(no subject)
Fandom: Assassin's Creed
Characters: Altair Ibn'La-Ahad, Malik Al-Sayf, Maria Thorpe, Others
Rating: PG
Warnings: A kink meme request: the templars and assassins switch places.
The Assassins are good.
They slide out of the shadows and ambush with an incredible finesse that the Templars don't possess, largely because the Templars don't need it. Why should they? They have all the power of a bright civilization at their disposal and no inclination to hide, so Altair doesn't even bother dragging the white-robed assassin into an alley before twisting around and burying his dagger into the nameless man's back, right between the shoulder blades, severing his spine. He steps on the man's neck and crushes it under his heel as he pulls the weapon out.
The Assassins are good, but Altair is better.
The crowd of onlookers underfoot gasp as the bloody body hits the dusty ground, averting their eyes like they could be guilty by association if they so much as stare a moment too long. The five bodies hanging in the gallows on the stage behind him are proof that they could. Even the city guards gather to see what the commotion is about before they catch sight of him and back into each other, stepping on each other's toes as they walk in a wide circle around him, dispersing the spectators and avoiding his gaze.
“Let this be a lesson to you all,” he announces. “Not even the Assassins can escape judgment.”
Ever so faintly, he lifts his head and, above the stench of the Poor District and the rot of the people, he catches a whiff of fire on the wind.
Even with one arm, Malik easily tosses the body into the fire. Flesh, like the pages of heretic books and sacrilegious propaganda, burns black then not at all, broken down into nothing but thick, clogging smoke. The white and red garb of the Assassins singe and char until even their bones turn brittle and dark. The smell of burning human meat is distasteful and sickening to the stomach. It makes one of his assistants start to retch wetly in the corner, adding the smell of vomit to the air.
“Get a hold of yourself,” he barks at the doubled-over back. Everyone in the vicinity cringes at the sharp whip-like crack of his voice, knowing better than to test his infamous ire. “And make sure the rest of this burns to ash. And stay alert! I am going to check that the rest of you novices haven't botched up a simple fire,” he says with disgust, sweeping out of the alcove and into the streets. Even though he is handicapped, the pedestrians part like the sea to make way.
There is no weakness in a man whose arm, even singular, is that of the law.
The hood falls off the assassin and Altair freezes, then sneers. “They are so pressed for men that they are hiring women now?”
The assassin kicks at him, hands scratching angry red welts into his arm, but she lets out a muffled growl and scrabbles her feet against the ground instead when he tightens the hold he has around her neck. It is thin and fragile under his fingers, not because she is a woman, but because any man's throat is vulnerable when in his grasp. She glares balefully at him, her arm shooting out once to claw at his face, but she has made concessions to walk in a man's shoes - the nails are brittle, chipped, and blunt. They do little damage.
“You Templar vermin don't know of what you speak,” she hisses, voice low and deep for the fairer sex. Her words are flecked with anger and disgust; she raises his chin as much as his choke-hold will allow, proud and crass, not at all like a woman. “You don't even know what you are fighting for. You are so well-ingrained in your bigotry that you have begun to believe your own lies. What do you know of equality?” Despite being pinned like an animal, waiting to die, she opens her mouth and laughs in his face. “What do you know of justice?”
He pulls her away from the wall and throws her to the ground, frowning as she gasps and holds a hand to her neck. This time, there is confusion as well as distaste in the way she looks at him, one of her hands instinctively flexing back to unsheathe the weapon hidden in her bracer, even if Altair broke the blade not ten minutes prior. Only the short, jagged base of the knife comes out, barely extending past the butt of her palm.
“I know there is no justice in gutting a defenseless woman,” he says, leaning forward and catching her wrist as she tried to slash at his throat with the ruined hidden blade. He smiles, all teeth. “At least not where no one else can see.”
“You don't understand, Altair. The Assassins are the ones who can see the true path to the future,” Al Mualim pleads, but he is already choking on his own blood, the collar of his robes soaking a deep red, matching the Templar cross sewn on his front and distorting its clean-cut lines. He is bleeding out on the floor and Altair watches him die, neither stooping to comfort them nor bending to pass a hand over his eyes when the old, wizened body finally gives out and shudders still. That would be too merciful; that would be too much like an Assassin.
When he returns to the castle, he has visitors.
“Al Mualim called us here,” explains the black-market dealer from Damascus, dressed in opulent, dark robes from the profit he makes from selling priceless counterfeit pots imported from the East. The wizened old doctor from Acre, his beard a snowy white, nods his agreement. “He said there was a matter of great importance to discuss, mentioned a letter from Europe.”
Malik's eyes wander over the blood still caked in Altair's nails, linger on the golden sphere still trapped in the claw of his hand, tight and secure like the bars of an iron cage. There is jealousy in that gaze, envy that Altair should be the one to have won that particular prize. “A trap,” he surmises sullenly, leaning back against the counter with a huff of irritation. “These days the Assassins are everywhere. And if you have dealt with your infiltration problem here, then I am going to return to my district to make sure I don't have such careless pest problems.”
“Malik,” Altair begins, but he is too proud and too power-drunk, too certain of his own truths to go searching for any others, too corruption-filthy and selfish. He lowers his attention away from the expectant look the other Templar gives him and shakes his head. What forgiveness does he seek that he himself does not grant at the gallows? “No, it is nothing.
All of you, go.”
Fandom: Assassin's Creed
Characters: Yusuf Tazim, Ezio Auditore
Rating: G
Warnings: Spoilers for Assassin's Creed: Revelations. A kink meme request: a conversation and a tribute.
It is quiet in Istanbul, calm in Konstantiniyye, peaceful in Constantinople in a way that it rarely is. The late afternoon has smeared the pale architecture with a vibrant orange-to-yellow fade, and all the colors of the city blends a little for a brief, beautiful moment. Smoke rises from the rooftops of every district, mixing in with the wispy tendrils of incense burning from the lower streets, barely visible at this altitude. It suffuses the air with the scent of a thousand different lives, a hundred different cultures, and Ezio likes to imagine that the sun sets on Constantinople with the city a little freer than it did when it rose.
“I keep on having this dream,” Ezio confides, quietly and almost to himself if it weren't for the man at his side as they swing their legs over the balcony of a towering mosque like they are still young men. At least they can still make this climb, he silently considers. They are not quite that old yet.
“A good one?” Yusuf asks, a small smile playing at the corners of his mouth as always, like it couldn't ever quite manage to find its way off his face. The roots of his hair are turning gray, his short beard thinning out and peppered with it, but there is a youthfulness in his enthusiasm that has never left him, even as his bones grow stiffer all the time. The end of his brightly-patterned bandannas sways in the wind, fraying at the edges and Ezio waits for the day the cloth will simply give up its valiant fight to keep itself together and unravel all in one go, a mess of thread around his friend's forehead.
“Unfortunately, no,” Ezio answers, and Yusuf makes a sound of acknowledgment but not of surprise, waiting wordlessly for elaboration. They are assassins, after all, and good dreams do not frequent their profession all that often. “In my dream,” Ezio continues, “We are younger men and I had not been in Costantinopoli for long. But I had to go away on a mission; I was hunting the last of the Palialogos still, and I asked you a favor.”
“Ah,” exclaims Yusuf, pleased at his own recollections. “I remember that.” He takes the pipe out of his mouth and laughs, for as many sorrows as their life has given them, he remembers most of his life with a nostalgic fondness indicative of old men, wise enough to know that it is a blessing to be able to look back at all. “Yes, it was to...babysit your wife, no?”
Ezio raises a brow at him and they both laugh - Ezio with a chuckle and Yusuf with a guffaw that knocks his entire upper body back for a moment, leaving him teetering over the railing they are perched on. For an instant, a flare of panic burns bright and hot in Ezio's chest, irrationally afraid for his friend's life - an senseless fear, considering they have fallen greater distances than this despite their age, and there is a cart of hay directly below them - but then Yusuf rights himself without any difficulty at all.
The moment passes.
“I asked you to watch over Sofia, yes,” Ezio confirms, though they would both not escape unharmed from Ezio's residence in the city if Sofia ever heard of the unflattering way Yusuf had put it, assassins or no.
“Why, Ezio,” gasps Yusuf, dripping with mock offense. “I would never steal your pretty young wife from you. Your dreams are unfounded!”
Ezio's mouth curves into a slow smile as he shakes his head, looking down and between the toes of his boots at the tiny specks of civilians still milling about in the streets - carpet merchants desperately peddling their wares, women swathed in beautiful silks pausing to look. “That was not why it was a nightmare, arkadaşim,” he replies, turning to look at the other man. “In this dream, I returned from my mission to find that she had been captured and you had been killed. Every time, it is the same. I go to Sophia's old shop, everything is ransacked, and you are in a corner with a knife in your back.”
The words settle like night over them, cold, dark, heavy, and strangely inevitable. Like a thick blanket, it muffles and drowns out the sounds of the people, the sounds of life, and casts a deadly still over everything as far as the eye can see, as far as the ear can hear.
Only after what seems like forever does a small sound break the heavy curtain - a tink tink tink as Yusuf taps his pipe against the railing, dislodging the excess ash, the tip of his hook blade hitting against the stone. With it comes the distant cries of shop-owners calling out last calls before they close their shops, the faraway drum-and-bell beat of the Romanis performing, the pitter-patter of feet as thieves ready up for their evening run.
Ezio lets out a breath he didn't realize he had been holding.
“At least I died trying,” Yusuf comments, sounding unabashedly proud of his dream self. “Even in your dreams, I have some mettle, eh?”
The smile Ezio gives him this time is indulgent. “If I must be honest, I would rather have no one dying in my dreams.” It happens when he is awake too much already.
“Sometimes it may happen. Someday, it will happen, even to us. We, of all people, know what mortality is.” Yusuf looks across his hometown, this wonderful ever-changing city, at the hundreds of lives that both begin and end here, and Ezio knows he thinks that he should be so lucky if he is one of them. Though Yusuf is grinning, his words are sober. “And should it happen sooner than either of us may think, we should only consider one thing.”
A dramatic pause.
Ezio sighs, playing into his friend's enjoyment of the talk, sometimes theatrical, and prompts, “Which is?”
Yusuf beams. “Have you any regrets, Ezio? We all wish we had more time, that we could have done more, yes, but do you have any that, at this point in time, that can be changed? Any that are not past the extent of our reach?” He throws an arm into the air, a powerful motion that seems to encompass the earth, the sky, the stars all at once. “Because I do not. Right now, right here, there is nothing that I would change at this moment, and I am perfectly content to be sitting here, at the top of this mosque, sitting and smoking with you - my friend.” Yusuf smiles, showing teeth, and leans in conspiratorially, cupping a hand over his mouth. “It is a blessing, you know. There are not that many who sit down at the table and can really think of the man beside them as a friend.”
Ezio stares at him, but Yusuf has never needed a reaction to make his punchline and he simply leans back with a laugh, leaning one elbow on his knee as he takes another drag at his pipe, long and slow and relaxed. This particular posture hunches him over, almost uncannily not unlike the image that haunts Ezio's dreams, except Yusuf's body is relaxed with comfortableness rather than death.
The night is growing dark and hazy. Even with his Vision, the darkness casts a shadowy blur over everything, like the spidery veil that exists solely in dreams. The stars don't shine brightly enough for this. It makes Yusuf's hair seem darker, no longer white at the roots where it meets his tanned, dark skin. It makes him seem younger, brushing away the shadows of crow's feet wrinkles and creases in his forehead. It makes his robes blotchy and dark where the shadow of the mosque's intricate architecture falls over them, and for a second, a particularly dark patch on his back looks like the stain of blood as it seeps from the hole beside his spine.
“Yusuf,” Ezio calls, urgently.
“In this dream,” Yusuf interrupts, looking straight at him now. His eyes are dull without starlight, but his expression is, has always been, kind. He doesn't straighten from his hunch and he doesn't pull whatever it is that is casting an odd, occasional metal glint from behind him - the hilt of his Kijil, perhaps, where the end extends into a curved crescent. (How does he know that? Such an intricate detail?) “Does it end there?” Yusuf asks. “Or does it go on? What happens after my death? Do you save Sofia? Do you marry her? Are you happy?”
“But we are married already,” Ezio protests. “You called her my wife.”
“Then you must be happy,” Yusuf presses. “You were always so protective when you spoke of her.”
Ezio swallows down something bitter; it clogs in his throat. “This dream I keep on having...”
“There is no use in having it, arkadaşim. We are men with no regrets worth changing,” Yusuf reminds, suddenly far away on the railing, like he has moved ten feet from one word to the next. That is impossible - the mosque is only so wide, the railing only so long, and neither of them have budged an inch, but Yusuf's voice carries on the wind like an echo, like they might as well have been shouting across chasms, like something old and gone and dream-like.
Yusuf then yawns, a movement Ezio can see clearly despite the distance between them. “I am tired,” he admits. “I have earned my rest, don't you think? It is about time we return.”
Ezio finds himself shaking his head, staring hard through the darkness at Yusuf's face, trying to see every detail, now hard to discern. There was no need for it before; he could have just turned and looked at the other assassin's face, but now it seems like a great effort, a challenge, like peering at an old memory. “Not yet,” Ezio answers nonetheless, trying to use his Vision and reverting back to regular sight when that only leaves Yusuf's face as a smudge of blue. “Not yet, for me. I think...I will stay here a little longer.”
Sofia is waiting for him, he reminds himself. (So shouldn't he go?)
Yusuf laughs, barely a whisper now. “Then I will see you when you are tired enough to rest as well, my friend,” he agrees amiably, pulling himself to his feet. Ezio calls out to him, but he doesn't seem to hear, balancing easily on the railing, untroubled by the strong gusts, looking free and unfettered like a bird. He bounces once or twice on the toes of his boots, spreads his arms, and jumps the Leap of Faith without hesitation. Ezio watches him careen downwards, flipping once in the air so that his back will hit the hay. His eyes are closed, his head tilted up, and the moment Yusuf makes contact, far, far away-
Ezio wakes up.
Characters: Altair Ibn'La-Ahad, Malik Al-Sayf, Maria Thorpe, Others
Rating: PG
Warnings: A kink meme request: the templars and assassins switch places.
The Assassins are good.
They slide out of the shadows and ambush with an incredible finesse that the Templars don't possess, largely because the Templars don't need it. Why should they? They have all the power of a bright civilization at their disposal and no inclination to hide, so Altair doesn't even bother dragging the white-robed assassin into an alley before twisting around and burying his dagger into the nameless man's back, right between the shoulder blades, severing his spine. He steps on the man's neck and crushes it under his heel as he pulls the weapon out.
The Assassins are good, but Altair is better.
The crowd of onlookers underfoot gasp as the bloody body hits the dusty ground, averting their eyes like they could be guilty by association if they so much as stare a moment too long. The five bodies hanging in the gallows on the stage behind him are proof that they could. Even the city guards gather to see what the commotion is about before they catch sight of him and back into each other, stepping on each other's toes as they walk in a wide circle around him, dispersing the spectators and avoiding his gaze.
“Let this be a lesson to you all,” he announces. “Not even the Assassins can escape judgment.”
Ever so faintly, he lifts his head and, above the stench of the Poor District and the rot of the people, he catches a whiff of fire on the wind.
Even with one arm, Malik easily tosses the body into the fire. Flesh, like the pages of heretic books and sacrilegious propaganda, burns black then not at all, broken down into nothing but thick, clogging smoke. The white and red garb of the Assassins singe and char until even their bones turn brittle and dark. The smell of burning human meat is distasteful and sickening to the stomach. It makes one of his assistants start to retch wetly in the corner, adding the smell of vomit to the air.
“Get a hold of yourself,” he barks at the doubled-over back. Everyone in the vicinity cringes at the sharp whip-like crack of his voice, knowing better than to test his infamous ire. “And make sure the rest of this burns to ash. And stay alert! I am going to check that the rest of you novices haven't botched up a simple fire,” he says with disgust, sweeping out of the alcove and into the streets. Even though he is handicapped, the pedestrians part like the sea to make way.
There is no weakness in a man whose arm, even singular, is that of the law.
The hood falls off the assassin and Altair freezes, then sneers. “They are so pressed for men that they are hiring women now?”
The assassin kicks at him, hands scratching angry red welts into his arm, but she lets out a muffled growl and scrabbles her feet against the ground instead when he tightens the hold he has around her neck. It is thin and fragile under his fingers, not because she is a woman, but because any man's throat is vulnerable when in his grasp. She glares balefully at him, her arm shooting out once to claw at his face, but she has made concessions to walk in a man's shoes - the nails are brittle, chipped, and blunt. They do little damage.
“You Templar vermin don't know of what you speak,” she hisses, voice low and deep for the fairer sex. Her words are flecked with anger and disgust; she raises his chin as much as his choke-hold will allow, proud and crass, not at all like a woman. “You don't even know what you are fighting for. You are so well-ingrained in your bigotry that you have begun to believe your own lies. What do you know of equality?” Despite being pinned like an animal, waiting to die, she opens her mouth and laughs in his face. “What do you know of justice?”
He pulls her away from the wall and throws her to the ground, frowning as she gasps and holds a hand to her neck. This time, there is confusion as well as distaste in the way she looks at him, one of her hands instinctively flexing back to unsheathe the weapon hidden in her bracer, even if Altair broke the blade not ten minutes prior. Only the short, jagged base of the knife comes out, barely extending past the butt of her palm.
“I know there is no justice in gutting a defenseless woman,” he says, leaning forward and catching her wrist as she tried to slash at his throat with the ruined hidden blade. He smiles, all teeth. “At least not where no one else can see.”
“You don't understand, Altair. The Assassins are the ones who can see the true path to the future,” Al Mualim pleads, but he is already choking on his own blood, the collar of his robes soaking a deep red, matching the Templar cross sewn on his front and distorting its clean-cut lines. He is bleeding out on the floor and Altair watches him die, neither stooping to comfort them nor bending to pass a hand over his eyes when the old, wizened body finally gives out and shudders still. That would be too merciful; that would be too much like an Assassin.
When he returns to the castle, he has visitors.
“Al Mualim called us here,” explains the black-market dealer from Damascus, dressed in opulent, dark robes from the profit he makes from selling priceless counterfeit pots imported from the East. The wizened old doctor from Acre, his beard a snowy white, nods his agreement. “He said there was a matter of great importance to discuss, mentioned a letter from Europe.”
Malik's eyes wander over the blood still caked in Altair's nails, linger on the golden sphere still trapped in the claw of his hand, tight and secure like the bars of an iron cage. There is jealousy in that gaze, envy that Altair should be the one to have won that particular prize. “A trap,” he surmises sullenly, leaning back against the counter with a huff of irritation. “These days the Assassins are everywhere. And if you have dealt with your infiltration problem here, then I am going to return to my district to make sure I don't have such careless pest problems.”
“Malik,” Altair begins, but he is too proud and too power-drunk, too certain of his own truths to go searching for any others, too corruption-filthy and selfish. He lowers his attention away from the expectant look the other Templar gives him and shakes his head. What forgiveness does he seek that he himself does not grant at the gallows? “No, it is nothing.
All of you, go.”
Fandom: Assassin's Creed
Characters: Yusuf Tazim, Ezio Auditore
Rating: G
Warnings: Spoilers for Assassin's Creed: Revelations. A kink meme request: a conversation and a tribute.
It is quiet in Istanbul, calm in Konstantiniyye, peaceful in Constantinople in a way that it rarely is. The late afternoon has smeared the pale architecture with a vibrant orange-to-yellow fade, and all the colors of the city blends a little for a brief, beautiful moment. Smoke rises from the rooftops of every district, mixing in with the wispy tendrils of incense burning from the lower streets, barely visible at this altitude. It suffuses the air with the scent of a thousand different lives, a hundred different cultures, and Ezio likes to imagine that the sun sets on Constantinople with the city a little freer than it did when it rose.
“I keep on having this dream,” Ezio confides, quietly and almost to himself if it weren't for the man at his side as they swing their legs over the balcony of a towering mosque like they are still young men. At least they can still make this climb, he silently considers. They are not quite that old yet.
“A good one?” Yusuf asks, a small smile playing at the corners of his mouth as always, like it couldn't ever quite manage to find its way off his face. The roots of his hair are turning gray, his short beard thinning out and peppered with it, but there is a youthfulness in his enthusiasm that has never left him, even as his bones grow stiffer all the time. The end of his brightly-patterned bandannas sways in the wind, fraying at the edges and Ezio waits for the day the cloth will simply give up its valiant fight to keep itself together and unravel all in one go, a mess of thread around his friend's forehead.
“Unfortunately, no,” Ezio answers, and Yusuf makes a sound of acknowledgment but not of surprise, waiting wordlessly for elaboration. They are assassins, after all, and good dreams do not frequent their profession all that often. “In my dream,” Ezio continues, “We are younger men and I had not been in Costantinopoli for long. But I had to go away on a mission; I was hunting the last of the Palialogos still, and I asked you a favor.”
“Ah,” exclaims Yusuf, pleased at his own recollections. “I remember that.” He takes the pipe out of his mouth and laughs, for as many sorrows as their life has given them, he remembers most of his life with a nostalgic fondness indicative of old men, wise enough to know that it is a blessing to be able to look back at all. “Yes, it was to...babysit your wife, no?”
Ezio raises a brow at him and they both laugh - Ezio with a chuckle and Yusuf with a guffaw that knocks his entire upper body back for a moment, leaving him teetering over the railing they are perched on. For an instant, a flare of panic burns bright and hot in Ezio's chest, irrationally afraid for his friend's life - an senseless fear, considering they have fallen greater distances than this despite their age, and there is a cart of hay directly below them - but then Yusuf rights himself without any difficulty at all.
The moment passes.
“I asked you to watch over Sofia, yes,” Ezio confirms, though they would both not escape unharmed from Ezio's residence in the city if Sofia ever heard of the unflattering way Yusuf had put it, assassins or no.
“Why, Ezio,” gasps Yusuf, dripping with mock offense. “I would never steal your pretty young wife from you. Your dreams are unfounded!”
Ezio's mouth curves into a slow smile as he shakes his head, looking down and between the toes of his boots at the tiny specks of civilians still milling about in the streets - carpet merchants desperately peddling their wares, women swathed in beautiful silks pausing to look. “That was not why it was a nightmare, arkadaşim,” he replies, turning to look at the other man. “In this dream, I returned from my mission to find that she had been captured and you had been killed. Every time, it is the same. I go to Sophia's old shop, everything is ransacked, and you are in a corner with a knife in your back.”
The words settle like night over them, cold, dark, heavy, and strangely inevitable. Like a thick blanket, it muffles and drowns out the sounds of the people, the sounds of life, and casts a deadly still over everything as far as the eye can see, as far as the ear can hear.
Only after what seems like forever does a small sound break the heavy curtain - a tink tink tink as Yusuf taps his pipe against the railing, dislodging the excess ash, the tip of his hook blade hitting against the stone. With it comes the distant cries of shop-owners calling out last calls before they close their shops, the faraway drum-and-bell beat of the Romanis performing, the pitter-patter of feet as thieves ready up for their evening run.
Ezio lets out a breath he didn't realize he had been holding.
“At least I died trying,” Yusuf comments, sounding unabashedly proud of his dream self. “Even in your dreams, I have some mettle, eh?”
The smile Ezio gives him this time is indulgent. “If I must be honest, I would rather have no one dying in my dreams.” It happens when he is awake too much already.
“Sometimes it may happen. Someday, it will happen, even to us. We, of all people, know what mortality is.” Yusuf looks across his hometown, this wonderful ever-changing city, at the hundreds of lives that both begin and end here, and Ezio knows he thinks that he should be so lucky if he is one of them. Though Yusuf is grinning, his words are sober. “And should it happen sooner than either of us may think, we should only consider one thing.”
A dramatic pause.
Ezio sighs, playing into his friend's enjoyment of the talk, sometimes theatrical, and prompts, “Which is?”
Yusuf beams. “Have you any regrets, Ezio? We all wish we had more time, that we could have done more, yes, but do you have any that, at this point in time, that can be changed? Any that are not past the extent of our reach?” He throws an arm into the air, a powerful motion that seems to encompass the earth, the sky, the stars all at once. “Because I do not. Right now, right here, there is nothing that I would change at this moment, and I am perfectly content to be sitting here, at the top of this mosque, sitting and smoking with you - my friend.” Yusuf smiles, showing teeth, and leans in conspiratorially, cupping a hand over his mouth. “It is a blessing, you know. There are not that many who sit down at the table and can really think of the man beside them as a friend.”
Ezio stares at him, but Yusuf has never needed a reaction to make his punchline and he simply leans back with a laugh, leaning one elbow on his knee as he takes another drag at his pipe, long and slow and relaxed. This particular posture hunches him over, almost uncannily not unlike the image that haunts Ezio's dreams, except Yusuf's body is relaxed with comfortableness rather than death.
The night is growing dark and hazy. Even with his Vision, the darkness casts a shadowy blur over everything, like the spidery veil that exists solely in dreams. The stars don't shine brightly enough for this. It makes Yusuf's hair seem darker, no longer white at the roots where it meets his tanned, dark skin. It makes him seem younger, brushing away the shadows of crow's feet wrinkles and creases in his forehead. It makes his robes blotchy and dark where the shadow of the mosque's intricate architecture falls over them, and for a second, a particularly dark patch on his back looks like the stain of blood as it seeps from the hole beside his spine.
“Yusuf,” Ezio calls, urgently.
“In this dream,” Yusuf interrupts, looking straight at him now. His eyes are dull without starlight, but his expression is, has always been, kind. He doesn't straighten from his hunch and he doesn't pull whatever it is that is casting an odd, occasional metal glint from behind him - the hilt of his Kijil, perhaps, where the end extends into a curved crescent. (How does he know that? Such an intricate detail?) “Does it end there?” Yusuf asks. “Or does it go on? What happens after my death? Do you save Sofia? Do you marry her? Are you happy?”
“But we are married already,” Ezio protests. “You called her my wife.”
“Then you must be happy,” Yusuf presses. “You were always so protective when you spoke of her.”
Ezio swallows down something bitter; it clogs in his throat. “This dream I keep on having...”
“There is no use in having it, arkadaşim. We are men with no regrets worth changing,” Yusuf reminds, suddenly far away on the railing, like he has moved ten feet from one word to the next. That is impossible - the mosque is only so wide, the railing only so long, and neither of them have budged an inch, but Yusuf's voice carries on the wind like an echo, like they might as well have been shouting across chasms, like something old and gone and dream-like.
Yusuf then yawns, a movement Ezio can see clearly despite the distance between them. “I am tired,” he admits. “I have earned my rest, don't you think? It is about time we return.”
Ezio finds himself shaking his head, staring hard through the darkness at Yusuf's face, trying to see every detail, now hard to discern. There was no need for it before; he could have just turned and looked at the other assassin's face, but now it seems like a great effort, a challenge, like peering at an old memory. “Not yet,” Ezio answers nonetheless, trying to use his Vision and reverting back to regular sight when that only leaves Yusuf's face as a smudge of blue. “Not yet, for me. I think...I will stay here a little longer.”
Sofia is waiting for him, he reminds himself. (So shouldn't he go?)
Yusuf laughs, barely a whisper now. “Then I will see you when you are tired enough to rest as well, my friend,” he agrees amiably, pulling himself to his feet. Ezio calls out to him, but he doesn't seem to hear, balancing easily on the railing, untroubled by the strong gusts, looking free and unfettered like a bird. He bounces once or twice on the toes of his boots, spreads his arms, and jumps the Leap of Faith without hesitation. Ezio watches him careen downwards, flipping once in the air so that his back will hit the hay. His eyes are closed, his head tilted up, and the moment Yusuf makes contact, far, far away-
Ezio wakes up.