Chapter Text
“Nope, sorry,” Shaun commented glibly. “I’m gonna have to say it. Ezio Auditore is a short arse.”
From next to him, Rebecca choked off a laugh. There was a reason she was his favourite.
Shaun had mostly said it to break the tension and shake everyone out of their gormless staring, but it was actually true. The legendary Italian assassin topped out at about 5-foot-6 if he had to guess — and that was an upper estimate. It was quite startling despite the fact it made perfect sense in the historical context.
Or mostly made sense, Shaun mused silently to himself as the man in question slowly pushed himself away from the wall under the arch and began to stalk gracefully towards them. The average height of a nation in any given era did depend on its general nutritional and sanitation standards but despite his later hardships, Ezio had spent his first 17 years as the pampered son of well-off nobility. Which meant that only part of his height (or lack thereof) could be attributed to what he ate and drank; the rest was all genetics.
Short arse genetics apparently.
“No really,” Shaun repeated as the Italian stopped in front of them, secure in the knowledge that there was no way he understood their 21st century English. “He’s really bloody short! Look at him, he’s like a kitten! A deadly killer assassin kitten I grant you, but come on, the top of his head is barely level with Desmond’s shoulder!”
“Hastings,” Bill sighed. “Shut the fuck up.”
Thankfully, it didn’t look like Ezio was overly bothered by Shaun’s ramblings or the fact that he couldn’t have understood a word of them. Instead, the legendary assassin simply quirked an eyebrow and then smirked salaciously at them all. His eyes flicked over them all, a hint of wariness present but mostly hidden by the stronger amusement. In fact, he more seemed to be—
Was he actually—?
Yep. He was. The Renaissance era assassin was definitely eyeing them all up more than he was assessing them as a threat. Good lord, it was even more blatant in person that it had been through the animus output screens!
“Desmond,” the man finally spoke, accent thick and his smirk still in place. “Desmond Miles.”
“Ezio Auditore da Firenze,” Desmond murmured back.
They stared at each other in silence for a few moments. And then—
And then Ezio’s smirk turned into a full blown grin. An eyes wide, gleeful, all round delighted sort of grin. One accompanied by him grabbing Desmond’s right forearm in both hands and starting to babble away in Italian at a mile a minute.
Shaun couldn’t see Desmond’s face from where he was standing, but he suspected from his posture that his expression was probably best described as overwhelmed and confused. Whatever it was that Ezio was saying, he was saying it with great enthusiasm and excitement. So much so that Desmond could barely get a word in edgeways, and most of what he did manage to say consisted of uh and um and the occasional sì…? (which even Shaun knew was Italian for yes…?)
“I really miss baby’s translation codex,” Rebecca lamented quietly after they’d spent at least a full minute watching Ezio’s excited flailing. He’d even let go of Desmond’s arm now in order to gesticulate wildly.
“Oh look!” Shaun quipped with light sarcasm when the torrent of words finally paused. “Your dulcet tones have managed to finally get him to remember we exist! Say something else Rebecca so that we might finally get to go inside; I am dying to get out of the sodden remains of my shoes. Why did Desmond get the dead guard’s boots and not me?”
Still standing on his left, Bill sighed with deep exasperation again.
(Shaun had zero regrets.)
(Or actually, maybe he had one regret, because Ezio was now staring at him like he was trying to strip him with his eyes alone. And while Shaun had spent some of his misspent youth in seedy gay bars— yeah, he wasn’t finishing that sentence thanks)
Fortunately, Desmond recaptured Ezio’s attention by saying something else in lilting Italian. Ezio nodded in response, and then made a follow me sort of gesture and turned towards the wood and iron door.
And then the door was hauled open and they were heading inside what was perhaps the most famous headquarters of the brotherhood of all time.
“...Okay,” Shaun muttered in shock about ten minutes later. “I admit to being surprised. Not what I was expecting.”
His first impression of the inside of the Tiber Island Hideout was a slightly baffled Huh. This place is massive! Perhaps it could partly be blamed on the way he’d predominantly watched Desmond’s animus feed via a small window open in the bottom of his already small computer screen. Perhaps it could even more be blamed on whatever compressional animus wizardry Rebecca had conducted to save on processing power. But even still… The entrance hall and all the rooms beyond it were big.
And also there were a lot more of them than Shaun had expected. A lot.
“Makes sense really,” he mused quietly to Rebecca as they all followed Ezio up a set of narrow wooden stairs at the back of the building. At the front of their little entourage, the master assassin was once again enthusiastically chatting away to Desmond in mediaeval Italian, gesticulating just as wildly as he was talking. “The only living space we saw in the animus was Machiavelli’s study. Yet there are dozens of people living here so of course there’s also a kitchen and a dining hall and a laundrette room and loads of bedrooms.”
Rebecca nodded in agreement and hummed thoughtfully as they emerged into another narrow hallway, this one bright with sunlight filtering in through small windows with actual glass in them. Bubbled and hazy glass in tessellated diamond panes that were each barely three inches wide, but actual glass all the same.
“I wonder what the bathroom situation is like?” she then pondered aloud.
“No,” Shaun shook his head in response. “No, I am refusing to think about that. I am not confronting the lack of indoor plumbing until I absolutely have to.”
“I suspect that you’ll have to start about now actually. Do those look like towels to you?”
Indeed, the stack of sheets that Ezio was now pulling out of an aged wooden cabinet did look like towels to Shaun. Unbleached cream linen woven with blue patterns, they resembled the ones he’d occasionally seen in paintings from this era. And towels meant baths. Or at the very least, hand basins they could use to splash the worst of the unthinkable river grime off of themselves.
“Dovrebbe esserci dell'acqua calda sul fuoco,” Ezio told them, gesturing at the closed door adjacent to the cabinet. “Forse non è molto, ma chiederò ad alcuni novizi di portarne di più.”
Shaun couldn’t even begin to guess what that meant, but Desmond made a general noise of agreement and muttered a thank you in Italian. Ducking his head, their laconic companion then pushed open the indicated door and scurried inside.
Bill hesitated only a moment before sighing loudly and following him. Rebecca was quick to go next, leaving just Shaun in the corridor with an amused Ezio.
“You really are bloody short,” Shaun told him, still safe in the knowledge he wouldn’t be understood. Ezio licked his lips and then grinned.
“Davvero non mi capisci?”
“I’m fairly sure you just asked if I can understand you, but I really do know sod all Italian, so…”
“In questo caso, vai prima tu, così posso guardarti il culo,” the assassin leered at him, eyeing him up and down again. “Mi piacciono gli uomini alti!”
Shaun echoed Bill’s sigh and decided it was the better part of valour to not question the man’s intentions too closely.
Inside, the room was not the horrific unsanitary pseudo-bathroom that Shaun had been fearing, but actually a reasonably sized dormitory. The walls were panelled with warm wood and then whitewashed up to the ceiling, with five narrow wooden bed frames pushed up against the two longest— three on one side and two more opposite, all currently without mattresses or sheets. A wash stand stood in the near corner with two glazed bowls atop it, a chest of drawers with a floral motif carved into the front was next to that, and then the far end of the room was taken up by a moderately sized fireplace. Over the well stoked fire, a large soot-stained metal pot was suspended from an iron frame, looking nothing so much like a witch’s cauldron.
Ezio pushed the stack of towels he was still holding at Bill and then turned to Desmond again.
“Dirò ai novizi di cercare abiti migliori anche per voi. Avete tutti un aspetto molto strano, vestiti come siete!”
“Grazie, Ezio,” Desmond replied with a tired smile.
And then with a final smirk, the man was backing out of the room.
“He said he’s gone to fetch more water and better clothes for us,” Desmond translated for them once the door had been pulled shut again. “I don’t know how long he’ll be, but I guess we have at least five minutes of peace?”
Shuan, eager to strip before the Italian ponce returned and leered at him for it, immediately sat on the edge of the nearest bed frame and started undoing his shoelaces. His oxfords might be real leather and worth a pretty penny, but being drowned in the filth of the River Tiber had not done them any favours; he wanted them off, and he wanted them off now.
Having moved to another bed, Rebecca also started stripping, removing the black felt hat first before starting to tug at the clunky buckles of the vambraces Desmond had given her. Meanwhile, Desmond’s hands had gone straight for the straps of his stolen pauldrons, already undoing them as he walked further into the room.
“Are we alone?” Bill asked sternly, crossing his arms over his chest rather than following suit and beginning to remove his armour and clothes.
“There’s one person lurking in the hall outside, leaning on the wall next to the door,” Desmond told him wryly as he continued tugging at his shoulder plates. “There’s another with their ear pressed against the wall behind the basins, and a third lying on the floor above us peering through a small hole in the boards.”
“A resounding no then,” Rebecca snorted.
“We’re foreign strangers with weird mannerisms that are dressed oddly in an assassin headquarters,” Desmond shrugged awkwardly.
“Indeed,” Bill rumbled, eying the right wall warily. “Are we certain they don’t understand us?”
“Ezio definitely doesn't, but they probably do have someone here who speaks English,” Shaun informed him testily as he finally pulled his sodden shoes off and kicked them out of the way with prejudice. “Middle English is close enough to contemporary English that they’ll be able to get the gist of what we’re saying, provided they can parse our accents. Think Shakespeare, but with much rounder vowels and fewer glottal stops than we use now.”
“Dost thou ree-kon thee can grasp-eh oo-er words?” Rebecca mangled.
Shaun paused in undoing the ties of his ill-fitting tabard to shoot her a disgusted look.
“No,” he told her shortly. “Just… do not.”
“If you two are done fooling around,” Bill interrupted with a scowl. “I ask because we’ll need to avoid… Certain topics if that’s the case. It wouldn’t do to disrupt the course of history too much.”
“Actually, I’m pretty sure that’s the entire point,” Desmond bit out, dropping one greave atop his pauldrons with a clatter. “We needed more time to come up with an alternative to using that damned Eye, so Minerva gave it to us.”
“So, what?” Shaun asked, his eyebrows raised. “Are we supposed to just, I don’t know, kick start the industrial revolution two and a half centuries early? Pray it’s enough to advance tech enough that by 2012, humanity can save itself?”
“Pretty much,” Desmond shrugged.
“Great,” Shaun breathed out, fully sarcastic. “I’m sure that will go swimmingly.”
The four of them versus the might of the catholic church. The four of them — two stubborn Yank halfwits who hated each other and two hackers with no computers or tech — versus the entire globe’s religious powers…
Yeah, they were going to be hanged for witchcraft almost immediately. Or burned at the stake. He could visualise it already; fire and smoke and brimstone, 16th century style.
Christ alive, Shaun thought morosely as he pulled the tabard off over his head. We’re all so doomed.
Abso-bloody-lutely doomed.