DISCLAIMER: New characters created by yours truly for a fandom whose original characters were created and are currently owned Hidekaz Himaruya.
Warnings: Blood, implied sexual abuse (for now), and Holocaust references. As much as I've tried to balance this, the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian issue is also very touchy, so if you're sensitive to regional politics you may not want to keep reading.
14 May 1948
Tonight, everything will change, she told herself as she adjusted her cracked eyeglasses. Never again.
Magazines clicked into their slots, alcohol and rags stuffed into bottles ready to throw. Strings pulled taut, ready to deploy an array of lethal traps on anyone that got near at the slightest tug.
She closed her eyes, concentrating on the sound of marching footsteps slowly getting louder.
This sound was not unfamiliar to her. On the contrary, it was practically deja vu.
But the first time she heard those footsteps she thought it was another parade passing by her family's mansion.
The first time she heard those footsteps she had no idea what was in store for her.
The first time she heard those footsteps, her family was alive and well.
Europa had taken everything that she and her family had built from the dirt that Romano had kicked them onto when they objected to his imperial rule.
Vash Zwingli still kept her family's wealth in a safe...under accounts registered to "Ludwig" and "Beillschmidt". Her library and papers had been burned in the streets as kindling. Her childhood toys had either been distributed to more 'deserving' children...and those that hadn't been destroyed in bombings were buried and rotting in some yard in the forest.
All she had was this decaying shell of a house, the dirt and sand and rocks around it and barely enough rations to outlast the ammunition. The siblings Czechoslovakia had been kind enough to give her some weapons as a 'housewarming gift' before Russia decided to make them 'one with him,' a welcome respite after having most of the rest either expended or confiscated by Lord Kirkland the last time the farmers revolted.
But nothing was respite from the fact that her family had been murdered, one by one, slowly and painfully, while she watched. Saved for last, she had been tortured - violated! - in ways that by the time Ivan arrived, she had been left to die like an animal on the side of a lonely, wintery road.
All she could sense in that ice of nothingness...was silence.
She slowly opened her eyes. She was already used to the sound of people coming to get her. But rather than run in fear, she let it drive her, moving the fingers that loaded the weapons and filled the Molotov cocktails with gasoline.
It was ironic that some of the weapons she was given were actually designed by her family's murderers. At least they would find a much more noble purpose here.
For all she - and her ancestors before her - had wanted was some place to live without being persecuted for who they were, without having to deal with the mockery, the stereotypes, the conspiracies...the pain.
A place where they could be free to live in peace.
It was why she and her family had come back to this land time and time again. It was theirs long before, and the farmers here seemed happy if not a bit reluctant to let them rent a small spot near the hill where, her father said, they once had a great altar.
They couldn't stay long because Papa had to manage his corporation. And their accommodations here were more Spartan than spacious. The plots they had tried to grow here yielded only enough for them to live on and sell to the neighbors for next year's seeds.
At least here, she didn't have to worry about being bullied or beaten. Not as often, anyway. The mobs were only a little less bothersome and Lord Kirkland often had to step in when things got ugly.
But when her family gathered around their humble evening meals and said prayers...they knew that at least here, there was a small measure of peace and freedom and that was more valuable than any mansion.
Of course, freedom was not free, she once heard Alfred say when they went over to his place for hamburgers. Sage words she kept in mind even though he ignored her pleas for help until it was too late.
It was through this blinding, unimaginable suffering that she learned freedom was worth even more than all the gold in every safe in the world, all the toys on every shelf, even all the books and sacred papers in Alfred's Library of Congress. She knew what had to be sacrificed for it. Her family, Feliks, Czechoslovakia and the Yugoslavians had all shed their blood and tears in the camps for it.
But now...nothing else mattered, because nothing else really existed. Her family was dead, nothing remaining of their earthly bodies except ashes in dirt. Ludwig and Gilbert's torture had also left those she shared the camps with emaciated - and easy prey for Ivan's greedy advances. It was cruelest fate that they gave up their freedom to stave off the same death they feared in the camps.
And now even her "liberators" were nursing their allies and nemeses back to health to raise as chess pieces against Ivan like the world was just a board game.
You can turn the planet into a smoldering cinder for all I fucking care, she told herself, but I will still have my freedom.
She crept to the window, taking a brief peek outside. Seven nations had gathered up a new task force on the other side of the hill. They were prepared to advance from three sides, with the specific intent of drowning her.
The fourth side, after all, was the sea.
She knew this was not the first time they had tried to drive her out, saying a small prayer to herself with each bullet she loaded into the Czechoslovakian Karabiner 98k.
But Andrea Rosenthal would make damned sure that this would be the last.
"Tonight, things will change," she shouted to herself, the ice melting to water and boiling away through the fire in her eyes, "I am Israel and I will be free!"
14 May 1948
Tonight, everything will change, she told herself. Never again.
Magazines clicked into their slots, gasoline and rags stuffed into bottles ready to throw. The adults discussed tactics around campfires and lantern-light, how to conclude their operation as quickly and efficiently as possible, along with how to divide up the spoils.
Among them - or rather, watching them, was a teenage girl dressed in a desert combat uniform one size too big, watching excitedly from behind an ammo crate. All these people, friends and comrades and cousins, were here to do a great deed for her family. And yet somehow, she wasn't simply content with just watching. She wanted to fight.
She quietly pried open a crate and lifted a slightly-used but still combat-worthy Enfield rifle out of it. Ducking behind the crate, she started assembling it, piece by piece.
Just then, a dusty hand grabbed her shoulder, paralyzing her with fear as she turned around. Had they found her!?
"What are you doing here, Rida!?" her father began sternly.
"You...you scared me!"
"How many times have I told you, this is not your fight!"
"I am not some delicate bird to be kept in a cage, father! I want to fight for what rightfully belongs to us!"
"Rida, you can fight when you are able and trained. But you are still a young girl, innocent and pure."
"You taught me to fend off the pests and wild animals that attack our farm! And those stories about how you fought with Egypt!"
"Pests!? Wild animals?!" her father said in utter disbelief, "If they capture you, they will violate you like they violated Europe for centuries!"
Rida suddenly lost the courage to reply, and the two knew exactly why.
She had heard the stories from her neighbors about the family that bought the old manor on the other side of the Hill some time ago. The stories were not unlike the stories of monsters told to her by her neighbors when she was a child, or even the Western fables of dragons and goblins from Lord Kirkland's storybooks.
It was the very fact that these monsters resembled humans so much still scared her to this day. It certainly quelled her sudden burst of fighting spirit.
"Y...yes father. I'm sorry..." she said, trembling.
"No...I should be sorry for scaring you like this. I know you can fight, but I just don't want you getting in over your head. You know these foreigners are as well-trained as we are, but I can't fight if I don't have you and your mother to fight for. Once the battle is over you can help guard the farm...but for now you must take shelter with your mother."
His father led her, disheartened yet somehow understanding, to a supply truck where Rida's mother waited. The stress had left her looking disheveled in her conservative traditional garb, but she was thankful to embrace her daughter as she climbed into the truck bed. A mattress had been set up for the two to sleep on, but right now they sat on the bench.
"Don't worry, Rida!" her father called out as the engine started, "This battle will not end until we are reunited on the hill once more!"
The girl only stared with a tearful smile as the truck pulled away from the battle. Her mother, however, raised a clenched fist in solidarity. Before long, they had reached a highway to the border, with nothing but desert and a long stretch of road to be seen in either direction...and the two had fallen into slumber and dreams. Dreams of freedom.
The farm Rida and her parents took care of, from the river on one end to the Mediterranean on the other, had been passed down through her family for generations, but it had never really 'belonged' to them. For the landlords in their grandiose wars of conquest - Grandpa Roma, Mama Byzantina, Sultan Sadiq Adnan, Lord Arthur Kirkland - the deed was just a small piece of bounty in their treasure hordes.
But to this family, the deed to their own land was more than a piece of paper...it was a dream.
It was under Lord Kirkland's rule that new technologies allowed them to receive news from his other colonies...including inspiring stories of how they too struggled for independence. Rida was practically listening to these while in her own mother's womb.
Thus it was wonderful news that Lord Kirkland was finally granting each of his subjects the deeds to their land. Or at least it was supposed to be.
The news really only softened them and their neighbors up for the shock when the world decided they would have to share her land of centuries with some foreigners that had barely given them more than rent for a few decades. It was bad enough that Lord Kirkland demanded the two stick to opposite sides of a line, but they even had to go to Jordan's palace and tell his King not to accept the foreigners' offer of their land for supposed peace!
To Rida and her family, there was absolutely no reason that these foreign tenants should simply be handed land that had to be earned, not bought like a piece of bread at market. Thankfully, their hope of ownership endured through this outrage...and they prayed it would become reality after tonight.
Reality, of course, was unpredictable. The truck's passengers were jolted back into reality by the sound of the engine suddenly sputtering dead and the hard metallic clanking sounds that followed.
"Damn it. Stupid old thing needs water," the driver grumbled as he propped up the hood to let out a small cloud of steam, "I'll never get why my boss believes these newfangled machines will get us across the deserts easier than a good stallion."
"Wait! Where is Rida!?" her mother cried out, her pained cries hastening the driver to the back. "Oh my God! She's gone!"
In the midst of the noise the truck made when it broke down, the truck bed door had somehow fallen open, and Rida was indeed gone.
There was only one long stretch of road, offering a clear view up to the horizon on either end, but nobody else to be seen.
"I'll radio a squadron to find her," the driver replied, "She could not have gone far."
"What if she dies out in the desert?!" Rida's mother pleaded as she lunged for the driver.
"Don't worry, knowing her, we know exactly where she's headed," the driver replied, trying to restrain her, "We must pray that your husband and his comrades find her before they do."
By now, Rida was bounding across the desert road, her anxiousness to fight keeping her going.
Her neighbors had begun their march. Even now she could hear the first volleys of gunfire.
It wasn't the first time her farm had been used as a battlefield. Fighting those foreigners had gotten so bad that it looked like nothing would grow on certain parts of her farm for a very long time.
Which was why she hoped this battle would damn well be the last.
"I will not fail my family," Rida Altair shouted to herself, switching the safety off the Springfield 1911 she'd kept in her jacket pocket, "I am Palestine, and I will fight to be free!"
Historical Notes:
The 1948 Arab-Israeli War was not the first major conflict to be fought in that part of the world after the Second War. It was actually the most famous phase of a war that had been raging between Jewish Zionist nationalists, Palestinian Arab nationalists, AND the British Colonial authorities in the Mandate of Palestine since the 1920s. I shall try to temper in a balance between history and APH character-isms if and when I get to continuing this.
Many of the weapons the Israeli forces fought with during the 1948 War, from guns to airplanes were donated by the Czechoslovakians - who ironically used German designs inherited from their occupation since 1938. On the other side, the Arab and Palestinian forces used mainly British weapons inherited from their colonial days as well as the then-recently-concluded Second World War.
The King of Jordan had actually planned that the Arab partition of the Mandate would be annexed into Jordan, however he was pressured by his neighbors into joining their alliance in order to restore his reputation within the region.
And yes, I did look up Rida's surname on a surname site, meaning "flying eagle", and the similarity with the protagonist from Assassin's Creed is actually a pretty awesome coincidence.