Archive of Our Own

It takes Andy a few days to realise what has happened. Actually, it’s Nile who brings it up first, still dreaming about Quynh. She and Booker have been spending the last couple months in Mongolia, apparently; good for them.

Andy almost envies them the snow.

Joe and Nicky had decided they wanted to spend a week hiking in a particular series of gorges in the height of summer. Even in the (advertised as) airconditioned motel room in the closest town, Andy resents being so close to the burning Australian Outback. Nile, still fresh from Afghanistan, is dealing with it easier. She spends a lot of time in town. Claims she needs a break from Andy’s “complaining” and Joe and Nicky’s “being Joe and Nicky”.

So when Nile brings up the change in her dreams, that she might be dreaming about someone new, Andy brushes her off. She’s too hot, sweaty and dusty to give it any thought. And too cranky to think about how she’s had the same weirdly dark dreams. There’s also the solar flare and global aurora to blame.

It isn’t until Andy wakes up one morning to find Joe and Nicky back a day early that she realises.

“Another one so soon?” she groans, staring up at the cheap motel room ceiling.

“You feeling alright there, Boss?” Nicky asks. “It’s been a couple nights since he died.”

“You don’t have a fever do you?” Joe asks. Even though Andy’s healing is starting to speed up again, the three of them are still overprotective of her.

“She's just cranky,” Nile says, “doesn’t like the heat.”

“Global warming,” Joe agrees. “The world used to be cooler.”

“It’s barely morning and already hot enough to burn alive,” Andy grumbles at them, but she does drag herself upright. “So what have we got?”

“He’s just another kid,” Nicky grumbles, tossing her one of the milk drinks she’s taken to lately. Australians do some weird things to coffee, but at least it’s cold and has caffeine. “Seems to have spent some time hiding in a cave. You think he fell down there?”

“He’s out, now,” Andy says, feeling a bit better after the milky excuse for coffee. “I saw a forest, slight dusting of snow.”

“Northern hemisphere,” Nicky answers.

“United States, somewhere in the eastern half,” Nile says, joining in their game. She blushes when Andy raises an eyebrow at her. “I saw sumak. My brother had a nature phase, made us learn the difference from the safe kind and the poison ivy kind.”

“Still a lot of ground to cover,” Andy says. Hiking through possible poison ivy doesn’t appeal any more than hiking through Australian desert.

“It’s a place to start,” Joe says, turning his sketchbook around. “I could swear I’ve seen this face before.”

“They say any one person has six doppelgangers around the world,” Nile says, studying the sketch. “Having lived as long as you have, it’s probable you have seen the face.”

“No, no,he definitely looks familiar,” Nicky says, squinting at the page.

“That scar is distinctive,” Andy points out, tapping the page where a pale line marrs the young man’s lips. “Old, too.”

“Booking flights is gonna be a pain, Boss,” Nile says, somewhat hesitantly. Andy chalks that up to the rarely used form of address. “35 hours and three connections to JFK, including LAX. Expensive, too.”

“Fuck,” Andy swears quietly. “That’s a long time to be stuck in a flying can. Book to LA. Hopefully by the time we get there we’ll know more.”

Plans made to return to somewhere with less extreme weather patterns, Andy stalks through the room intent on getting a cold shhower.

Andy wakes up with a groan and an already forming headache. They’d been tracking the new guy for almost a month with no success. He moves fast, never staying in one place for too long.

Somehow, he always has a way out of town. A train, a bus, a helpful truck driver picking up a hitchhiker -

“He’s ditched the car,” Joe scowls, sounding just as put out by it as Andy feels.

- or just hotwires a car in the middle of the night.

“At a gas station in the middle of nowhere?” Nile says pointedly. “I don’t buy it.”

“He’s got four major routes he could hitch a ride on,” Nicky says, finger on the map he insisted on getting when they finally landed in New York. They were already two states behind, back then. “Look; Champaign, Illinois.”

“He was in New York,” Andy says thoughtfully, tapping on the map. “Then Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Indianapolis. He’s young. Let’s assume he’s headed for California or Vegas and will keep up the pattern. If we drive through the night to Kansas City, maybe we can cut him off. Especially if he goes through Iowa.”

“He could be going to Chicago,” Nile points out, with a look of ill-hidden want.

“You can’t go to Chicago,” Andy tells her gruffly. She understands, it’s just not safe.

“She has a point,” Nicky says reasonably.

“Fine,” Andy barks out. “We split up. Boys to Chicago, girls to Kansas.”

Of course, that’s when the kid breaks the pattern. He spends nearly two weeks drinking in some long forgotten cabin in the woods. Got there by foot and was immediately snowed in, so no way to track him. And here Andy thought the late snow was scheduled for April.

It leaves her and Nile kicking their feet in small town Missouri.

Missouri is the first time they’ve sat in one place for more than a night, so of course that’s when they get the first clue who he is.

The power of doing nothing.

Nile is the one to turn on the news. She says she wants to know what’s going on in the world, too young to know it’s all the same shit. She calls Andy jaded. This time she might have a point.

Right there on the screen is an image of their kid. ‘Terrorist at Large’ says the rolling banner at the bottom.

”Last seen in Indianapolis,” the newscaster says over the top, ”Desmond Miles is to be considered armed and highly dangerous. If you have any information, please call the number on the screen. If you see him, do not engage.”

“That’s ominous,” Nile says as the broadcast switches to sports. “Maybe we should try tracking him down faster?”

“He’s spent the last three months leading us on a merry chase, not blowing things up,” Andy says. She reaches under her bed for the vodka she hid there while Nile wasn’t looking. “North and South, North and South, but steadily East. If we just wait here he’ll come to us.” That said, she cracks open the bottle and starts drinking.

Despite her words to Nile, this has just gotten a whole lot more complicated.

She might have to call Copley.

It takes Copley a week to get back to her about the mystery of Desmond Miles. And it is a mystery.

According to Copley, there’s the information available on Desmond Miles and then there’s the truth. Also according to Coply, they don’t line up. He also asks a lot of questions about what she wants this for, are they going after individual murderers now?”

Andy promises to tell him when things calm down.

The available information puts Desmond Miles as having been born and raised in midwest America. He performed poorly in elementary school and earnt himself a juvenile record by middle school. No high school records at all, he was pulled out by his anti-government father. His mother is dead, done in by an addiction to prescription painkillers.

Next place he pops up is New York. There he tends a bar, is reported missing by his coworkers, then paraglides onto a notable building home to a major pharmaceuticals company several months later. Of all the night staff working there that night, rumors are Desmond Miles is the only one to walk out alive.

Shortly after that, he kills his way through a building in Rome. A building run by the same drug company - Abstergo Industries.

Desmond Miles isn’t the loose cannon disestablishmentarianist the media paints him as. He’s a man with a grudge.

The truth is, Desmond didn’t exist before that missing persons report in New York. No birth records, hospital records, school records of any kind. Even his juvenile record was faked. Copley can’t find anything at all on the parents.

Andy thanks him, hangs up, and resumes trying to get drunk before Nile puts a stop to it.

Luckily, she’s decided to visit some of the neighboring towns. Today’s is one of America’s many Washingtons. Andy doesn’t see the appeal.

Something changes. Where before Desmond seemed fine to dick around in the American backwoods, visiting a city once every couple of weeks, suddenly he moves with purpose. One morning he’s hiking in whatever woods he’s in, the next he’s practically gunning it to Memphis. The night after that he’s successfully smuggled himself into Mexico.

Andy is livid.

It takes them a couple days to get their shit together and regroup. Which means they get into Mexico City just in time for disaster to strike.

Someone’s fancy special ops team report Desmond’s location to be a certain abandoned warehouse. Somehow, Copley hears and lets them know.

Unfortunately, when they get there the team is dead and Desmond is gone. It’s strange. The team all have silencers on their guns and half of them were stabbed to death. Stabbed in a way Andy knows she should recognise.

Before she can properly work out what happened, a new fancy strike force shows up and sprays bullets everywhere.

The thrill of battle is a balm to Andy’s soul after the year she’s had. Removing themselves from the resulting clusterfuck and then having to lay low, she could do without.

Somehow, when Andy isn’t paying attention, Desmond boards a ship.

“Why does it have to be a boat?” she demands. The sound of her stone running along the blade of her axe isn’t as soothing as usual, but at least it will be sharp when they finally catch him. “The power of flight, but he gets on a boat.”

“Do you get sea sick?” Nile asks, cleaning her guns on the other side of the table.

“Only in a truly terrible storm,” Andy says. “But I’d still rather not be trapped at sea.”

“Because of Quynh, I suppose,” Nile says, and she can stop talking any minute now.

“Boss is just impatient,” Joe says from the armchair with Nicky curled in his lap. “My love, on the other hand, has only one fault. Poor Nicolo can barely get a smell of the ocean before it makes him ill. He becomes violently sick at sea.”

“Isn’t Genoa a port town?” Nile asks. “Aren’t you from Genoa?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Andy interrupts, taking pity on Nicky, who is already starting to look a little green. “We can’t know where he’s going until we get there. We’re stuck.”

“Sure we can, all ships these days have live tracking, and I saw the name written on the life rings,” Nile says, fiddling with her phone. She turns it around to show the screen. “He’ll be in Lisbon in a little over a week.”

“Well done,” Andy says, cheered up. “We fly to Lisbon.”

As a reward to Nile, Andy books rooms at the Miriad and goes to meet Desmond at the port alone. Joe and Nicky she leaves in the city, ready to back her up if she needs it.

It was supposed to be simple. No more chasing.

Even in that infernal white hoodie he wears, Desmond turns out to be slipperier than Andy gave him credit for. She only manages to catch glimpses of him before he slips once more into the crowd

Despite his elusive nature, Andy does manage to track him almost back to the hotel before she loses him again. She spends two minutes trying to work out where he might have gone before her phone beeps.

It’s from Nile.

Eyes on target

She arrives back at the tower just in time to see Desmond leap off of it and dive into the river below. Someone screams.

Lost him

Disgusted, Andy stalks back into the building to call Copley.

Meanwhile, Desmond gets on a train, vanishes for a week, and turns up again in Madrid. Notably, there’s an Abstergo facility there.

They don’t waste time in Madrid, going straight to the Abstergo building. They’re late. The front guards are dead, stabbed in that way Andy recognises from Mexico. She eyes the door critically, wondering how they’re supposed to get in through the lockdown.

“Constantinople, 1511,” she decides, stepping back.

Joe immediately takes her place, setting a small detonation charge on the doors.

“It’s Istanbul, now,” Nile says conversationally. But she also loads her gun and steps into place, just like the marines are trained.

“It was Konstantiniyye back then,” Nicky replies, right before the doors are blown in.

They rush inside to a massacre. Desmond has killed everyone in the foyer and moved on. It looks like he’s gone systematically, going from room to room and picking up weapons as he goes.

When Desmond finally appears. Andy is fully prepared to shoot him and drag out his corpse, but she’s too busy with what remains of Abstergo’s private militia. Instead, she has to watch him stalk around the walls. His movements are familiar and she knows she’s seen that walk before, if she could just remember where.

Then Nile almost grabs him and Desmond stabs her with a blade that comes out of a bracer on his wrist.

Assassin! Andy thinks, just before something explodes and she’s too busy being dead.

They decide to back off after Madrid. Change tacks.

They call Copley, who is having fun with Desmond’s records. Apparently someone keeps deleting them and someone else keeps putting him at the top of the Most Wanted list. Andy finally tells him what’s been going on, that Desmond is a new immortal that keeps getting away from them.

He offers to try scrub Desmond’s record himself, but Andy tells him not to bother just yet.

Instead, she has him turn his attention to Abstergo. She has him track Desmond’s heading and find an Abstergo facility he might be heading for. Eventually, he comes back with a server bank in Amsterdam.

They rent an apartment nearby and settle in for the long game. They’re not dreaming of each other anymore, so with any luck he’ll think he’s lost them.

Amsterdam is a nice city, and Andy almost finds herself relaxing into the rhythm of it.

Of course, because the universe likes to fuck with people, Desmond finally shows up while she’s out on a grocery run. Nicky’s been going on about goose fat and the proper ingredients for Italian cuisine again, so it was the perfect excuse to get out of the apartment for a while. Or all day.

Desmond turns and locks eyes with her. For a moment, she thinks about shooting him before dismissing the idea. In a crowd like this, it would be more trouble than it was worth. Then he runs and she regrets not doing it when she had the chance.

She turns to continue on her way, maybe actually look for the things Nicky wants instead of just pretend to. Her phone rings before she makes it to the end of the block.

”We got him, Boss,” Nicky says as soon as the line connects. ”Ran straight out of the alley. We’re taking him to the warehouse now.”

“Good work,” Andy tells him, hailing the first taxi to pass by.

For some reason, Desmond looks like a pissed off kitten when she finally sees him.

“Andromache of Scythia,” he says, surprising her. "So not the person I wanted on my ass for 6 months."

“You know who I am?” Andy asks, surprised. She considers shooting him just for the principal of it.

“I know you’re immortal.”

“So are you.”