'Jus' lemme lie down ... one second.'

Desmond slumped heavily against Daniel's shoulder, and a glance over at him showed that his eyes were drifting closed for about the twentieth time so far. Gritting his teeth, Daniel hosted him up again, shaking him awake in the process and eliciting a discontented groan as Desmond lifted his head loosely. It had taken a full fifteen minutes just to drag him back to the compound, and Daniel was now forcing Desmond to walk up and down the cabin, passing the beds on each pass but refusing to let the drugged-out Assassin to lie down.

'Come on, I'm doing all the work here,' Daniel encouraged, as kindly as he could manage.

'My legs hurt,' Desmond complained vaguely. 'And my head...'

'That's from the antidepressant binge you just went on. Pick up your feet.'

Desmond didn't so much pick them up as he did sort of vaguely drag them along the ground, but at least it was a sign of consciousness. Daniel didn't even know if this was the right thing to do, but he remembered that when Kelly had overdosed he had just sat there and watched her slip into a sleep that she had never woken up from. Actually, he'd pulled the needle out of her vein and shot up with the heroin that was left over in it. At least you could call this an improvement.

'My heart feels weird,' Desmond slurred as they reached the cabin's far wall for the sixth or seventh time and turned around.

Daniel paused for a moment, and then sighed. 'Alright, you can sit down while I check your pulse, but you have to stay awake.'

'Sure, 'kay, no problem...'

The pair shuffled over to one of the beds like some kind of giant, malformed crab. Daniel turned Desmond around until his knees were against the edge of the mattress and then unslung the tattooed arm from around his aching shoulders. Desmond's ass landed on the bed and the rest of him quickly followed as he immediately fell backwards, releasing a quiet sound of contentment.

'Woah, no you don't!' Daniel dragged the kid back into a sitting position, ignoring the protest that followed. He quickly pressed two fingers against the pulse point in Desmond's neck and cursed inwardly as he felt the quivering of a heart that was beating like a frightened rabbit's. Maybe walking around with him had been the wrong thing to do.

Desmond wilted forward, his head landing on Daniel's shoulder.

'Hey, none of that, wake up, look at me.' Daniel eased the kid back, holding into the back of his head to keep him from falling over again, and stared analytically into the deep brown eyes that were barely visible from beneath Desmond's drooping lids.

The kid blinked drowsily, his gaze wandering away from Daniel's face and landing somewhere above his headline. 'Clay?' he mumbled.

'No, it's Daniel.'

'You don't sound like Daniel.'

'What do you mean?'

'You're not yelling at me.'

It may have simply been wishful thinking, but Desmond seemed marginally more alert than he had been. Not alert enough that Daniel was about to risk letting go of him, but there was a little more colour to Desmond's face now, and he was making eye contact, blinking slowly, rubbing at his chest worriedly to in an attempt to soothe his fluttering heart.

'Man,' he said at last, rubbing a hand over his face. 'I'm exhausted. Everything hurts. Can I lie down?'

Daniel bit back a furious response and asked, 'Do you know what just happened?'

A frown was the first reaction to the question and then, 'I remember being in the storeroom. Then ... I was outside, and you were making me puke. Thanks for that, by the way, that was great...'

'I had to get the pills out of you somehow.'

'Pills?' Desmond looked puzzled. 'What pills?'

Daniel looked him over. This could easily just be an attempt to deflect difficult questions, but he knew from experience that Desmond was a terrible liar at the best of times, and the toxic amounts of antidepressants coursing through his system were unlikely to improve his talents in that area. A more likely explanation was that he had mentally blocked out the memory of his suicide attempt until such a time as he was better equipped to deal with it.

Without waiting for an answer, Desmond allowed his eyes to drift closed again, and Daniel shook him gently back to wakefulness.

'I'm sorry,' he said, in a carefully calculated tone of non-combativeness. 'But I can't let you go to sleep just yet.'

'Keep me awake, then,' Desmond challenged drowsily.

'How?'

'Just ... talk to me.'

'What about?'

'Mmm...' Desmond didn't seem to care enough to give an answer. He swayed as much as was possible with Daniel holding him in place, and seemed to doze off for a few seconds.

'Oh, come on, uh...' Daniel dropped down onto one knee, tightened his grip on Desmond's shoulder, and wracked his brain for a topic of conversation that might keep Desmond's brain awake. Surely asking him questions, and forcing him to answer them, might help. What had he said earlier...?

'Tell me about Clay,' Daniel instructed firmly.

It was a little cruel, perhaps, but effective; these, of course, were the memories that would have kept Desmond awake more than anything else, the memories that would have tormented him. Predictably, Desmond's eyes widened a little at the mention of the name, and he looked up at Daniel uncertainly. 'Clay?'

'Yes. Tell me about him.'

For a moment, anger and disgust flitted across Desmond's face. 'You want me to tell you how he died?'

Daniel considered it, but then shook his head. 'No. I know how he died. I want to know why you cared enough about him that you were willing die avenging him.'

'You wouldn't understand, Cross.' The use of his surname came out sharply, deliberately, and with a kind of bitter malice, still tainted by a hint of sleepiness.

'Fine, I wouldn't understand. Tell me anyway. How long did you know him for?'

'A ... not long.' Desmond cast his gaze downwards. 'A few weeks, maybe. But he ... he was all I had, I didn't have anyone else who...' He suddenly squeezed his eyes tightly shut and said, 'No.'

'No?'

'No. You want to keep me awake, you don't get to dig around inside my head as well. Tell me something about you.'

Daniel blinked in surprise. 'Something about me?'

'Yeah. Something true.'

'Like what?'

Desmond looked him in the face and chewed the inside of his lip for a moment in thought before saying, 'Tell me about your parents.

'Bad question,' Daniel answered dismissively. 'I never knew my parents.'

'You don't know anything about them?' Desmond pressed sceptically.

'I know that they were Russian immigrants. I know that they're dead now.'

For a moment, an expression crossed Desmond's face that was quite alien. Not simply because Daniel had never seen the kid wearing such an expression, but because it had been a long time since he'd had someone look at him like that. It was sympathy, barely there, but it existed, and it made Daniel's stomach twinge uncomfortably.

'How did they die?' he asked, his voice suddenly all soft edges.

For a moment, Daniel considered lying. It was something that he always considered before speaking, because lying was often a lot less boring than telling the truth; anyone could recite facts, but it took real genius to spin a story and breathe life into it, making it believable. Then he decided that Desmond wasn't a worthy enough audience to bother putting the effort in, and so he told the truth, in blunt, ugly terms. 'I'm pretty sure Abstergo killed them when they kidnapped me.'

Desmond was still again now, but not because he had fallen asleep. He was staring at Daniel with unguarded curiosity. 'They kidnapped you too?'

Daniel smirked. 'Before you start feeling less embarrassed about getting caught, I should point out that I was only a toddler when they snatched me. Wasn't really much I could do about it.'

'Why would they kidnap a baby?' Desmond asked, his face screwed up in pensiveness. 'Surely they wouldn't...'

'They put me in an Animus,' Daniel interrupted shortly. 'You were Subject Seventeen, right? Well, I was Subject Four. One of the original models.'

'How long did they...?'

'About nine years or so.'

'Jesus!' Desmond seemed to have more or less left his desire to pass out behind him, though he was still rubbing his chest, as though Daniel's revelation had set his heart aflutter once more. 'What did they...?'

'I don't remember any of it,' Daniel interrupted shortly. 'I wasn't supposed to. The whole 'sleeper agent' thing doesn't work if the person knows they're a sleeper agent. If you remember your training then you're just a regular old agent.' He sighed in boredom; he'd already been over this in therapy with Dr Sung, and it had been irritating the first time around. 'I know that I didn't really get a childhood. They locked me inside my ancestor's memories for a decade. I was watching throats get sliced before I was out of diapers, and by the time I was five I would have known a hundred differents ways to kill a man before he drew breath. When I was eleven they had me all programmed up, so they threw me out onto the streets to find my own way. I didn't speak a word of English, and when someone found me I was all malnourished and battered up...'

Daniel paused in the story. Desmond was looking slightly horrified now, and it was tempting to tell him all the gruesome details, just to secure his sympathy and - by extension - a measure of his loyalty. There was plenty that Daniel could tell him: he could tell him about the couple who had found him by the side of the road. About the woman, whose kind and maternal ways had felt weird and foreign to Daniel, and how when she had tried to stroke his hair he had recoiled in discomfort. He could tell Desmond about his first foster home, and about the foster father who would creep into his room late at night and try to climb into bed with him.

He could tell Desmond about the violent, awful hallucinations that had plagued him throughout his sleeping and waking hours, and turned him into a freak with no friends at school, and got him into brutal playground fights where he had no idea who he was pummelling with his fists. He could tell Desmond about all the glue he had sniffed before he was old enough to afford more expensive drugs. He could tell him about the things he had done to earn enough money for drugs. He could tell him about prison: how he'd landed there, and what it had been like on the inside. He could tell him about Kelly, and how cold her skin had felt when Daniel had woken up vaguely horny and tried to rouse her: how he'd stuck his tongue in a corpse's mouth and tasted death there, his brain too stupid with heroin to recognise it.

Daniel could have easily told Desmond these things. Not even all of them: a small handful would have been enough to manipulate him into feeling sympathy, into believing that Daniel was just a poor, lost soul in desperate need of love and understanding. Someone who could be "fixed", the way that Dr. Sung had tried to fix him. In truth, Daniel did not know whether he had turned out the way he had because of his childhood, or whether it was simply genetics. Perhaps he had just been born without a capacity or a desire for friendship or kindness, possessed purely by self-interest, incapable of love. Whatever the reason, he had never felt in need of fixing.

Regardless, he could see that Desmond was partially hooked already, and so he skipped a few years and went on to a more favorable period of his life. 'So eventually I joined up with the Assassins. I was good at it, too. It's in my blood. I was going to become apprentice to the Mentor, but when I met him a flip switched in my brain and I killed him, and I ran away, and I rejoined Abstergo.' He shrugged. 'I bet your daddy told you the rest.'

'You went back to Abstergo,' Desmond repeated in dull tones. 'After everything they'd done to you.'

Daniel shrugged nonchalantly. 'Seemed like the right idea at the time.'

'You're a coward.'

The statement took Daniel by surprise, and he stared at Desmond in consternation, temporarily dumb with it. He'd assumed that he'd reeled the kid in, hook, line and sinker, but here he was throwing out the accusation with harsh, unflustered brutality: a simple, if inaccurate, judgement.

'I'm a pragmatist,' Daniel countered at last. 'What was I supposed to do, go back to the Assassins, weeping for forgiveness? No way. I knew that Abstergo had lots of power, that they could protect me, that they could put me back to sleep so that I wouldn't have to deal with anything. So I went back to them. Then, when they eventually pulled me out of the Animus, everyone treated me like a hero, so I figured I may as well start acting like one.'

'They tortured you, when you were just a kid. They stole your childhood.' It was obvious that Desmond was finding the cognitive dissonance upsetting and impossible to come to terms with. 'Jesus, Daniel, they murdered your parents. Why would you work for them? Why would you pledge your loyalty to them?'

Daniel thought the question over, then chuckled at the memory that came to mind. 'I found this e-mail once, when I was bored one day and hacking through the system. From Warren Vidic. He wrote to Rikkin, and he said that...' He had to stop and pause for breath as he laughed. 'He said that he thought I'd come to think of Abstergo as ... family. Fucking hell. The guy raised me, albeit in a really fucked-up way, but he doesn't know me at all.'

This time, Desmond did not prompt for further details. He simply sat and watched Daniel with hooded eyes, waiting for the story to continue. To his surprise, Daniel found himself quite happy to go on.

'I've met my family, Desmond. My real family. In the Animus, and out in the real world. For a long time, I thought that they were what I was looking for, that I'd feel at home with them. But I didn't, not really. And as for Abstergo, well, they were just the biggest bully in the playground. It just so happened that they grew in strength after I joined them, and so I stayed, and I used whatever they gave me, and I survived. But they were never family, and even if they had been I wouldn't have cared about them.'

Quite suddenly, Daniel realised what Sung had been getting at for all those years, telling him how much better he'd feel if he simply opened up and was completely honest with her. Of course, she'd been trying to get at the soft, vulnerable little boy that she obviously believed was curled up somewhere beneath his abrasive shell, and he'd offered her a cariacture of that to keep her satisfied. He would never have made to her the confession that he'd just made to Desmond: that he was hard and uncaring through and through, and that he had no quivering little inner child that was simply in need of love.

It felt good, to speak the truth.

'Thank you,' Desmond said at last, quietly.

Daniel raised an eyebrow. 'What for?'

'For being honest.'

'Being honest about the fact that I'm a cold-hearted bastard?'

'Yeah. It's useful to know. There's one thing I still don't get, though.'

They'd been talking for so long that even Daniel was starting to feel exhausted, but he nodded at Desmond, giving him permission to continue.

'You joined up with the Assassins because you thought they had something you wanted. You went back to the Templars because they had what you needed.' Desmond twisted his mouth in consideration. 'But why did you stop me in the parking lot? Why did you save my life just now?'

Daniel couldn't help but grin; it was a good question. The kid might actually be cannier than he'd originally thought. 'You might not be the biggest bully in the playground yet, Desmond. But you could be. I saw the way you were looking up at Abstergo, like you'd bite through the walls just to get revenge, and I figured that if anyone can take Rikkin down, it's you. I'm not angry enough. Vicente's not invested enough. But you, you've got that good old righteous vengeance thing working for you, and it's going to take you far, Desmond.'

The kid shivered. 'God, that sounds really creepy coming from you. But thanks.'

'You're welcome.'

'And I assume that you're ready to betray me at a moment's notice? If I stop being useful to you, you'll hand me over. If you lose faith in my, uh, "righteous vengeance", you'll stop having my back and start plunging daggers into it instead.'

Daniel figured it was too late to start lying now. 'Pretty much.'

To his surprise, Desmond smiled: weary, but genuine. 'That's oddly reassuring.'

'It is?'

'Sure. If I'm still alive, it means I'm not a complete waste of space.'

And strangely enough, the kid did look rather calm about the revelation. He also looked less like he was about to drop dead, and was even wrinkling his nose at the smell coming off his vomit-stained shirt, as though he'd only just noticed it. Daniel took a step back, figuring that he could trust Desmond not to collapse now, and watched in dry amusement as the Assassin eased his way out of the garment, trying not to smear his face with his own puke in the process, before wrestling it over his head and throwing it triumphantly across the room, as far away from himself as he could get it.

'OK,' Desmond said at last, rubbing a hand over his face wearily. 'Can I rest now? I think I'm in the clear.'

'Yeah, you should survive the night,' Daniel said, looking Desmond up and down clinically. There was a little more colour in his cheeks now, and the vein in his throat was no longer jumping violently.

Desmond nodded, but didn't lie down just yet. He furrowed his brow and said. 'I meant it, when I told you that I don't remember taking the pills. It's like there's this big black hole in my memory, and something important vanished into it.' The effort of trying to recall it seemed to pain him and he shook his head. 'Ugh. I need to sleep on it. Nothing's making sense right now.'

Daniel nodded and crossed the room, opening a mini-fridge that was standing on top of a chest of drawers and pulling out a chilled bottle of water. He tossed it over to Desmond, and despite his drugged-up state the kid caught it with a deft hand and twisted the cap off before sucking down the liquid gratefully.

'Drink as much as you can,' Daniel said, stripping off his jeans and climbing into the other single bed. 'Your head's gonna hurt like a bitch tomorrow no matter what you do, but the water will help.'

Desmond broke off for air and wiped an arm over his damp limps and chin, looking over at Daniel with a quizzical expression. 'Why are you being nice to me?' he demanded bluntly.

Daniel shrugged as best as he could manage whilst lying on his back. 'I got no reason to be nasty to you. Besides, I'd prefer it if you didn't die in the night.'

'Thanks. That's sweet.' He lay down, too weary to pull the blankets over him, and muttered, 'Night, Daniel,' before finally passing out.