fic: i grow tired of my flesh and bones, #02
title: i grow tired of my flesh and bones
part: #02
rating: r
characters: modern assassins, desmond/shaun (which actually is altaïr/malik)
warnings: not quite there insanity, angst, murder.
words: 2634
summary: slowly, he grows unattached to these flesh and bones, like there is nothing left in them to make him feel like he’s home.
notes: it stems from brotherhood. for this prompt at the kink meme. my first serious writing in this fandom, and i hope you enjoy!
one | two | three
i grow tired of my flesh and bones
02: the fall
It doesn’t take long until he starts forgetting things. He thinks nothing of this; People forget all the time, he says, why can’t he forget as well? If he doesn’t remember it, then it means it’s nothing worth recording. It’s normal, he says. I’m alright, trust me, guys. It’s just his mind locking up the useless information (“You don’t want me walking around thinking about how to mix a martini, right? It’s useless information, now”), to keep what really matters inside. He lets his memory fade away and fall and chip off like cracked plates of paint on an old wall.
It’s nothing much. He’s incorporating them into him, and that is good.
Then again, Rebecca says, “It isn’t when you forget our names, Desmond.”
But names are small things. Names are temporary.
~
Eventually, she stops coming to him in the night. He figures his mistakes when it comes to calling out for her have broken her enough already.
~
Desmond becomes a distant childhood friend, a doppelganger that lives his life from afar, a title which they use to call him out. It gets harder and harder to respond to that call. Feels dislocated, somehow; but he can’t exactly come up and say, Please stop calling me Desmond. I’m not Desmond. He doesn’t though; they will be worried and it’d be unbearable. Who he is, what he is, what he thinks-these things become forgotten, because apparently Desmond was only a recent acquaintance, never had trust enough, or the time, to confide these little things. Oh, pity.
He stalks the others and learns a thing or other about himself; like that he used to be a bartender. But that’s hardly helpful. That much he can remember. “It’s alright,” the Black Hair Green Eyes says. “You’ll remember it soon.”
‘Or not, we’ll see.’
Soon, he thinks about giving up on this Desmond idea; he is Desmond, so he shouldn’t need any past model of himself to be himself. Maybe Desmond was a mistake, maybe Desmond was a fake. He is the true thing, rising from the broken shambles and used up blood of Desmond. Maybe he’s like the phoenix, the bird reborn from the ashes, a flower blooming from the garbage, who knows. Maybe this is needed, this is the only thing that will work for him and make that feeling stop, that feeling that somehow this body doesn’t belong to him.
He walks up to the statue of Altaïr and remembers the time when he’d sneak past the bookcase and spend hours staring at it, just taking in the legend that the man was, until Mario came in and stared at the statue with him as well for countless hours.
~
He just wants to sleep.
And maybe dream a little bit, too. Yes, that would be nice.
In sleep, the darkness holds him, soothes him, anaesthetizes him, and even dies a little bit with him. He dies very peacefully in the makeshift bed and in the morning he feels as good as new, if everything goes as expected. Just like the phoenix, reborn from the ashes. And that is beautiful and everyone will be happy. If not, it will amount to nothing and he’ll continue feeling displaced from this body.
But he stops sleeping, stops dying and stops rebirthing too. And that’s no good. He’s just dying while he’s awake, losing track of everything around him.
Even these walls that surround him don’t feel the same anymore. These people that work with machines and question him about his welfare seem aliens in the Sanctuary. They shouldn’t be here. This isn’t their place. He starts seeing things that shouldn’t be there, now. Although that’s not entirely strange to him: he remembers having these illusions of himself and others in past times. After some time without sleeping, everything just disjoints and becomes a new reality altogether. It’s like his sensory notion of this place is sent through him as seen from an opaque glass. Like every time he looks at anything it’s as if it were seen by someone else in a dream.
He watches as Rebecca works on the currently retired Baby, her hands quick but careful as she does the work of updating, fixing bugs and all those things she talks about, but they really go over his head.
Poof.
Lucy stares at a computer screen and thinks about what she should do to avoid the slaughter of more teams on the field. It’s like she’s sinking into a well of problems she can’t quite find the solution to on her own, but is too damn proud to ask for help.
Poof.
There’s Shaun mumbling things he can’t quite understand; words of conspiracies, how much he is busy and even the occasional curse.
Poof.
And he is lost.
~
“He can’t go on like this,” he hears him whisper to the other two when they think he’s dozing or at least abstracted enough to not notice.
He can’t help but agree.
~
Sometimes when he’s on the verge of falling asleep, he remembers things. Only when he’s in that almost asleep almost awake stupor does he remember them. This discomfort doesn’t allow him rest at any moment. He feels like he’s standing in an iron maiden; like his whole being is stuffed in this tight coffin ready to attack him if he’s not careful. He must be half awake so he won’t fall and risk being impaled by the countless sharp spikes waiting to bite his flesh; he must be half asleep so he won’t think too much about the danger and become edgier.
Like that time just after they’ve arrived at Monteriggioni and they’re still setting in and it’s their first time sleeping there; in a time that seems kept in a sanctuary in his memories, unscathed by whatever corruption he may be suffering.
It’s kind of late, really, and it’s quite and as cold as it can get in the region around late October. The girls are sleeping, already, tired from moving boxes and setting all their equipment; finally the hours of stress after their escape catching up with them. Desmond is peering moodily up into the sky to catch the soft frail moonlight on his skin, shivering with how cold it is in the unyielding stone room. From the crown of the Sanctuary Altaïr’s gaze pierces even the darkness, threatening to become more than just a statue. Shaun has gathered as many blankets and whatnot he could muster up around his person and sits in front of some computer doing something Desmond doesn’t really care about.
(Of course, the prat says, “It seems I have to do all the bloody work around here.”)
Desmond has recently made the somewhat strange discovery that after all Shaun isn’t as much as a dick as he had thought. And that he is quite enchanting when he actually tries to be nice.
“Desmond, cover yourself will you?” Shit, he must have heard his teeth clinkering together.
He wants to snap, You stole all the damn covers, you idiot.
But he shrugs and says, loud enough that Shaun can hear him and low enough to let Rebecca and Lucy sleep, “I’m fine.”
Of course Shaun knows better than this, weren’t he goddamn master of knowing all things uninteresting. So he gets up and walks to where Desmond is sitting, hugging his blankets close to him, careful to not trip on any wire or limb of the sleeping women; because that would be nasty. Desmond has no time to react, because if he had, really, he’d react; but he doesn’t, so he just stands there as the other pulls the blankets off, leaving only the thinnest for himself, and throws them around Desmond’s shoulders. Shaun even nudges the ends of the blankets so Desmond is nice and toasty.
“Can’t let our dear Subject 17 go ill, can we, Miles?”
How nice of you to ask.
But Desmond smiles and means to thank you. Shaun smiles to, and it’s beautiful. Excruciatingly brief, terrifyingly beautiful.
They kiss. Shaun’s face invades his face, leaving Desmond’s head boxed between him and the white hoodie. Soft and kind of warm; slow; and then they pull apart and in silence (silence, or it’s all ruined) Shaun walks away with his blanket behind. Desmond feels lost at that, hugging the warm layers of fabric to his body, feeling maybe guilt and some other vague emotion he’s too sleepy to place.
~
When he wakes up (really, when did he actually sleep?, he doesn’t remember it), he feels like his palms are sticky.
He looks down to find them covered in red.
~
It’s the start of a fourth week and he says, “It’s not working anymore.”
It’s not. For once he’s aware enough to realize that. He’s sitting on the stone floor of the Sanctuary. Bright autumn sun streams in from the grates high above. The sun’s dripping onto her hair making it the most lovely shade of yellow and she asks, “What’s not working, Desmond?”
This. Everything. It’s not working. It’s not getting better; I don’t belong here in this body.
“Everything.”
~
He watches as she returns to the Sanctuary just as the dawn begins to approach.
She says, “I don’t think we’re alone; they found a girl dead yesterday.”
“Abstergo?”
For a moment, she hesitates; her lips turn into a thin, nervous line as her gaze lingers on him for a moment before replying, “No …I don’t think so, Rebecca.”
His heartbeat drums against the stretched skin above his ribs, his body sculpted leaner because of the feeding regimen. And he breathes, just breathes, as the blonde walks up to him, gingerly sits by his side and looks at him with her two blue, owl-like eyes. Just sits, doesn’t expect anything from him-not anymore, not when every time he forgets her name it breaks her more and more.
“I can’t sleep. Not anymore.”
She whispers, “Calm. Go to sleep. Just go to sleep and don’t worry, Desmond.”
He means to repeat, But I can’t, not now, not ever. It’s over. You don’t want me to do a brand new paint job to this place, do you?
She holds him. “Just …have a little faith.”
Because she doesn’t anymore.
She holds him and he is terrified, because he’s lost hold of what is real and what isn’t; he barely remembers the time when she’d take him to make a pathway to the Sanctuary; he doesn’t even know what day it is or when is his birthday. He is terrified, confused, and this ache in his bones makes him feel incredibly unwelcome. She strokes his hair, hums into it. She dies a little.
He dies a little, too.
Just like that girl. But she didn’t die just a little bit. He swears he can almost remember her; and her blood, the searching for his displacement. He almost means to tell her about this. But there will be time later for that.
He’s barely falling asleep.
~
In the middle of the night, he wants to escape.
No, not escape, actually. He will return, he swears. It’s just that his bones and the regular spasms in his muscles are begging for the effort he was used to, once. The fall from the highest point of the highest tower, the curling of the air around him and the landing on a lonely bale of hay. They wouldn’t understand it, really.
I-I don’t think you understand, he means to say. But I think I killed someone. To find out what is it that’s inside that makes me feel quite like this; if there’s anyone out there that feels like I do.
Anyone who’s not dead, that is.
~
Sometimes he still sees them.
Altaïr paces around in circles, anger and boredom becoming one emotion and fueling every single of his movements. His wrist flicks every now and then and the quiet slide of the blade replies, quickly and lethally. His whole body screams one single desire.
Kill.
Ezio entertains himself. He sits here and there and whispers low strings of Italian. Probably because he’s just fond of the sound of his own voice. However, his apparent inertia does nothing to mask the fact that the air around him breathes death and how he can bring it.
Kill.
Kill.
This desire, it’s in his blood-
-Kill.
~
He’s washing the dried blood off his hands to the best of his ability, using a puddle of rainwater just outside to serve his purpose. In the darkness just before the first rays of light, he can’t see much, so he fumbles and fumbles until he can do a decent job.
He looks over his shoulder and Malik’s face, a lot different from what he remembers, looks back at him, only a little bit surprised. He stops what he’s doing, and he thinks, This is it, it’s over; it’s all over. For a moment they say absolutely nothing, just stare at each other as if otherwise it would disrupt the moment.
He doesn’t even try to disrupt what happens between the two of them.
Eventually, he gets up from his crouching position with a pleasant tingling of his legs and walks up to him, nudges him against the wall.
Are you fucking bloody insane? Malik snaps, and he brings a hand to pin his wrist against the wall as Malik’s breaths come in sporadic gasps, looking at his still red hands. It smells like blood, iron, tangy. He feels Malik’s eyes roving wildly on his face, looking for a sign-any sign-of life, any that he recognizes who he is. But, he realizes, there must be none but the smile spreading across his lips, and how much dazed he looks.
He asks, Don’t you recognize me, habibi? It’s me, Altaïr.
It’s Malik. Malik. After all this time.
It’s intoxicating. He feels better than he has for a long time. Even if he feels the mental weariness weighing down on his body, after all these years.
“You always manage to screw things right up, don’t you?” He asks.
“No, no, no Malik. Stop speaking like that, that’s not your accent; stop speaking like Maria’s country people.”
He-no, Altaïr-steals a kiss. He steals another, and steals his neck.
He steals his clothing.
He steals Malik’s body, even if just for a while.
He tries to not think too much about it, because it would give this too much meaning. He doesn’t want to think about how willingly Malik throws his head back to give him free access to his neck as he runs teeth and lips down his skin. (Even as he whispers, “Shaun, Shaun. Not Malik.”) He keeps his armed arm positioned just below his neck throughout this whole ordeal, won’t he do anything strange. He doesn’t think about the way Malik slips a leg up and around his waist and how he stays still as he does with him as he will.
He doesn’t think about how Malik gives him control.
All he can think about is how good it feels, how much blood he can smell and how intoxicating it is.
The blood.
It feels goddamn liberating.
He bites the slant of Malik’s shoulder and draws blood and licks it with the broad of his tongue. His left hand is planted against Malik’s sternum, carefully so he won’t trigger the hidden blade, pressing him into the cold wall.
Altaïr sighs and closes his eyes, dreams of the colors of Masyaf and not the white and the black and the red. He tries not to lose himself.
Maybe this is therapy, maybe he-
-he leaves, afterwards.
~
Soon, he learns that there is no one that can help him unveil how to die fully and be reborn in a vessel without these scars.
part: #02
rating: r
characters: modern assassins, desmond/shaun (which actually is altaïr/malik)
warnings: not quite there insanity, angst, murder.
words: 2634
summary: slowly, he grows unattached to these flesh and bones, like there is nothing left in them to make him feel like he’s home.
notes: it stems from brotherhood. for this prompt at the kink meme. my first serious writing in this fandom, and i hope you enjoy!
one | two | three
i grow tired of my flesh and bones
02: the fall
It doesn’t take long until he starts forgetting things. He thinks nothing of this; People forget all the time, he says, why can’t he forget as well? If he doesn’t remember it, then it means it’s nothing worth recording. It’s normal, he says. I’m alright, trust me, guys. It’s just his mind locking up the useless information (“You don’t want me walking around thinking about how to mix a martini, right? It’s useless information, now”), to keep what really matters inside. He lets his memory fade away and fall and chip off like cracked plates of paint on an old wall.
It’s nothing much. He’s incorporating them into him, and that is good.
Then again, Rebecca says, “It isn’t when you forget our names, Desmond.”
But names are small things. Names are temporary.
~
Eventually, she stops coming to him in the night. He figures his mistakes when it comes to calling out for her have broken her enough already.
~
Desmond becomes a distant childhood friend, a doppelganger that lives his life from afar, a title which they use to call him out. It gets harder and harder to respond to that call. Feels dislocated, somehow; but he can’t exactly come up and say, Please stop calling me Desmond. I’m not Desmond. He doesn’t though; they will be worried and it’d be unbearable. Who he is, what he is, what he thinks-these things become forgotten, because apparently Desmond was only a recent acquaintance, never had trust enough, or the time, to confide these little things. Oh, pity.
He stalks the others and learns a thing or other about himself; like that he used to be a bartender. But that’s hardly helpful. That much he can remember. “It’s alright,” the Black Hair Green Eyes says. “You’ll remember it soon.”
‘Or not, we’ll see.’
Soon, he thinks about giving up on this Desmond idea; he is Desmond, so he shouldn’t need any past model of himself to be himself. Maybe Desmond was a mistake, maybe Desmond was a fake. He is the true thing, rising from the broken shambles and used up blood of Desmond. Maybe he’s like the phoenix, the bird reborn from the ashes, a flower blooming from the garbage, who knows. Maybe this is needed, this is the only thing that will work for him and make that feeling stop, that feeling that somehow this body doesn’t belong to him.
He walks up to the statue of Altaïr and remembers the time when he’d sneak past the bookcase and spend hours staring at it, just taking in the legend that the man was, until Mario came in and stared at the statue with him as well for countless hours.
~
He just wants to sleep.
And maybe dream a little bit, too. Yes, that would be nice.
In sleep, the darkness holds him, soothes him, anaesthetizes him, and even dies a little bit with him. He dies very peacefully in the makeshift bed and in the morning he feels as good as new, if everything goes as expected. Just like the phoenix, reborn from the ashes. And that is beautiful and everyone will be happy. If not, it will amount to nothing and he’ll continue feeling displaced from this body.
But he stops sleeping, stops dying and stops rebirthing too. And that’s no good. He’s just dying while he’s awake, losing track of everything around him.
Even these walls that surround him don’t feel the same anymore. These people that work with machines and question him about his welfare seem aliens in the Sanctuary. They shouldn’t be here. This isn’t their place. He starts seeing things that shouldn’t be there, now. Although that’s not entirely strange to him: he remembers having these illusions of himself and others in past times. After some time without sleeping, everything just disjoints and becomes a new reality altogether. It’s like his sensory notion of this place is sent through him as seen from an opaque glass. Like every time he looks at anything it’s as if it were seen by someone else in a dream.
He watches as Rebecca works on the currently retired Baby, her hands quick but careful as she does the work of updating, fixing bugs and all those things she talks about, but they really go over his head.
Poof.
Lucy stares at a computer screen and thinks about what she should do to avoid the slaughter of more teams on the field. It’s like she’s sinking into a well of problems she can’t quite find the solution to on her own, but is too damn proud to ask for help.
Poof.
There’s Shaun mumbling things he can’t quite understand; words of conspiracies, how much he is busy and even the occasional curse.
Poof.
And he is lost.
~
“He can’t go on like this,” he hears him whisper to the other two when they think he’s dozing or at least abstracted enough to not notice.
He can’t help but agree.
~
Sometimes when he’s on the verge of falling asleep, he remembers things. Only when he’s in that almost asleep almost awake stupor does he remember them. This discomfort doesn’t allow him rest at any moment. He feels like he’s standing in an iron maiden; like his whole being is stuffed in this tight coffin ready to attack him if he’s not careful. He must be half awake so he won’t fall and risk being impaled by the countless sharp spikes waiting to bite his flesh; he must be half asleep so he won’t think too much about the danger and become edgier.
Like that time just after they’ve arrived at Monteriggioni and they’re still setting in and it’s their first time sleeping there; in a time that seems kept in a sanctuary in his memories, unscathed by whatever corruption he may be suffering.
It’s kind of late, really, and it’s quite and as cold as it can get in the region around late October. The girls are sleeping, already, tired from moving boxes and setting all their equipment; finally the hours of stress after their escape catching up with them. Desmond is peering moodily up into the sky to catch the soft frail moonlight on his skin, shivering with how cold it is in the unyielding stone room. From the crown of the Sanctuary Altaïr’s gaze pierces even the darkness, threatening to become more than just a statue. Shaun has gathered as many blankets and whatnot he could muster up around his person and sits in front of some computer doing something Desmond doesn’t really care about.
(Of course, the prat says, “It seems I have to do all the bloody work around here.”)
Desmond has recently made the somewhat strange discovery that after all Shaun isn’t as much as a dick as he had thought. And that he is quite enchanting when he actually tries to be nice.
“Desmond, cover yourself will you?” Shit, he must have heard his teeth clinkering together.
He wants to snap, You stole all the damn covers, you idiot.
But he shrugs and says, loud enough that Shaun can hear him and low enough to let Rebecca and Lucy sleep, “I’m fine.”
Of course Shaun knows better than this, weren’t he goddamn master of knowing all things uninteresting. So he gets up and walks to where Desmond is sitting, hugging his blankets close to him, careful to not trip on any wire or limb of the sleeping women; because that would be nasty. Desmond has no time to react, because if he had, really, he’d react; but he doesn’t, so he just stands there as the other pulls the blankets off, leaving only the thinnest for himself, and throws them around Desmond’s shoulders. Shaun even nudges the ends of the blankets so Desmond is nice and toasty.
“Can’t let our dear Subject 17 go ill, can we, Miles?”
How nice of you to ask.
But Desmond smiles and means to thank you. Shaun smiles to, and it’s beautiful. Excruciatingly brief, terrifyingly beautiful.
They kiss. Shaun’s face invades his face, leaving Desmond’s head boxed between him and the white hoodie. Soft and kind of warm; slow; and then they pull apart and in silence (silence, or it’s all ruined) Shaun walks away with his blanket behind. Desmond feels lost at that, hugging the warm layers of fabric to his body, feeling maybe guilt and some other vague emotion he’s too sleepy to place.
~
When he wakes up (really, when did he actually sleep?, he doesn’t remember it), he feels like his palms are sticky.
He looks down to find them covered in red.
~
It’s the start of a fourth week and he says, “It’s not working anymore.”
It’s not. For once he’s aware enough to realize that. He’s sitting on the stone floor of the Sanctuary. Bright autumn sun streams in from the grates high above. The sun’s dripping onto her hair making it the most lovely shade of yellow and she asks, “What’s not working, Desmond?”
This. Everything. It’s not working. It’s not getting better; I don’t belong here in this body.
“Everything.”
~
He watches as she returns to the Sanctuary just as the dawn begins to approach.
She says, “I don’t think we’re alone; they found a girl dead yesterday.”
“Abstergo?”
For a moment, she hesitates; her lips turn into a thin, nervous line as her gaze lingers on him for a moment before replying, “No …I don’t think so, Rebecca.”
His heartbeat drums against the stretched skin above his ribs, his body sculpted leaner because of the feeding regimen. And he breathes, just breathes, as the blonde walks up to him, gingerly sits by his side and looks at him with her two blue, owl-like eyes. Just sits, doesn’t expect anything from him-not anymore, not when every time he forgets her name it breaks her more and more.
“I can’t sleep. Not anymore.”
She whispers, “Calm. Go to sleep. Just go to sleep and don’t worry, Desmond.”
He means to repeat, But I can’t, not now, not ever. It’s over. You don’t want me to do a brand new paint job to this place, do you?
She holds him. “Just …have a little faith.”
Because she doesn’t anymore.
She holds him and he is terrified, because he’s lost hold of what is real and what isn’t; he barely remembers the time when she’d take him to make a pathway to the Sanctuary; he doesn’t even know what day it is or when is his birthday. He is terrified, confused, and this ache in his bones makes him feel incredibly unwelcome. She strokes his hair, hums into it. She dies a little.
He dies a little, too.
Just like that girl. But she didn’t die just a little bit. He swears he can almost remember her; and her blood, the searching for his displacement. He almost means to tell her about this. But there will be time later for that.
He’s barely falling asleep.
~
In the middle of the night, he wants to escape.
No, not escape, actually. He will return, he swears. It’s just that his bones and the regular spasms in his muscles are begging for the effort he was used to, once. The fall from the highest point of the highest tower, the curling of the air around him and the landing on a lonely bale of hay. They wouldn’t understand it, really.
I-I don’t think you understand, he means to say. But I think I killed someone. To find out what is it that’s inside that makes me feel quite like this; if there’s anyone out there that feels like I do.
Anyone who’s not dead, that is.
~
Sometimes he still sees them.
Altaïr paces around in circles, anger and boredom becoming one emotion and fueling every single of his movements. His wrist flicks every now and then and the quiet slide of the blade replies, quickly and lethally. His whole body screams one single desire.
Kill.
Ezio entertains himself. He sits here and there and whispers low strings of Italian. Probably because he’s just fond of the sound of his own voice. However, his apparent inertia does nothing to mask the fact that the air around him breathes death and how he can bring it.
Kill.
Kill.
This desire, it’s in his blood-
-Kill.
~
He’s washing the dried blood off his hands to the best of his ability, using a puddle of rainwater just outside to serve his purpose. In the darkness just before the first rays of light, he can’t see much, so he fumbles and fumbles until he can do a decent job.
He looks over his shoulder and Malik’s face, a lot different from what he remembers, looks back at him, only a little bit surprised. He stops what he’s doing, and he thinks, This is it, it’s over; it’s all over. For a moment they say absolutely nothing, just stare at each other as if otherwise it would disrupt the moment.
He doesn’t even try to disrupt what happens between the two of them.
Eventually, he gets up from his crouching position with a pleasant tingling of his legs and walks up to him, nudges him against the wall.
Are you fucking bloody insane? Malik snaps, and he brings a hand to pin his wrist against the wall as Malik’s breaths come in sporadic gasps, looking at his still red hands. It smells like blood, iron, tangy. He feels Malik’s eyes roving wildly on his face, looking for a sign-any sign-of life, any that he recognizes who he is. But, he realizes, there must be none but the smile spreading across his lips, and how much dazed he looks.
He asks, Don’t you recognize me, habibi? It’s me, Altaïr.
It’s Malik. Malik. After all this time.
It’s intoxicating. He feels better than he has for a long time. Even if he feels the mental weariness weighing down on his body, after all these years.
“You always manage to screw things right up, don’t you?” He asks.
“No, no, no Malik. Stop speaking like that, that’s not your accent; stop speaking like Maria’s country people.”
He-no, Altaïr-steals a kiss. He steals another, and steals his neck.
He steals his clothing.
He steals Malik’s body, even if just for a while.
He tries to not think too much about it, because it would give this too much meaning. He doesn’t want to think about how willingly Malik throws his head back to give him free access to his neck as he runs teeth and lips down his skin. (Even as he whispers, “Shaun, Shaun. Not Malik.”) He keeps his armed arm positioned just below his neck throughout this whole ordeal, won’t he do anything strange. He doesn’t think about the way Malik slips a leg up and around his waist and how he stays still as he does with him as he will.
He doesn’t think about how Malik gives him control.
All he can think about is how good it feels, how much blood he can smell and how intoxicating it is.
The blood.
It feels goddamn liberating.
He bites the slant of Malik’s shoulder and draws blood and licks it with the broad of his tongue. His left hand is planted against Malik’s sternum, carefully so he won’t trigger the hidden blade, pressing him into the cold wall.
Altaïr sighs and closes his eyes, dreams of the colors of Masyaf and not the white and the black and the red. He tries not to lose himself.
Maybe this is therapy, maybe he-
-he leaves, afterwards.
~
Soon, he learns that there is no one that can help him unveil how to die fully and be reborn in a vessel without these scars.