Chapter Text
In the end, it was Rebecca who found the first trace.
It had been months - almost a year - since the Flare, and just as long since they’d last seen Desmond alive. There hadn’t been a body, in the end, just a swarm of agitated and confused Templars, and then nothing.
In less than a day, their ancient enemy was… diminished. Reduced. Neutered, even. All of their people on the inside reported mass blankness and confusion when prompted about Assassins. All Templar databanks that had alluded to the existence of Assassins whatsoever had been wiped clean – nothing was recoverable. In the end, they had resorted to kidnapping, followed by an Animus scan. The holes in the man’s memory were astounding. Torn away, but cleaner. Deleted on an atomic level.
And if that hadn't been bad enough, people of their own had Blanked. Shaun received reports from all over the world that members of hidden cells had woken up remembering nothing. Every group that reported one or more wiped individuals had the worst sort of luck – it happened, of course, to many – but once their addled teammates had been seen off, said team’s mission success rates spiked, and they spiked hard.
The implications were clear.
The cause was… less so.
Shaun had strung it all together in his head – timelines and causality were his thing, you know – and he kept coming back to Desmond.
Rebecca was less focused on the why’s and more focused on the what’s. Technology was her thing, and the pristine gaps in every affected database infuriated her. But when he’d approached her in their downtime, with his mess of notes in hand (he hadn’t put something so scrambled together since his Master’s thesis, it was almost embarrassing) she listened. And, more importantly, she agreed.
Without knowledge of their conflict – who they were fighting, what they were fighting for, how long they had been doing so – the Templars had essentially collapsed under their own weight. Defeated. And Shaun – and now Rebecca – was certain that it had been one last gift from Desmond before-
Before.
And so the least they could do, they thought, was give the man an actual ending. The Assassin that finally ended the Templar threat to the world deserved final honors of the greatest sort. Their friend Desmond simply deserved better than what he had gotten.
So they looked.
There was nothing, Shaun complained. There was nothing, Rebecca affirmed. And that was their greatest tool. The internet was so overflowing with complete shit that it was a miracle anything could get found. But there was nothing about Desmond Miles. No face shots, no records, no charges, no death certificates. All of his information that had been remotely available had been collected by Abstergo, and promptly deleted when the Wipe happened. There were barely even unidentified bodies that loosely matched his description. If something even loosely related to Desmond came up – a mugshot, a fingerprint (again), a naming coincidence that couldn’t be immediately dismissed – she’d find it in a heartbeat.
And in the meantime, it was Shaun’s job to do the footwork. Shaun… wasn’t great at footwork.
“I’m a historian. Not a bloody archeologist, Rebecca.” He would gripe over the radio, even as he combed through the woodlands and cave systems of Turin for the nth time that month. “I find stories, connections, documents at best, not,-” ‘bodies’, went unsaid.
“-not disturbed earth. Not miniscule traces of human presence. I’ll have you know-” As much as Shaun griped and Rebecca teased, there would be no swapping of places. The sporting accident that Rebecca had suffered left her with constant dull pains in her legs, and prolonged hiking only worsened them. So she sat and combed the internet while he sweat and swore his way through the woods.
They were somewhat certain, at least, that if Desmond’s body was going to be found, it would be in or around Turin. From what they could piece together, the Wipe had happened near-instantaneously to when the Flare was blocked. Any team of Templars sent in to extract Desmond would have found themselves lost in the woods, with no clue as to why they were there.
This many months later, Shaun was privately starting to think that the whole endeavor was hopeless. He had a semi-permanent parking spot next to the trail head closest to the Grand Temple, and the waitress at the local pub thought he was taking a gap year to go caving in the Americas, and he’d fallen in love with a local, keeping him in the area.
Shaun knew full well how these types of things worked – if he told her no, absolutely not, then he became the odd foreigner hanging around for sketchy business. If he humored her, on the other hand, he was a handsome Englishman wallowing away in secretive, forbidden love. How. Bloody. Romantic.
And she had access to the ears of the entire town, likely, so anything she thought, Turin would know in short order.
Rebecca thought it was a damned riot.
…
William had fucked off entirely, and good fucking riddance, he thought.
Shaun had been a right bastard – properly cold to Desmond, at times – he’d admit it. But sweet Christ, if Desmond’s attitude towards the Assassins as a whole didn’t make more damn sense when juxtaposed with William Fucking Miles.
The man hadn’t even stopped on their way out of the Temple. When he and Becca had paused to – he doesn’t know. To wait? To witness? The man kept right on going, pressing them both along the whole way. The man’s face had been hard and blank the entire time.
Shaun suspected that William compartmentalized his way through the entire experience. Good at his little brain-boxes, was William Miles. Mentor responsibilities in one, fatherhood in another. Only one opened at a time, and Shaun suspected that he knew which one Bill prioritized.
As soon as it became clear that Desmond wouldn’t be walking out of the Temple with them, he became just another of Bill’s Assassins, sent off on a mission everyone knew was pyrrhic. No point in stopping everything, we’ll mourn when we win.
They’d been trying to ‘win’ for millennia, now.
So William took off for the great unknown, most likely to consolidate the shaken web of Assassins across the globe. They would recover, Shaun knew. Ideas were impossible to kill, after all, and total control was an addicting idea indeed. Eventually someone would stick their heads up again, and the Order would re-discover its purpose.
And so, Rebecca hunted, Shaun slogged, and that’s how things proceeded. Until finally, one unremarkable evening, they were sitting around their beat-up table eating cold leftovers, and Rebecca’s computer chimed. She had a hit.
…
Desmond’s vision had been getting steadily… weirder for the last several days, now, but only recently did it start developing into a headache. Or at least, he thought it was one. He knew that googling your symptoms was a fast-track to despair, but the internet’s definitions of ‘aura migraines’ matched pretty well to what he was seeing every time he looked up.
His only other option at this point was genuinely believing that the sky was melting and, well, he knew which one he would take.
Erin had taken over the bar for the night – it had only taken one fumbled glass on his part to get her concerned, and the next thing he knew, he was bundled away in the kitchen, and Damien was doing his level best to fill him with soup. From then on, every time he tried to get back to work, she would take one look at his drawn face and shoo him off, gently mocking him until he capitulated.
Erin had gotten the whole bar in on it too, because he couldn’t even help ring up checks without Maria and Rosie shooing him away.
So he… sulked. Only a bit, really. He mostly ended up occupying a table of his own, and chatting away with whoever cared to sit down next to him.
Strangely enough, if he got invested enough in the conversation, it would distract him to the point that his headache abated. Kind of like how a repetitive beeping was the worst thing ever right until a more pleasant sound drowned it out. Walled in by content, happy people, their shades were enough to blot out the strange twisting that the air had started to do.
So he stopped and chatted with folks for the next few hours until Pepper stopped in, usual train of office workers and executives trailing her.
…
“We received an inquiry, recently,” Pepper told him later. The bar was a fair bit emptier at that point, but there was still a nice background hum. Pepper’s co-workers had gone home for the most part, with a couple hanging out at the bar, rather than staying tucked away in the tables.
“Oh yeah?” Desmond eyed her over his glass of water. Their working relationship had relaxed somewhat since they first signed it into agreement, and as Pepper visited the 1000 Miles more and more often purely for a night out, they’d come into something of a casual friendship. But this was the first time she had hinted at their other business while presumably being there to drink.
She hummed in agreement. “Yes, regarding the investigation firm. Someone sent us an email hoping to set up an initial appointment.” She eyed him.
Pepper didn’t need to tell him why that was an issue. Heightened Investigations was about as legitimate as it could be, but it was unlisted. If you wanted to find it, you had to know exactly where to look and who to talk to. No amount of searching for private investigators in the Chicago area would turn it up. And they hadn’t told anyone. SHEILD’s jobs were handled through SI, which then turned around and filed everything appropriately through his little office. Pepper was the only one who should have his work email.
Which meant they had a leak of some sort.
“Did they provide any sort of contact information? Names, anything?” He asked, leaning in.
Pepper pulled her phone out to show him the email in question. “No, just initials, or an acronym or something. And the domain is strange, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before.”
Desmond stilled, and the throbbing in his temples redoubled. The ‘@server.hph’ domain at the end of the email meant that it was from the Hephaestus network. The actual name of the email didn’t matter, those were scrambled every time a message was sent outside the server. But the initials at the end of the message were S.H.
Shaun Hastings.
Fuck.
…
The result was… disappointing, honestly. It only took Becca a second to throw her hands up in disgust, and to roll on off to her main setup.
Shaun… had to agree. D. Miles, head P.I. of Heightened Investigations was not that promising a lead. And in Chicago, of all places.
From what Shaun loosely knew of Desmond’s prolonged little Rumspringa, he’d pretty much hightailed it to New York and stayed there. There was no picture included on the sparse little page, and barely any contact information. It was a pretty shit lead, all told. But something needled him about it.
Waving off Becca’s derisive comments over his hovering, Shaun settled in to dig. And what he found only piqued his interest further.
The little investigative firm didn’t have its own building. A quick search of the mailing address gave him a building of shared offices, and a search for the building gave him Stark Industries.
Well.
So not necessarily Chicago then. From the look of it, D. Miles may well operate anywhere there was an SI branch, and – it felt like a bit of a reach, but they’d been grasping at straws for months now – Stark Industries’ headquarters were in, wouldn’t you know, New York City.
And so, halfheartedly and not expecting much, he sent off a basic inquiry.
Hours later, much to his shock, he got a response.
Hello S.H.
Go away.
-D.M.
He practically fell off his stool on his way to show Becca.
...