Chapter Text
The first thing Desmond notices isn’t the screaming, or the crying, or the bodies lying cold at the bottoms of six cages — it’s the music.
Something about it is all wrong, the way it drifts and pierces from reality to reality like temptation tied to a string. It isn’t off-key or broken, but strangely timed, out of place, and so utterly curious. Calliope-bright, imperfect, and tinny: it echoes through the dark like a memory someone else must have had first. Usually, Desmond Miles is not this curious of a man, but for the first time, he allows himself to be lured. Snake to charmer, mouse to trap.
A second ago, he’d been… somewhere else.
Not a place, exactly. The Grey never really was. It stretched and folded and whispered in half-formed probabilities, in paths not taken and outcomes still arguing with and folding over each other. He’d been following one of those threads, a thin one.
And now:
Now, all he sees is canvas. Crimson.
The music stops abruptly, without any rhyme or reason. Everything morphs, probabilities stringing themselves together from the fragmented pieces, a million blurs of light and motion, until suddenly it all makes sense. Cages. Blood. The dingy fabric of argyle patterns.
“Please! Please, no, stop!”
And before he can realize where he is or what he’s doing, Desmond is running. His body remembers things his mind doesn’t have the time to process: angles, exits, weight distribution, the subtle give of warped floorboards beneath the thin soles of his shoes. The space bends around him in pieces: narrow corridors dressed up in peeling paint, bright colors dulled by grime and something much darker smeared into the seams. The air is thick. Wet. It clings to the back of his throat like something almost alive.
The music is long gone, but the echo of it lingers, wrong in a way he can’t quite name.
“Please—!” The voice cuts off into a choked sound.
Desmond turns sharply, shoulder grazing over the canvas stretched too tight over splintered wood. A flap hangs half-open ahead, light spilling through in jaundiced gold. Things materialize right before his eyes, the picture fading more and more into view, until it’s as clear as day. He slows. Not out of hesitation, but because he’s suddenly sure that whatever is beyond that curtain is watching him back.
It prickles along his spine, that familiar shift, and the world tilts. But Eagle Vision blooms and everything fractures into truth; color drains until only intent remains.
There: five shapes.
No. Six.
Clustered, collapsed inward, starving.
Desmond’s breath slows. It’s not from fear — never from fear — but it does have something to do with the quiet recalibration that comes with understanding. The world sharpens around him, each detail slotting neatly into place as if it had always belonged there. And he can’t shake the feeling from before: this is wrong. And it isn’t in the way that The Grey is wrong, in the way the probabilities stutter and rewrite themselves mid-thought. No, these things are wrong and real. Flesh and bone and something older threaded through both.
Five bodies and one that hardly even counts: too small, too still.
Is she… alive?
Yes, but barely. They’re all hardly holding on.
The others are arranged around her, having shot through the steel bars of their own enclosures, but it’s tighter than protection. Hungrier. One of them is shaking. Another won’t look. And at the center, just above the little one—
The tallest in green. As still as a blade held midair. Watching.
He’s moving again, faster than before, until his hands grip the rusted steel of their enclosure. He pulls. Once, twice, until just the sound alone is enough to startle the figures inside. Screech. They scatter like rats, leaving the smallest still in the middle, each of their individual backs now pressed against the outer edges. Some of them huddle, others fold inward on themselves, awaiting some kind of punishment, surely.
They’re so thin, these creatures. Even the taller figures are all sunken in, hollowed out until only the ugly frames of ruin and bone remain.
“Hungry?” Desmond tries.
The figures pause, and then, by the tiniest measurement, inch ever so slightly closer.
Not toward him. Toward the space between. Toward the idea of food.
Desmond watches the shift happen in real time, the way restraint frays at the edges, the way instinct begins to bleed through the cracks. It’s not aggression, it’s worse. It’s need.
His grip tightens once against the rusted bars.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “Thought so.”