#always fun

So, Ezio, what was that with the ‘seeing ghosts through Eagle Vision’?”

Ezio blinked, taken aback, before he chuckled, not reacting to the way Altaïr’s eyes had snapped to him, piercing and eerily similar to the raptor he was so often likened to. Instead, Ezio leaned back on his hands, every line of him the casual sensuality that had made him so successful with the people he took a liking to, charming arrogance in his gaze and a challenge in his smile. “Oh? Did the greatest Mentor in the history of our Brotherhood never learn of the full scope of what is possible with our Second Sight?”

“No, I didn’t,” Altaïr said, all casual ease, his eyes flat. “But I knew that already. Our earliest records speak of Brethren that were able to link their Vision to a bonded raptor, often an eagle or hawk, to see for miles and miles from high above.” He wasn’t looking at them, and Desmond thought if his ancestor was even a little more deliberate about it, he would be checking his nails. But it was when he chanced a glance at Ezio that Desmond had to violently suppress a snort of laughter.

The practiced conceitedness had fallen away, leaving behind wide, surprised eyes and a slack jaw. Feeling Desmond’s eyes on him, Ezio snapped his mouth shut, cleared his throat and very deliberately turned away from his fellow Mentor and answered the original question, voice closer to the timbre of a teacher than the haughtiness of earlier. “Well, I stumbled across it more by accident than anything else, really. The more I used my Sight, the more I noticed how dependent it was on the emotional state of the people I was looking at.

“I tried to deliberately look for it, and after a few weeks started seeing the emotional imprints people left behind.” Ezio was now firmly in teacher-mode. “I learned through trial and error, that the more emotional someone is, the higher the probability that they left an imprint behind. Although, and I never found the answer why it was like this, but others with the sight left their shadows behind more readily than others.”

Huh, that was interesting. His head cocked to the side, Desmond mused, “And we know now that Eagle Vision is genetic… And I always thought it was strangely close to things like, I don’t know, telepathy, stuff like that.” There was something that twinged at the back of his mind, something he should remember but didn’t.

“Weeell,” Clay interjected out of nowhere, the word drawn out obnoxiously, the glowing lines of his arrival dispersing back into the ether while he started pacing in front of the pillars that led into Desmond’s past, the fingers of his left hand idly playing with the buttons of his flannel. “All of that comes from the Precursor bullshit in our genome. The more ancient asshole in the mix, the stronger the ‘Eagle Vision’.” He added very big air quotes around the name, and Desmond would have been tempted to laugh — The name was objectively ridiculous — but he was too busy silently losing his mind.

“Eagle Vision comes from them?!” Desmond blurted out, and then the connection he’d been trying to make finally snapped into place and he immediately felt like an idiot. Juno had said something like that!

A hundred years I might speak and still you would not know us. You with five senses. Us with six. The one we kept from you. To be safe. Now, you can never know. Only try. Grasp. You can see. Smell. Taste. Touch. Hear. Knowledge has been locked away.

Her strange, far-away voice was still echoing somewhere in his thoughts.

None the wiser about Desmond’s internal frustration, Clay snorted, bitter and sarcastic. “Yeah. Abstergo had a field-day with that, the files they had about it were hilariously all over the place when they first noticed the triple helix in Subject 2.”

Desmond’s mind was spinning. Going by that logic—

“It would fit very well onto what Assassin Hastings told us of the differences in strength of the Eagle Vision in different people,” Altaïr said, voicing Desmond’s thoughts before they could fully form. “If our extra sense stems from them, a higher concentration of their genes would be a cause for a more developed Vison.”

The way his Eagle Vision had seemed to only get stronger with time, always keeping pace with what his ancestors proved capable of.

Clay nodded, a series of jerky movements. “And the more of their DNA, the better they took to the Animus. And the worse they ended up. Clearer image, worse bleeds.” Coming to an abrupt stop, his bright eyes snapped to Desmond. “You can thank your lucky starts or whatever strange Precursor tech that pulled those two into your brain. With just how much you got out of Grandpa one and Grandpa two over there, without their help you would have been a vegetable a long time ago.”

The crystal-clear memories he had been inhabiting for over month, playing out for him like the most immersive movie ever made.

“That does make sense,” Ezio mused, his dark eyes thoughtful. “I wonder if our ability to manipulate the Pieces of Eden stems from the same source.”

How the Apple had felt strange and so very familiar at the same time.

Clay turned on his heel in a movement that looked strangely dance-like, the sole of his shoe grinding in the sand. “Probably. Never had the displeasure, myself.” He paused, taking a few hopping steps back the way he came, dropping his head back to look at the sky in all its drab, grey glory. “Read in Abstergo’s files that they had a theory that a higher quantity of triple helix DNA could also boost stuff like strength, speed, flexibility…” Trailing off, Sixteen’s eyes found Desmond’s wide-eyed gaze.

Six weeks to go from average fitness to what felt like peak human condition.

Desmond shot to his feet. Once there, he didn’t know what to do with himself. Going back to his fake thinking-rock didn’t feel like a good idea, his skin buzzing with the urge to move and work out some of the questions he had.

He knew that the other three were all looking at him, but he didn’t dare meet their gazes, afraid Clay’s unsympathetic bluntness would make him scream, or maybe that Ezio’s warm kindness would bring on the tears. So, for a small eternity, Desmond just stood there, hands clenched into shaking firsts at his side, head down, eyes shut.

There was a time his coworkers at Bad Weather had described him as unshakable, zen even. He’d been calm and even-tempered, a rock in the chaos and sheer drama that sometimes permeated both the staff and the regulars of the club. When someone wanted a steady person to vent to, they’d gone to Desmond.