Ezio spends a lot of time searching out the apple over the next couple of years. Sometimes he has people with him, and sometimes he's alone. Sometimes Desmond shows up in his head or by his side, and those days are unusually fun, because there's no point hiding from the man in his head. To everyone else, he needs to be an example. But with Desmond, he can be a little more himself and a little less just someone's mentor.

It's not always easy to share his head with someone else. Sometimes they argue- like on the day Ezio they finally have the information they need to go after the apple.

"I think I've spent most of my life tracking this thing," Ezio complains to Desmond.

"Yep," Desmond says. His voice is distracted inside Ezio's head, and the older assassin frowns.

"What's the matter?"

"I'm worried about the apple," Desmond says. "Getting it back is-" he hesitates. "I mean, it's good, obviously. It would be worse if it stayed in templar hands. But the last apple caused a lot of trouble. Nobody understands what it does, or how, or why."

"It's been sitting around for a couple years and nothing's gone wrong yet," Ezio points out.

"Maybe because it wasn't around the right DNA," says Desmond.

"Don't be so worried about it," Ezio says. He's nearly twenty years older than Desmond, but there are times when he feels like the less mature one. Or at least the one less prone to worrying. In his time as an assassin, Ezio has learned that there's a time for making plans, and a time when the only choice is to go in hoping for the best. So while he understands that the apple holds more mysteries than answers, he can live with not knowing.

And he's proved right. Sort of. Over the next four years, plenty of things go wrong- Cesare Borgia flees Rome, and Ezio doesn't manage to track him down to Spain until 1507. But the apple causes no problems, and does nothing more than what is asked of it. Gradually, both Ezio and Desmond relax. In 1506, Ezio hides it away, in a place he hopes the templars will never find.

Desmond isn't there to see it, which Ezio decides is strange, because he's gotten used to Desmond's near constant presence for most of the important things in his life. It's almost gotten to the point that he can guess when something big is about to happen, because Desmond usually isn't there for the small things in his life. And that goes doubly for anything connected to the apple. When he asks about it later, Desmond says their sync rate isn't high enough- Ezio puts on his normal act of pretending to understand what Desmond's talking about when future technology comes up, and doesn't mention it again.

With the apple hidden away, and Rome recovered from templar control, Ezio starts to think about where he's going next- it's not in his nature to stay still for long, and he's growing restless. Desmond hasn't been around for a while, and Ezio starts to worry that he's run out of memories important enough for Desmond to visit. He knows the twenty first century assassins are facing something important, and that they're working against a tight time limit. He knows that there are probably more important things on Desmond's mind than visiting. It still feels strange to be on his own after all this time, though.

-/-

I figured I should probably say something about why I'm skipping over most of the main plot of the games in this story. I probably should have said something earlier, but hey, better late than never. So basically there's two reasons- first, I'm too lazy to actually look up what happens in all the sequences, and second, because the thing that makes this fun to write for me is the juxtaposition of the modern world and the older assassins, and almost all of the modern day bits between the end of AC (where this story picks up) and the end of AC:B (where we are now) have been clustered at the beginnings and ends of the games. This may or may not change as the story goes on, because AC:R has no modern bits at all, just animus island while Desmond's in a coma, AC3 has modern bits at random in the middle, and ACIV has no Desmond at all.

TL;DR: modern day stuff is cooler than old stuff, I like having an excuse to use the word juxtaposition in a sentence