Clay Kaczmarek woke with the sunrise, slowly. He didn't realise he was alone in the bed until he heard someone knocking on the door.

"Desmond?" he mumbled, sitting up and groping on the floor for his boxers. He pulled them on and had just climbed out of bed when the door opened and William Miles grew tired of knocking and came in.

It must have looked bad, based on Miles' face as he took in the room, and afterwards Clay imagined that his own expression must have been extremely guilty. Standing near-naked in Desmond's room, the sheets crumpled, and the smell of stale sweat lingering in the air. He hadn't been able to get his hair properly tidy since he'd taken over this body so he could only imagine what kind of state it must have been in right then. William must have long since guessed that there was something more than friendship between Desmond and Clay, but this probably wasn't how it should have been confirmed for him.

Struggling to maintain a neutral air, William asked, "Where is Desmond?"

"I don't know. He was gone when I woke up."

He didn't think about the words until they were out of his mouth. William's mouth set in a hard line. Clay realised that this wasn't going to be an easy day.

"Clay? Jesus, man, put the gun down!" Desmond cried, his hands raised defensively. Clay took a step closer, keeping the gun trained on Desmond's midsection, and Desmond unconsciously took a step back.

"I didn't come here to kill you, Desmond, but I swear to god if you try to run again I'll shoot you in the leg."

This is bad, Desmond thought to himself. Clay didn't look broken down or ill like he had right before he died. His hair was shorter now than the last time Desmond had seen him, as though he'd taken a set of clippers to it at some point, and his eyes were trained on Desmond's face with an eerie calm. He was insane, not with the babbling lunacy of before but a cold madness now, a madness that could kill.

"I'm not going to run," Desmond said slowly, keeping his hands raised. He stepped away from the door and walked around to the back of the storeroom, Clay moving around with him until he stood between Desmond and the only exit.

Clay surveyed him analytically. The eyes of the First Civilisation body he now inhabited were brown but there was no warmth in them, and Desmond thought for a moment he could see the pale blue of Clay's real eyes gleaming through them. His next words were soft, but not gentle. "But you did run, Desmond."

Keeping his hands up in a placating manner, Desmond consented. "I know. I know I ran. I'm sorry, Clay, I..."

"Don't apologise, Desmond. I should thank you. I didn't realise until you'd gone just how much you were protecting me from the others. Then, when you left..." He left the sentence trailing, waiting for Desmond to follow it to its logical conclusion.

Desmond felt the truth wash over him in an unpleasant wave. "Oh no," he murmured. "They blamed you."

Clay stared down at the formica wood-pattern of the table. "I told you a thousand times already," he growled. "He didn't tell me where he was going. I didn't do anything to him. I'm not a Templar."

"Fact is, we don't know what you are," William Miles said. He was leaning against the wall, staring at Clay coolly. "You claim to be Clay Kaczmarek, but Kaczmarek is dead. He died after offering the Templars unlimited access to his DNA, after giving them unlimited opportunities to study his behaviour-"

"That was the mission!" Clay screamed, finally losing control. He strained at the cuffs which bound his hands behind his back. "That was the mission that you gave me!"

"It would have easy," William Miles continued, raising his voice to be heard over Clay. "It would have been easy for them to create an artificial intelligence program designed to simulate the image and behaviour of Clay Kaczmarek. A virus, which infected Desmond Miles before he escaped Abstergo. A virus with the power to influence his actions, perhaps even with enough power to force him to kill Lucy Stillman and induce a coma..."

"You have no evidence for this, this is wild speculation!"

"And yet you claim to be a ghost, capable of possessing other living bodies. Where's your evidence to back that up?"

He was a cold bastard, and Clay knew that he had to find a way to get to him. If William Miles got his way, Clay would be tortured for information, perhaps even executed as a spy. He glanced at the other Master Assassin in the room, who was sipping coffee nonchalantly from a polystyrene cup. His name was Michael Halliwell, one of the older Masters who had a cover job working for the FBI. It made him good at situations like this, and it also meant that he would recognise the signs of an investigating officer losing his objectivity.

"You want evidence, Miles?" he asked, slowly turning his gaze back towards Desmond's father. "Before Desmond left, he told me that he loved me. So according to you, your son is in love with a computer program..." He grinned evilly. "Or maybe he just really liked the way I fucked him."

William looked up at him sharply. He didn't lash out with his fists, though Clay could see in his eyes how much he wanted to, but Halliwell saw his mask crack and Clay knew it was over. William Miles left the room and didn't come back.

"Did you mean it?" Clay demanded, still keeping one finger poised on the trigger of the gun. Desmond could have sworn he heard the creaking of the mechanism inside it. He was millimetres away from death, and he knew what Clay was asking.

He tried to play dumb anyway. "Did I mean wh-"

"You know what," Clay interrupted, raising the gun slightly. "Did you mean it, or were you just saying it because I had my dick inside you?" He said it sarcastically, but Desmond thought he saw a shadow of emotion pass over his face and realised that Clay hadn't descended all the way into madness.

Desmond looked him in the eye. "I meant it," he replied truthfully, his words soft and sincere.

It clearly hadn't been what Clay wanted to hear. His face contorted and the gun shook in his hand a little.

"Then why?"

Clay sat on Desmond's old bed, the bed where they'd slept together just a few nights ago. Without warning he'd been released by the Assassins, but no one had told him why he was suddenly free of suspicion. William Miles had already left, gone up to Canada for some reason, and none of the other Assassins would even look him in the eye, let alone talk to him.

It was agony. Was Desmond dead? Had they found his body? Had Abstergo sent a ransom note? No one would answer his questions. Most of Desmond's clothes were gone, along with his duffel bag. What did that mean?

Someone at the door cleared their throat. Clay looked up to find Shaun leaning against the doorframe.

"Alright, mate?" he asked awkwardly.

"Since when am I your ... mate?" Clay asked bluntly. He'd once 'accidentally' taken over Desmond's body and attempted to throttle Shaun. You could say that they'd got off to a rocky start.

Shaun rolled his eyes and became his usual abrasive self. "Alright, so I think you're a twat, but I know that no one will tell you what's going on. They didn't want me telling you either, but you meant a lot to Desmond and I think you deserve to know."

"Know what?"

Shaun took a deep breath. "We got a call from Desmond's mother this morning. Apparently he called her to play catch-up, and asked her to pass on a message that he was OK. He hasn't been kidnapped, he's just run off. Again." He said the last part scathingly, but Clay barely heard him. There was a pressure building up in his chest, a roaring in his ears, and it was all too horribly familiar.

To keep himself thinking straight, Desmond decided to take it for granted that Clay wasn't going to shoot him. If he was proved wrong ... well, at least he wouldn't get much of a chance to regret it. He lowered his hands and began to explain.

"You don't know what it was like. At least you chose to join the Assassins. For me, it was like they'd decided from birth who I was going to be, what I was meant to do, and every time I tried to take control of my own destiny I got ... slapped down. Like I was messing it all up. That was why I ran away the first time. I just got sick of being a ... a thing. I wanted to be more than just the tail end of an ancestry."

Clay shook his head angrily, impatiently. "That's not what I asked."

"I know, I'm getting there." Desmond took a deep breath, forcing himself to dredge up the memories that he'd spent months trying to bury. "After what happened ... No one criticised me. No one told me I'd messed up, even though thousands of people were dead. My father, Rebecca, Shaun ... They were upset, yeah, but they looked at me with this ... pride." He spat the word out in disgust. "Everyone was suddenly all ready to pat me on the back for fulfilling my destiny. For becoming a mass murderer." He looked up at Clay, rife with confusion and anger. "Isn't that sick?"

Clay stared back at him mercilessly. "What about me?" he asked. "Did I look at you with pride?"

No. He hadn't looked at him with pride. The way Clay had looked at him had been much, much worse. Desmond had grabbed him and kissed him in the hope that Clay would fuck him roughly and hurt him, deliver the pain and punishment he so badly needed to feel. Instead they had crossed a line together with the worst possible timing; Desmond had realised that he was in love precisely when he needed more than ever to be hated.

He couldn't say any of that, so instead he skipped ahead in the story. "You should probably know. After I left I went to New York, and then to Jersey City. When I was in Jersey..." Desmond averted his gaze. If Clay shot him, he didn't want to see the bullet coming. "I paid some guy..."

"His name was Mikey Sanchez."

Desmond looked back at Clay, but the other man's face was like stone. He took in Desmond's expression and drew the obvious conclusion from it.

"You didn't even stop to find out his name, did you? It took me a while to find you, Desmond, and I had to track you every step of the way."

The kid scratched at the inside of his elbow and looked at Clay twitchily. "I don't talk about my clients. That's classified information." He eyed Clay's clothes, trying to get an idea of how much money his interrogator might have. "Unless you wanna pay me for it."

Clay took a step forward, backing the kid against the brick wall of the side alley. He pressed one hand against the brickwork to block any chance of escape, and his eyes glittered dangerously. "I'm not paying you," he said simply.

Mikey Sanchez gave in. Nothing was worth this hassle. "Fine. I found him all curled up in an alley and I helped him back to his hotel. Like a Good Samaritan. Then he said he'd give me sixty bucks if I let him fuck me, and I wasn't about to turn it down." Mikey coughed, turned his head, and spat slightly bloody phlegm onto the asphalt. "Shoulda charged him more, it was pretty brutal. I didn't even get off."

Clay took his hand away from the wall slowly, not looking the kid in the eye. "Did he say where he was going?" he asked quietly.

Sensing the danger in the air, Mikey decided to be as helpful as possible. "No, but there was a road map for Greensboro on the table."

Desmond was leaning back against some shelves now, staring up at the ceiling, bathing masochistically in the pain of the memory. "After we were done," he said dreamily. "The guy looked at me with this ... this total fucking disdain. Dismissal. Like I was nothing to him, less than nothing." Desmond gave a horrible, choked laugh. "It felt so goddamn good to be looked at like that. It was exactly what I needed, you know?"

It seemed that Clay did know, for that was how he was looking at Desmond now. With total fucking disdain. He wasn't even bothering to point the gun any more, and the arm holding it was limp at his side.

Desmond didn't care. He felt a sudden urge to drive Clay further away from him, to feed the fire of his hate.

"I killed Arthur," he bit out. "I killed that little baby, Clay. I f-felt ... I felt each one of them go as I fed them to the shield and Arthur ... he w-wasn't even scared. He saw the light ... he must have thought I was waking him up."

This wasn't going to plan. Clay wasn't looking at him with disgust or hatred. The cold neutrality of his expression was finally fading, but he was looking at Desmond with ... pity. Not just pity but...

"I killed Arthur!" Desmond repeated, screaming now. He darted forward and grabbed Clay's hand, the one holding the gun, and lifted the weapon up so that it was pressed against his chest, directly over his heart. Desmond closed his fingers over Clay's, trying to put enough pressure on the trigger to fire.

"So shoot me then!" he hissed. "Shoot me, Clay! Avenge them."

"Ezio?"

Both of them froze. It was Harry, obviously coming to investigate the commotion. He had reached the corridor outside and was getting closer by the second. Clay pulled his hand away from Desmond and stared at him for a moment before tucking the weapon into a holster under his jacket.

"You make me fucking sick, Miles," he said quietly. Then he left, knocking into Harry as he passed through the door. The older man stared at him as he passed, didn't try to stop him. He was far more concerned with Desmond, who was standing in the middle of the storeroom and staring at the door like a man staring into the gates of hell.