For your consideration: mongoose!Desmond. They're small, cute, stealthy, and fully down to throw hands qiwth a lion if need be. Hides in the hood of whichever Assassin he's accompanying at the time and jump out for attack at the most unexpected moment. Alternatively, Altair gets reincarnated in modern time as Desmond's mongoose, and just takes down the whole Abstergo facility when they dare to kidnap Desmond.
It was illegal to keep a mongoose as a pet in the United States.
That was one of the few laws that Desmond knew he was deliberately breaking.
It wasn’t like he had planned to do it from the start.
It had been a strangely freezing morning. Desmond was walking back to his apartment after a grueling 2 hours overtime that he was sure his boss wouldn’t include in his paycheck, citing some shit like “it’s because you’re too damn pretty that those drunks tried to beat each other up for your ass, Derek.” and tell him that it’s only right that he be the one to clean up the mess those two had done after hearing last call.
If he didn’t knew that his boss had the sex drive of a corpse and liked the company of dogs more than people, he would have considered his words as sexual harassment instead of the usual way his boss spoke.
But Desmond knew him long enough and has already made plans to be 2 hours late for his next shift. He’s going to tell his boss that “you don’t need to pay me for my 2 hours overtime since I deducted it from this shift” and his boss wouldn’t have the grounds to dock his pay.
Yes.
It was the ‘perfect’ revenge for his stingy rude boss.
Desmond had just rounded the corner that would lead to the back of his apartment, preferring to enter through the back than the front due to both the stairs being nearer there and also because the back door was less conspicuous.
Years away from the Farm and he still held the paranoia trained into him.
God, he was pathetic.
At that moment, Desmond looked up as he sighed.
And got smacked by some kind of falling fur.
He named the mongoose Altaïr.
To be more exact… the mongoose named himself, using the letter magnets Desmond placed on his small ref. There was only one ‘A’ so the mongoose had to drag the ‘A’ at the start of the name to the empty space between T and I repeatedly. He even went as far as use the ‘:’ magnet to form those two dots above the ‘I’.
Desmond had to look up on his phone how to properly pronounce his name.
Desmond had never had a pet nor did he even know that Altaïr was a mongoose.
He had assumed that Altaïr was some kind of really intelligent pet that someone in his apartment stole from some rich family or something. (No one in this apartment complex would have the money to buy an intelligent pet like Altaïr)
He tried to ask Altaïr who his masters are or if we can remember where he was taken from.
The bland unimpressed look Altaïr gave him made Desmond realize two things:
(1) he was being stupid asking a complicated question to Altaïr regardless of how smart he was and
(2) Altaïr was an asshole
That was fine by Desmond to be perfectly honest.
Altaïr stayed in his apartment and did his own hunting for food. He seemed to only slip inside the small opening on the window that Desmond purposely left for him whenever he wanted to relax or… use Desmond’s computer.
… not that Desmond saw Altaïr use it.
He just had a feeling that Altaïr was using his old wheezing whenever it was turned on laptop that he got for cheap from his bootlegged DVD dealer at the back of the nearest Seven Eleven from his apartment.
Desmond could probably check if Altaïr was truly using it by checking the browser history or something but…
Ignorance was bliss.
Desmond really didn’t want to find out just how scarily smart Altaïr was and suffer the consequences.
So really…
When the power was cut in the Abstergo facility where he was being held, he didn’t immediately think of Altaïr.
Honestly, he had this weird feeling that his ‘roommate’ Altaïr might be his ancestor Altaïr but that was crazy talk.
So he ignored that gut feeling.
Then Vidic got a call from someone who told him that someone had locked down the security room AND all the exits.
Then everything went silent.
He was still strapped in the Animus. He didn’t even know that the Animus had cuffs that could slide around his wrists and ankles (and fucking neck, what the fuck, Vidic) until Vidic pushed something in the Animus itself the moment the blackout happened and Desmond was still groggy from being forcibly kicked out of the Animus.
He heard Lucy whisper that someone was using the emergency sleeping gas and it was spreading throughout the facility.
Desmond was just going “???” because who the fuck added sleeping gas in their goddamn building as an ‘emergency’???
Then…
The laptop on Vidic’s station started making this beeping sound and Vidic walked towards it.
He had a moment to say that someone had taken over their computers (Desmond thought they were having a blackout??? What the ever living fuck was happening???) before the computer exploded and the shards from his monitor hit Vidic on the face and neck.
Desmond wasn’t sure if it was life threatening or not but Lucy was panicking as she rushed towards him.
And Desmond heard the soft sound of something creaking. He looked at where the sound came from and noticed the vent on the floor was now open.
And Altaïr the freakishly intelligent mongoose quietly scampered towards the Animus, looking over Desmond for a moment before scuttling towards the section of the Animus where-
The cuffs keeping Desmond still slid off and Desmond sat up.
They both stared at each other.
And Desmond finally sighed as he admitted, “Okay… you’re no ordinary animal, are you?”
Altaïr gave him the same bland unimpressed expression he had given him all those years ago.
And Desmond realized that it looked exactly how his ancestor would look whenever he heard something stupid from one of the novices.
Well…
Shit.
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