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Apr. 7th, 2012 12:43 pm![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tacticianFandom: Assassin's Creed
Characters: Clay Kaczmarek, Desmond Miles
Rating: G
Warnings: Kink meme request, regarding the fragmented parts of Clay's character. Spoilers for ACR and the TLA DLC. Plainly speaking, THIS IS MY ODE TO YOU, SUBJECT SIXTEEN.
Cache
When Constantinople, rich with colors and sights and lives, is a little too much for Desmond, who is having enough trouble with just his own, he draws himself back to the Island. Often times, it is peaceful and serene there, quiet and still save for the crash of the waves, the rocking of the water against the shore.
Sometimes, it isn't.
“Hello,” Desmond says, warily approaching the boulder Sixteen – no, Clay – is perched upon, staring into one of the glowing stone gates on the plateau at the center of the Island. When Desmond looks into it, he sees the bright, pulsating lights of a city that is centuries after but not quite unlike Istanbul, filled with a million lives that Desmond wishes were his. He wonders what Clay sees.
Clay whips into attention, entire body seizing up and straightening as if he were a static still of a movie clip that Desmond only just now pressed 'play' to. He looks up and grins a smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes. “Desmond!” he greets, turning his body towards the other man. “What happened? Living a dead man's life get to be too much for you in there?”
“Don't be a dick,” Desmond shoots back, used to his odd companion by now as he leans against the side of the rock outcrop. It's uneven and uncomfortable; he adjusts himself a few times before he finds enough of a niche to fit into. The passing of time is different here and he feels like he has rendezvoused with Clay enough times to know that sometimes, Clay is an asshole because he's crazy, and sometimes he's an asshole just because he's a jerk. “What's your deal with all that 'living a dead man's life' stuff anyway? You're the one who told me to go in there.”
Clay laughs but his eyes stay dim, a misty blue-tinted gray that adds little color to the pallor of his skin, the washed-out blond of his hair. He shrugs, turning to look back into the gate. “I don't know. I was just wondering if it was different for you, I guess. I've been doing it for so long that I don't know what the difference is anymore.”
And then, like a blinking cursor, he disappears.
Clay is angry.
He doesn't raise a fist, but he crowds Desmond back against one of the rocky outcrops, eyes narrowed and tone biting, bitter. He spits his words out like they're vile and his lips pull back over his teeth when they talk, baring them like an animal with its hackles raised. “Were you blind?” he asks without precursor, movements short and curt like he's pushing them out. Desmond has no idea what he's talking about; his mind is still half-caught up with trying to come to terms with finding Yusuf in Sophia's bookshop with a knife in his back. “Couldn't you see what she was doing?”
“What? No, I-” Desmond sputters.
“Shut up!” Clay shouts, raising his hands to cradle his head as if nursing a headache. Desmond does because he feels all the air suddenly suck out of his lungs. When he tries to raise his hands to his throat, he finds them glued to the slab they're resting on, like the program has put him on pause as per a higher initiative's override. He can't feel anything other than the hammering of his pulse in his veins, but the saline smell of the air suddenly burns and the sound of the waves is as distant as an echo. “Shut up! You still don't know anything!
“She's not helping you, she won't help you,” Clay seethes, pressing a hand against Desmond's chest, between the ribs, and pushing in. It becomes uncomfortable and escalates into painful quickly. As Desmond's eyes roll down to look, he catches a glimpse of a darkened patch of skin near Clay's inner elbow, a bruise shaped like the end of a long, narrow rectangle. It's the sort of mark that comes from the repeated spring-release action of a hidden blade, when the sharpened metal kicks off the end of its sheath in order to push forward. It's the sort of mark that marks an assassin.
“She'll never get you out. You have to do that yourself,” Clay hisses, voice becoming hazy with white noise near the end. He's already phasing out, lines of static cutting across him like a clean cross-section. It allows thin threads of sunlight to pierce through his shadow, burning little streaks across Desmond's skin. Though Clay is still leaning into him, his weight seems to lessen. As it does, a hint of desperation colors his voice. “Desmond,” Clay calls, exasperated. Desmond looks up, eyes widening when he finds half of Clay's head already gone, only a moving mouth remaining. “You're going the wrong way.”
Desmond finds himself choking out an answer. The hand on his chest barely registers now. “I'm not going anywhere,” he responds breathlessly.
Clay's mouth presses into a thin line. He disappears up to his neck. “Exactly,” he says.
When Desmond stumbles out of the nexus gate again, out of breath and heart beating too fast, Clay is waiting for him, arms crossed as he phases into sight, leaning against one of the gate posts as if he's been there all along, waiting. “Come with me,” he says, kicking off the flat, polished granite and passing Desmond without offering a hand to help him up. He leads without looking back to check that Desmond is following and only turns when he comes to one of the gates – the last one standing by clockwise order.
“Wait here,” Clay orders before stepping into the gate. When Desmond looks through it, he sees the sterile white walls of Abstergo, but when Clay steps through it, the invisible barrier separating the worlds swallows him up like the surface of a vat of oil – denting in slightly when he makes contact but closing up after him without even the slightest disturbance or evidence that he had breached it at all. Desmond doesn't see his image walking into the Abstergo hallway, and he waits.
Clay comes back out after three or four minutes, fist clenched tight. His hair looks a little mussed, the button-up he's wearing is scrunched up towards his ribs, as if he's been jumping, but nothing else as changed. He smiles at Desmond and, holding his arm between them, opens his fist.
A small, glowing transparent cube rises from the palm of Clay's hand slowly, going up, up, like it's growing from the cage of his fingers, like the bloom of a flower, steady and relaxed. They watch it rise into the cloudless sky until it becomes only a dot of light, fading out of sight, swallowed by the gray of the atmosphere. Desmond stares after it for a moment and then lowers his eyes to look at Clay, who has his face tilted towards the heavens, neck craned back. There is a look of wonder on his face, the barest pinprick of illumination reflecting in his eyes.
“What was that?” Desmond asks, and he's not quite referring to the cube, because he's seen those in the few times he's crossed into the gates himself. He knows they change the air, knows they sweep you up whenever they go, like a heady current, but he has no idea why Clay would steal one and bring it back just to let it go and float away, like a lost balloon. “A data fragment?”
Clay doesn't lower his gaze. “Idiot,” he says. “That was a star.”
Desmond has come to understand that when it comes to Clay, he should really just learn to expect the unexpected, but that still doesn't prepare him to walk out of Ezio's memories and right into the Island cast into darkness by night. It has always been day here with unerring accuracy and the sudden change, when he had come to expect constancy, is jarring enough for him to stop in his tracks as soon as he's out. “What...Sixteen? ...Clay?” he shouts, cupping a hand over his mouth as if volume will make the transfer of data (because that's all this is) any faster.
There is a crash, like a gunshot, and something bursts into the sky into a million different streams of light, colored red, white, blue and orange. They shine and then dissipate into sparks, all vaguely square-shaped. Then, another crash sounds and it happens again, although this time the pattern is shaped like an eight-pointed star. The process repeats again and again, and under the flare and ebb of fireworks, Desmond makes his way to the plateau.
“I knew the guy in China who invented these,” says Clay, once Desmond draws near enough. He is lying on his back in the grass and dirt, arms spread out like an eagle, fingers flexed like pinion feathers.
“That's right, one of your ancestors was Chinese,” Desmond agrees, settling on the ground a few feet away. It's been a long time since he's seen fireworks. He used to wake up and look out the window of his crummy downtown apartment to see the displays in the distance, where people in the outer boroughs illegally bought them in Connecticut and set them off in parks. They're much louder and brighter in close proximity.
“He always smelled like gunpowder,” says Clay with a dry note in his voice. “Impressed the Emperor with those. Moved up in the world after that. I don't really talk to him much anymore these days.”
“Who do you talk to, these days?” Desmond asks, looking over the slope of his knees at where he can see Clay's profile, lit up by multicolored lights in the air. He doesn't quite know what to make of these occasional, melancholic moods Clay sometimes drops into. Every meeting with Clay contrasts so much with the ones prior that he wonders if he's talking to a different fragmented, isolated bit of a complex, human soul every time, that he wonders if he's going to be like this if he doesn't get out fast enough, or if maybe he's talking to every single assassin that's somehow made it down the bloodline only to end with Clay Kaczmarek, who will be the end of it.
“Lucy never answers when I call her,” Clay says, not quite answering Desmond's question and not quite lucid to begin with. Desmond feels a stab of regret and guilt tear into his chest cavity and his hands clench into the weathered material of his jeans. Another firework goes off, followed by two others in quick succession. They paint the blackness of the sky with a thin sheen of flame-bright fire red.
“I emailed my father the other day,” Clay continues, the sentence punctuated by the burst of another explosion. He chuckles. “Dads. They're always just waiting for you somewhere out there, huh?”
Desmond can see the irony in that. He runs a hand through his hair and leaves it at his nape, letting it settle there against the column of his neck like the weight of an approving, parental hand. “Guess they always are. What'd you tell yours?”
The sky bursts into a sudden cacophony of sound and light, the grand finale. There must have been at least twenty or thirty going off at once – every bit of sky Desmond can see, even in the far distance, is covered with exploding light in every spectrum of color. It reflects in the water circling the Island until it looks like they're surrounded by nothing by darkness and a sea of dissipating light, like right here, in this moment, is every single firework Desmond has ever seen in his life, added to every single one Clay has seen in all twenty, thirty, forty of his.
“Not to,” says Clay, half-drowned out by the noise.
Although he is living Ezio's memories, Desmond holds on desperately to himself. He knows what will happen if he doesn't, and he's already let too much slip through the cracks of his fingers. It is with an outsider's perspective that he realizes, when Ezio decides to visit Masyaf's locked-away library with Sophia, that he is nearing the end. There is an almost dramatically appropriate cadence and flow to Ezio's life.
This is a good place for a story to end.
“Still no?” Clay asks, already lying in wait as Desmond pauses for a breather outside the gate. He is sitting atop a mountain of sea-spray-smoothed rocks, kicking his legs off the side of the one at its peak.
“No,” Desmond responds without missing a beat, straightening from where he is hunched over his knees. He squints up at Clay, trying to read his face like he has many times before and like many times before, comes up fruitless. It is hard to tell what a dead man's thinking.
“Too bad,” Clay sighs, dropping his chin into his palm. “Would've been fun.”
“For you, maybe,” Desmond scoffs, approaching the small mountain and beginning to climb it. He has climbed the highest towers of Constantinople and even the peaks of Masyaf's fortress mount; he makes short work of the ten-foot pile. With a huff, he settles himself into a niche on the layer right under Clay's, his shoulder bumping into the side of Clay's foot when he kicks it far out enough. From here, he can see the entire Island (not that there's much to see).
“What's your deal, anyway?” he asks, a hand catching Clay's foot by the heel and stilling it.
“The shitty one,” Clay answers, peering down at his captured shoe. “Want to trade?”
Desmond lets go with a sigh, knowing better than to have expected a straight answer. “You've got a serious case of MPD going on there, you know. One second you're fine, the next you're about to rip my face off. I don't even know if you're here to help or hurt me, to be honest.”
“Yeah, your record for recognizing enemies hasn't been too stellar so far,” Clay agrees, fighting against none of the aforementioned allegations. He hooks his ankles over one another and lets them rest against the rock, offering no other answer other than the quiet drumming of the waves. Desmond senses it in his bones - this, too, has a natural sense of closure about it, which is good, if not a little bit overdue. Clay has been finished for years.
“I know what to do,” Desmond says, after a little while, looking out to sea. “I know, now.”
Clay makes no indication that he heard him. “Did you know,” he says, “That in quantum physics, there's a theory that if you go fast enough, maybe a hundred, thousand, million times faster than the speed of light, you could breach the limit of time? That things that are happening will be going too fast for it to even reach you, that it'll have ended before it even began? Only in theory, of course. There's no possible way for man to actually get to those kinds of speeds, maybe even with a Piece of Eden. How funny is that?”
Desmond sighs again, clasping his hands together. Sometimes, Clay talks about things that he can't possibly hope to understand, things from ages past, things from lives he's lived, things from the life that was stolen. He runs through topics like the words are falling off his tongue, like he's doing a mental recall of everything he knows so that he won't forget it, so the data won't get lost. There's no blood left in his body to write it all down; there's only stars and theories and fireworks left.
“Clay,” says Desmond.
“It's dark and cold in the ground, Desmond, when they cover you up,” says Clay, far away.
“Thanks,” Desmond breathes, closing his eyes for a brief moment before beginning to climb down.
He reaches the ground when Clay is in the middle of reciting something Chinese. A few steps after that, Clay is speaking in fast, fluent Italian – something about the perpetual orbit of the planetary bodies – then French, then an unfamiliar bout of speech from a Native American tribe. In American-accented Italian, a children's prayer from the Holy Bible. In a Mongol dialect, a shepherding song. A math equation in Latin, even a nursery rhyme in Portuguese. Then right before Desmond breaches the gate, he hears, in English:
“And all that light at the end of the tunnel stuff is crap. You know, heaven – it's like freefall.”
Desmond feels the words echo in his bones as he slips into Ezio's skin. He feels it - this is a good place for a story to end.
Characters: Clay Kaczmarek, Desmond Miles
Rating: G
Warnings: Kink meme request, regarding the fragmented parts of Clay's character. Spoilers for ACR and the TLA DLC. Plainly speaking, THIS IS MY ODE TO YOU, SUBJECT SIXTEEN.
Cache
When Constantinople, rich with colors and sights and lives, is a little too much for Desmond, who is having enough trouble with just his own, he draws himself back to the Island. Often times, it is peaceful and serene there, quiet and still save for the crash of the waves, the rocking of the water against the shore.
Sometimes, it isn't.
“Hello,” Desmond says, warily approaching the boulder Sixteen – no, Clay – is perched upon, staring into one of the glowing stone gates on the plateau at the center of the Island. When Desmond looks into it, he sees the bright, pulsating lights of a city that is centuries after but not quite unlike Istanbul, filled with a million lives that Desmond wishes were his. He wonders what Clay sees.
Clay whips into attention, entire body seizing up and straightening as if he were a static still of a movie clip that Desmond only just now pressed 'play' to. He looks up and grins a smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes. “Desmond!” he greets, turning his body towards the other man. “What happened? Living a dead man's life get to be too much for you in there?”
“Don't be a dick,” Desmond shoots back, used to his odd companion by now as he leans against the side of the rock outcrop. It's uneven and uncomfortable; he adjusts himself a few times before he finds enough of a niche to fit into. The passing of time is different here and he feels like he has rendezvoused with Clay enough times to know that sometimes, Clay is an asshole because he's crazy, and sometimes he's an asshole just because he's a jerk. “What's your deal with all that 'living a dead man's life' stuff anyway? You're the one who told me to go in there.”
Clay laughs but his eyes stay dim, a misty blue-tinted gray that adds little color to the pallor of his skin, the washed-out blond of his hair. He shrugs, turning to look back into the gate. “I don't know. I was just wondering if it was different for you, I guess. I've been doing it for so long that I don't know what the difference is anymore.”
And then, like a blinking cursor, he disappears.
Clay is angry.
He doesn't raise a fist, but he crowds Desmond back against one of the rocky outcrops, eyes narrowed and tone biting, bitter. He spits his words out like they're vile and his lips pull back over his teeth when they talk, baring them like an animal with its hackles raised. “Were you blind?” he asks without precursor, movements short and curt like he's pushing them out. Desmond has no idea what he's talking about; his mind is still half-caught up with trying to come to terms with finding Yusuf in Sophia's bookshop with a knife in his back. “Couldn't you see what she was doing?”
“What? No, I-” Desmond sputters.
“Shut up!” Clay shouts, raising his hands to cradle his head as if nursing a headache. Desmond does because he feels all the air suddenly suck out of his lungs. When he tries to raise his hands to his throat, he finds them glued to the slab they're resting on, like the program has put him on pause as per a higher initiative's override. He can't feel anything other than the hammering of his pulse in his veins, but the saline smell of the air suddenly burns and the sound of the waves is as distant as an echo. “Shut up! You still don't know anything!
“She's not helping you, she won't help you,” Clay seethes, pressing a hand against Desmond's chest, between the ribs, and pushing in. It becomes uncomfortable and escalates into painful quickly. As Desmond's eyes roll down to look, he catches a glimpse of a darkened patch of skin near Clay's inner elbow, a bruise shaped like the end of a long, narrow rectangle. It's the sort of mark that comes from the repeated spring-release action of a hidden blade, when the sharpened metal kicks off the end of its sheath in order to push forward. It's the sort of mark that marks an assassin.
“She'll never get you out. You have to do that yourself,” Clay hisses, voice becoming hazy with white noise near the end. He's already phasing out, lines of static cutting across him like a clean cross-section. It allows thin threads of sunlight to pierce through his shadow, burning little streaks across Desmond's skin. Though Clay is still leaning into him, his weight seems to lessen. As it does, a hint of desperation colors his voice. “Desmond,” Clay calls, exasperated. Desmond looks up, eyes widening when he finds half of Clay's head already gone, only a moving mouth remaining. “You're going the wrong way.”
Desmond finds himself choking out an answer. The hand on his chest barely registers now. “I'm not going anywhere,” he responds breathlessly.
Clay's mouth presses into a thin line. He disappears up to his neck. “Exactly,” he says.
When Desmond stumbles out of the nexus gate again, out of breath and heart beating too fast, Clay is waiting for him, arms crossed as he phases into sight, leaning against one of the gate posts as if he's been there all along, waiting. “Come with me,” he says, kicking off the flat, polished granite and passing Desmond without offering a hand to help him up. He leads without looking back to check that Desmond is following and only turns when he comes to one of the gates – the last one standing by clockwise order.
“Wait here,” Clay orders before stepping into the gate. When Desmond looks through it, he sees the sterile white walls of Abstergo, but when Clay steps through it, the invisible barrier separating the worlds swallows him up like the surface of a vat of oil – denting in slightly when he makes contact but closing up after him without even the slightest disturbance or evidence that he had breached it at all. Desmond doesn't see his image walking into the Abstergo hallway, and he waits.
Clay comes back out after three or four minutes, fist clenched tight. His hair looks a little mussed, the button-up he's wearing is scrunched up towards his ribs, as if he's been jumping, but nothing else as changed. He smiles at Desmond and, holding his arm between them, opens his fist.
A small, glowing transparent cube rises from the palm of Clay's hand slowly, going up, up, like it's growing from the cage of his fingers, like the bloom of a flower, steady and relaxed. They watch it rise into the cloudless sky until it becomes only a dot of light, fading out of sight, swallowed by the gray of the atmosphere. Desmond stares after it for a moment and then lowers his eyes to look at Clay, who has his face tilted towards the heavens, neck craned back. There is a look of wonder on his face, the barest pinprick of illumination reflecting in his eyes.
“What was that?” Desmond asks, and he's not quite referring to the cube, because he's seen those in the few times he's crossed into the gates himself. He knows they change the air, knows they sweep you up whenever they go, like a heady current, but he has no idea why Clay would steal one and bring it back just to let it go and float away, like a lost balloon. “A data fragment?”
Clay doesn't lower his gaze. “Idiot,” he says. “That was a star.”
Desmond has come to understand that when it comes to Clay, he should really just learn to expect the unexpected, but that still doesn't prepare him to walk out of Ezio's memories and right into the Island cast into darkness by night. It has always been day here with unerring accuracy and the sudden change, when he had come to expect constancy, is jarring enough for him to stop in his tracks as soon as he's out. “What...Sixteen? ...Clay?” he shouts, cupping a hand over his mouth as if volume will make the transfer of data (because that's all this is) any faster.
There is a crash, like a gunshot, and something bursts into the sky into a million different streams of light, colored red, white, blue and orange. They shine and then dissipate into sparks, all vaguely square-shaped. Then, another crash sounds and it happens again, although this time the pattern is shaped like an eight-pointed star. The process repeats again and again, and under the flare and ebb of fireworks, Desmond makes his way to the plateau.
“I knew the guy in China who invented these,” says Clay, once Desmond draws near enough. He is lying on his back in the grass and dirt, arms spread out like an eagle, fingers flexed like pinion feathers.
“That's right, one of your ancestors was Chinese,” Desmond agrees, settling on the ground a few feet away. It's been a long time since he's seen fireworks. He used to wake up and look out the window of his crummy downtown apartment to see the displays in the distance, where people in the outer boroughs illegally bought them in Connecticut and set them off in parks. They're much louder and brighter in close proximity.
“He always smelled like gunpowder,” says Clay with a dry note in his voice. “Impressed the Emperor with those. Moved up in the world after that. I don't really talk to him much anymore these days.”
“Who do you talk to, these days?” Desmond asks, looking over the slope of his knees at where he can see Clay's profile, lit up by multicolored lights in the air. He doesn't quite know what to make of these occasional, melancholic moods Clay sometimes drops into. Every meeting with Clay contrasts so much with the ones prior that he wonders if he's talking to a different fragmented, isolated bit of a complex, human soul every time, that he wonders if he's going to be like this if he doesn't get out fast enough, or if maybe he's talking to every single assassin that's somehow made it down the bloodline only to end with Clay Kaczmarek, who will be the end of it.
“Lucy never answers when I call her,” Clay says, not quite answering Desmond's question and not quite lucid to begin with. Desmond feels a stab of regret and guilt tear into his chest cavity and his hands clench into the weathered material of his jeans. Another firework goes off, followed by two others in quick succession. They paint the blackness of the sky with a thin sheen of flame-bright fire red.
“I emailed my father the other day,” Clay continues, the sentence punctuated by the burst of another explosion. He chuckles. “Dads. They're always just waiting for you somewhere out there, huh?”
Desmond can see the irony in that. He runs a hand through his hair and leaves it at his nape, letting it settle there against the column of his neck like the weight of an approving, parental hand. “Guess they always are. What'd you tell yours?”
The sky bursts into a sudden cacophony of sound and light, the grand finale. There must have been at least twenty or thirty going off at once – every bit of sky Desmond can see, even in the far distance, is covered with exploding light in every spectrum of color. It reflects in the water circling the Island until it looks like they're surrounded by nothing by darkness and a sea of dissipating light, like right here, in this moment, is every single firework Desmond has ever seen in his life, added to every single one Clay has seen in all twenty, thirty, forty of his.
“Not to,” says Clay, half-drowned out by the noise.
Although he is living Ezio's memories, Desmond holds on desperately to himself. He knows what will happen if he doesn't, and he's already let too much slip through the cracks of his fingers. It is with an outsider's perspective that he realizes, when Ezio decides to visit Masyaf's locked-away library with Sophia, that he is nearing the end. There is an almost dramatically appropriate cadence and flow to Ezio's life.
This is a good place for a story to end.
“Still no?” Clay asks, already lying in wait as Desmond pauses for a breather outside the gate. He is sitting atop a mountain of sea-spray-smoothed rocks, kicking his legs off the side of the one at its peak.
“No,” Desmond responds without missing a beat, straightening from where he is hunched over his knees. He squints up at Clay, trying to read his face like he has many times before and like many times before, comes up fruitless. It is hard to tell what a dead man's thinking.
“Too bad,” Clay sighs, dropping his chin into his palm. “Would've been fun.”
“For you, maybe,” Desmond scoffs, approaching the small mountain and beginning to climb it. He has climbed the highest towers of Constantinople and even the peaks of Masyaf's fortress mount; he makes short work of the ten-foot pile. With a huff, he settles himself into a niche on the layer right under Clay's, his shoulder bumping into the side of Clay's foot when he kicks it far out enough. From here, he can see the entire Island (not that there's much to see).
“What's your deal, anyway?” he asks, a hand catching Clay's foot by the heel and stilling it.
“The shitty one,” Clay answers, peering down at his captured shoe. “Want to trade?”
Desmond lets go with a sigh, knowing better than to have expected a straight answer. “You've got a serious case of MPD going on there, you know. One second you're fine, the next you're about to rip my face off. I don't even know if you're here to help or hurt me, to be honest.”
“Yeah, your record for recognizing enemies hasn't been too stellar so far,” Clay agrees, fighting against none of the aforementioned allegations. He hooks his ankles over one another and lets them rest against the rock, offering no other answer other than the quiet drumming of the waves. Desmond senses it in his bones - this, too, has a natural sense of closure about it, which is good, if not a little bit overdue. Clay has been finished for years.
“I know what to do,” Desmond says, after a little while, looking out to sea. “I know, now.”
Clay makes no indication that he heard him. “Did you know,” he says, “That in quantum physics, there's a theory that if you go fast enough, maybe a hundred, thousand, million times faster than the speed of light, you could breach the limit of time? That things that are happening will be going too fast for it to even reach you, that it'll have ended before it even began? Only in theory, of course. There's no possible way for man to actually get to those kinds of speeds, maybe even with a Piece of Eden. How funny is that?”
Desmond sighs again, clasping his hands together. Sometimes, Clay talks about things that he can't possibly hope to understand, things from ages past, things from lives he's lived, things from the life that was stolen. He runs through topics like the words are falling off his tongue, like he's doing a mental recall of everything he knows so that he won't forget it, so the data won't get lost. There's no blood left in his body to write it all down; there's only stars and theories and fireworks left.
“Clay,” says Desmond.
“It's dark and cold in the ground, Desmond, when they cover you up,” says Clay, far away.
“Thanks,” Desmond breathes, closing his eyes for a brief moment before beginning to climb down.
He reaches the ground when Clay is in the middle of reciting something Chinese. A few steps after that, Clay is speaking in fast, fluent Italian – something about the perpetual orbit of the planetary bodies – then French, then an unfamiliar bout of speech from a Native American tribe. In American-accented Italian, a children's prayer from the Holy Bible. In a Mongol dialect, a shepherding song. A math equation in Latin, even a nursery rhyme in Portuguese. Then right before Desmond breaches the gate, he hears, in English:
“And all that light at the end of the tunnel stuff is crap. You know, heaven – it's like freefall.”
Desmond feels the words echo in his bones as he slips into Ezio's skin. He feels it - this is a good place for a story to end.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-07 09:57 pm (UTC)At the end of your fic, Clay is obviously too broken to go forward, and getting dissolved would a rest, if nothing else. *pets* He deserves whatever we can give him. (This, even though I hated his actor in Revelations!)
HOLY FUCK.
Took me a min there, but this is the first official confirmation that Astergo turned Lucy! ARGH. Goddamn it, Why'd a lady have to be the weak turn coat. GRRRR.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-08 02:44 pm (UTC)Clay's story is pretty tragic. >: Although, I think it's easy yet hard to just get mad at Lucy. The Assassins are pretty ruthless themselves in their ways - leaving a girl entirely on her own during the latter part of her adolescence is really tough! Especially if leaving her to a cold, ruthless environment like Abstergo.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-09 06:17 pm (UTC);_; I just really liked her as a no-nonsense leader, it was cool.