Subject Sixteen paced up and down, rubbing Malik's stump with his remaining hand and glaring accusingly at Desmond. His fingers worried at the cloth that covered the scarred flesh as though he was trying to reach an itch beneath the skin, and his eyes were that same cold blue once more, standing out strangely in the dark skin of Malik's face. In turn, Malik's dusty robes looked odd when framed by the slightly unreal backdrop of the Animus loading screen where they stood, about ten feet apart, Desmond still nursing a phantom wound in his stomach. "You were gone," Sixteen bit out abruptly.
"I..."
"For a week. I kept ... a tally." He giggled at some private joke.
"I was sick."
"I pictured you leaving Abstergo without me. Running away and leaving me here. To rot." He growled out the last word, and the knowledge that he couldn't come to harm whilst inside the Animus did nothing to prevent the wave of unease that curved through Desmond's abdomen.
"I didn't leave!" he snapped back defensively.
Sixteen looked up sharply and stopped. "Was it the headaches?"
"Yeah," Desmond admitted.
"Shit. Fuck. OK..." Sixteen shook his head, as though there were flies buzzing around it. "We need to get out of here, and soon. Before you die, if possible."
Desmond hesitated, remembering the conversation with Lucy and Vidic. "Listen, are you sure about ... what you said about the other subjects?"
He'd tried to ask the question casually but Sixteen was too sharp for that. He looked at Desmond searchingly, and then groaned. "Vidic," he muttered. "Vidic got to you."
"I..."
"What did he call me? Did he say I was a liar, or just crazy? Crazy, I'll bet. You'd believe that. You do believe that."
Desmond could feel the situation starting to unspool and tried to pull it together before it dissipated completely. "I already told you, I don't think you're crazy."
"So you think I'm a liar?"
"What?"
Sixteen took his hand away from the stump of his arm and began scrubbing it through Malik's black hair. "I don't blame you," he muttered. "You don't even know me, you don't..."
He stopped scratching.
"Of course."
Suddenly Desmond was staggering backwards as Sixteen vanished and reappeared immediately by his side. The other man caught him with his remaining arm and pulled him close so that they were pressed hard against each other. Desmond fought a rising wave of panic that was mixed in with something else, something that he didn't want to think about, and then Sixteen's cheek was pressed against his, beard scratching against Altaïr's clean-shaven cheek.
"Close your eyes," Sixteen murmured.
"What are you doing?"
"Nothing, unless you close your eyes."
Reluctantly, Desmond followed the instruction, lowering his eyelids until the blue haze and crackling lines of the Animus were obscured by darkness.
"No cheating."
One of Sixteen's hands was still pressed palm-down into the middle of Desmond's back, and he felt the other come up to cover his closed eyes.
Wait a minute. Two hands?
"Shhh, I'm concentrating. Try to clear your mind."
Desmond tried, but against the skin of his cheek he experienced the incredibly surreal sensation of Malik's beard drawing back into his skin, leaving only a layer of fine stubble, and the structure of his facial bones shifting and changing. It was accompanied by a strange crackling sound, like the noise the Animus made as it began to reconstruct places and people from Desmond's genetic memory.
"Almost there," Sixteen gasped in his ear, and his voice had changed as well. Before he had simply sounded like Malik, speaking in an American accent, but now there was a different pitch to it and the syllables were drawn out like the strain of bowstrings on a violin.
"What's happening?" Desmond managed at last, opening his eyes to find the hand gone from his face. He brought a hand around to tap Subject Sixteen's shoulder, and found that instead of Assassin robes his fingers were touching the dark green material of a T-shirt, a modern label just visible under the collar, and the skin beneath it was far paler than Malik's. "Sixteen, what are you...?"
The crackling noise stopped as abruptly as it had started and the other man drew away slowly, keeping one hand against Desmond's back and then sliding it around to touch his chest until they were an arm's length apart, Sixteen's fingers pressed directly over Desmond's heart as his blue eyes fixed Altaïr's face with an unbridled intensity.
Desmond stared back at him.
"This is what I look like. Really."
"You look..." He looked a lot of things. "Taller."
Sixteen gave a rich peal of laughter. He took his right hand away from Desmond's chest and held it up alongside his left one in front of him, looking at them admiringly. "Man, it feels good to have all four limbs again. Just my luck to have an ancestor who was a cripple."
Desmond looked down at Sixteen's arms and swallowed hard. The palm of his right hand was covered in shiny red patches, much like the ones Desmond himself had acquired a week ago but obviously much more severe. His fingernails had been torn or bitten back so far that they were nothing but ragged half-moons buried in sore-looking flesh and his forearms were criss-crossed with wounds that seemed to have been made by teeth, nails (while he still had them) and the sharp edges of furniture. A lot of them seemed to have partially healed over, only to be opened up again. It wasn't a pretty sight.
Sixteen looked up to find Desmond staring and gave him a hollow grin. "They wouldn't give me any paint."
"That's pretty resourceful of you," Desmond said. He had no idea if the flippant remark was sufficient in concealing the emotions of horror and pity that threatened to overwhelm him when he looked at those injuries. These were not created by the sharpness of a razorblade or a scalpel. They were the result of trauma from blunt edges and tearing and must have been agonising, created in a state of pain and confusion that Desmond couldn't even begin to imagine. The sight of them made him want to cry and embrace Sixteen and kill Warren Vidic and every Templar who ever considered himself entitled to turn a human being into something like this, all at the same time.
"They'll never clean it off the walls, not all of it," Sixteen purred, stroking a bite mark meditatively. "Blood sticks."
"I know."
Sixteen raised an eyebrow that was a slightly darker shade of blonde than the hair on his head.
"Assassin, remember?"
"But you've never really killed anybody." It was a statement, not a question, and Desmond was a little taken aback.
"How do you know that?"
"I can tell," Sixteen crooned, running his eyes over Altaïr's face. "You don't wear him well. There's something about Altaïr that doesn't quite fit you. He was a killer, you're not."
For some reason Desmond found himself offended by the statement. "You don't know me."
"And you don't know me, which is why I'm showing you this. I need you to trust me, Seventeen." Sixteen took a step closer to him, anxiety breaking through the amused condescendence of his expression.
"So showing me your face is supposed to make me trust you?"
"Did it work, Subject Seventeen?" Sixteen was so close now that Desmond could count the individual flecks of grey in his irises, could feel an aura radiating from his body like heat, and could hear the low crackle of data flowing beneath his skin and holding him together.
"No," Desmond replied, trying to keep his voice under control. "I don't trust you."
Sixteen's face twisted.
"But you're all I've got."
The snarl turned into a Cheshire Cat grin and Sixteen stepped away a little, dropping his gaze to stare at Altaïr's boots before raking it back up his body. "I wonder what you really look like," he murmured.
"I could give you a description," Desmond began, but Sixteen waved a hand at him dismissively.
"Don't bother."
"But..." Desmond shook his head in frustration. "You don't know anything about me. You don't know my name, what I look like ... Hell, you don't even know if I'm a man or a woman."
"You're a man."
"Oh? You can tell?"
"I can tell. You want to know why I'm so adamant about not knowing your name or what you look like, Seventeen? Before I met you, I'd lost all interest in escaping from Abstergo. There was plenty of stuff that I wanted to know, and every bit of it was locked away somewhere inside the Animus. I was about ready to have them put me into a coma so I could stay here permanently." He paused for a moment, running a hand backwards through the dark blonde strands of his hair whilst keeping his gaze fixed on Altaïr's face with an almost rabid fascination. "Now I have another unanswered question. You."
Desmond felt some phantom muscle contort inside his chest. It was hard to imagine anyone considering him to be so interesting that the prospect of finding out more about him was a reason to live. He opened his mouth to respond, but when he met Sixteen's gaze he suddenly realised that he had no idea what to say.
Then the sky, such as it was, fractured.
There was a sensation like an earthquake and both men tumbled onto the surface of the Animus, which had turned from its usual blue to a deep black shot through with red scars.
"-anaged to bypass the firewalls he set up..." Desmond heard Lucy's voice echoing around them and he met Sixteen's panicked gaze as the other man struggled to find his feet again.
"Excellent." That was Vidic, triumphant. "Your little game is over, Mr Kaczmarek."
Sixteen's face set in a hard, angry line. Desmond, who was on his feet again, reached out and took the other man by the hand, pulling him up.
"Kaczmarek?" he repeated, and Sixteen shrugged in defeat.
"I think you've wasted enough of our time as well, Mr Miles," Vidic added.
Desmond heard a sharp intake of breath and felt Kaczmarek's fingers tighten painfully on his hand, saw his eyes widen in shock and then anger as he stared disbelievingly at Desmond.
"Miles?" he echoed, the last letter coming out as a hiss.
"Yeah, that's my..."
"William Miles?"
Desmond gaped.
"You son of a bitch!"
Any protests he had planned to make were lost as Kaczmarek's hands whipped up and latched fiercely around Desmond's throat, bearing them both to the ground once more. Desmond kicked out and struggled but Kaczmarek was impossibly strong and the last sensation Desmond felt before Lucy pulled him out of the Animus was the sickening crack of Altaïr's neck snapping under the pressure of those fingers.
