December 6th 2012

'Heh.'

Desmond blinked and looked over at Clay in surprise, temporarily distracted from the agitation of being stuck at a red traffic light. 'What's funny?' he asked.

Clay pointed out of the window at a fairly modern-looking leisure centre on the other side of the road. 'I built that,' he explained, sounding a little amazed.

Desmond raised his eyebrows. 'Wow. Must have taken you a while.'

Clay laughed. 'Not the whole thing. I worked construction on weekends while I was in high school, and that was one of the first projects I worked on. That would have been around ... the late nineties. After we dug out the swimming pool we used to use it as a kind of breakroom. Eat our lunch in there, play games of soccer.' His eyes roved over the building, lost in memory. 'One time, when it was nearly finished, I took a tumble off the roof and twisted my ankle. Not so much a leap of faith as a fall of stupidity.'

A horn blasted angrily through the air, making them both jump, and Desmond realised he had been sitting at a green traffic light for a few seconds. He hurredly struggled to put the van into the right gear and took off again with a slight screech of tyres.

'Sorry,' Clay said distantly. 'Didn't mean to distract you. It's just weird, being back here.'

Following his outburst a couple of days ago, Clay had been even more closed-off and flippant than usual, but now that the initial tension had eased away he was seeming a lot more relaxed and open around Desmond. He'd even talked a bit about his childhood, described the strained relationship he'd had with his father and the drunken note his mother had scribbled to him before she had left for good. He had made brief allusions to a therapist but quickly gone tight-lipped when Desmond had tried to get further details out of him with regards to this.

'Do you think your dad will be OK with both of us staying?' he asked tentatively. 'I mean, you haven't seen him in a while.'

'If it wasn't for me he wouldn't have been able to pay off the mortgage on the house. It's my home as much as it is his,' Clay replied, though not without a trace of uncertainty. 'Besides, he's not all that bad. He can be kind of ... abrasive, but that's just a generational thing. His dad - my grandpa - used to beat him with a leather belt when he was a kid, but Dad never laid a hand on me.' Now he spoke thoughtfully, introspectively, as though he were on a psychiatrist's couch once more. 'I sometimes think that's the only way to get an idea of what someone's really like, by looking at how he treats people who are weaker than him. Dad might have bossed me about, but he never hit me.'

Desmond shifted uncomfortably in his seat, suddenly feeling as though the scar on his mouth was itching. 'How much farther is it?' he asked, by way of changing the subject.

'About a couple more miles, on the outskirts of town. But we shouldn't stop right outside my house in case the Templars are looking for this van.' He pointed at a road sign up ahead. 'Look, there's an underground parking garage coming up on the left. We could leave the van there and walk the rest of the way.'

Thankfully the garage had an automated ticketing machine, and was far enough outside of the town that there were very few people around. Desmond parked the van - a little sloppily, but it would do - and turned the engine off, relieved to be away from open air at last. He watched in the wing mirror as a middle-aged women put shopping bags in the trunk of her car whilst talking on her cell phone and frowned, the niggling worry that had been eating at him rearing its head again.

'We can come back for the research materials later, once we're settled in,' Clay mused. 'There's a basement that we could work out of.'

'Yeah,' Desmond affirmed unenthusiastically.

'Don't get too excited about it,' Clay joked, but his levity soon dissipated at the look on Desmond's face. 'What's the matter?'

There was little point in lying now, and it would be unfair to do so considering that Desmond had insisted on Clay being honest with him. He rubbed at his forehead awkwardly and then sighed, resting his head back against the seat. 'It's just that ... sometimes I wonder whether we're doing the right thing.'

Clay waited for Desmond to continue and, when he didn't, prompted, 'You're going to have to be more specific. Are you talking about the parking spot...'

'I mean this whole "saving the world" jag.'

Clay raised his eyebrows as Desmond's hands fell back into his lap. 'Wow. It must be serious if you're using air quotes. You think there's something wrong with saving the world?'

'Saving it from what?'' Desmond burst out, grabbing an old newspaper from behind the seat and waving it pointedly. 'From world peace? From a complete end to all crime? From people being totally cured of drug addiction. From record low rates of STDs? I mean, from everything I've ever been told about the Templars I didn't exactly expect their version of world domination to be this ... utopian.'

Ckay was quiet for a few moments, and Desmond galnced over nervously to find that his friend was staring straight ahead, his guard obviously back up. At last, Clay responded, 'None of it is by choice, though, is it? Democracy and liberty are dead now, even if people still have the illusion of them.'

'Maybe it's better this way,' Desmond suggested daringly. He couldn't tell if he was just playing devil's advocate to test Clay's reactions, or if this was really how he felt. 'I mean, let's face it - human beings make stupid-ass decisions every single day. Give the average person nine right choices and one wrong choice, and nine times out of ten he'll pick the wrong choice out of pure spite. People are selfish, and short-sighted and ... and idiotic. Look at us!' He gestured at Clay, then at himself. 'Everything in the world is getting better and we're doing our level best to destroy it all, just because of our own personal philosophy. Hell, it's not even my personal philosophy, it's my dad's.' He pressed his lips together defiantly, breathing through his nose and staring at Clay, waiting for a response.

Clay simply looked weary. 'What do you want from me, Desmond?' he asked. 'Do you want me to remind you why we're doing this? Do you want me make a case for fighting the Templars?'

'Yeah, I would. That's what I'd like you to do.'

'Well I'm not going to,' Clay stated bluntly, a rising inflection in his voice hinting at frustration bubbling beneath the surface. 'You know why we're doing this, Desmond, and you're either in with both feet or you're out altogether. We barely had a snowball's chance in hell at beating the Templars when we were fully dedicated to it, and if you start wavering then we might as well not bother at all.' His piercing gaze was in full effect now, and Desmond felt an urge to cower away from it. 'What it comes down to is this: do you trust Alan Rikkin with the fate of every human on the planet? Can we rely on Templar altruism to keep everything from going to shit once the honeymoon period is over?'

Desmond sighed, half in despair and half in relief. 'Thanks,' he said sincerely. 'That's what I needed to hear.'

'So we're doing this?'

I guess, was what Desmond wanted to say. But that wasn't a very "in-with-both-feet" reply so instead he agreed, 'We're doing this.'

'Good.'

Desmond glanced up nervously at the security cameras as they left the van and made their way back to the street, wishing that he had thought to wear his hooded jacket for this excursion. Clay, by contrast, was too absorbed with the return to his home town to express much discomfort. He looked around at grocery stores and parks as they passed them, clearly lost in his own thoughts.

'Is it weird, being back here?' Desmond asked. 'How long has it been?'

'Four years, practically to the day. Last time I visited was at Christmas and it was ... awkward.' Clay pulled a face but didn't elaborate on what had made the trip so unpleasant. 'Last time I spoke to my dad must have been over two years ago, on the phone.'

'He's probably been worried about you.'

'Mmm.' Clay was still looking around. 'My old elementary school is coming up on the left,' he announced. 'My dad said he was working on an extension for it a while ago. It'll be cool to see what it looks like now.' He hesitated, and glanced over at Desmond almost bashfully.

'What is it?' Desmond prompted, after they had gone several paces in silence.

'Desmond, look...' Clay swallowed nervously. 'You said that if there was anything I needed to get off my chest, anything I needed to tell you, then I should just do it.'

'Yeah, of course.' Desmond realised that he probably sounded a little too eager, but it was only because he did not want to end up having to rescue Clay from another delusional rampage, or come back to the van one day to find him bleeding out on the ground.

Clay have a short nod, and stopped walking, taking hold of Desmond's shoulder to still him. He took a deep breath, turning so that he and Desmond were face to face, lifted his eyes and got as far as, 'I wanted to tell you...' before his eyes lost focus and he stiffened in sudden fear.

Presuming it was the bleeding effect taking hold, Desmond raised a hand and clicked his fingers in front of Clay's face. 'Come on, stay with me. It's 2012...'

'No, I know,' Clay interrupted huskily, his eyes still fixed at a point somewhere over Desmond's shoulder. He jerked his chin almost imperceptibly and said, 'Look, behind you.'

With a growing sense of unease, Desmond turned slowly on the spot to look in the direction that Clay had indicated, and what he saw was so creepy that he could have sworn he felt his balls try to climb up inside his body. 'Oh, Christ,' he muttered, not daring to speak to loudly. 'What the fuck?'

They had been passing Clay's old elementary school, green-painted railings rising up over their heads to divide the playground from the sidewalk. It must have been the lunchbreak, because it seemed as though half the school - children of all ages between six and eleven, and at least a couple of hundred of them in total - were outside. There was a thud-thud-thud-thudthudthud sound as a forgotten basketball bounced and then rolled away across the asphalt, and the slapping of a jump-rope against the ground had stopped abruptly. An eerie silence had fallen across the entire street where there should have been the sound of kids laughing and screeching as they made the most of their hour of freedom.

None of them were playing or talking. They were all standing bolt upright - a sea of young faces all looking in the same direction. Every single child in the playground was staring at Clay and Desmond with cold, hard eyes.

'Uh, you ever see that movie Village of the Damned?' Clay whispered in a choked voice.

Desmond swallowed hard, not daring to reply at first. 'We should ... we need to get out of here,' he murmured, taking a couple of steps to continue in the direction they'd been heading. 'We need to move.'

'Uh-huh,' Clay agreed, hurrying along the street next to Desmond without taking his eyes off the army of children. 'Let's ... oh, fuck!' he groaned.

A glance back at the playground gave a swift explanation for the terror-struck curse. As Clay and Desmond moved up the street, the children's heads swivelled on their necks with horrible uniformity, keeping the two men always firmly in their gaze. Desmond felt hairs rising on the back of his neck and sped up.

Finally, someone moved out of sync. A tow-headed boy, no older than seven, stooped slowly to the ground and picked up a stray rock, weighing it in his palm as he straightened up again.

'Run,' Desmond whispered urgently. 'Run.'

He shoved Clay ahead of him and they both took off at a sprint. Just before they reached the end of the railings, Desmond heard something whistle past his head and collide with a resounding clang against a nearby lamp-post.

The railings ended and they stumbled into the shade of a tall line of shrubbery outside someone's front garden. Once they were out of sight, almost instantaneously, they heard the sound of children's voices and boisterous activity from the school start up again as though it had never stopped. Desmond could feel his entire body shaking and wondered if he was experiencing a panic attack, which seemed ludicrous after everything he had already been through. Nonetheless, he had the feeling that he would be seeing the awful, robotic turn of those children's heads and the glassiness of their eyes in many nightmares to come.

He looked over and found Clay looking even more shaken than he was. Too shaken, in fact. Clay's eyes were darting around madly - blindly - in his head and a glance at his mouth revealed that he was muttering under his breath, very quickly, in an unknown language.

'Oh, crap,' Desmond sighed, putting his hands on Clay's shoulders and gently easing him down to the ground. He then took Clay's chin in one hand, pressed the other hand over his eyes, and began speaking to him very clearly. 'Your name is Clay Kaczmarek. My name is Desmond Miles. The date is December 6th, 2012. We're in your home town, we're going to see your father...'

It took about a minute or so of speaking the basic facts before the tension finally went out of Clay's body and his breathing evened out. Desmond took his hands away cautiously and was relieved to find Clay looking up at him with recognition.

'Welcome back,' he said, trying to keep his tone light.

Clay licked his dry lips and got to his feet, mostly steady now but still looking somewhat disoriented by the return to reality. 'Sorry,' he said in an anguished voice. 'I just...'

'Forget it, there's nothing to apologise for. Come on, let's get to your dad's place.' Desmond didn't want to stay near the school any longer than they had to.

They walked faster now, with a nervous edge about them. 'Maybe things have just changed since I was at that school,' Clay said, glancing back over his shoulder. 'But I don't remember kids being that...'

'Hellspawn-y?' Desmond suggested.

'That's a good word for it, yeah. What do you think it means?'

'Well it basically means that they were acting like they came from...'

Clay socked him lightly in the shoulder. 'Shut up. I meant, what do you think they were doing?'

'They were staring at us. Probably wondering what a cool guy like me was doing walking around with a geek like you.'

'Joking isn't going to make this go away, Desmond,' Clay said sternly, but he was grinning a little despite himself and seemed to have relaxed marginally.

'I know, I just...' Desmond sighed. 'Let's just get to your house, OK?'

'There it is.' Clay pointed a finger towards a low-roofed house not far down the road, an odd expression on his face as he took in the ragged lawn and the bare tree out front. Desmond looked as well, and was a little taken aback by how normal Clay's childhood home appeared from the outside. Desmond himself had grown up in the woods, the faint smell and rumble of the generators always in the air, the compound made up of small wooden buildings that the Assassins had built themselves. This street might not be white picket-fenced but it was disarmingly suburban. To have come from this world into one of ancient artefacts and assassinations and secret organisations must have been incredibly jarring.

'Do you have a key?' Desmond asked as they walked up to the front door.

Clay smiled tightly. 'They weren't really big on letting me keep sharp metal objects when I was in the mental hospital. I don't know what happened to all my stuff.' He took a deep breath. 'Dad's home, though. That's his van parked outside.' He didn't comment on the fact that his father was home in the middle of the day on a Thursday, but instead raised his fist and rapped sharply on the door.

As they waited, Desmond suddenly realised how bedraggled they both must look after over a fortnight sleeping in a van. He couldn't even remember the last time he'd properly washed, and while he'd been rotating the few clothes he'd brought with him he must have been wearing this set for at least a couple of days now. He tried to nonchalantly run a hand through his hair to flatten it, and was just considering trying to sniff his armpit in a subtle manner when the door opened and suddenly Harold Kaczmarek was standing in front of them.

'Hi, Dad,' Clay said, barely a tremor in his voice.

Desmond had expected that Harold would simply look like a much older version of Clay, but there was little superficial resemblance between father and son. Harold was at least an inch shorter, with grey-threaded dark hair, brown eyes and heavy brows. There was something of Clay in his nose and jawline, but the telltale broken blood vessels of alcoholism were visible in his cheeks and his breathing was a little short. There was no smell of booze on his breath, though, and he was steady on his feet as he stared at the two young men on his doorstep.

He didn't say anything when he saw Clay, but Desmond got the impression that Harold had just fractionally clenched every muscle in his body. He didn't move out of the doorway.

'This is Desmond,' Clay added after an excruciating pause. Glancing over at him, Desmond spotted the familiar signs of Clay fighting down emotion, and wondered if it was his father who had taught him to be ashamed of expressing his feelings too openly. He fidgeted on the spot before asking, an edge to his voice, 'Can we come in?'

For a long moment, Desmond was sure that Harold was going to refuse. Then he gave a neutral grunt and walked back into the house, leaving the door open behind him.

Desmond glanced hesitantly over at Clay, whose brows had lifted in sadness now that he was no longer face-to-face with his father. 'He's a real charmer, right?' he said through gritted teeth, stepping over the the threshold.

They caught up with Harold in the kitchen, sitting at a grimy-looking table and nursing a cup of coffee. On the way in, a series of notches on the doorframe caught Desmond's eye. He peered at them, and realised that they were height marks scratched in with ages next to them, showing how tall Clay had been at six months old, and nine months, and one year, eighteen months, three years, the growth spurt that had occurred at age four and so on until the height marks stopped abruptly at nine years and four months old.

'Coffee?' Clay asked, and Desmond broke out of his reverie to see his friend standing by the sink, the kettle gently pouring a cascade of steam into the air besides him.

Desmond's mouth watered at the offer. 'Yeah, please. Black, one sugar.'

Clay nodded and plucked two cups from the sink, rinsing them out. As he prepared the coffee - clattering sounds deafening in the excruciating absence of conversation - Desmond looked over at Harold and attempted a friendly smile. He may as well have not bothered, for Clay's father was not looking at either of them, but was instead staring down into his coffee as though it held the secrets to life itself.

'Looks like we're out of sugar,' Clay sighed, handing Desmond a steaming cup of black coffee before taking a seat at the kitchen table. Desmond walked around and sat opposite Harold, glancing from him to Clay expectantly as the family sat in silence.

'I'm fine, by the way, Dad,' Clay said, and he wasn't even bothering to mask the irritation in his voice any more. 'Thanks for asking. You must have been worried, what with the fact that I haven't called or come to visit for two years. Did you try to get in touch at all or-?'

'Clay,' Desmond admonished gently. He didn't want to be caught in the middle of a family feud so soon after showing up.

Clay made a visible effort to collect himself, taking a deep breath before looking up at his father again. 'I was ... I was in a mental hospital, Dad. I was going through a lot of bad stuff and I ... we need to stay here for a while. I need to get myself together. We won't get in your way, we can sleep in the basement. I'll pay ... rent, if that's what it takes.'

Harold didn't reply to this - not to ask about the mental hospital, nor to rage at the idea of Clay and Desmond coming to stay in the small house. He didn't even drink his coffee, just sat and stared downwards. Desmond noticed with unease a slight shaking in his hands and shoulders, but Clay now seemed too upset to notice anything of the sort.

'Talk to me, Dad,' he pleaded. 'Yell at me if you have to, but please just say something.' He drew in a deep, brave breath. 'I ... I missed you.'

At that, Harold finally looked up, and with an uncomfortable squirm of his stomach Desmond realised that the man was crying silently. His expression stayed neutral but his cheeks were wet with tears.

Then he said, to Clay, 'I wish you hadn't come home.' And he stood up abruptly, and walked out of the room.

Clay stared at the spot where he had been sitting for a good few seconds. A huff of disbelieving, utterly humourless laughter escaped his mouth and he slumped backwards in his chair.

'He's probably just in shock,' Desmond suggested, needing to say something to counteract the awfulness of it all.

'Yeah? Guess he's been "in shock" for most of my adult life,' Clay said bitterly.

'He'll come around.'

Clay shrugged and finally turned his head. 'Maybe we should just...'

He stopped talking. His lips parted a little in dismayed confusion. He stared into the doorway ahead of him, the doorway with the notches on the frame, and Desmond turned his head to find out what Clay was looking at, the timing of the turn such that he didn't really see the shotgun fire, and he didn't see Clay get hit either. He heard the roar of it, the shattering of Clay's coffee mug and the window behind him, and the clatter and thud and crash as what seemed like half the kitchen was demolished, but Desmond was already moving by that point. He vaulted across the table as Harold - wide-eyed, with tears still streaming miserably down his cheeks - brought the barrel of the shotgun around.

Desmond hand whipped up and he grabbed the shotgun, wrestling it away and throwing it to the ground without so much as a thought of trying to use it. He fought his way past Harold's fists and grabbed the man by the hair, using the leverage to slam his skull back against the doorframe until he went limp. Harold slid down the frame, his head coming to rest by the mark of Clay Kaczmarek, aged three years and six months.

For a moment, Desmond could do nothing but stand with his head reeling and chest heaving. It was as though he had left his mind behind, still sitting at the table, and now it was catching up to his body and failing to cope with the insanity of what had just taken place. He might have stood there all day, had he not been stirred by a soft moan from behind him. Desmond jerked in shock, and then turned around.

The kitchen was a wreck. There was a thick splatter of gore over the sink and walls that had been directly behind Clay, and a fine red mist still settling everywhere else. At first it seemed that Clay had completely vanished, wiped out of existence by the shotgun blast, but then Desmond heard another groan and realised that Clay was lying on the floor where he had fallen, partially hidden by the table, and then time went from passing by in slow motion to suddenly speeding up to much faster than was normal, and Desmond threw a chair across the room when it blocked his path to Clay, and then he was kneeling in a spreading pool of blood and hyperventilating madly as he tried to figure out what the hell to do with his hands.

Clay had practically been cut in half. He'd been hit just below the breastbone and everything south of there and north of his groin was a tangled, impossible mess. He was making a guttural clicking noise in the back of his throat with each laboured breath and staring up with dimming blue eyes at the ceiling with an expression of bewilderment. With a great effort, he lifted a hand from his side, and Desmond grabbed hold of it desperately and squeezed Clay's slippery, cooling fingers as he leaned over him.

Clay was the first to speak, his voice slurred and thick. 'My dad...' he mumbled, blood bubbling at his lips. 'Is my dad OK?'

Desmond looked over wildly at Harold, who was still slumped on the ground, his chest rising and falling steadily. In between shaky, hiccuping breaths Desmond replied,' Yeah ... yeah he's just knocked out.'

Clay closed his eyes wearily. 'G'd,' he muttered. 'Take ... the shotgun ... when you go. Don't wan' him waking up ... doin' something dumb.'

Briefly, Desmond considering telling Clay that he was going to be fine, and that they would get to a hospital and the doctors would fix him up and he'd be back on his feet in no time. Except they'd both seen too much death not to recognise it when it was in the room, and Desmond couldn't let his last words to Clay be a lie, so he just sat there with Clay's hand in his, and after a while Clay opened his eyes to squint at him, and Desmond realised that he was saying, 'Sorry, sorry, I'm so sorry, oh God, Clay, I'm sorry, Clay, oh fuck...' or words to that effect in a strange litany.

But Clay only smiled faintly and said, 'It's OK ... least I got ... to come home.' And then he died, with his eyes still open, and Desmond was left kneeling and staring in disbelief and noticing with an odd fixation the way that Clay's blood oozed into the cracks in the kitchen tiles. He tried saying Clay's name a couple of times, out of a sheer incredulity that something so enormous and terrible could have happened in so short a space of time, but of course there was no reply.

Time passed, an indeterminable amount, and when Desmond came back to himself he was standing on Clay's lawn with the shotgun in his hand, swaying slightly on the spot, and his clothes were drenched in cold blood and clinging to him, and quite suddenly it occurred to Desmond that he could not cope with this, with any of this.

There was a woman walking down the street, pushing a stroller with a baby in it, leaning over occasionally to coo at it. Desmond let the shotgun drop from his limp fingers and it landed with a heavy clatter on the grass. He walked out onto the sidewalk, into the path of the woman and her stroller, and he held out his hands placatingly and said in a surprisingly clear voice: 'Help me.'

The woman stopped and looked at him and went unnaturally still. Even the baby stopped its discontented wailing and gawped up at Desmond with wide blue eyes.

'Help me,' Desmond said again. It felt as though someone else was in control of his mouth and vocal chords, and he was happy to let them take over.

The woman reached into the pocket of her coat, still with that same calm expression on her face, and stepped around her stroller. Desmond looked down passively as she arranged a ring of keys in her fist, spreading the keys out in the gaps between each clenched finger so that they protruded like claws. His instincts saved him as she suddenly whipped her hand towards his face, for he threw himself backwards and stumbled and nearly fell. The woman pursued him, leaving her baby forgotten behind her.

Feeling as though he was caught in some kind of hideous nightmare, and taking a fleeting comfort in the idea that he might wake up at any moment, Desmond screamed for help again, and again as he ducked another attack. A car that had been driving by screeched to a halt and several people crossed the street to see what all the commotion was about.

Desmond staggered towards a thickly-built man gratefully, hoping for some kind of protection from the madwoman, but then felt a chill spread in his chest as the man's expression went simultaneously completely blank and utterly focused ... on Desmond. The same happened with each of the people who had come to help; as soon as they got close enough to see Desmond's face, their concern would vanish and they would look at him with an awful kind of hunger.

In desperation, Desmond grabbed a man's shirtfront and screamed, 'Help me!'

A blow landed on his shoulderblades. Another in his kidneys. Then the woman with the keys slashed them at the side of his head, tearing his ear and neck open a little, and there was fresh blood trickling down to seep into the shirt that was already soaked with Clay's. People were lashing out at Desmond with their fists and scratching at his clothes. One man grabbed hold of his arm and yanked viciously, as though trying to rip it from the socket, and that was when Desmond finally reacted as his ancestors had taught him.

He slammed his heel upwards into someone's nose and drove his elbow into a stomach. These were not people to him any longer, they were simply body parts in need of breaking, and break they did as Desmond fought his way out of the insane, bloodthirsty crowd. Knowing that he could not take them all on, he sprinted over Clay's lawn (there was a shower of bloodstained glass from the kitchen window embedded in the ground) and barely slowed down as he snatched up the shotgun, fleeing with the mob rapidly falling behind farther and farther as they failed to keep up with him.

The entire world might have turned upside down, but Desmond could still run. And so he ran.