Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Desmond Miles is sixteen years, two months, seven and a half days, four and a half hours old when the Farm’s Mentor calls him into the dirt-floored ring of the training grounds for the first, last and only time.

[five minutes, twenty-eight seconds, three point five hundred forty-three picoseconds pending to regression]

The dance with sharpened knives that any other Novice would be deemed too young to handle is familiar and rote from practice with his instructors, worthy, by their estimation, of praise; but still somehow never good enough.

Not for the Mentor, at least.
Not for William Miles.

[three minutes, forty-three seconds, one point thirty-two picoseconds pending to regression]

Nothing is ever good enough for the proud and ambitious Auditore heir, up to and including the gangly limbed teenage form of his youngest son, failing in the moment to live up to the exaggerated mythos of their shared illustrious ancestor with a misstep and a poorly timed parry; an intolerable lapse in concentration as the youth drops his guard and slaps one hand to the side of his neck in sudden alarm, distracted by a sudden burning sensation there beneath his palm.

[one minute, thirty-two seconds, zero point four hundred fifty-seven picoseconds pending to regression]

The knife’s edge catches both of them off guard as Desmond stumbles to the packed-dirt floor, the blade slicing straight through the flesh of his lips, colliding with and catching on his eyeteeth in a jarring, grinding motion before mercifully sliding free without inflicting further damage.

[zero minutes, two seconds, thirty-four picoseconds and two hundred forty-seven zeptoseconds pending to regression]

Desmond does not notice, too busy grappling with the sudden, momentary hyperawareness of individual synapses firing into overdrive and then, not even that, as the burning sensation in his neck winds a thorny, fiery path up his spinal cord and then blossoms inside his skull into a celestial flower of all-consuming heat that scours away any hint of awareness.

[countdown completed, commencing regression sequence]

When his body curls in on itself and his mouth opens to keen in a tongue not spoken on this planetary body in seventy-five thousand full solar revolutions, Desmond does not notice; it is an act born of mindless animal instinct, an ancient [hardwired, encoded directive. function: preservation-of-the-self] response to pain.

When William Miles half-drops, half-flings the bloody knife away from himself like it is a live explosive and then turns, face pale with horror, to call for the compound’s doctor, Desmond does not notice; for the white-hot heat of the reborn star unfurling within his mind leaves no room for thought, pushing his consciousness [mind-memory-sense-of-self] past the limits of his awareness and down into the murky, inky-black sea-like state of non-being.

[Concealed beneath his slightly-too-long curls and splayed fingers shaking against his neck, no one notices as the blotchy, spiderweb-like mark he’s had on his neck since birth flares momentarily with a pale, unearthly light before winking out like a distant star.]

[regression sequence completed, terminating transmission]

Chapter Text

When the call crackles in over the walkie talkie hanging from her belt in a burst of static, the Farm’s resident doctor is already swamped, busy tending to the life-threatening wounds sustained by several members of an off-Farm team in an artifact retrieval mission gone terribly (predictably, routinely) wrong.

They had had to make a sudden emergency reroute to the Farm, as the wounds had been far beyond the scope of their newly added junior field medic; herself an unexpected - but not unwelcome - addition that had apparently come part and parcel alongside their new Historian.

To her credit, the junior medic - who until that moment had been lingering awkwardly in the wings of the surgery - gives no outward sign of how badly she is startled by the sudden noise save a slight tensing of her muscles, a coiling of her posture that suggests a readiness to fight; which quickly relaxes when she sheepishly realizes there is no immediate threat to be had in the Mentor’s urgent tones as he makes a request for medical attention to an incident in the training grounds.

The doctor shares a brief look of consternation with her assistant before glancing down helplessly at her bloodied gloves and the man lying sedated on the table between them and then-

“We can go.” The field medic eagerly volunteers.

After a moment’s hesitation, the doctor nods, trying her best to keep her relief from showing on her face.
She doesn’t bother to wonder at the ‘we’ - the team’s Historian has been the medic’s ever-present shadow since the moment of their arrival, which makes sense; survivors from cells that had been wiped out tended to stick together, after all - and even though no one had outright said as much, the doctor was willing to bet that whatever had happened to the pair’s previous team prior to joining retrieval, it hadn’t been a trip frolicking through the daisy fields.

The Historian let out a quiet noise of discontent - but when his teammate turned and darted out of the room, he wordlessly pushed himself off of the wall and followed with a measured, stalking stride.

Good. They had both seemed, by the doctor’s estimation, to feel somewhat useless for not being able to help their injured teammates as much as they would like, at least - if the distressed, guilty looks the field medic kept sharing with the Historian were any indication.

Neither of them seemed inclined to idle, nervous chatter; a fact for which she was both grateful and oddly disappointed. What few things they had to say had been mostly limited to clipped, short one word sentences, most of them only in response to questions she or her assistant asked.

She takes a moment, as she works, to wonder what kind of tragic and unhappy circumstance would force a promising, capable Enforcer and cool-headed Bureau Master [and she knows this is what they are - or were - it was immediately, painfully obvious to anyone with eyes] to take on roles so disparate from their skill sets and training; and then she remembers the blood slicking her gloves and tools, the way her wing is full of too many injured and too few staff, the defeated mein of those who did survive and the dull, numb acceptance displayed for those who did not; and suddenly, she finds she no longer has to wonder.

[With the blood from his facial injury smeared across him in broad streaks, there is a momentary uncertainty in how and were, exactly, the boy was injured. The off-farm medic can treat the knife wound, but, unsure of what to do with his unconscious state or the unusual, erratic way it had come about, can do little beyond requisition the aid of a pack of nearby Enforcers and bring the boy back to the medic’s wing of the Farm’s center of operations.]

Desmond does not notice anything at all until he surfaces into a dazed state half an hour later.

For a moment he is preoccupied with the sudden, alien weight of new old memories reasserting their place, but when the warmth of the sun begins to slide into cool dark shadows across his face, his eyes snap wide open.

As awareness slams back into him like a blow to the gut, his first instinct is to fight; to fight the hands, the straps, the gurney, anything and everything that tries to hold him down, keep him from-

He wants to go back he wants to go back he wants to go back-

Someone is leaning over him but that doesn’t matter because their neck is right there and -

No one will ever trap him or trick him or hurt him again and -

He has not forgotten the hands that took his hands in their own, the hands offered in false-friendship, the hands that made false promises their owners couldn’t keep and-

He might not have any weapons but he still has his t e e t h and-

<Here you die, Deceiver!>>

[The man moves as he lunges upward and his teeth catch on the enforcer’s ear instead. It matters precious little to the boy’s panic-riddled mind. The enforcer yowls in stunned pain, hands swatting in a useless flailing effort to dislodge his assailant, and his fellows gawk in surprised horror for several seconds before instinct kicks in, one of them reaching without a second thought for the stun gun at his belt.]

It is Desmond’s turn to howl in pain; A sharp and sudden pain in his side, a burning sensation that lances across his nerve endings; on the wrong side, different from before. Enough to hurt. Not enough to stop him.
Irrelevant.

[“Are you trying to fucking kill him? Using a stun dart on a patient in transit? No. Fuck you. I don’t care if he had ripped your entire ear off right in front of me with nothing but his teeth, this kid is Important-with-a-capital-I, got it? No, It doesn’t fucking matter what I meant by that - If your Mentor doesn’t kill you himself, I sure as hell fucking will.”]

He shakes his head like one might try to dislodge a buzzing fly; and the buzzing fly of low words in a language he should know rises in pitch and volume and to his left among the sea of grey and white, the twin steady blues of ally-kin-protector bloom with a sudden flush of wine-colored irritation-surprise-alarm-worry.
Irrelevant.

[The medic swears violently as she shoves the Farm enforcer aside and into the Historian’s waiting arms, and the moment William’s boy is restrained enough, swiftly removes the stun dart, thanking her lucky stars under her breath that the Farm’s armory mandates stun guns with dart removal heads built in.]

Hands in his peripheral vision.
Hands trying to reach his neck. Hands grab his head, and hands push down on his shoulders. Hands pinning his hands to his side. He snarls in response and lunges against their restraint with a sibilant hiss.
Irrelevant.

[No sooner than the dart is removed than does the boy jerk his head violently to the side after the medic’s hand, teeth clicking together on empty air, only seconds too slow, eyes laser focused on her fingers with singular maiming intent.]

Hands in his peripheral vision.
Hands grab his arms, press against his chest. Hands, dragging him back down onto a bed of fabric and metal. Hands, dragging him back into the cold and the dark, away from the warmth and light of the sun and the kin he has missed since seven winters old-

<<No!>>

He fights with all his worth, straining with singular purpose towards the blurry sunlight-gold wanted-looked-for-needed-important-target of the open doorway, of escape, of freedom, of home-

Hands in his peripheral vision.
Hands tie straps about his arms and legs and-
Hands tie straps.
And his mind skips with terror and hysteria on the thought, and-
Hands tie straps. Hands tie ropes-

Hands tie straps tie ropes make oaths break oaths tell lies make scars bring pain bring poison bring d e a t h-

His vision whites out.

Chapter Text

The still-protesting enforcers were unceremoniously tossed back out into the hallway and the door to Desmond’s new temporary room in the medic’s wing was slammed shut, their muffled shouts of alarm far overshadowed by the medic’s much louder explicative filled rant, peppered with strong words from a surprisingly eclectic multitude of dead languages.

“-No, fuck you. Sure, go report this to your superior, yes, by all means. I’m sure your Mentor would be delighted to know you’ve just tazed his injured son. Now fuck off.”

“Ignore them. We don't have time for that.” the Historian called from his place at the bedside, eyeing their patient with wary caution.

The medic turned and braced her back against the door for a moment, sharing a fleeting look of distress with her teammate before clicking the lock and striding across the room to stand at the side of the bed next to him.

They stood there a moment, just watching, the boy’s breathing loud in the quiet and then they both spoke at the same time, sentences overlapping:

“Next time, I’m going to be the medic.” the Historian muttered dryly, shaking his head. “You can be the Historian.”

“Do you think it’s h - ‘next time?’” she cut herself off, her pinched, worried expression shifted to one of amused disbelief as she turned to her teammate. “You really think there’s going to be a ‘next time?’”

“Not at this rate there won’t.” he snorted, stepping closer to the bed, tilting his head as he studied the boy’s face intently. He waved one hand to indicate the general populace of the Farm beyond the locked door. “They’ll be expecting answers, Kass. Answers we can’t give them."

Kass made a noise of half-hearted protest and then fell mulishly silent for several seconds, watching as the Historian carefully lowered himself to crouch at the bedside, gently tilting the boy’s head to one side and brushing strands of hair away from his neck. She turned away, fixing her gaze on the patch of dappled summer sunlight playing against the far wall.

“Look I… It was supposed to just be an in-joke, something to get the team lead off our trail while we recovered the artifact- how was I supposed to know the idiot was going to walk his team right into the temple’s defense systems-” she sighed, scrubbing at her face. “This… this is why I don’t work with anyone during retrieval anymore.”

The Historian made a low noise of either surprise or complaint, and when she turned to face him he was staring up at her with one eyebrow raised, lips curved into a slight smile. She rolled her eyes. “Other than you, of course, Sl-”

“No.” he interrupted, and then his voice gentled into something strangely reverent as he tilted his head to indicate their patient. “Look.”
 Kass came around the side of the bed to stand behind him, leaning forward slightly to get a look. A tiny, startled grin flashed across her face, and then she turned to her companion with a look of wonderment in her eyes.

One hand, missing a ring finger, held dark curly tufts of the boy’s hair away from his neck, and there, glowing faintly from between his fingers, light pulsed in time with the boy’s heartbeat, blooming outward into a familiar spidery star-shaped mark.

"He’s-” she started, delighted laughter startling from her throat. “So it was a regression-”

“Yes, it certainly would appear so.”

“Is it really- Do you think it’s-”

“Him?” her companion removed his hand and pulled himself to his feet, wincing as he braced against the side rail of the bed for support. He leaned warily forward and peered searchingly at the boy’s face for a moment before looking back at her and shrugging his shoulders in a noncommittal fashion. “Could be. Could not be. I can see the resemblance, but-”

“The resemblance? As if it could be anyone else - he’s the only one unaccounted for-”

"Aita.” He reminded. 

"Eyes.” she countered easily. “Besides, look at him. You can ‘see a resemblance?’ I’d sure hope so. Anyone with eyes could see that. You saw the disks, same as I did. He looks like a clone.” She paused for a moment, then nodded to herself and turned to head for the door.

“We should tell them.” she said decisively.

“No!”

“No? What do you mean ‘No?’ The others will want to- how long have they- have we- been looking for this kid-”

“A kid that is the youngest son of the Mentor of the modern Assassin Brotherhood” the Historian interrupted, voice dropping to a low, urgent hiss. “A kid who lives on the Farm, who has just been injured and suffered an unknown and inexplicable trauma in the process- think, Kassandra! If he goes missing now, people will look for him-”

“I wouldn’t- I was not suggesting that we kidnap him-” she hissed back.
“Just…" her voice softened. "don’t you think that at least he should know? After everything that’s happened…”

“I… yes… I want nothing more than to tell him right now but… After the last tw- We haven’t even spoken to the boy yet. We don’t even know if the regression was successful or if it-”

“Even if the regression was botched ag- I still think they should know.  We should tell them.”

“And we will! Eventually. Just… not right now, Kass. Give it time.” he sighed uncomfortably, and then admitted; “I just want to be sure we’ve got this right.”

“...Fair enough.”

Just as before, the moment Desmond became aware enough to process the straps preventing him from moving his arms and the enclosed space of the exam room, he absolutely lost it, bucking and twisting, yowling like a wounded animal.

Anything that moved was perceived as a threat, bright gold eyes tracking them with acute awareness even as he continued to struggle against the restraints.
Anything that tried to touch him was subjected to immediate and violent hostility using whatever means he had available to him. They already knew from the incident with the Farm enforcer in the hallway that he wasn’t above biting, but within seconds of releasing the first strap, Kass was sent reeling backwards with a hand clutched to her face, already mentally adding ‘headbutting’ to that list.

“Ahhh fuck that hurts. He’s strong, I'll give him that.”

She shook it off and then made a half-hearted attempt at consoling the distraught teen, which trailed off into an startled explicative as he lunged in her direction again. “Shhhhhhhh-it! I know, I know. Being trapped freaks you out. I got it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, here, can I just - HEY! Kiddo, watch it! I know you’re upset - don’t bite me about it!”

Her teammate chuckled, mischief flickering in his blue eyes as he worked with steady hands to undo the straps. “I don’t know, you could probably bite her a little. She’d probably even deserve it.”

“Very funny, Slipp-”
“Do NOT call me that.”
“Hah. You know what they say; ‘If the horseshoe fits, wear it.’”
“It doesn’t.” the Historian snapped, giving her a withering look. ”And no one ever says that.”

“Kid, please stop trying to bite me - I know you hate this but - look, your parents would KILL me if I let you die of heatstroke after all this time it took to find you - are you even listening?” Concern flickered across her face. “Can you even understand me? English? Ελληνιστική Κοινή?”

Her teammate shook his head slightly in exasperation and then side-eyed her, interrupting. “Ancient Greek - Kass, why would you expect the poor boy to speak Ancient Greek?”

"I don’t know!” she snapped, tensely. “Look; his mother did - it was worth a shot, alright?”

“That’s not exactly true, though?” He stood back from the bed, widening his stance and lacing his fingers together in front of him, pitching his voice down as he recited in clear imitation of someone else. “That would be the telepathic translation. It’s mind-to-mind communication; it doesn’t really use ‘words,’ strictly speaking-”

Kass snorted despite herself.

“Whatever. Hytham - we don’t have time for that. What’s wrong with the kid? The regression can’t have erased his knowledge of modern languages. I mean,” She released the last strap and skipped back a pace as the kid in question launched himself off the bed, scrabbling in a blur of motion towards the far side of the room, and then vaulted up the counter and onto the cabinets above. She opted to ignore this and turned to the former Hidden One with a look of alarm. “Could it? Hytham?”

He wasn’t paying her any attention, staring up at the frightened teen - who had somehow managed to wedge himself into the space between the admittedly high ceiling and the over-the-counter cabinets - with a pensive look on his face.

“...Is that safe?” Hytham wondered skeptically. ”I don’t know if those can support him.”

Her words caught up with him and he turned to her with a snort. “Why are you asking me?? I’m not one of them - I’m not even a Sage!”

“Oh no, of course not. You were only adopted by one through a blood oath and given a nanite graft and then you only spent practically your whole childhood following him around-”

“And that was years after his regression-”

“...And then you spent several years in the company of other Sages-”

“Neither Sigurd nor Eivor were exactly stellar examples of successful regression, Kass. Besides, they were part of the Eight-”

“And then you spent a millennium hooked into a precursor temple alongside him-”

“And you spent two traveling the world with his wife-”

[Perched on the cabinets above them, the boy called Desmond watched the two strangers-friends-blue-of-kin(?) argue with utter bafflement, before shaking his head and tuning them out, focusing his attention on the skylight in the center of the room's ceiling, glowing the watery pale golden shimmer of important-useful.]

“Yeah, but you were adopted by the one with the ‘inherited backdoor recall on Project Anthropos.’” She said smugly. “Which he thinks the Seventh Solution was based on. Soooo, since you’ve got the nanites... you should be able to-” she wiggled her fingers in a vague, abstract gesture that failed to convey much of anything. "You know," she said, encouragingly. "Know."

“I… don’t know how. The information is… there… but I don’t know how to- I’m still not fluent. I don’t know if I could understand it even if I could access it.” Hytham sighed in frustration, a pensive, slightly embarrassed expression on his face. “He’s still teaching me,” he admitted. ”it’s… slow.”

“Early stages,” she murmured, patting him sympathetically on the shoulder. “It gets easier. Still get the headaches?”

“...Yes. Those go away?” he asked, lifting his head hopefully.

“Nope!” she said with faux cheer. “Though if it makes you feel any better; they get them too.” She flung one hand up in a broad gesture at the boy perched atop the cabinets, who bared his teeth in response and flinched further back into the corner he’d wedged himself into.

“Price of being human! Well. Mostly.” she squinted upwards. ” …Feral little thing, isn’t he? What is he doing up there?”

“He’s scared, Kassandra.” Hytham said softly. “Treat him like a non-threat, let him come to his senses on his own.” His expression became grim.
"Then we can assess the damage."

Chapter Text

“... Wonder what causes them.”

Hytham looked up from his burner phone, glancing over at his partner with a distracted frown. “Causes what?”

“The headaches.” Kass elaborated, tapping at her temple with a finger for emphasis. “Both Sages and descendants get them… It has to be something we have in common - Oh! Eagle Vision.”

“...You think EV is what causes Isu descendants and Sages to have chronic migraines?” Hytham side eyed her skeptically.

“Well it makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Hm. I mean, I suppose. I… I think it’s… Their brains were …formatted differently than ours; that much I do know. Information was stored differently because of-”

“Because of the Sixth, yeah. Knowledge.” Kass intoned.

“EV.” she repeated triumphantly, then frowned thoughtfully. ” ...And the nanites.” she added.

“And the nanites,” he agreed. “It’s why the regressions sometimes go… wrong, I think. Trying to run Isu ‘software’ on human ‘hardware’ can… do strange things?” he ventured, sounding slightly unsure and baffled even as he said it.

“... I hate that I understand that analogy.” she muttered, shaking her head. Hytham let out a bark of laughter alongside her and ruefully tilted his head in agreement.

“I fully blame your dad for that, by the way.” she called back to the figure lurking above them. “And your mom.” There was a series of dull wooden clunks on the cabinetry behind them and Hytham frowned at her.

“He ever talk about it? His regression?”

“Nope.” Hytham snapped the burner phone closed and slipped it into his pocket. “Keeps prodding at his scar though. Looked into it once. Think it had something to do with his mentor.”

“Roshan, right?”

“Yeah.”

She sighed in consternation. “Well that’s not very helpful.”

[Above them, Desmond pressed himself further into the corner. He kept his gaze sharply fixed on the pair of strangers, and then reached out to the other side of the cabinets, groping blindly along the wall for the glimmer just barely visible in the corner of his eye that shone with the white-gold of a useful tool. A small, satisfied smile flashed across his face moments later as his fingers brushed across lacquered wood grain.]

A sudden pulse of alarm, a second-and-a-half of prescience and the indistinct awareness of movement behind them and something vaguely weapon-shaped [that sent instincts honed in battle millenia ago screaming spear! and move!] being aimed in their direction was all the impulse Kass needed to turn and bodily shove Hytham to the side, throwing them both to the floor.

There was a rush of air just behind them, and Kass allowed herself a moment of smug satisfaction that their assailant had missed their mark - and then there was a dull wooden thonk and then the clatter of the same object hitting the floor, followed by a click and the tell-tale slow hiss of hydraulic hinges.

A square of warmth crawled onto her back, and she frowned.

More commotion behind them - the cabinet doors rattling on their hinges, and then the squeak of sneakers on linoleum flooring.

She struggled to untangle herself from her partner, still protesting her sudden reaction, and turned around just in time to watch a pair of sneakered feet disappear over the lip of the now open skylight as their patient made good on his escape.

Kassandra gawked for a moment at the discarded broom handle as it dropped to the floor once again - and then growled in frustration and took off after the boy.

Hytham leveraged himself upright with a grunt, casting a worried, pained glance towards the ceiling as a startled yelp followed by a series of thuds announced that their daring patient had almost immediately lost his footing and started to slide off of the roof. Kassandra was only using the tamest swears she knew, so she had likely caught the boy.

Desmond was fine.

Probably.

There was a rap at the door, firm but polite in a far different manner than the impatient pounding of the earlier enforcers.

“Master Hisan?” A woman’s voice called indistinctly through the wooden door.

Hytham hesitated a moment, frowning up at the open skylight.

It had gone quiet on the roof overhead, and a brief flash of headache-inducing Eagle Vision indicated two watery gold figures crouched on the far end of the rooftop [and what, by all the stars, were they doing all the way down there?] so he could only assume Kassandra must have the situation well in hand.

He sighed and went to open the door.

The Farm’s doctor stood in the hallway, wearing a look of bone-deep exhaustion and annoyance that Hytham immediately sympathized with. “He escaped out the skylight didn’t he?” The doctor asked flatly in greeting, leaning around him to eye said open skylight and the pole propped haphazardly against the window inset with a resigned look on her face that suggested this was a much more common occurrence than Hytham would have previously thought. He stepped back out of the doorway.

She pinched the bridge of her nose, and groaned tiredly as she stepped past him into the room. “There’s a reason this room was unoccupied, you know.” she muttered.

He raised an eyebrow. “Uncooperative patients are a universal constant of medicine, Master Hisan.” She said in answer to his unspoken question.

The doctor gestured frustratedly up at the skylight. “It's just that Assassin patients tend to be more …creative in their uncooperativeness than most.”

He nodded hurriedly.

“...I’ll send one of the enforcers to fetch a ladder,” she sighed.

“Ah.” Hytham finally croaked out in response, rubbing at his sore chest. Kassandra hit hard.

All that over a broom handle, he despaired.

”...Maybe not the ones with the enforcer whose ear just got bit?” He suggested pensively. “...He’s already tried to taze Desmond once for it.”

“That was from William’s boy??” The doctor barked in sudden alarm, and then shook her head.

The look on her face told him that the enforcer in question was likely in for the dressing-down of a lifetime.

He couldn’t find it in himself to pity the man.

“Huh. Goddamnit." she hissed. "Idiot told me it was a wild dog.”

Hytham wisely bit back the joking response that perhaps, in a manner of speaking, the enforcer hadn’t been exactly wrong.

Chapter Text

Kassandra side-stepped cautiously along the rooftop to crouch closer to the boy, who had hastily scrambled along the ridge of the roof to put himself once more out of reach. Desmond huffed, but otherwise did not make any further attempts to flee, now more mindful of their precarious position after his near-brush with the effects of gravity.

«Hunrah -» she stumbled over the unfamiliar word, grimacing as she butchered the pronunciation.  «Hunrhunasi-rach?»

«hṇrhṇasich.» (Do you understand?) the teen corrected automatically, still focused on trying to figure out how to haul himself into the nearby tree from his perch at the edge of the roof. He paused, eagle-gold eyes flickering to glance warily in her direction. «wahæáid. hṃ æű hṇrhṇ gwarômi.» (It is true. I understood you the whole time.)

«dű gwesá gwaràsachṛ?» (What were you doing?)  she asks.

He gestured back towards the skylight with a look on his face that clearly said he thought it should be painfully obvious. «...hṃ zorhwul ṛ chuômi lolhæsômi.» (...I wanted to see the sun.)

«dű duàs hnomṇá shuàgwàsi.» (Tell me your name.)  He said after a moment, tone cautious and wary but not openly hostile.

“Kassandra.”

«...khàssṇdṛa.» he tried, testing the sound of the name on his tongue. She made a face in response and huffed wordlessly to herself, rolling her eyes. Great. The boy’s sire and dam pronounced her name the exact same way, every single time, and it drove her mad.

“Yes.” she said. “Fine. Let’s go with that.”

«ḷ dű duàs gwesá smṛàsi hnomṇrá?» (And you? Do you remember your name?) she asked, gesturing at him encouragingly.

«hhnomṇrá? ...keyṃ hakrosàs.» (My name? ...dweller-of-meadows.) He murmured, turning to offer her a cautious smile. «fe—»

Yes! She cheered internally. Finally!

“Desmond!” A man’s voice called out from below them, simmering with irritation. Kassandra leaned forward slightly, and blinked, startled, and then shook her head and frowned when she saw the voice’s owner standing below them, arms crossed and a scowl on his face. It took her a moment to recognize his voice as the one who had called in Desmond’s injury over the walkie-talkie.

…So this was the famed Mentor of the modern Assassin Brotherhood.  
William Miles.

The way that the boy beside her shrank back, curling in on himself, one hand flying protectively to his mouth, made her hate the man below them a little more than she already did.

Little wonder Hytham and the rest of their family avoided the modern Brotherhood like they carried some sort of plague, if this was the man who led them.

 “What do you think you’re doing up there?” Miles Sr. snapped. “Quit wasting the doctors’ time and get down here.”

The “what if we were all clones of one another” family genes were just as dominant in Miles Sr. as they were in his son beside her—though probably (hopefully) not to the same extent.

Truthfully, when she had first seen him, she had halfway expected him to start speaking with that same rolling purr as his family’s distant ancestors did, and go blathering on about ‘the inherent superiority of holograms’ or some other equally asinine Precursor technological advancement.  

For a disconcerting moment, she had thought she was looking at Hytham’s mentor, and had only been mildly surprised by his abrupt change in attire; unlike his most distant ancestor, Miles Sr. actually seemed to make fairly decent choices in fashion.

Pity that was seemingly just about the only thing likable about the man.

The-dweller-of-meadows had not been lying when he told khàssṇdṛa he had understood them the whole time.

Not exactly.

The ceaseless ranting and harsh, belittling words of the man before him still registered as perfectly intelligible to his ears. It was just… he did not trust himself to be able to respond in kind. His mind was still a tangled, hazy web, memories still unspooling within his head.

Technically, he should probably not even be awake right now.

 The adrenaline high from his earlier panicked attempts at escape—when he had awoken, he had first believed himself trapped in lingvi again, the havi prepared to subject him to gleipnir’s lasting sting once more—was wearing off, and he would desperately like nothing more than to retreat to some high up, sunwarmed place and sleep until his head no longer felt like someone had filled it with a thousand-thousand incredibly angry, incredibly noisy bees.  

He kept his tongue locked firmly behind his teeth, even as the man’s anger slowly mounted as he failed to respond to a question he was evidently expected to actually answer—if he responded now, he wasn’t sure that he would be able to manage to output English.

 Almost without even thinking, he directed his gaze to a spot just to the left of the man’s ear, letting the words wash off of him with practiced ease as the man paced back and forth before him in the small, cramped office space. He had heard far worse from far more dangerous people.

Far, far worse.

This was nothing.

…It still hurt, however,  when the man lashed out impulsively, catching him across the face with a backhanded slap for refusing to answer.

The yelp that startled from his throat as he stumbled backwards and into the arms of khàssṇdṛa’s silent companion, and the tears that stung at his eyes when the stitches on his wound came loose again were merely instinctive reactions that this body had not yet trained itself out of.

Truth be told, he had been expecting the slap from the moment the man had barked at him with strident, barely concealed fury-ladened impatience earlier on the rooftop. He knew this man was undoubtedly his blood-sire in this life, but looking at him now, all that the-dweller-of-meadows could see was flickering shadows of havi and tyr.

Hands—one of them, he notes curiously, missing a ring finger—steady him gently and then hold him for a moment against the other’s chest. There is a barely audible warning rumbling slowly building in the other’s chest, and khàssṇdṛa’s companion bristles fiercely at the Mentor, steady, comforting kin-ally-protector blue of his aura purpling slightly with the warm red hues of outrage-willingness-to-defend.

With the all-too-familiar pain stinging at his lips and the taste of his own blood on his tongue came a sudden, unexpected clarity, striking him like a bolt of lightning in all its surety: this will not be his life, and this man is not his father. 

Pain irrelevant but not forgotten, he swiped a hand across his face as he gently untangled himself from the protective embrace of his maybe-kin, and stepped forward, eyeing the Mentor with newfound contempt.

They kept calling him Desmond. 

That was his name, he knew that, but it still picked at (new?) old wounds to have some other name not of his own choosing forced upon him, one other than those he bore in his (first?) youth.

[«Lælaps.» His uncle rumbles, ruffling his hair.<<You’ll be swift enough to catch me one day yet.»]

[«Fenris.»  His sire’s voice murmurs in his ear, laughing. «My little dweller of the fens.»]

This place was not a farm, he decided. It was a prison dressed in pretense; and there was nothing he had ever hated so much as a gilded cage.