A/N
This is super old and outdated. Please don't read it, but if you really want to go check out the new version on Archive of Our Own. It's available for public viewing so you don't even need an account. Both versions will probably be updated and completed in 2019.

Prologue: Legacy

My name is Didem Bayrakdarian.

I know that's a bit of a mouthful– feel free to blame my parents. My father is a cousin of the opera singer Isabel Bayrakdarian. They were both born in Lebanon and moved to North America as teenagers. Dad met my mother in New York; back then she was a dancer in a Middle Eastern restaurant. After getting married they moved to San Francisco for a less stressful life. When I was born my parents didn't have a name picked out yet, so my mother blessed me with the moniker of one of her idols, the Turkish belly dancer Didem.

I thought it was a weird name so I made everyone call me Dee, then in junior high I acquired this annoying nickname of DeeBay; even my teachers occasionally let it slip. By the time I became a sophomore in high school I learned to love that stupid name, and that was also the year I started following in my mother's footsteps despite many arguments stating I would end up doing the exact opposite.

Isn't it funny how that happens? As a teenager you hate everything your parents stand for and want to grow up to be completely unlike them. But when I turned twenty I realized we had more in common that I would have admitted a few years ago.

Apparently one of the things we shared was an affiliation with a group of people called Assassins.

I was taken after dancing at a renaissance faire in June. It was a great day– the sky cloudless, my outfit perfect, and everyone staring at me in wonder and amazement. One thing I realized about belly dancing is that both men and women admire the courage of anyone brave enough to perform it, especially if you're a solo artist.

After the show I returned to my friend's campsite to get some water, and all of a sudden two random guys showed up. I first noticed they were wearing suits, nice white ones by Armani or Calvin Klein. Then one of them spoke into a device on his wrist, the other shot at me with a weird gun, and I barely had time to register the dart sticking out of my arm. When I woke up I was in a plain white room where everything looked smooth and futuristic, and my clothes had been changed.

As soon as I got out of bed a panel in the wall slid aside and in walked a balding older man with a thick beard. He introduced himself as Dr. Warren Vidic, a researcher working for a company called Abstergo, which I'd never heard of. He informed me I had been "procured" and safely transported to their laboratory in Italy so they could run some mental tests on me.

The first thing I thought was 'how did I get from northern Cali to Italy in a day?' Then it occurred to me that I must have been unconscious for at least a few days. I didn't believe Vidic was a real doctor; he had an unsettling look in his eye that made me suspicious of his line of work. He had said mental tests, after all.

But for fear of being shot and dumped in a back alley to rot, I followed the man to a different room with an odd-looking table in it. There, a blonde woman in a white lab coat introduced herself as Lucy Stillman. Vidic regarded me curiously while Lucy attached sensors to my head. I didn't even ask what the machine did but the doctors took turns explaining it to me. "This is the Animus," Vidic said fondly, "a device that lets us see the memories of your ancestors."

"It uses genetic memory retrieval to go back in time and let you experience life as your ancestors," Lucy added while focusing intently on her keyboard.

Now I had even more questions. Who were these people, really? Why in the world did they want to see into my past? I didn't even know that much about my family history, but apparently there was something worth looking for in it. Since I hadn't said anything they both stared down expectantly.

"Well?" Vidic prodded, hoping I'd be interested. "Aren't you going to ask why we chose you to enter the Animus?"

I shook my head as best I could since it was trapped beneath a thin visor. "No... I just want you to get done doing whatever you're doing and let me go home."

They shared a smirk. "I do believe she's the most cooperative subject we've had so far," the old man remarked. He looked back at me. "Didem—"

"Dee," I clarified. I did not want these people feeling we were familiar enough to use my given name.

"Dee..." Vidic smiled kindly, though it was laced with malice of the psychopathic variety. "You are going to be unconscious. Your body will not respond to any of the things you experience in the Animus, but your mind will make it feel real. When you wake up some things may be different about you."

"...Like how different?" I asked. My nerves then decided to explode in my stomach and I felt like I was going to be sick. Was I about to become an android or something?

"You may find you possess certain qualities of your ancestors. There will be no physical effects, no transmutations or anything out of a sci-fi horror, but if you do 'change' in the Animus we will have to run further tests."

"Okay..." I mumbled. "Can we just get this over with?"

That was the last thing I remembered until opening my eyes in that pure white room again.

It went on like that for a few weeks. I would wake up, be escorted to the Animus, plugged in, and have my brain probed for hours on end. Getting out of the machine left me so exhausted that all I could do was sleep, and I began having weird dreams of times long passed. I saw myself as many different women in history, presumably my ancestors. Sometimes I would wake up with the ability to speak languages I had no prior knowledge of. Whenever that happened I was whisked off to a different lab where two scientists (one technician and one translator) attached sensors to my head and had random conversations with me until I started speaking English again. One day I overheard the linguist talking to Vidic outside the room.

"So far we've recorded Subject 19 conversing in Arabic, Persian and Turkish as well as dialects that are exclusive to nearby regions."

"But when it wears off, she is unable to remember any of it?"

"Precisely," the linguist said. "She can't even count to ten in anything but English."

"Interesting..." Vidic mused. "Upload those dictionaries to the Omniglot Program and let her listen to them tomorrow. We'll be able to tell if her temporal lobe has been traumatized or not."

Thanks to my genius father I knew exactly what they were talking about. He studies archaic languages for fun, thus I know that "omniglot" is Latin and means "all tongues". They probably had a Rosetta Stone-type program going on to teach their employees how to become fluent in any language. Admittedly it was interesting to learn about my eclectic gene pool, but I was worried that sometime soon I would leave the Animus believing I was somebody else entirely. I certainly didn't sound like myself most of the time.

Thankfully that never happened. I only spent three more days under Abstergo's watch because I woke up to someone in my room who was wearing the exact opposite of a white lab coat.

It was a ninja.

At least, that was my first impression of the man. He scared the crap out of me when I noticed him standing beside the bed. "Don't scream," he whispered as soon as my eyes flew open, and leaned over a little. "Didem?"

"Y-y-yes, that's me." My teeth chattered like one of those wind-up toys. "Who are you?"

"Your father sent me to rescue you. I can't delay– you need to come with me now. A guard is on the way to check on you." He turned toward a rope hanging from one of the ceiling panels and I couldn't help but feel I was in a spy movie.

"Are we really going to crawl around the air conditioning ducts?" I asked from the ground. The ninja was already climbing up the rope and glanced down at me.

"You can stay here to continue being mind-fucked if you really want," he replied. My mouth dropped open incredulously, but I realized he was right: I should follow him if it meant reclaiming my life.

Once we were in the ventilation system, which was just tall enough to shimmy through, I tried to make sense of the situation. "Who are you, exactly?"

"Johnathan Carpenter," he answered. "Professional corporate espionage agent and savior of fine women."

I let that comment slide. "Okay Johnathan… how did my father find out where I was? These people abducted me so it's not like they wrote him a letter explaining where they took me and what they were going to do."

We turned a corner and the duct widened, allowing us to crawl on hands and knees. "You underestimate your family, Dee. Your father's company is very powerful. Abstergo has been a corporate nemesis for a long time. Have you heard anything about the Omniglot Program?"

"Yes…" I answered suspiciously.

"Your father's company developed it first and Abstergo stole it. He believes they planted a mole in BayTech and waited for the programming to be finished."

"Why does Abstergo want a glorified Rosetta Stone program?"

Johnathan paused to look back at me and I almost ran into his butt. "Think about it. What's the easiest way to tell a tourist? They have accents or barely speak the language of whatever country they're visiting. If you're a spy or a recruiter, it's a lot easier to communicate when people believe you're a native. You make a personal connection based on language alone."

"That hardly seems nefarious."

He scoffed. "Okay, what's one profession where translators are quintessential?"

"Televangelism?" I snarked.

"Interpreting for the United Nations."

Whoa. "You think... Abstergo would send bombers into the United Nations building under the guise of interpreters?"

"Assassins, not bombers," Johnathan clarified. "That's what we think they're doing right now– planning to kill the leaders of certain countries to put their own members into power. You don't realize it, Dee, but Abstergo is really just the public face of a very secretive and ancient society of evil people. They're called the Knights Templar."

Just as I was beginning to wrap my head around all this, Johnathan slipped out of the ventilation system and landed in a small, dark room. I maneuvered myself through the square in the ceiling less gracefully and barely had a moment to catch my breath before being dragged down a narrow tunnel. "Where are we going now?" I demanded.

"A safe house" was all he said. We exited into a back alley where a black Maserati was waiting.

"Oh, this is low-profile all right," I scoffed. Johnathan was definitely enjoying his role as James Bond.

His teeth flashed in the night. "It's fast as hell and we need to get to Monteriggioni before dawn. So get in, sit down, buckle up and hang on."

This guy was unreal! As we sped away from the laboratory that had been my prison for the past month, I knew I must be dreaming. No one had known what happened to me. There was no way anyone had found out where I was. If these Abstergo people were as diabolical as described, how could they have let a ninja sent by my father get to me so easily? "Monteriggioni?" I asked after a moment. It was a weird name that was hard to say. "What's there?"

Johnathan gave me a half-smile. "It's an Assassin safe house. Someone there was contracted by your father to keep you secure until safe transport back to the States can be arranged."

"Assassins?" I repeated dubiously. Assassins and Templars and murder plots... What the hell I had been dragged into?