Work Text:
Desmond should have known that for someone like him, death was too easy an out. Too simple to hope that at the end of the road, everything would just end. He was also the kind of person who just rolled with the punches.
Saving the world was an easy choice. Not one he should have make, but a simple one nonetheless for someone like him, with barely any identity to scrape together shorn from a man who could afford very little of that realized personhood nonsense to begin with. Waking within the half-familiar cyberspace of the Grey was halfway expected, too. It was where Clay helped him put himself back together, where he travelled through each time he delved into memories that weren’t his.
Death served him, in a fucked-up way. No more Templar-assassin conflict, no more Abstergo, no more Bill, no more running around the globe. Near-nothing to worry about. He had time to dig into memories in his head, his own and the borrowed ones, all the time he needed to sort and categorize them. It made him feel alive again, and the irony of the statement was not lost on him.
It made him feel lonely, too. The Grey was an empty nowhere, and humans were social creatures prone to boredom, so Desmond spent his dime delving deeper and deeper into his own mind, and into whatever data he could get his hands on. It was a repository of data he couldn’t quite decode, didn’t have the experience too often, and it frustrated him. Parts of it were similar to the technology he knew, courtesy of Abstergo no doubt. Parts of it was purely ISU tech of which knowledge was locked deep within Altaïr’s memories that Desmond had no access to at all.
Part of him even wished Altaïr was there, all dry and terse commentary yet full of life experience. Part of him wanted that drive because when he stripped away the ill-gotten memories and all the laser-focused survival, Desmond realized there wasn’t much left that was him at all.
He should have known that the Grey had its own ways of working that he simply didn’t get yet, and that Desmond, too, was a repository of lives. Three ancestors, lived within and through him well beyond their times—and now he was asking for one.
For a time, Desmond thought he was going insane from isolation, that he was seeing things. A glimpse of a familiar silhouette here and there, on the edge of his perception, as if stalking him, a mirage of hope and frustration, beaked hood and all.
Then—
“You’re moping,” Altaïr says. And his voice is different than Desmond remembers, and tinged with Arabic accent that the Animus purged, and Desmond is pretty sure the man is not speaking English at all but he hears it that way, and he understands.
Desmond also very carefully doesn’t flinch when the ghost of Altaïr materializes right next to him, shoulder-to-shoulder by one of the glowing data-trees Desmond found on his travels through the digital waste but never could do anything with.
“This is… Well,” Desmond turns to face the man. Altaïr remains mostly uninteresting, golden eyes fixated on the tree. “Are you a figment of my imagination, or—”
He can swear he sees a ghost of a smirk on Altaïr’s lips, but it’s gone quicker than it appears.
“I am dead. Is this not a place where the dead go?” Altaïr asks. “Through my use of the Pieces of Eden, and through the memories of mine taken from your blood and bone, I am here. You called, after all.”
“I don’t think I did?”
“You wished me here. You had all the parts, and the Grey obliged. I’m no less confused by this than you, to be truthful, but I am here. And privy to your memories myself.”
Desmond blinks. “I didn’t think it worked both ways.”
“I didn’t think it worked at all,” Altaïr admits.
“You’re, uh. You’re taking it well?”
“Pieces of Eden work in mysterious ways. And the way I see it, I am here to help you understand these ways,” Altaïr says and steps forward, to the tree, extending his arm to Desmond. Desmond takes it.
It’s easier from there once he gets over Altaïr’s inexplicable appearance. It’s—good, actually, to have company. Altaïr is dry and deadpan and has incredibly sharp tongue and a retort for any moment, and seemingly endless well of patience to draw from. His knowledge of the ISU tech surrounding them isn’t perfect, of course, but it is far greater than Desmond’s. Between that, and Desmond’s familiarity with modern technology, they manage. They dig into the code of the Grey, uncover secret after secret, whole backups of consciousness of ISU waiting for something.
Conspiracies and webs spanning millennia.
Juno’s trail leads them to an Abstergo facility in Australia where, in the end, dispatching of her is deeply anticlimactic and meticulously thorough. They shut down the whole thing, find Elijah. Desmond certainly has an emotion over it, but so does Altaïr, haunted by ghosts of his own past.
By that time it’s no longer about Juno, though. The web they uncovered has grown too big, and their escapades in the Grey, as it spans the whole ISU network, proven fruitful. With Elijah on their side, awakened as a Sage but having beaten, bested and banished Aita’s consciousness, they have a willing pair of hands in the physical world, too. Even though both Desmond and Altaïr are loath to send a young child into danger, Elijah runs off himself, and best they can do is direct him safely.
Slowly but surely, they will dismantle the whole thing. For peace. For freedom.
For future.
One ghost at a time, until they’re all that’s left to haunt the living.
“We are Assassins,” Altaïr tells him simply. “We hunt from the shadows, from the alleys and rooftops and from the crowds. We strike the unprepared when we are the least expected.”
“From the coffins and confines of a cyber afterlife?” Desmond asks. When Altaïr huffs and turns around, arms crossed on his chest, there is certainly a ghost of a smile on his lips.
“ISU are not expecting long-dead ghosts to hunt them. It will be their undoing. They are not gone, but neither are we. And from here, we can actually destroy them for good. Even the likes of Aita, protected in a cycle of reincarnation as he is."
Desmond cracks his knuckles. “Well then. Let’s get to saving the world some more.”