Author's Note: I began writing this a long time ago, around the time I first played Bonfire of the Vanities and it struck me how much had changed in Ezio's life up to that point, what a different man he had become while the city was still right there.

Then I watched Embers and I wanted to do something with that. So here it is.

These are the spoilers you should watch out for: Bonfire of the Vanities, Cristina in Brotherhood and Embers.

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The scent of smoke hung heavily in the air, acrid and ugly, making his nostril flare like an angry stallion's. How dared this madman Savonarola defile Firenze like this? Any other city, any other place, Ezio could have seen the full picture, taken a step back and considered with hard-won calm, but here, he felt himself slipping. As if it wasn't bad enough that the monk had taken the Apple from his unresisting hands, but he had taken it here to mock him further, to rub his face into his defeat.

People were giving him a wide berth as he walked and for a moment it seemed an odd thing for them to do. He remembered pushing through crowds, people getting in his way and all he got was a displeased look or some hearty slap on the back of his head for his troubles. Of course he had been barely more than a boy back then and he knew he had matured since. Amusement briefly filled his thoughts, remembering who he had been those years ago. Young and thinking himself so worldly, so clever. He would have taken on the world when all he did was get in some pointless scuffle with others who were, at the heart of them, just as innocent as him. He was different now, time had written scars across his body and tempered his mind with experience. It was an old man's privilege to remember his youth as happier times, but Ezio didn't think he was old and he wasn't unhappy precisely. Still, walking the streets of Firenze left him feeling strangely thoughtful. If his father had lived, would he be here, now? Would Savonarola still have come with his poisoned words and the power to make them true? Would it be raining fire down across his hometown?

He found himself a bench, across from Il Duomo, settled back in the evening sun and watched as Firenze slowly came back to life in time for the coming night. He watched the pattern of people as they crossed the open space, in groups or alone, stopping to gossip or a moment's rest. There were no street performers now, no revelry slowly coming into swing with the falling light. His Firenze had become a place of washed out colours without laughter, lit only by burning pyres.

Ezio had always found that cities were a lot like people, each with its own distinctive personality, a crowd on a plaza — perhaps a little like this one had been in happier times — populating the maps of Italy and Europe and all the world beyond.

In this way, was Monteriggioni his comrade-in-arms, his ally and friend, the one who had his back in whatever storms life would throw at him. Venetia was a courtesan, no longer young with her beauty fading, cracked paint on her face with a smile of sweetest sin, so seductive and worldly all other concerns fell away before it. San Gimignano always fought him, challenging him, bristling with walls and looming towers to block his path and thwart him at every turn. Ezio had to wrestle San Gimignano anew every time, negotiate a reluctant truce and still sleep with one eye open. And Forlí at last was another's lover who would flirt and tease and lick her lips, but who would never be his.

Firenze was none of these. Firenze was no person because he couldn't see it. Firenze was the streets he had raced with Federico. It was the shadowed gardens on the roof to spent a summer afternoon, dozing, or talking with Claudia, teaching chess to Petruccio or listening to his mother's wry narrative about the world at large. In this city, there was the cool room by his father's study, where he had been brooding over books, learning banking skills even if he had — somehow — always known he would not be a banker in this life. Firenze was the climb to Cristina's bedroom window and it was the chase across the rooftops afterwards, under silvery morning light.

Firenze was the place where he would kill Savonarola. He itched for it, needed to spill this one man's blood in ways he thought he had long left behind. This was going to be revenge, sweet and simple and it would clear the stink of burning from the air so his Firenze could breath again.

He spotted a courtesan making her way through the crowd. She had wrapped a shawl around her bare shoulders in courtesy to newly enforced modesty even while the sway of her hips was still the same and the wild style of her hair did little to hide her true identity.

Ezio liked and respected the courtesans, their world-weary humour and easy-going disregard for self-deception. He admired the strength the women had to have, living and surviving in this hardest of trades. He at least could go into his fights armed and armoured, but these women had nothing but their skin and skill to help protect them, stripped of anything else, as they were.

Masina had tied a strip of velvet around her long throat, woven it into a bow, but the fingerprints still showed beyond its edge on her pale skin. Ezio would have to ask Paola about this later, knowing that Masina usually didn't play this roughly. He knew he couldn't always protect the courtesans, but he would help set examples of what might happen to any man who dare lay a hand on one of them.

She sank down on the bench by his side, slipped a hand up the inside of his thigh and leaned her head towards his chest.

"It will be a trap," she said. "It is an open secret that he waits for dissenters to come find him. He lets them fight in an arena for entertainment, allows his friends to place bets how long they'll last."

Ezio nodded, watched the crowd over the top of her head. The whore and the mercenary on the bench had not escaped people's notice, some were punishing them with a scandalised look, others' gazes would skitter away in embarrassment. It was only a question of time until the guards came by. The patrol routes and their timing were ingrained in his bones. Part of him wanted to linger, wanted to provoke them so they gave him the fight he wanted.

For a moment, he indulged himself, wound an arm around Masina's thin waist and dragged her close.

"Don't worry, I always last," he whispered to her. "I'll enjoy this."

Soon enough, the way to Savonarola would be open for him, all of Firenze would fall in step behind him and take back what had been stolen from it. It had been a long time since he had began living for revenge, long enough for him to sometimes regret his choices or at least wonder if, perhaps, there had been other ways to find justice for his murdered family. But not now, this was not one of those moments, not while Savonarola held sway over his home with the terrible power of the Apple.

Masina laughed and allowed herself to sink against him for a moment before she suddenly stiffened and settled both hands on his chest, pushing herself away again. The laugh faded from her face. "This is not a good place," she remarked with a quick glance at the open square around them.

He relaxed his grip, settled back on the bench and nodded. "I'll come by Paola's tonight," he said. "There are things we need to discuss anyway."

He never went to La Rosa Colta. Things changed again and his Firenze bled once more. With Cristina's weight in his arms, he found himself wondering if Firenze was a woman, after all. A woman and clever and beautiful and he could never truly return to her, no matter how much he wanted because the world had changed around him. Because he had been changed by the world, shaped into something he barely understood somedays, pushed down pathways of life he had never known existed. And yet, it all seemed natural, predestined, and he hated this more than anything else. He had power, he knew that, all the power in the world when he stood in the middle of battle, and yet, everything that mattered to him seemed an impossible fever dream.

He felt like growing up, finally, like coming into his own when he watched the people of Firenze rise up against the tyrant who would take the soul of their city from them. This is what he had planned, what they all had worked for, but it left him feel hollowed out. No crowds should be cheering at an execution, he thought, no matter the reason or the excuse, it belittled them all.

He felt himself pushing through the enraged crowd before he even noticed he had began moving, for some reason keenly aware of the weight of the Apple in its pouch and the clean, beautiful steel he carried on his hips and wrists.

There are many things that could be said about Ezio Auditore, he found himself thinking, but he is not merciful. It had always been a pointless virtue to him that would have bereft him of so much of his purpose. He made concessions to it, ritualised gestures followed because there was a proper way of how things were done and how people had to be killed — requiescant in pace — but his heart had rarely been moved.

He reached the platform past the screaming crowd and this close, he could barely hear them. The fire roared in his ears instead and there was only Savonarola's shrieking above the noise.

Ezio Auditore had never had the chance to become a man of mercy. But Ezio Auditore had loved a woman once and maybe her existence — brief, distant and so very tragic — made all the difference in the world.

Savonarola died of the blade in his face before the fire had a chance to let him suffer further and the sudden hate crested up against the platform with full force. This, Ezio know, it must seem as a betrayal to them, a deception of first using the people for his own goals and then depriving them of the justice they would bestow upon Savonarola.

The moment hung in the balance, before the mob made up its mind, whether it would dare attack Ezio instead, but he was a different animal now and he was their's as well, a son of this city as much as anyone in the crowd. The moment held and when Ezio raised his hands and demanded silence he was obeyed rather than be torn to pieces.

Firenze would have to reclaim her soul and it would be a long journey from these wreckages brought down around them. There had been too many fires in this place to douse them quickly. He would set Firenze back on its path, he owed her that much, if it was all he could ever give her.

Ezio wasn't ready to come home to Firenze yet. The world would have to come full circle, in time and in space, before he could. For now, Roma was an aged warrior, perched in the distance, at the end of his long, bloodied history, waiting for death or salvation or perhaps someone who would breathe life back into his old bones and weary soul.

End