Chapter Text
“Is that him?”
She was looking at an image on a monitor of a man lying in a chair. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought he was comatose.
“Yeah, that’s him. The last best hope for humanity,” her Mentor responded.
“I hope you’re right. I lost too many teams trying to save this guy. He better be fucking worth it,” she shot back.
Her eyes narrowed as she recalled those missions. All of them had ended the same way—lots of shouting, and gunfire, and screaming, and then silence as the radios went dead. She refused to refer to them as failed missions the way some of the others did; no amount of training could overcome the sheer amount of resources that Abstergo had at their disposal. Her teams consisted of some of the best Assassins the Order had to offer, but expecting an underfunded, outgunned team of Assassins to come out alive with their cargo safely in tow was optimistic at best. As far as she was concerned, they’d sent her teams to be massacred, and she couldn’t do anything but sit and watch.
Imagine her surprise, then, when she learned that they had someone on the inside all along.
“Watch it,” he warned sternly.
“What? If I’d known all the variables, we could have had him out weeks ago,” she retorted.
The day she found out that Lucy Stillman had been embedded with Abstergo, she nearly took on the entire Council. She’d lost four teams—20 Assassins in all—colleagues, and friends, and family, for what? So Lucy could maintain her cover? So she could keep dawdling instead of pulling this guy out of there like she was supposed to? She’d already stood by while another Assassin had died at Abstergo—Lucy didn’t exactly seem to be the proactive type.
It took a screaming match with her Mentor—not to mention a few punches—to persuade her to stand down. Still, her trust in the Council had been shaken. Not enough to defect to the Templars, but enough to show her that the Council would only tell her as much as they felt she needed to know. Like all families, they kept secrets from one another, and from that day on, she kept her thoughts a little more guarded and more of her opinions to herself.
Today was an exception.
“If the Council had told me what was going on, I could have come up with a better plan. I might have done things differently, and maybe I wouldn’t have… maybe some of the teams wouldn’t have been sacrificed,” she said, the edge falling out of her voice. “William keeps telling me that I’m one of his best strategists, but I can’t do my job if I don’t have all the information I need to plan effectively. I have no interest in Council politics—I just want to train my teams to kill Templars, and I want to keep them as safe as I can.”
“You have to stop blaming yourself. And you have to stop blaming them, too—they did what they thought was best for the mission and the Order. Remember, they lost their brothers and sisters, too,” he countered. “There’s no time for doubt and dissent right now. We got Desmond out, but the real fight is just beginning.”
“Desmond?” Her eyes widened, and her attention snapped back to the monitor. She leaned in, searching for confirmation, but she found none in the grainy, black and white image. “Dammit… where’s his file? Surely he has a file…”
She rifled quickly through the papers on the consoles in front of them, eventually locating his file and tearing it away from a novice’s grasp. She glared at the novice when he protested, cowing him into silence. She looked at the file, and her heart sank.
“But he left. I thought he got out… he wanted out. Why has he been pulled back into this?” she murmured. She flipped slowly through the pages, reading everything she could about Desmond—about his life after leaving The Farm.
Her Mentor cleared his throat, and she looked up to see him watching her carefully. He knew her history better than anyone else including things that weren’t in her dossier. She realized almost immediately why she hadn’t been told more about who the cargo was and why she’d been ordered to stay behind while her teams were out in the field.
Desmond had been her best friend, and if she’d known he was there, trapped and being experimented on, there’s nothing her Mentor, or William, or anyone else could have done to stop her from trying to rescue him herself. She surely would have compromised the mission and Lucy and gotten herself killed in the process.
She and Desmond had grown up together. She was a few years older than he was, but since there were so few children at The Farm, they’d been trained together and had become extremely close. She watched as he grew from being fearful of his father’s stories to disillusioned by them. He became restless and sloppy as he decided that although he was born an Assassin, but he didn’t want that life for himself. She knew he’d never be happy—and that his sloppiness would lead to injuries, or worse—so she persuaded Desmond to leave the Order. She’d even helped him plan his escape, using her newly-honed skills to find the best route, determine the best time to leave, and how to slowly build up a store of supplies so nobody would notice anything was gone. She’d missed him terribly after he left, but she found solace in the knowledge that he’d gotten out, that he’d been able to escape and live on his own terms.
As she looked at him on the monitor, plugged into the Order’s Animus, she couldn’t help but feel like she’d been wrong to help him escape. She felt like she’d failed him somehow, because not only had he been pulled back into the war, he now seemed to be a key player.
“Who’s he with now? What’s going to happen to him?” she inquired. She hoped none of the lower-ranked Assassins could recognize the anxiety in her voice.
“He’s with a team in Italy. The Council thinks it can catch him up on training using the Animus, and then he can help us find more Pieces of Eden,” her Mentor responded.
She raised an eyebrow. I wonder what else they have planned for you, Desmond. What they haven’t told my Mentor… what they’re keeping to themselves.
“A team? What team? I don’t remember putting together a team for this.”
“We sort of had to improvise; Lucy pulled him out a little earlier than we expected, so the team is pretty lean right now…” one of the other Assassins interjected.
She rounded on him, angry that she’d been left out of such an important decision. “Who is on the team?”
“Um… I’m not sure I can tell you that.” He looked at her Mentor. “Can I tell her that?”
“I think it would be the wisest thing to do, don’t you?” her Mentor responded. She could see the amusement in his eyes.
“Okay, well…” The Assassin looked at some files. “There’s Lucy of course, since she was with him at Abstergo. She has to go into hiding, too, and we figure it’ll be an easier transition for him if he’s with a familiar face. And then there’s Rebecca Crane—she’s the only one who figured out how to reliably reverse-engineer the Animus, so she’s performing maintenance and monitoring the Animus sessions. And finally, we have—“
“Shaun Hastings.” She pinched the bridge of her nose.
“Yeah—how did you know?”
“Rebecca insists that he’s on all the same missions as her.” It was admirable, really—Rebecca felt responsible for Shaun since she’d brought him into the fold—but damn if it hadn’t caused her problems on other missions. Shaun was rude and pompous—a genius who knew how smart he was and made sure everyone knew it, too. But he was an expert historian, and a skilled hacker, so he was usually more of an asset than a liability. He just wasn’t much of a team player.
Lucy, Rebecca, and Shaun alone wouldn’t be enough to stave off Abstergo if they were coming for Desmond. She needed to put together a backup team, and fast.
“Any plans to send help? The three of them can’t do this alone,” she pointed out.
Her Mentor shook his head. “We can’t send anyone right now, but maybe in a few weeks—“
She closed Desmond’s file and took the others’ files from the Assassin at the console. “Right, well, they may not have weeks. If they won’t let me send anyone after them, I’ll go myself to help relocate to somewhere safer.”
Her Mentor grabbed her arm and dragged her into the corner. He made sure the others weren’t looking at them.
“Look,” he said in a low voice. “I know your history with Desmond, and I know what’s you’re thinking. You are not responsible for his being captured by Abstergo. You need to think twice before rushing into the field like this.”
“I’m going,” she asserted. “I can help the team come up with contingency plans in case they’re caught—I’d probably be doing that anyway, and it’ll be more secure if I do it in person rather than remotely. Shaun can help me; his skills actually complement mine. And they said it would be better if a familiar face eased Desmond back into the Order, right? Who’s more familiar than your best friend of 16 years? Lucy can get me up to speed on what happened at Abstergo, and I can help her train Desmond.” She paused. “Admit it—this isn’t a bad plan.”
Her Mentor rolled her eyes. “Fine. Give me a few days to gather information for you, and then you can go. I don’t want you leaving unprepared.”
She nodded. “Done; I’m going to need all the information you can get. I’ll start gathering my things. Send me everything I need and I’ll upload them to my computer and my backup drives. Once I get there, I’ll have Rebecca or Shaun create a special channel of communication so we can stay in touch without anyone else monitoring us.” She smiled and touched his arm. “And thank you.”
Her Mentor waved her away grouchily. She turned back to the monitor and looked at Desmond.
I’m coming for you, Desmond. I just hope your team can hang on until I get there.