries since the original assault on the town. He didn’t even kick out when Ezio wrapped his whole hand around his ankle and gently untangled him from the couch. Turning him sideways. So his legs were thrown over the man’s lap. He just tipped his head back into the cushions of their couch, still nodding.

 Under those brown eyes that spoke of decades of ‘what ifs’. That were absolutely fixated on him.

 “Well, mostly,” the descendant amended, “Nobody ever actually, like, repaired it. After the Borgia. But people live in the town again; it’s a thriving little place. Quiet. Preserved. Just…maybe not preserving the best parts of it, I guess.” 

 “So it is in ruins still,” Ezio murmured, curling over Desmond’s legs like he needed something to hold onto and - damn - that made the selfish part of this descendant want to fix something he had no part in breaking, “The ruins of our happy memories. Of before.” 

 Before Rome.

 After the Pazzi Conspiracy. 

 When Ezio had still known grief as cutting as a blade, but had still…had some semblance of hope. Maybe innocence. Definitely naivety. When he still thought their conflict with the Templars was one he might see an end to. Before he had regrets so plenty. Before he had wasted so many years of his life, not realizing what he had until it was lost to him.

 Before he’d ever known Desmond’s name.

 “Why did you never go back, Ezio?” He finally asked a question that had lingered for so long while reliving the man’s later years; Rome and then Constantinople and then Firenze. But not Monteriggioni. And Desmond had never been able to figure out why. Had always wanted to know.

 Had felt at home in Monteriggioni in a way he’d never felt before. 

 Monteriggioni had been his and Ezio’s, and the pang that had taken up residence in his heart after Abstergo chased them away from it was still there. 
 
 “It…would’ve been too painful, at first,” the Mentore of Roma tried to find the words, for Desmond, running a hand up and down his leg while speaking, “And by the time I wished to? Restoring Monteriggioni was a task that would’ve surpassed my lifetime, so I settled for my home in Firenze. With Sofia and our children. Our grapevines, our winemaking. It was a good life.”

 He nodded, affirming that to himself.

 “It was a good life,” Ezio sighed, “though it was so short a time compared to the rest of it. I don’t regret what could not be done. What I was not capable of,” pausing, he then lifted his head to give Desmond a smile that was all Auditore boyishness and that never failed to make the kid’s heart clench seeing it these days, “I am most glad that she offered you shelter at a time you needed it, mio caro. That our home was still a sanctuary for our family, even five-hundred years removed from us.” 

 It was hard. To swallow the lump in his throat.

 “It was only for a couple months, while I was reliving some of your memories,” Desmond whispered, tossing an arm over his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see Ezio’s dang encouraging way of looking at him, “but…Monteriggioni was home. Fuck, Ezio, Monteriggioni was…the only place I think I’ve ever - “

 There had always been something about it.

 “Have you any idea why?” 

 “I - we…” Damn him, tricking him into showing emotions, and having an emotional talk, and being an Auditore. Ugh. Desmond refused to cry while mumbling to a ceiling he couldn’t currently see, “It’s dumb. But. It felt like, we built Monteriggioni together, you know? In the Animus, running around there when you first arrived, I saw the potential with you. And then I watched day by day as you rebuilt it into a fortress, a thriving town, a home. I was there beside you at the drafting tables, Ezio. Talking to the architects. Handing over the money we earned.”

 It had been real to him.

 “Sometimes it felt like we were making choices together, I’d favor one renovation idea and then you’d pick it, and then I’d see it be made real. And I. It. Ugh,” he turned over, flopped over more like, and groaned into the couch cushions like a grouchy teenager while Ezio’s hand ran up the back of his leg, “Nobody…ever hurt us in Monteriggioni, until the Borgia. Nobody ever threw insults, or stones. Claudia and Mother were safe there, and I…I kept imagining…one day, it being the place you rebuilt the whole Brotherhood from.” 

 He plucked at strings on the couch, feeling hot in the face from both emotions and embarrassment as he remembered those fantasies of his. Of hope.

 “I mean,” he mumbled, “you rebuilt the Brotherhood in Rome, and Tiber Island was special to me too, Ezio. So special. But Monteriggioni was…”

 Everything.

 “It was, wasn’t it?” The dearest of his ancestors whispered, the one he’d been with the longest, and Desmond chose to simply close his eyes. Think of nothing. Nothing but those days, of building outlines, money pouches, and watching new people wander curiously through Monteriggioni’s gates. Looking for somewhere to settle down and call home.

 Desmond’s daydreams of the eventual day when Assassin Novices ran those same rooftops, practiced horsemanship in those same fields where cannons were fired, a safe fortress where whole families of Assassins could be born and raised and grow families of their own! Like a new Masyaf. A better Masyaf. Without the rot of Al Mualim’s ways laying in its foundations.

 It had been a silly dream.

 But it had made him happy.

 He dozed off, to Ezio humming his mother’s lullaby, a thumb rubbing at his ankle again.

…

 Monteriggioni, hm? Ezio gently draped a blanket over his descendant after he dozed off, lowered the volume on the TV, and rose from the couch. Careful to avoid the squeaky floorboards, lest he wake their Desmond. At a bedroom door, he stopped and knocked twice. Then he waited.

 Altaïr opened the door, golden eyes seemingly glowing in the dim din, and tracing over Ezio, then over to the couch where Desmond was sleeping, then back to him.

 Who grinned broadly, with all his teeth, at the man before him who’d no doubt heard all of that.

 “Show me how to do the Google,” Ezio demanded.

He was nodded silently to, and then the legendary Master Assassins in the doorway stepped aside. Motioning him into the bedroom that Altaïr and Desmond shared. And looking quite bound and determined, if the Auditore had to say so. Which he did.

 Perhaps for now it was outside of their abilities, but one day?

 If Monteriggioni still stood, then Ezio believed it would make a nice gift to their Desmond.

~>-----<~

Chapter Text

~>-----<~

 And life carried on. Shocker! No, seriously, Desmond found himself peeking around corners for a few days, suspicious about how easygoing things had been for them lately. Like, what? No Abstergo? No Templar enemies to hunt down? No rigorous training that left him drained day after day, after he was already drained from being stuffed into the Animus day after day too? How…strange.

 Okay, so maybe the son of the Mentor had a skewed impression of normal life.

 Not his fault though.

 …No traitors either? 

 Weird as fuck.

 Never in Desmond’s life had he been anything close to a normal teenager, and in some ways he was grateful for that. Teenagers sort of sucked, from his experience. There were good ones, obviously, but those weren’t typically the sorts of teenagers he spent time with. First as an Assassin Novice and then as a homeless kid trying his best to not get picked up by cops. But he thought he was maybe as close to being a normal teenager as he’d ever been.

 Hanging around the apartments, climbing up and down fire escapes, peoplewatching. Lazily lounging on the couch with his feet kicked up and one of Mckenna’s offered magazines in his hands. Listening to whatever music he wanted to on the radio, just low enough to not bother Altaïr. 

 They still kept up training. Doing physical workouts, and then freerunning around the apartments, but that took up less of the day than Desmond remembered it doing at the Farm.

 A large part of his days was him just drifting. Doing whatever. None of his ancestors really minded.

 Altaïr had mentioned wanting to teach him to forge simple weapons, but they’d need a modern-day smithy for that.

 Ezio had dragged Desmond into silly games like tag or hide and seek.

 Raton taught him to build a birdhouse or two.

 It was just life. Again, weird.

 Maybe he had died.

-----

 Mckenna clapped her palms together to ask a favor of Desmond eventually, considering all of the teen idol magazines she lent him. Wasn’t that unexpected. They’d found a balance between them, sort of. A balance between Mckenna checking out his ancestors and biting at her lip, and Desmond trying to tell her all the stupid things they did on the daily to discourage her.

 Apparently stupid didn’t beat sexy, but he could still try.

 “You want me to bring your cousin somewhere?” The young-again teenager repeated, arms crossing casually as they stood in the doorway talking over her favor. Sounded like a simple one. He’d honestly been expecting something involving one of his three ‘guardians’, so he was a little surprised too.

 And glad.

 “Yeah, it’s totally not a big deal if you can’t tonight,” Mckenna said, playing with the hem of her shirt with a pout of her lips…that Desmond suspected she was hoping Ezio might notice, cooking in the kitchen over his shoulder, “Just, she got invited to a friend’s. And her friend’s is halfway across town, way too far for her to be walking by herself, you know?” 

 “She’s the one who’s been staying with you this last week?” 

 “Yep! Her mom, ugh, decided to go on a spa trip to the Big Apple so, you know.” 

 Nodding, Desmond did know. Parents taking off for personal reasons wasn’t something foreign to him. He’d glimpsed her cousin a few times. She seemed normal enough, younger than Mckenna, a bit ditzy. And the streets weren’t exactly on the level of trashed where they lived, but with how many prostitutes walked the street? A teenage girl probably shouldn’t be walking alone in the evening.

 Still, he found himself peeking over one shoulder just to double-check.

 A reflex he hadn’t realized he had until he found Ezio waiting for his look.

 “Sounds as though you have a young lady to escort, mio caro. What a privilege!”

Could Ezio sense how unimpressed he was? He hoped he could. He hoped that troublesome, smug, unserious Mentor could sense it.

 Sighing, Desmond made sure he was seen rolling his eyes before switching his attention back to Mckenna and nodding along, “I’ll do it.” 

 What kind of trouble could a little walk cause?

-----

 Mckenna’s cousin wasn’t just invited to a friend’s.

 Desmond facepalmed hard enough his palm hurt a little, even if he stayed in step with the girl who’d spent their whole walk talking his ear off about some teenaged popstar named Justin Bieber she was obviously a huge fan of. 

 A house party. An honest-to-God house party, open to all the city’s block. And a few more blocks besides. One of those with music turned up so loud the bass was literally making the apartment walls vibrate. Lights turned down low. A hundred fire hazards and a hundred more on top of that in the form of drunk teenagers, dancing around way too provocatively in way too little of clothing, red solo cups sloshing in their hands from the movements.

 Desmond was waved in by some drunk sitting on the apartment’s stoop, who waved so far he literally tipped to the side and went giggling drunkenly to the ground.

 A pair of girls with their arms around each other’s hips passed him by, bodies swaying and shirts short and tramp stamps dark on the base of their spines. They shot him a look. Together. Giggling over it as they passed.

 He really didn’t want to read into that look. They were, like, seventeen. 

 He was twenty-five for crying out loud. Actually, should he even be here? Wasn’t it a bit like a creepy adult dude hanging around a party full of drunk teenagers? Even if he looked fifteen, Desmond had no fucking intentions of coming within touching distance of any of these kids making bad decisions all around him.

 Bad decisions he’d already made plenty of in his youth, thank you very much.

 The music got turned up, and the flow of bodies coming and going led to him being naturally pushed into the apartment. 

 There was a lot of body glitter. A few people brushed against him, and it ended up all over him and his dark clothes way too easily. One girl that brushed past him literally leaned in to nip at his ear - not cool. He cringed away, glad the action was hidden by just how chaotic things already were. The flow of the party crowd got him away from her real fast.

 A group of girls with pretty tongue piercings were playing spin the bottle on the living room floor, and a group of guys were exchanging bills in the corner like something shady as fuck that Desmond wasn’t getting involved in -

 And there were people dancing on the kitchen countertops, because of course there was.

 This descendant, for one, could not find the girl that had brought him there in the first place, even after doing a full circle.

 Switching to his Eagle Vision though, all it took was a second circle to find the form glowing gold over by the drinks. Welp. Mckenna’s cousin seemed to have found a few of her safe girlfriends. They were already dancing with drinks together, tossing their hair and swinging their hips, and yep. Desmond’s job here was done. He patted himself on the back for dealing with things so well.

 Somebody fell off the counter to the tune of a lot of laughter.

 Some girl’s flipflop flew across the room.

 Somebody’s drink spilled all over a couple in the middle of a hot makeout session on the couch - and damn.

 This hadn’t been Desmond’s scene in a while. Like a decade’s worth of time ‘while’. This hadn’t been his scene since his first few years free of the Farm. Since he was a homeless teenager getting by by shadier and shadier means, mostly going about those means in these sorts of parties. Baggies of things he shouldn’t have had on him, cops on his tail in snowy alleyways, bigger guys threatening to rough him up -

 And at the end of it all, him throwing back beers way too young, with lips on him and his lips wherever felt best for his partner too.

 Sure, Bad Weather had still been a bar, a bit of a club too, but it was an upscale place. 

 The used condoms at least made it to the garbage there.

 Speaking of which, hands were wandering, and so were mouths, and way too many of the people surrounding Desmond seemed to be under the age of eighteen so. He’d done what he’d said. He’d gotten Mckenna’s ditzy cousin here. She was safe, she was with her friends, maybe she wasn’t responsible but it’d be less responsible for him to stick around now, so -

 The young-again teenager dropped his eyes to the floor and started shouldering his way back towards the apartment door. That he’d been herded away from by all the subconscious pushing. 

 He could feel the vibrations of the music through the soles of his shoes.

 And then he felt when somebody’s palm slammed into his shoulder. Hard enough to brush right past accidental and hit the ‘hey, asshole alert’ alarm drilled into the Assassin’s head after so many years of dealing with so many of said assholes.

 Sure enough, when he stumbled back into straightening up, which involved somebody’s hands helping to shove him upright before they went right back to partying?

 He found himself turning towards a whole flock of assholes. Five of ‘em. All five looking halfway to sloshing drunk, mean-faced and grinning like jocks after winning some big sports game. Like they were on top of the world and wanted a loser to pick on. 

 Desmond was subtle when he sighed, and more subtle in looking around for an out since the last thing he wanted was to pound a few drunk teenagers.

 Then he squinted at one of the guys. He looked…a little familiar.

 The recognition came a bit late to bail when he realized it was one of the kids from that religious family a floor below the apartment he shared with his ancestors. The oldest kid. The teenaged son, close to graduating. A cross hung from his neck and everything, and his mouth was twisted into a sneer that got Desmond’s fingers curling into fists before he’d even opened his mouth.

 “Who the fuck invited you?” 

 Great.

 “Nobody,” the young-again teenager told him, barely loudly enough to be heard over the thudding bass of the music, and as coolly as he dared while bodies writhed around them in a malformed ring, “I was just escorting somebody. Now I’m leaving.”

 “Sure you weren’t the one being escorted? All that body glitter,” one of the tough jocks, oh no, so scary - as if. Anyways, he said that, sneering too and shouldering a bit around that religious neighbor kid to be big and bad. Ah. So terrifying. Desmond was just shaking in his sneakers. 

 And covered in body glitter, sure, but all the golden flecks on his skin, on his clothes, weren’t his fault. Too many people at this party were touchy was all.

 “Nah,” another jock scoffed, slapping the first hard on the shoulder all douchey-like, and you know? Desmond really didn’t appreciate their disgusted tones of voice, “Him? With an escort? He may live where the sluts live, but remember where he actually lives, man.”

 Gritting his teeth, there was a split second there where Desmond considered that violence might not be the answer here.

 “He lives with those fag dads of his. He probably couldn’t be with a proper woman if he paid for her!” 

 There was a splintering crack of noise.

 And then there was blood.

 Gushing down onto the already drink-stained carpet underneath their feet. Red. Really red. 

 There was that pretty stupid jock crying out, in pain, in pure anger too. Cupping a hand over his completely broken nose and stumbling back into his fellow assholes who split. Because they were assholes. Letting their bloodied friend land hard on his ass on the floor, while Desmond shook out his fist. Knuckles a bit sore. Assholes one through four gawked at their fifth on his ass, then at Desmond, then started to turn red with anger.

 Well. Shit.

 He really was trying to get away without beating up kids today. 

 The music’s bass was still thumping, the party still partying, but there were shocked cries from the sardine-packed people surrounding them. As they noticed the commotion, noticed the bloodshed, as Desmond activated his Eagle Vision. As he found five red figures standing in front of him. And he had to check himself.

 Sometimes, it was a little hard to remember that red didn’t always mean ‘kill on sight’.

 His hidden blade he nearly flexed, on his left forearm, hidden under his hoodie’s sleeve. Which would’ve been dumb as fuck. Come on, Desmond. He scolded himself plenty as he settled back on the balls of his feet to see what would happen. He was facing kids. Dumb kids, but still kids. Dealing with teenaged hormones really wasn’t healthy for people who fucked with him.

 Or insulted the people he cared about.

 “You little piece of shit!” Jock number one screamed, big, burly, thick enough neck to probably impress people who hadn’t fought literal bears - and he charged headfirst at Desmond. All anger. No thought.

 It was child’s play to sidestep him, and stick out a leg that sent that asshole faceplanting into the floor too. Right into a sticky puddle of somebody’s drink soaked into the carpet. 

 More people began to notice there was an argument happening. A physical one.

 Desmond reached out with a shy smile to one partygoer, took her red solo cup from her fingers while she flushed up to her eartips, and then casually overturned the cup above the faceplanting asshole’s head.

 He sputtered as something that smelled distinctly alcoholic poured over him.

 Casually turning his attention back to the three assholes he hadn’t laid a single anything on, he tilted his head. Sort of wishing his hood was up. An ingrained thing in him, by now, easy to ignore. They all looked absolutely uneasy now, even if they also looked like they wanted to ambush him on his way home from school or something. Red in their faces and disgusted.

 By him? By their loss? He didn’t really fucking care.

 Then, he was distracted.

 By somebody shouting above the sound of the thudding bass, “YO. THE COPS.”

 Distraction was deadly. And painful. All it took was that short moment, of Desmond twisting to look towards the apartment’s windows - which he couldn’t even see out of because of the throngs of partying people - but he saw the flashing lights. Red and blue. Underaged kids starting to panic. Him panicking too, a bit, since his fake ID definitely wouldn’t hold up against a police investigation.

 And then an arm wrapped around his ankle, making him stumble.

 The asshole he’d poured a drink on.

 Setting him up for the other asshole Desmond barely had time to face before he was suckerpunched across one cheek, followed up by fists grabbing at his hoodie's front to headbutt him. Hard.

 Stars sparkled in bursts of white behind his eyes as he staggered back, into all the underaged party animals now screaming about their parents and trying to stampede out of the apartment. Get out. Get out. Get out.

 The young-again teenager grabbed a random sweatshirt to get dragged along by, deeper into the stampede, further away from those absolute dickfaces, holy shit, kids were still awful assholes nowadays for sure. Something warm and sticky ran down his chin. He smelled nothing but blood and strong perfumes and alcohol, and he stumbled into a few walls in the process of hearing people - adults, police - screaming for them to calm down and cooperate.

 Even out of it, adults screaming at him were enough of a trigger to knock Desmond back into his own head.

 He slammed palms-first into a window at the end of the apartment's hallway. Ignoring the shouts for him to cooperate behind him. Ignoring the crying of teenagers caught, the wails, the chaos of a teen party broken up by the cops.

 The window was old, the paint chipping under his fingers as he flung it up and open. But the fire escape held his weight outside. Which was all that really mattered at the moment, when Desmond’s shoulder slammed into metal bars, when his fingers grabbed at night-chilled metal too, when he was dropping -

 When he thudded sneakers-first down onto the pavement of an alleyway between apartment buildings, and booked it.

 Leaving behind the flashing of red and blue lights.

 The badges being waved around.
 
 The flood of kids flowing off in every direction, trying desperately to avoid getting picked up by cops for underaged drinking and whatever else had been happening in that stupid, stupid party.

 Desmond didn’t care about much of anything else, besides the pounding of his sneakers echoing off of alleys. The fading sounds. And then a chainlink fence he leapt up like any other obstacle an Assassin would run into - like it was nothing. Flipping over the top and hitting the other side and ducking down a few more alleys before the chaos of a party busted had fully faded behind him.

 That was the only time he was willing to slow to a more staggering pace, glancing over his shoulder. Then slumping against a brick wall for a breather. Panting. 
 
 Yeah. Great. Party busted, police called, enemies made…children, technically, but enemies. Fuck. Awesome. 

 Desmond cringed when he sucked in a deep breath without as much adrenaline and an annoying stinging made itself known in his face.

 Well. Shit. He reached up to lightly touch at his bloodied, bitten lip and the shiner along one eyebrow.
 
 His dads were gonna be pissed.

 Brown eyes went wide.

 Altair, Ezio, and Raton were gonna be pissed, he corrected himself.

 He stood there for a while.

 Well.

 Fuck.

 Desmond maybe dragged his feet a bit, heading home to the apartment after that.

-----

 Lots of small excuses made Desmond hesitate in the hallway outside of their apartment. Small, dumb excuses. He was mature enough to admit that to himself, fifteen years old or not. Physically. Just physically. He was still a twenty-five years old man too, mentally, and he had no plans of letting his ancestors forget that fact! It was just…also hard, sometimes, to stand up against how overpoweringly adult they felt. Which was so stupid. He’d literally lived through several of their most embarrassing moments in life!

 Maybe it was respect.

 …Maybe it was love.

 Whatever it was, it was frustrating to struggle with alone, in a dimly lit hallway, tugging at his hoodie as if he were actually an anxious teenager in trouble or something. So frustrating. Desmond wanted the records to show! This was dumb. 

 What got him moving was the half-there realization that that one asshole was probably going to be coming back to the apartment building too tonight. The religious kid from downstairs. Who had to be the reason the rest of his jock friends even knew what to say to piss Desmond off at the party.

 Looks like he’d have to help them get another exorcism for their apartment.

 Scoffing, Desmond tugged his hoodie sleeves down over his fingers and then just shouldered into their modest little apartment. Aiming for a casual air. It wasn’t a big deal. None of tonight was a big deal. There would be no emotions, no adulting, and no being parented, no sirs.

 He was an adult.

 “And just where have you been all evening, young man?” 

 His mantra would be more believable if Ezio wasn’t, well, Ezio. And standing in the kitchen. Arms crossed, leaning back against the countertop’s edge, grinning all wide and boyish at him.

 In the perfect position to glimpse under the hood Desmond had pulled over his head.

 His grin died a quick death. Replaced by something stony and Mentor of Rome-worthy. 

 Shoulders crawling up towards his ears, Desmond’s lips peeled back in a scowl, and that scowl only deepened significantly when Ezio pursed his lips together. To give a piercing whistle. A specific whistle. One Altaïr had taught all of them early on; the Eagle Whistle. A call for Masyaf Assassins. A warning, a cry for help, a signal that they were on the same side. It probably meant all three of those things right then, and a neighbor of theirs pounded on their wall at how shrill a sound it was.

 But more importantly, the door to Altaïr and Desmond’s bedroom was swept open.

 And the Mentor of the Levantine Brotherhood was filling up the entire doorway, regardless of his actual size, with how forceful his presence was.

 Raton was probably up on the roof with his pigeons, since he didn’t immediately answer as well.

 With a lot of reluctance - a ton, seriously - Desmond turned to properly face the oldest of his ancestors. Grimacing when the expression on Altaïr’s usually expressionless face twisted into something he’d only ever seen Abbas Sofian bring out of him. Which. Said a lot the teenager wasn’t about to examine right then.

 Altaïr crossed the space between them in three strides.

 And then reached up with one hand to flick down Desmond’s hood, the other to grasp surprisingly gently at his chin, a thumb sweeping under his lip that still felt split open by that damn headbutt -

 “Who dared to strike you?”

 Geeze. No wonder other Assassins had always referred to Altaïr as completely terrifying.

 He seemed ready to storm Masyaf with just a hidden blade and his barely contained anger.

 “Do they lie in a pool of blood, or do we have a hunt to begin, mio caro?” Altaïr? Altaïr’s scariness was sort of expected. Desmond had never had any illusions about how absolutely dangerous the Syrian man was - but Ezio? Ezio with that stony expression, Ezio with those dark eyes, Ezio with that frown carved across his mouth?  

 That was the Ezio who had stood in the middle of a party, drenched in blood, screaming that ‘the Auditore are still here’.

“They were just kids,” and the young-again descendant of theirs had to get that out of the way, fast, because they both looked minutes away from actually going out and hunting. Though it was very mumbled because of Altaïr brushing at his lower lip for a second time.

It was a split on the opposite side of his lips than their three shared scars were. 

Well. At least he’d be symmetrical.

“...Kids managed to make you bleed so?” Altaïr asked dangerously, though not disbelievingly. He clicked his tongue without Desmond’s answer. Clearly frustrated all of a sudden. Yes, he couldn’t go hunt down highschoolers, oh the horror, thoughts and prayers to him but Desmond really just wanted to go get cleaned up and sleep.

 “Were they trained?” Ezio got a scowl from the teenager for that question.

 “No, I was just distracted by the cops showing up.”

 “So they aren’t dead? Or horribly disfigured, fratellino?” 

 “I wasn’t going to beat up teenagers, Ezio!” 

 “Si, but I just may.” 

 “Ezio,” Altaïr interjected calmly, fingertips dancing along that shiner turning blues and purples and ugly in a crescent-shape around one of Desmond’s eyebrows, and was shot the most deceptively innocent of smirks anyone had ever seen.

“Our Desmond was attacked, la mia mila, will you really stand by and do nothing?” 

 “...”

 “It’s fine you two,” their Desmond, as it were, grumbled. Eyes flitting balefully between the two adults who actually did seem on the verge of going out and beating up somebody if not those jocks from the party, “I didn’t exactly just stand there. They got a bit beat up too. And if they cause trouble again, they’ll get beat up again. Simple.”

 “Who were they?” Altaïr asked, catching onto the idea that they’d be a cause for trouble in the future, maybe. And Desmond scuffed his shoes on the floor, shaking his head, grumbling more. Feeling really, sort of, stupid. And small. And tired, at this point.

“...One of the bigot kids who lives downstairs; eldest son. Party, drinks - it was dumb and that’s that. As long as they don’t try anything, we’re good.”

Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad and Ezio Auditore exchanged a look.

“No murdering teenagers!” Desmond demanded, pointing at both of them in their own turns to get how serious he was across. It was frankly ridiculous how much like a grumpy cat told to get off the countertop Altaïr looked. And how Ezio glanced towards the apartment windows, as if he was going to make a run for it. 

Finally though, the both of them let out small noises of agreement. Even if it was only to appease their descendant.

Ezio led him over towards the kitchen sink, teasing lightly about the party, about the training they’d be redoubling in the next few days, affectionate and gentle and teasing and such an older brother about reaching for their medkit in the cabinet. Altaïr followed just to stand there with his arms crossed and watch every little action with the intensity of a real eagle.

Just as Ezio was dabbing a cotton ball to his lips, which stung because hydroperoxide ouch, the apartment door swung open.

 And Ratonhnhaké:ton entered with a new birdhouse in his big hands that he was frowning at. Until he raised his head and his eyes. Until he caught sight of them all. Until his eyes landed solidly on the blood, the bruises, the resignation on Desmond’s face as he sighed and knew what to expect.

 Sure enough.

 Raton’s face went cold, and he lowered his birdhouse, and he growled out, “Who are we hunting?”

 And Desmond began the dance of not letting his ancestors murder teenagers all over again. 

 It was sort of nice that they cared, but what he really wanted was bed.

-----

 Bandages, food, then bed. In that order. That was what Desmond got from his ancestors, which was nice. There wasn’t any scolding. No telling him he was better than this, that he was a disappointment for letting himself get distracted, no running either. Like a few of the safehouses he’d ended up in with modern-day Assassins. It wasn’t, ‘You fucked up, now we’re on the run again.’

 It was more an air of…he’s allowed to make mistakes.

 Since he has people on his side strong enough to take the hits for him.

 Desmond probably should feel somewhat guilty about that, but he really didn’t. Hadn’t he taken enough hits?

 He only felt guilt when he woke up in his and Altaïr’s bed, he’d guess not all that long since he dozed off since the lighting was still dim and moony through the blinds on the windows, and his fingers were grabbing at fistfuls of the sheets. Well, on one hand. The other one was pushed under his pillow where two of Altaïr’s throwing knives were kept.

 He knew what had woken him up without even having to guess. What would wake up any Master Assassin. Noise.

 Somebody was banging on their apartment door.

 He debated, and then he shoved himself slowly up. Wincing at the fresh sting from his face. Stretching wounds and bruises he did not recommend. He still pocketed one of Altaïr’s knives.

 Then he slipped out of bed, in a bedroom where he was the only person there, creeping towards the door to that bedroom just in time to hear somebody opening the apartment door. None of his ancestors would be knocking at this time of night. Which was how Desmond knew they had uninvited guests. It made the nerves crawl across the back of his neck.

 His Eagle Vision came to him in a wash of grayscale, and shapes beyond the walls. 

 He ticked off their positions in his head.

 Raton seemed to be pressed against the door to his and Ezio’s bedroom, while Ezio himself seemed to be leaning casually against the counter in the kitchen, while Altaïr - was the one answering the door. The now open door. With two more shapes standing in it. Shapes that were grey, but also just slightly swirling with red shades. 

 Those who could be enemies. If they were made to be.

 “Why are you here?” Altaïr’s crisp tone sounded clear in the way only an Assassin’s enhanced senses could make it, through the door that Desmond crouched next to, and he winced when he saw the unknown shapes shift around at that tone. Drawing themselves up. Like they were impressive in any sort of way, other than their own tone of authority that quickly gave them right the fuck away.

 Cops.

 “Mr. Al-Sayf, we presume.” 

 “You presume correctly,” Altaïr at least must’ve been listening to Desmond’s ‘teachings’ in the last month, since he didn’t sound nearly as disrespectful as he normally might. He knew what the police were. Knew how to at least act like he was a law-abiding citizen, “For what reason have you disturbed us at so late an hour?” 

 “Seems like you were already plenty awake,” one of the officers scoffed, just to be swatted by his partner as a reprimand. Well, hopefully that meant both of them weren’t the respect my authority sorts of cops that had always pushed Desmond around when he really was mentally a teenager.

 His wrist flexed, and his hidden blade slid out from his hoodie sleeve.

 They had to handle this quietly, he knew…dead cops would be like lifting up a neon sign to Abstergo at this point.

 And a neon sign to the Assassins.

 “We are sorry to disturb you so late,” the more sensible partner sort of apologized, making motions Desmond’s Eagle Vision couldn’t quite make out through the door, “Is your son home tonight? A ‘Desmond Al-Sayf’?”

 “Yes.”

 A pause, like the cops expected Altaïr to continue…but he didn’t. Of course not. Desmond nearly snorted.

 “...Well, has he been home all night?” 

“Yes.” 

Another pause. This time Desmond lifted his palm to cover his smile.

Altaïr could be funny when he wanted to be.

“...See, sir,” the officer then seemed to decide to jump forward in the discussion after clearing his throat, but by now Desmond relaxed somewhat since he was starting to see how Altaïr intended to handle being questioned by the police and he definitely approved, “we’ve just finished answering a call for a party downtown. Lots of underaged drinking, lots of illicit substances, and some of those teens brought in named your son as one of the wilder ones there tonight. So, if we could talk to him - ?” 

“He’s asleep.” 

“...Could you wake him?” Desmond had to sheathe his hidden blade so he could cover his mouth with both hands over how desperately lost the officer was starting to sound, and he rolled from his crouch into simply sitting against the wall. Smiling to himself, and then actually snorting out loud when Altaïr answered.

 “No.” 

 Somewhere in the kitchen’s direction, Ezio cleared his throat suddenly to help disguise Desmond’s snort.

 “If that’s all?” The more charming of his two older ancestors said in a leading tone, probably beckoning towards the door so the officers could see themselves out. His accent clipped, but they wouldn’t be able to hear the annoyance in it. 

 “And who are you?” The less sensible officer puffed up, all chest and shoulders arching back in Desmond’s Vision. To which he was swatted again.

 “Altaïr’s lover.” 

 Well.

 That silence was certainly awkward.

 “...Is there no way we could speak to Desmond?” The poor officer with sense asked, still sounding lost. Like he wasn’t used to being shut down without even a chance to stick his foot in their door. Poor guy. He probably had some morals to go with his sense. Those cops never got far in Desmond’s books, either in the past or present.

 “No.” 

 Desmond snorted louder now.

 And Altaïr simply shut the door in the cops’ faces.

 You know, most normal teenagers would probably be freaking out if the cops showed up at their parents’ apartment in the middle of the night to accuse them of attending a wild, underaged party. Desmond wasn’t freaking out. He was just sitting there against the wall beside the door, laughing out loud now without restraint, laughing hard enough his stomach hurt and his eyes watered. 

 Footsteps came to the door, and then it swung inward. He reached out a palm to stop it from smacking into him, tucked away behind it.

 Wiping at his watering eyes, as golden eyes peered around the edge of the door at him.

 “That? That was awesome, baba!”

 Altaïr’s expression almost like a soft smile froze, and Desmond wondered why. And then his brain caught up. And translated. And left him also freezing guiltily there, gaping up at his oldest ancestor with eyes wide enough to be completely ringed in white. Caught, he was caught -

 Oh man.

 Welp, time to run away and get a new fake ID and change his name while he’s at it and never let himself be found -

 Bending both of his legs to bring his knees up to his chest, Desmond groaned while bonking his forehead against his kneecaps. Then he did it again and again, just for good measure. Hiding his face there. It had barely been more than a month! A month! A month of regular meals, sure, and not being yelled at, he guessed, and being encouraged instead of scolded or torn down, that might be true -

 But was that really all it took? 

 To call Altaïr his dad?

 “Desmond,” the Mentor, the Master Assassin, the Eagle of Masyaf, Altaïr called his name lowly. Voice low too. As in, it sounded closer to the floor, closer to him, and Desmond knew with a sudden, sinking resignation that his first ancestor was crouched down in front of him. Why did he have to do that? Why did he have to do the Dad Crouch? Desmond had seen it with other sons and their dads, had seen it on TV too, why did Altaïr of all people have to do that?

 Now, of all times? 

 It was a trick! To make him fall into the trap of talking about emotions!

 “Desmond. Look at me…habibi.” 

 Too late.

 Too fucking late.

 Desmond kept repeating to himself that he wasn’t going to cry. No. No. No. No matter what his hormones were trying to tell him, he was an adult. He was an adult. He was twenty-five years old, fully grown, had survived the Farm and homelessness and Abstergo and the Assassins and the Animus and the Isu and had died to save the whole damned world, he was not going to cry over - over…over being called Altaïr’s…Altaïr’s…

 Altaïr touched his cheek with his left hand. Four fingers. Altaïr didn’t really like touching people’s skin. Desmond had forgotten, because he touched him without hesitation so often.

 Desmond raised his head, just a tiny bit, just enough to peek over his knees.

 No, his vision wasn’t blurry. He resented the idea. It was just dark in their bedroom. That was all. The shades of moonlight through the blinds, there were clouds over the moon or something, that was all. That was why things were hazier than usual. 

 And Altaïr was crouched in front of him. Hood down. Eyes gleaming gold.

 Lips genuinely pulled back into a smile anyone would be able to recognize.

 “No.” Desmond…couldn’t. Not yet.

 “Alright,” Altaïr agreed, without a hint of annoyance even flickering across his face. His still smiling face.

 Not yet.

 “When you’re ready.” 

 Part of Desmond Miles thought he’d never be ready.

 But as Desmond Al-Sayf, maybe one day…he would be.

~>-----<~

Chapter Text

~>-----<~

 Peering into mirrors? Not Desmond’s favorite pastime, he was willing to admit. Insight told him it probably had to do with too many occasions when he really was a teenager, looking at his beat up reflection. Bruised and bloody, and being in the middle of stitching himself together as best he could on the harder nights. So he’d never made much of a habit of it. 

 But, geeze, he looked godawful. 

 For the most part, he’d gotten used to catching glimpses of a younger version of himself in the bathroom mirror. For the most part. Yeah, so it was weird. Weirder than weird. He’d flipped off his reflection more than once, okay? Dumb teenager Desmond. Maybe he stuck out his tongue a few times too, but hey. He remembered being a teenager. The first time around. 

 He definitely deserved it.

 For now, he peered at his reflection with all the reluctance a moody teenager could possibly feel, if that was possible. Leaning over the bathroom counter to better see in the dimly lit space - not the fanciest bathroom, duh - as he gingerly poked at his face. At his swollen lower lip, at his eyebrow that was a ridiculous array of bruised colors. Again.

 Dumb.

 Why did bruises have to take weeks to heal? Mckenna had taken one look at his face that morning and burst into apologies, actually coming off way less airheaded than she usually did. Fluttering around. Flapping her hands. Bringing him a facial mask? From her apartment? That she promised reduced swelling? They made those? Either way, the bunny-brunette had refused to leave until he promised her he’d try the mask.

 Mckenna blamed herself, in her blabby way of talking, but that was silly. Sure, Desmond had escorted her cousin to that house party, but it was those assholes who had banged up his face. And on top of that, the young-again teen had been the one to throw the first punch! Why was she so -

 Ugh.

 Right.

 People actually care about him these days. Disgusting. How dare they.

 Desmond snorted softly to his own reflection, his exhaling breath fogging up the mirror. So he brought up an arm to wipe it clean with his hoodie’s sleeve, frowning a final time at the bruises crowning half his face. Far from the worst he’d had. And being tended to probably better than some of the more severe injuries he’d suffered in his life, thanks to three overprotective ancestors of his.

Welp. As long as the police weren’t going to come knocking again anytime soon, and as long as Desmond stuck around the apartment for a while? It’d be done with.

He still had to call down an exorcism on that family downstairs though.

Swinging his face from the mirror towards the open bathroom door, Desmond’s shoulders climbed towards his ears a little. Voices. Louder than they needed to be, inside the apartment. The fact that he recognized the accents, the tones, them, was the only reason his hidden blade wasn’t flexed. Instead, he rolled his shoulders back down and sighed.

This had also been a thing the last couple of days since the house party. 

Desmond - Al-Sayf, maybe, but never Miles, never again - walked silently over to the bathroom doorway, then peeked out. Then sighed. Then folded his arms across his chest and leaned lazily on the doorframe, pursing his lips at the sight greeting him from the kitchen. Settling in to watch. And refusing to smile. Ezio thought he was so funny, so hilarious, idiota Auditore. 

 Poor Altaïr, he supposed.

 “Do you care for me at all? Care for how much effort I put in? For how hard I work? To keep this family together!” The Mentor of Rome was in the middle of ranting, voice raised, accent even heavier with his passions as he paced the kitchen, moving his hands wildly with his emotions - as if he weren’t grinning broadly every time his face was turned away from his fellow Mentor, “You care nothing for me! You will not even allow me one night - !” 

 “Ezio.” Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad said, flatly, leaning against the kitchen’s countertop in much the same pose Desmond was currently in, expression almost blank. Almost.

 His eye twitched when Ezio spun gracefully on his heels, waving his hands more wildly, wagging a finger at his…’partner’.

 “A few hours! A few hours, but no!” The last Auditore son scoffed, throwing his broad shoulders back to curse heartily in Italian several times in a row. Desmond raised his unbruised eyebrow. Almost impressed by how colorful those curses were - clearly taught to the Italian by sailors he’d journeyed with, wow, “That is too much to ask of you! Un amante così egoista! Such a selfish man!” 

 Altaïr reached up to rub at his temples. It impressed the dark-haired teen, watching, because it took quite a bit to genuinely annoy his oldest ancestor.

 Ezio Auditore da Firenze was a bit of a natural at it, though, he’d proven.

 “Why I ever chose you when your Keeper was so much better an option, why, I never - !” Both Altaïr and Desmond’s brows shot up at that surprise reference to Malik in the middle of this ramble, and that seemed to be where the Levantine Mentor had enough. Uncrossing his arms from his chest to clap his hands together. Loudly.

 What a neat trick. Desmond wanted to learn. It made Ezio’s mouth snap shut in an instant.

 “I,” Altaïr said slowly, clearly, articulately to the expectant Italian staring at him, “will take him out for a few hours, so. Please. Stop.” 

 In a heartbeat, Ezio Auditore went from a ranting, wronged lover to grinning perfectly pleasantly and warmly at his predecessor, nodding, “Grazi.” 

 Altaïr had a secret limit for these sorts of things. Loud noises. Long talks. Lots of movement happening around them. Honestly? Desmond was super surprised how easily the ever-energetic labrador puppy that Ezio was had seemingly mapped out those limits, after only a bit more than a month of them all living together. He sauntered out of the kitchen, humming like a cat that’d caught its mouse purred.

 Leaving behind a completely blank-faced Altaïr, closing his golden eyes for just a moment of meditation if Desmond knew him. And he did.

 He sympathized. This had been a regular scene the last couple of days. And it wasn’t hard to guess what the troublemaking Master Assassin was up to. Stirring the pot. Adding in flavor. Adding drama to their apartment building. Yes, Ezio was playing up their cover by getting into lover’s spats with Altaïr and he was very much enjoying himself.

 It was a bit hard to scold the man for it.

 Since they only had to do this sort of thing to take away some of the heat surrounding the fact that the cops had shown up at their door, in the middle of the night, looking for Desmond. A few of their neighbors? Had learned about that tiny situationship. From where? Probably from downstairs. Probably another teenager bragging about tattling to the cops about Desmond being at that party, if he had to guess. Even if he wasn’t arrested or anything, it had brought around one or two of their more nosy neighbors.

 So give them something else to gossip and twitter about.

 Keep them off their backs by giving them - loudly - a few ‘secrets’ to spread around.

 Was he ever going to touch the apartment building’s gossip with a ten-foot pole? Absolutely-the-fuck-not. The young-again teenager had already eavesdropped on a few of their less observant fellow tenants and learned the building had assumed his three ancestors were all in a polyamorous throuple, raising Desmond who was believed to be Altaïr’s blood-son that he had had when he was a teenager. So they had a bingo list of gay, threesomes, and a single father under the age of eighteen scandal wrapped up around them as far as their neighbors were concerned. 

Just.

…Great. 

 “Did he just reenact one of his soap opera’s scenes?” The bruising and bruised youngest of their household asked, slipping into the kitchen to join Altaïr to the tune of Ezio singing silly songs while cleaning in the living room. It was ridiculous how familiar this little scene felt to Desmond these days. How comfortable it was to hear one of his ancestors doing housework cheerily in their small apartment. He wanted to complain. To who? 

 The Isu maybe. This was their fault, after all.

 “I cannot know,” the older ‘Al-Sayf’ beside him said, more softly, pulling Desmond from his thoughts to peek at Altaïr.

 Yeah.

 He was just going to pretend he didn’t see the expression so openly showing on the Eagle’s face when looking at him with those golden eyes of his.

“So who are you taking out today?” Desmond asked, almost snorting at the double meaning that sort of question might have when asked between two Master Assassins. Then almost slunk away from their modest little kitchen cubby, when Altaïr shifted away from the countertop. Shooting a pointed stare at the younger. Ah. Geeze, “Well, good luck to them, whoever they are,” he still tried to make a run for it -

 But a four-fingered hand rested itself lightly on his shoulder when he tried to turn away, and he knew he was trapped.

 “Every Assassin is taken by surprise at times,” the greatest Mentor of them all told him, almost kindly, but especially serious, letting go the moment Desmond glanced back at him and gave him his attention, “Your distraction, that was not your fault. You trusted somebody would be beside you, protecting you from threats you hadn’t noticed, and we will be there as often as is possible - “

 He opened his mouth to say that wasn’t why he’d gotten suckerpunched at the party.

 Then closed it wordlessly.

 Blinking at just how true the words rang after hearing them. That he…had thought somebody would protect him when he risked looking away from a threat.

 “But often is not always,” Altaïr went on, nodding, “Come. It was not your fault, but it can be trained against. That is what we will do.”

 Well, Desmond Al-Sayf wasn’t the obedient child Desmond Miles had been. He did not duck his head, he did not shut his mouth, he did not avert his eyes or brace for a punch. He didn’t do any of those things. He never intended to again. But. When Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad walks, you follow him. You listen to him. You respect him. And Desmond did. 

 You love him.

 And Desmond did.

 Altaïr reached up to pull his hood into place, to shadow his face, to leave their modest little apartment, and right on his heels? 

 Desmond did the exact same thing.

-----

 Security cameras sucked so much. Smaller city like this? Maybe didn’t have as many as, say, New York City. But they still had a few. Which was too much, in Desmond’s opinion, and frustrating in Altaïr’s opinion because he couldn’t simply destroy said security cameras. The modern-day’s technological advancements were great, were grand -

 Were frustrating.

 And Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad stood by that, when taking the lead in getting them past those security cameras scattered around the streets they now lived on. Grateful for his Sight. For the mist of red that laid over every surface the security cameras could record. A future of technology. A future under surveillance. It grated on the Levantine Mentor, reminded him of grandfatherly eyes and the sure belief that he knew all, that all must obey.

 Omnipotent. Able to see all.

 That was what Altaïr was regrettably reminded of, at times, in this future of their Desmond’s where technology was widespread and freedom’s chains shortened.

-----

 There was a construction site several streets away from their apartment. A startlingly large one. The signage all excitedly exclaimed that a new mall was being built, shops would be coming soon, but none of the construction trucks had moved an inch in the month since the Assassins had found this site. Had started using it as a training ground. No security cameras, lots of ledges, lots of privacy since it was off the main streets.

 Desmond was starting to wonder if the mall’s construction had been called off, but that didn’t matter all that much, did it? If they resumed construction, they would just find somewhere else to train.

 The city had plenty of options, especially on their side of the tracks. Ezio had been interested in freerunning at the train depot. So maybe there.

 The parkour part of training was easy. Any Master Assassin was capable of doing that in their sleep, which they were. Master Assassins, not sleeping. Desmond did multiple circuits of climbing the mall’s frame and even the construction crane kept at the site, just to show that he could under the piercing stare of Altaïr’s golden eyes.

 And if he sat on the tippy top of the towering crate, swinging his dangling legs over the edge, staring down at his ancestor who looked so small from up high?

 Well. That was entirely his business.

 It was when they switched over to sparring that things got dicey.

 On the topmost level of the site, a cement slab with a circle drawn in chalk that Altaïr had made before they started, they had something of a training ring.

 Desmond was used to getting thrown out of the damn thing during training.

 Master Assassin or not, trained by three of the greatest or not, he was still a teenager.

 And that sucked as much as it sounded like it would, when he caught a knee to the stomach - far more gently than he would’ve felt it in a normal fight - and slid back a few steps, wrapping his arms around his middle protectively as he bent over and tried not to puke. Altaïr gave him that much. And also gave him the wonderful gift of conversation, oh boy.

 “What do you think of me?” The Eagle asked, circling his descendant.

 “...I think…you talk too much,” Desmond wheezed out, sucking in a long breath through his nose as he tried not to be sick all over the man’s white hoodie when he came closer out of pure stupification.

 Yeah. Nobody in history would’ve ever thought to accuse Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad that he talked too much.

 Taking the chance while he had it, Desmond twisted suddenly. Dropping low, low to the cement, ignoring the scrape of it under his palms and along his leg through the fabric of his jeans as he jutted one leg out. Sweeping Altaïr’s own legs out from under him. Granted, the Mentor was too skilled to be downed by that alone. Caught himself, rolled, and was ready to stab an opponent in a heartbeat a second later -

 Met by a teenager tossing himself straight at him, full-force.

 Altaïr sheathed his hidden blade the moment before Desmond would’ve thrown himself onto the thing, cursing out harshly in Arabic, grappling with the lean kid that sent them both rolling recklessly across the cement. Out of the ring. 

By the technical rules of a sparring session, they’d both lost.

But by Altaïr’s rules, until one of them was ‘dead’ there would be no end.

It was child’s play to flip them over, pinning the young-again, less muscled teenager beneath him by his thighs and frowning from under the hem of his hood down at his descendant as he asked again, in a more demanding voice, “What do you think of me?” 

Grunting, Desmond put all his force into bringing his head up, fast, trying to give Altaïr a headbutt that surely would’ve broken the man’s nose.

 His first ancestor rolled off of him, kicking out as he went, catching the boy harshly in the side with his boot. Which made him roll, which made him grab at his middle again, groaning, but Altaïr knew he’d held back enough to not dislocate anything. Despite appearances, despite how rough the whole situation would look to an outsider, he was being gentle.

 The equivalent of a cat playing with its kittens, teaching them how to fight back in this cruel world.

 “Desmond,” Altaïr repeated, lips drawn into a tight scowl now as they both knelt, both caught their breath though one more obviously did that than the other, “what do you think of me?” 

 Third time’s the charm.

 The third time made him snap.

 “I think, you deserved better,” his descendant snarled, launched himself forward using his heels to push back extra hard on the cement, and of course the Eagle of Masyaf met him in the middle. Answering each punch, each kick, each slash of a hidden blade emerging just to be sheathed again in a deadly dance between two assassins, “I think you were good! I think the world was blind! I think the Brotherhood was blind! I think I don’t fucking deserve you - !” 

 With one palm, Altaïr easily caught the solid elbow coming for his eye socket.

 And with the other, he caught Desmond’s wrist, wrapping four fingers firmly around it, stopping the stab of his hidden blade from coming down.

 For a second, this descendant of his struggled in his grip, growling. Frustrated. Then Altaïr squeezed each grip, just for a moment, and all the fight drained from the younger Assassin. His shoulders drooped, and he loosened his stance, and the Mentor of Mentors didn’t flinch when Desmond fell forward into him. Forehead hitting his chest, arms still in his grip because he believed he knew his descendant by now.

 Knew he had to feel trapped to let himself be vulnerable.

 “You are so angry on my behalf. It is unnecessary,” the Eagle, the hope of their Brotherhood, the one who was betrayed so horribly told his younger, and got a vicious snarl against his chest for the words. Yes. His Desmond…reminded him very much of his oldest friend at times, a certain Dai. Who would scoff and flick his forehead for saying such things.

 Centuries ago.

 “You’re unnecessary,” Desmond muttered mutinously.

 “Those times have gone,” Altaïr reminded him, rubbing his thumbs lightly back and forth across the boy’s hoodie sleeves as if he hadn’t heard him, “Those times are no more. Those times are no longer remembered by any but ourselves, and I did not die grieving, ˁAyuni.” 

 “‘Grief doesn’t stop with death’,” was quoted right to his face then, so rebelliously too, in a tone so mullish it took the Mentor of the Levant a moment to realize it was a line from his codex. 

 “No, it doesn’t,” he admitted, agreeing with words he had written what seemed a lifetime ago when the wounds of loss were freshest and the blood still wet, then continued before Desmond’s expression could shutter with grief of his own, “But it may stop before death, habibi. And mine did.” 

 Barely a second later, and Altaïr was bringing up one of his calves to stop the knee that had been about to head towards very painful places between his legs. Giving Desmond a bit of a shake by his grip on him, which made the teenager’s lips twist into something flat and furious. Eyes bright.

 Truthfully, Altaïr wasn’t sure he was doing this the right way.

 Neither one of his sons, nor his grandsons, had ever acted so contrary as Desmond Miles. Now Desmond Al-Sayf. This descendent of his, nine hundred years removed from his time.

 If he told Desmond to duck, he was starting to think the young Master Assassin would jump, just to continue being contrary.

 “I apologize. For calling you as such,” still, the old man in his thirty-year old body knew to apologize properly for slipping up like that, even if it wasn’t truly a slip up, “I promised to wait. I meant that. I shouldn’t have disregarded that promise over emotions.” 

 A boy. He, Desmond, really was just a boy. Looking so unbelievably lost to have a genuine apology, taking away his excuse to be angry, to act out. Dropping his guard, and his head, and muttering something annoyed and low. Too low for Altaïr to pretend he heard, even though he did with his enhanced senses. He kept quiet.

 He released his descendant after a moment more of keeping him close.

 And accepted, with the way his newest son stalked over to the edge of site and balanced on a metal bar sticking out of the cement before leaping, that this was the end of their training for today.

-----

 Later, after dark, blinds drawn over the window with only thin shafts of light from the streetlamps shining through in random slants across the room - Desmond lay on top of the bed. The one he shared with Altaïr. The one where Altaïr wasn’t, because he was meditating in the living room. His phone was playing music, some song he had no idea of the words for. But it had a tiny bit of bass, and a tiny bit of tech, the sort of music Rebecca had liked listening to while working on the Animus.

 It was easier, to remember them, when he was sprawled out on the bed like this.

 Staring up at the shadows shifting across the ceiling.

 Swimming in a hoodie he’d stolen from Raton.

 Life, the world, it didn’t feel so large at times like these, you know? It was hard to feel like anything outside of that room even existed. Hard to feel like there were sounds other than the nonspecific music. Hard to feel like his own heart was still beating. There were just the shadows of the blinds, and then the shifting of those shadows whenever a car’s headlights would pass by their apartment building.

 Nights like these, Desmond wondered what the fuck he was doing.

 Living a happy, domestic life with three of his ancestors? Three of the Brotherhood’s greatest Mentors? Keeping them contained to a shoddy apartment, in a shoddier part of town, forcing them to look after him? 

 Most Assassins…most Assassins would’ve escorted them to the Brotherhood as soon as possible, he knew. The Altaïr II maybe. Maybe some other safehouse in New York. 

 He died.

 He woke up, ten years younger than he’d been.

 Yeah, so what if the others had sped away from the Temple as soon as it became clear what the price would be for staying? That was sensible. Desmond himself had told them to go. Only Shaun had tried to stay. How the fuck was that where they’d ended up, when he’d sworn Shaun would always hate him more than anyone else? 

 Well, Lucy had turned out to be a Templar. And Rebecca had been so buried in denial about what she’d been a part of, what she’d helped do to him…she’d basically ran, at the end there. And, well - the less said about Bill Miles? The better. Always the better. 

 Other than them…there weren’t all that many people in the world who Desmond cared much about.

 Did that make him a bad person?

 He’d died for people of the past, not the people of now.

 If they hadn’t put him in the Animus, the way that they had, if he hadn’t lived the lives he had? The people of today wouldn’t have been enough to convince him to touch the Eye.

 He felt like he should feel more ashamed of that fact.

 But all there was, was the music.

 He still didn’t know the words, by the time he drifted off to sleep.

 But he woke up, with Altaïr wrapped around him like a snake in a basket, sheltering him, between him and the door to their bedroom, and Desmond knew how he felt.

 Safe.

 How unfair.
 
 “Fuck off, Minerva, Juno,” he muttered to the ceiling cast in daylight’s shadows.

~>-----<~

Chapter Text

~>-----<~

 Ezio Auditore was like a stray pussycat. Strutting through alleyways, tail up and waving. As confident and as vain as a peacock, and proudly that. Few might be able to blame him. He was Ezio Auditore da Firenze. He was the Mentor of Roma, the savior of their Brotherhood, he had gone down in their historical records as being widely regarded as the second coming of Altaïr - the greatest Mentor to have ever lived. 

 He had owned his city.

 He had laid his claim upon hundreds of others across the known and unknown world, spreading the Brotherhood’s influence.

 He had rebuilt them from ruins in the shadows, to shining beacons of hope garbed in white that stalked the rooftops, protecting the innocent. Rising up against tyrants. Putting down monsters who wore the skin of men. He was l’angelo della morte. And angel of death, who left the feathers of eagles fluttering to the ground in his wake.

 He was charismatic, charming, a man of the people and a noble-born son all wrapped up in one. He drank with mercenaries as easily as he laid in whores’ beds. He dined with nobility as easily as he struck deals with thieves. He was Ezio Auditore of Firenze, of Monteriggioni, of Roma. He was the Mentor, the teacher, the artist who painted on quiet days as simply as he eventually made wine on those quiet days instead.

He was impressive, Altaïr admitted without jealousy.

Because he was beyond ninety years old, and the Eagle of Masyaf had grown beyond feeling jealous as well.

 Jealousy was a feeling for Novices and insecure men. Jealousy was not for a prodigy, a Mentor to feel. It was an excuse for weaker, crueler people. People like Abbas Sofian. And things like vengeance? One also outgrows long before they reach their nineties, if they are smart, and Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad had never been accused of being anything less. He had not forgiven Abbas’ actions, but he had forgiven his motives. Jealousy was like a pustule deserving to be slit open and drained of its pus.

That was never done for Abbas.

But those days, and those mistakes, and if Allah allows it those regrets were nine-hundred years in Altaïr’s past now.

 These days were where he was, where new regrets might form if given a seed to grow from. 

 Altaïr refused to give a seed.

 These days, the apartment they shared, the home they built day by day by day, in all the little ways. That was where his mind stayed focused. Their nestling Bureau becoming more that with every pocket picked. Every shop they visited. Every item they returned with. Every time one of them entered that front door and announced that they were back. 

 An old man such as himself was content with that sort of simpleness. 

 Keeping their food stores stocked, letting Ezio turn their kitchen cozy and abundant, settling their commons space into one of cushions and soft things and entertainment, the other ancestors decorated their shared room as they pleased, and Altaïr slowly assembled a nest of pillows and drapes in the best patch of sunlight in his own room he shared. He’d often find his habibi dozing in the center of it on sunny afternoons.

 This was a place they had no intention of leaving anytime soon…even if that was dangerous for them. 

 The more they made that intention clear, the more their Desmond settled down as well. And that was worth the danger.

 All seemed well, as the bruises began to fade from the youngest Assassin’s skin.

 So Altaïr refused to let any troublemaking put that at risk.

 The Levantine Mentor hadn’t thought he would have to concern himself with wherever Ezio was sneaking off too like a stray on the prowl. All three of them ancestors had their vices. Nothing so shameful as slipping away to drink wine in excess, or pass time with the luring women who walked their streets, but Altaïr slipped away often to meditate. To pray.

Desmond had found him a prayer mat and a rosary, and he was grateful to his descendant.

 Ratonhnhaké:ton slipped away too, to spend time with their roost of pigeons on the rooftop, or to visit the ‘park’ Desmond had scouted out for him several streets away. Where there was some of the only greenery in this city of stone and subjugated lightning. Electricity. 

 Ezio, though - Ezio, that frustratingly charming Mentor slipped away to do things he had not mentioned to Desmond.

 Acting as if he was never seen.

 But few things remained hidden from Altaïr’s golden eyes for long.

 The golden-haired-and-eyed Mentor had seen his fellow ancestor of Desmond’s, watched him, wander into the streets. Doing the oddest of normal things. Talking to the city’s people. Ezio talked to the children playing games on the sidewalk, until they bubbled with laughter at the mere sight of him and ran over to hang and swing and play on the man. He talked to the tenders in the stores, until it was normal for them to wave and smile and call Ezio over, offering him special prices whenever they caught a glimpse of him. He talked to the young men who loitered in alleyways, drawing himself up to seem imposing but still never lacking his charm, until they’d flock to the Assassin to slap him on the back and boast and beg his attention.

 He also talked to the women who walked the street, those ones clad in brothel garb who swayed and called like cats in heat, but seemingly not out of lust. Ezio spoke to them kindly, motioning, and grinning, and leaning in for a flirt and a fleeting touch and conversation that made the girls lose some of the soullessness in their eyes to laugh. Loud and true.

 Ezio had been doing all of this talking for weeks now.

 And Altaïr had had yet to see a reason to intervene, until he caught a glimpse of movement from the rooftop where he meditated. Just a glimpse. Of one of those young men his fellow Mentor tended to speak to.

 Leaping up to reach a building’s fire escape, and then leaping again to grab a window’s ledge that he used to swing himself upwards into a window left open. 

 Not a thief, the Levantine Mentor assumed, for he’d seen that young man enter that building many times in the last month. His house, his home, his apartment; a safe assumption.

 But Altaïr recognized those movements. 

 So he went in search of Ezio Auditore, who happened to be cooking a fine dinner in their kitchen cubby at that time. Sleeves rolled up to his elbows, buttoned shirt unbuttoned down to his sternum, with his chocolate-brunette hair tied back using a ribbon and one of their kitchen towels tossed over his shoulder; it had become such a familiar sight Altaïr barely blinked twice at his Italian successor ruling their kitchen with an iron gauntlet.

 Nobody else was allowed to cook. Ezio had made that supremely clear the first time Altaïr burnt water on the incredible, fire-summoning stovetop. And Raton excelled at preparing ingredients, but not nearly as much at adding them together.

Desmond was the only one actually allowed to use the kitchen unsupervised.

 But they all knew he was Ezio’s favorite.

 “Ah, la mia mela,” the Eagle was greeted upon entering on silent feet, noticed a few spare seconds after - faster than even most Master Assassins would manage. He had yet to find a reason to be upset with being called Ezio’s ‘Apple’, so he ignored the nickname and came over to stand directly in front of the man who gave him his attention with a patient smile, Altaïr nearly frowning in response, “What can I do for you, my friend?” 

 “You’re training them.” 

 He did not specify who he meant.

 He knew their Desmond was currently spending time with Ratonhnhaké:ton in the park downtown to fill the time before dinner, so the apartment was solely theirs. They would not be overheard. But he still did not feel the need to specify. Being specific, he had always found, made it easier for charming people to talk their way out of situations. Kadar…had always managed it somehow.

 Even if it had been a lifetime since his death, the sting of causing Malik’s little brother to be killed was one of the few griefs Altaïr carried which would never fade. Not even with his own death.

 “Is that a problem, il Mentore?”

 “Do you intend it to be? Do you expect there to be trouble? Do you intend to inform our other two Brothers before those troubles arise?” Altaïr challenged, now, because he was a man who refused to know more of those griefs and would question a fellow Mentor if he must, trusted as Ezio was or not, “This is a time vastly different from our own, Ezio, and Desmond I know has impressed upon you how hard it is to stay anonymous in it. Teaching others may bring the Templars straight to our door. And then what?” 

 A patient smile slipped into something older, more bitter, more cold. 

 The expression of a Mentor who had held Brotherhoods on his shoulders.

 “Your fears are valid, Mentore,” Ezio ducked his head, putting himself lower than his predecessor as he explained his thinking, for he had a suspicion that no matter the decades he would never be able to think of them as complete equals, “But I ask you do not feel them. I have done my research with the Google. Our skills - aside from killing - are not so uncommon in this day and age. Our skills in running, pathing, climbing especially. It is called ‘parkour’ here, and some of the street boys already knew the basics. I merely expounded on that knowledge.” 

 Tilting his head like his namesake, Altaïr peered into deeply brown eyes and found no deceit in their depths.

 Some of his ruffled feathers smoothed down.

 “If I teach them to run, there is no harm to be done, and they are grateful,” the Italian Mentor continued, motioning with his hands between their bodies, “If I teach the courtesans to protect themselves, there is no harm to be done, and they are favorable. And if I teach the shopkeepers to haggle, there is no harm to be done, and there is information. If we are to call this our Bureau, then I will treat the neighborhood as it should be treated.”

 Tilting his head further, Altaïr remained silent while Ezio stood steady and waited for his verdict.

 Masyaf’s Eagle…had not considered they might treat their home like a proper Bureau. A Bureau, yes. But a proper one? The Templar threat was greater here than it had ever been in the Holy Lands. They had information networks that stretched the world, and ways to spy on them from a great distance, and forces backed by the governments of these lands in ways even a king couldn’t have managed nine-hundred years ago.

 Forming a proper Bureau…could they? 

 Could they trust those who Ezio trained, those strangers of the streets? 

 “Dear Mentore, does the idea bother you so?” Altaïr’s eyes fluttered through not a full blink, and he turned his frown properly to the man that was the source of so much of his…mild frustration since coming to this future time. Not in a negative way. Not in the way Abbas once inspired in him, when they were young; still young enough to dismiss their mistakes.

 But frustration, nonetheless, just for his troublemaking.

 “I will speak to Desmond about it,” he decided finally, for if Ezio was going to make such a big decision that could affect them all, their charge needed to know about it the most. Raton would be informed as well. After, “It will be his choice. If it is too great a risk, if you will continue.” 

 Young the boy may be, a child in all the ways that mattered the boy may also be, but Altaïr knew Desmond appreciated when he brought matters to him.

 Communicated like adults.

 In this, he would. 

 And with that settled, with answers belonging to him, the Master of Master Assassins gracefully turned on his heel to make his way out of their kitchen cubby. Just for Ezio to click his tongue intentionally at his back. Which stopped him. The Italian man had learned early on that grabbing for the Levantine Assassin was a good way to get a reflexive hidden blade thrusted in his direction, so he’d settled for the clicking when he wanted to regain Altaïr’s attention after he turned away. As opposed to catching his arm or shoulder. Smart, as far as survival instincts went.

 Altaïr tipped his head to show he had given Ezio his attention, and frowned when he motioned for the Eagle to hold out his hand. 

 It showed how much Altaïr had decided to trust his fellow ancestors that he did so, offering up his five-fingered hand.

 A kitchen knife was placed carefully in his palm, and another’s five-fingered hand wrapped his fingers around the handle.

 Silent dread filled up Altaïr’s chest, and he full-on scowled up at the Mentor of Rome now grinning innocently right at his face. 

 “In the kitchen, we cook, la mia mela.” 

How foolish of him. The Eagle of Masyaf had forgotten a very, very important fact he’d learned early into their first weeks in this shared apartment. A trap he’d witnessed sprung on Desmond and Ratonhnhaké:ton multiple times, but that he’d thus far evaded out of sheer stubbornness, and the knowledge that Maria and Malik would be rolling over in their graves laughing at him, alalala. 

 If one entered the kitchen cubby while Ezio Auditore was in the middle of preparing a meal, one would be expected to stay and lend a hand. 

 Which was how the legendary Assassin, Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad, the very architect of the Brotherhood’s greatest histories - ended up expressionlessly pouting at a kitchen counter, chopping up vegetables in loud, pointed chops of his knife against the cutting board. Putting up with Ezio’s comments about the bits being too big or too small or too unevenly cut or -

They were edible. What more did nutritional food need to be?

Altaïr was still there, chopping, when Raton returned from the park with Desmond in tow. Both of them covered in small, downy-grey feathers and smiling widely. Leaving feathers falling in their wake, asking what was for dinner while Desmond grinned wickedly at the sight of the Eagle in their kitchen.

 Altaïr sighed.

 The things one does for family.

-----

 Following dinner, and dishes, and being herded out of the kitchen by a nesting Italian eager to clean up properly as if they were all nothing more than unruly children, Altaïr silently padded after Desmond. To the bedroom they shared. Letting the door shut without a sound behind them, he stood by and watched as his great-great-great-many-greats-descendant walked right over to their bed, and flopped onto the soft, dove-grey and white blankets draped across it. Wiggling around to get comfortable and to get fully onto said bed.

 Altaïr then waited with patience for Desmond to dig a crinkly bag from somewhere inside the blankets - chips, a snack the young-again teen liked to munch on - and with a loud pop of air the bag was opened.

 And Desmond was splayed out on the bed, in a patch of sunsetting sunlight just barely reaching through their window.

 And the boy grabbed a handful of crunchy chips to shovel into his mouth, while flopping onto his side so he could at least somewhat face Altaïr. A dark eyebrow arched to ask why he was being followed.

 “Were you aware Ezio has been teaching the people of our street tactics of the Brotherhood?” The Levantine Mentor asked evenly, not even bothering to expect Desmond to get upset at Ezio for he never would, and sure enough the young man in a child’s body shrugged. Swallowed.

 …Chips made very offensive sounds, and so too did their crinkly bags.

 “Yeah. I knew Ezio was training the gang kids,” he confirmed, joined by another mouthful of chips he chewed and swallowed before continuing while Altaïr waited with saintly-like patience - Desmond never understood how the young, brash Altaïr he had known in the Animus had grown up to be so patient, “The prostitutes too. Saw him wandering around doing it, ah, a few different times.” 

 Another shrug, and Altaïr narrowed his eyes slightly to try and get a read on whether or not the frustration was being hidden from him, “And you approve?” 

 Desmond did that sometimes. Hid the feelings he thought would see him scolded.

 Desmond just shrugged again.

 “...Ezio is like…um,” he turned onto his stomach, glancing over and frowning and rolling up the noisy chip bag that was grating on Altaïr’s ears before setting it aside with a sudden, purposeful quiet the older appreciated. Like he appreciated the full attention he was given while Desmond put his thoughts to words, “like an overly anxious mama cat who is constantly nesting. Mixing metaphors, but yeah. The guy needs kittens to take care of. Seriously. And I’m not really giving him enough responsibility over me, so I figured he’d do something like this pretty soon. I’m fine with it. Ezio knows what he’s doing.” 
 
 Did their descendant realize what a show of trust he was giving to Ezio, by saying that? By letting him act on his own?

 "Major empty nest syndrome," Desmond muttered.

 The last rays of sunset faded with Altaïr’s arms crossed, and his unclaimed, stubborn son dozing on their bed as he considered the explanation. In the end, only able to agree with Desmond. About all of it. Ezio Auditore was a man who needed a full nest. He needed fledglings, Novices, young ones to train, hope to sow, loyalty to foster. It was his life. His life as a leader.

 If he found it in building up a semi-official Brotherhood Branch in their neighborhood, if he did so safely and with care, Altaïr couldn’t think of any reason to scold his successor.

 “Does it bother you?” A question that tugged him from his thoughtful mood, a question from his descendant who was peeking quietly up at him, cheek squished in the blankets. He looked small and child-like down there. Even if they were nearly the same height, even if they were nearly the same figure.

 Desmond just looked too much like a child trying to parse out if they were in trouble.

 If they needed to run.

 Or hide.

 Or grab a weapon to defend themself.

 It had barely been more than a month, Altaïr had to forcibly remind the paternal part of his brain that argued about that instinct. A paternal side fostered by the two sons of his who came before Desmond, and now it would help him reach his youngest. Or so he hoped. It would take more time to alter those instinctive reactions in the young-again teenager.

 It had barely been more than a month since the police knocked on their door and Altaïr made his intentions clear, he would give his youngest son more time.

 “It does not bother me,” he swore, clearly and concisely.

 He, the others too, had noticed weeks ago that when it came to important subjects, being subtle or talking around whatever emotions they were feeling made Desmond doubly tense. Strained. They suspected his birth father had done it often, to confuse him, or to simply make the boy feel young and small and helpless, so Desmond might rely on him more.

 They would treat him with the maturity of an adult, when it made sense. 

 Even if they would also protect him like a child, whether he liked it or not.

 “You sure?” The young brunette doubted, narrowing his eyes into a squint that still looked far too much like a street child's, used to taking hits he shouldn’t have to in order to survive, “You’re wearing the same look you wore that time Malik shoved you into a lake outside of Alamut.” 

 A shudder ran through the Levantine Mentor’s body, and he puffed up like a surprised housecat. Nose scrunching like one too. 

 Just because he’d startled Malik into dropping his map in the mud, did not mean he deserved to go into the water.

 That had been a very irate day indeed, and just for reminding him? Altaïr took great satisfaction in stalking closer to the bed, each step making Desmond shrink into the covers, until he was squawking and twisting and trying to scramble away. Unable to. He had let the Mentor get too close. Let that be a lesson.

 Let Altaïr scruffing him be his lesson.

 Desmond squeaked under his five-fingered hold, whining about how he was too old to have this done to him, he was an adult, he pouted tremendously when Altaïr shook him like an unruly kitten who refused to listen, keeping his hold on the back of the boy’s neck firm but far from tight. 

 “You old man, who’s the mama cat now?” Desmond snipped.

 When he scowled at Altaïr, Altaïr deigned to scowl back. 

 When he growled at Altaïr, Altaïr growled right back too.

 And when he snapped his teeth, like he was trying to test the limits of how far the greatest Mentor in the Brotherhood’s history would go, Altaïr taught him that was a stupid idea.

 By leaning in and biting him, right on the ear, with a firm clench that actually made his habibi jolt and yelp, then laugh, short and sharp and shocked, then complain a second later that he’d gotten saliva in his ear. Altaïr did not do anything as juvenile as roll his eyes - outwardly - but he did gentle his grip.

 And he did reel Desmond into his lap, while settling down on the tangled bedcovers. On his knees. Placing his third son’s head in his lap, in the way Desmond would sometimes nap so long as they never acknowledged it happening.

 Sure enough, the boy with brown eyes went as still as stone, like he was trying to blend in with the background of their shared bedroom while streetlights came alight outside.

 Then, little by little, Desmond let himself relax.

 And little by little, Desmond dozed off to the sound of cars driving by their street and one of Ezio’s soap operas playing in the living room.

 And little by little, Altaïr took the greatest leap of his life; daring to run his four fingers through his son’s short hair. Grinning inwardly at the adrenaline that came when Desmond allowed it. When he nuzzled into the older Master Assassin’s thigh so much so that his cheeks squished up. When he made a cute, sleepy sound like Sef used to during his naps, then curled closer to Altaïr’s bodily warmth while drifty and half-asleep.

 Desmond Al-Sayf was not a replacement for the children the Ibn-La’Ahad no longer had.

 He was simply another son of his.

 And if it would take years for Desmond to accept that truth, then Altaïr would wait years.

 He could be patient.

 And in this life of theirs, if Ezio Auditore wanted, he could be the one responsible for the rebuilding of their dishonored Brotherhood. Both of them would prefer that route, Altaïr was starting to suspect. He had done enough for one life. 

He was ready.

Ready to savor his peace.

~>-----<~