AC/ Clay headcanons

 originally posted on tumblr, Apr 5th 2022

i did a Desmond headcanons post a while ago, so it’s only fair i do one for my other All-Time Blorbo so,

Clay headcanons that only make sense to me:

• Clay was born and raised in suburban Chicago, and spent most of his life there, save for a few family roadtrips during vacations and then training with the Brotherhood. Infiltrating the Animus program was the first time he ever went abroad;

• He had a collection of space-related clippings, like NASA news, reports on coming eclipses, blurry pictures he took with his father’s borrowed camera, which eventually became clear pictures after he got a telescope for his twelth birthday. There was a leaflet and pictures from a space exploration museum exhibit he went with his school, a faded grinning moon keychain he got from an aunt, and his most prized possession, a picture of four-year-old him grinning and staring up at the sky when he saw the Halley comet;

• After getting severely stung as a kid, he became phobic of bees and hornets and gets very antsy around large flying insects. Ironically, he’s also one of those people who never seem to get stung by mosquitoes;

• He often watched anime movies at a friend’s place after school. First time he watched Akira on a bootleg VHS, he had nightmares for two days because of the body horror. Afterwards, he developed a fascination with cyberpunk and technology in general;

• His first gaming console was a second-hand Nintendo 64, but if you ask him it was a Playstation 2. He ran a bet with a friend of his that if he could fix it, he could have it, and said friend agreed since the neighborhood maintenance guy told him it was more worth it to get a new one than fix it. Clay pulled it off after pouring months on the thing, and many a Halo split screen nighst were had thanks to it;

• Clay went into a Mechanical Engineering major and a Computer Engineering minor for college, and he went through the oath cerimony and he had an engineer’s ring. He often tapped it on something when he was lost in thought;

• While canonically his therapist was a major ass, Clay did in fact have ADHD and OCD. He almost had to quit college several times because of his symptoms;

• He’s one of these people who hoard internet tabs on their browser, and god help whoever deletes even one of them.

• He’s also incredibly picky about his filing system, digital and physical, which has both been a hindrance and a boon for his programming classes;

• He played Dungeons and Dragons and other TTRPG during high school, and in college he was a bit of a forever DM in the nerd circles there, though because of how his campaigns constantly died because of scheduling issues, he stopped doing homebrew and stuck to adventure books instead;

• He was also positively insufferable when the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out in theaters, and he almost failed a college class because he was in line for premier tickets instead of taking an exam;

• Clay realized he wasn’t straight really young, but only figured out he was gay in his teens. Going to college helped him explore his sexuality more, but joining the Brotherhood made him more confident and comfortable in his own skin, and he went to his first pride before being inducted as a full-fledged assassin;

• He never came out to his father, uncomfortable with being this vulnerable with him, but coming out to his mother was a bit of a “oh I knew already, I was just waiting on you to tell me yourself” situation;

• After his mother left and went back to her parent’s home in Detroit, he kept in contact with her and often relied on her for support when he didn’t find it with his father;

• The divorce was a long process overall, what with his father in denial about it and then the whole arguing about splitting assets. His mother did remarry though, and he had two stepsiblings from it, a younger brother and a baby sister. It was rocky at first for him during visits on holidays, but eventually they worked things out;

• While he does drink on occasion, he refuses to touch stuff like spirits due to bad memories from his father’s alcoholism;

• He won’t admit it even at threat of death, but he hates deep dish pizza with a passion. It’s too much filling for too little crust, he’d rather eat a sweet traditional pie instead;

• Speaking of, he absolutely loves jams and jellies. He can’t explain why, he just does and he’ll take those over any other spreadable anyday;

• His favorite snacks are fried fish fingers with spicy ranch, and jelly donuts. He’ll kill several men for those and that’s a promise;

• Clay does have curly hair, but he has a hair brushing tic and it pretty much kills any curl definition he has and it looks vaguely wavy instead;

• While him and Rebecca collaborated on several projects together, they never met personally as they were rarely in the same team, and they only knew each other through codenames until the Animus infiltration mission;

• He went to the Farm for a portion of his novice training with Bill, though he didn’t spend much time there. Only a few of the other kids who grew up with Desmond had stayed there, and that was the first time Clay ever heard about him;

• Lucy had thought for a bit that Clay had a crush on her during his time in Abstergo, and he awkwardly reassured her he couldn’t even if he tried. It made for an oddly sweet conversation, and ended up cementing his trust on her beyond Bill vouching for her.