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noficbyhalves · 7 months

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I was scrolling the Altaïr tag when I came across your wip snippet with Malik and the magic cell phone and im so curious and also just really love the way you wrote him and I'm dying to see more <3

Congrats friend on activating my single remaining spoon in order to mostly finish this scene (it would've been real nice if it did that for something useful, like cleaning the bathroom, but here we are). Have some more Malik al-Sayf, Disaster Wizard (and Altair not-yet-ibn-La'Ahad, being a Completely Different kind of disaster):

It was muscle memory more than anything that dragged Altair out of the dungeons and up the stairs. He didn't know what would have happened if he encountered anyone on the way there. By the time he got to the room, his heart was pounding so loud he could barely hear his own footsteps.

Malik's repeated trials had shown that the room only worked if it could make your thoughts into a place, but the only thought in Altair's head was MalikMalikMalik. A door appeared anyway. It occurred to him, when his hand was already on the handle, that there might have been something specific he was supposed to have asked for that he had forgotten entirely. With no other options and his heart rabbiting wildly, he pushed the door open.

The room inside was surprisingly large, and gave the impression of being half hideout, half library. There was a cot in the corner, and a long low table off to one side, positively covered in open tomes and piles of notes and diagrams. In the middle of it all was Malik, wand tucked behind his ear, scowling at a book heavy enough to be a weapon. His face was doing that twitching thing it sometimes did when he was focusing very intently. He looked gaunt, Altair realized, haggard and tired, the bags under his eyes large enough to swallow the sun. How had he not noticed earlier? The thought sunk like a stone.

[...]

Altair shoved back the hood of the cloak, trying to form a barely-adequate apology for the days-long delay. When he glanced back at Malik, the smile creeping across his face made Altair's chest ache. It softened the harsh lines of his brow and made his eyes crinkle at the corners. Not a brilliant, bright-eyed, look-at-this-shit grin, but a quiet, gentle smile. The kind of smile he associated with late nights and starry skies, the feeling that they were the only two people in the world.

Altair pulled Malik into a crushing hug, making him squawk in mild surprise, mostly to prevent himself from doing anything stupid (like kissing him on the mouth). The solid, grounding pressure of Malik's arm curling around his back was an added bonus. If Altair was struggling not to cling to him the feeling was at least mutual.

"Altair?" Malik said. Altair didn't even know how to answer. He clutched Malik tighter, hoping to communicate the tangled nest of emotions churning in his chest. Malik let him – always let him – hugging him back just as fiercely and waited for him to untangle his thoughts.

"My summer was horrible," he finally mumbled into Malik's shoulder, when the silence became unbearable.

Malik made a noise that sounded halfway between a laugh and a sob. "Really? I couldn't tell."

All of Altair's words seemed caught in his throat. I miss you. I need you. I lo- "I should've gone back with you," he croaked.

"We're not doing should'ves," Malik said, squeezing him once more before slowly pulling back. "Only way out is through, and all that rot."

The only way out had – up until that point – looked like painful, horrible death, but Altair chose not to mention that.

"Speaking of," Malik said, gesturing to the portion of the room behind Altair, "we should probably get started."

When he turned, he startled at the giant sprawling runic design taking up the other half of the space. He had no idea how he had missed it. (He knew exactly how he had missed it.) The whole thing could easily have spanned his grandfather's gilded dining table twice over, made up of swirls and eddies of finger-length runes that even creeped up the walls a good few feet. Altair had no earthly idea what most of the individual symbols meant, much less why some were chalked and some were painted and some were carved into the stone. Suddenly the exhaustion on Malik's face made a horrifying amount of sense.

"What? I- what is that?"

"Somewhere between my magnum opus and my sleep paralysis demon," Malik commented dryly. "I'm calling it a Sanctumancy Rig."

#skies au #wip #altmal #everything is fine #they are Coping (TM)#altair ibn la'ahad #malik al sayf #assassins creed #assassin's creed #i forgot those are two separate tags thanks i hate it #words that mean things

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