There was something both intimate and unfeeling about silence.
He had been born Ratonhnhaké:ton, affectionately named Connor, dubbed Death by the whispered machinations of soldiers as they suffered through the cold nights and massacres called battles. In his early years, silence had been an almost foreign concept to him; if his mother wasn't singing softly to him as she brushed his hair or put him to bed, then he was playing with his friends, and they were laughing and shouting and giggling.
"We used to have a ceremony for this sort of thing, but neither of us are the kind for that."
Achilles' words started his life as an Assassin, and he finally learned the true meaning of silence. With the Kanien'kehá:ka, silence had been the moments spent stalking an animal, before the words of thanks would be said and what could be used was brought home to roaring fires and friendly faces. As an Assassin, however… there were days and weeks spent in silence, stalking men and observing their movements, quietly slipping through the background of history and making others believe that, yes, they could be free. Silence then was cold and contemplative, reflecting on the fact that his life had become a canvas where all the colors were merely different shades of red, and a world where men who preached of freedom would also stand and shout out prices for another human being.
Intimacy came with the days and nights spent at the Homestead, where he could quietly sit in his room with the windows open, allowing the cool breeze to float in, bearing the scent of the sea and the pines. Gusts would float in, softened by the obstacle in its path, and when it finally reached him in the night it always stirred his hair softly, and he could swear that the sensation was the same as his mother's fingers gently running a comb through the soft hair of a much younger, more carefree boy. There was a silence in the manor that could scarce be described. During the days, the sun managed to stream through the windows, casting rays that almost seemed tangent, and each particle of dust swirled into the ray, visible for just a moment before it would swirl back out.
The limp was fierce and pronounced for months after the conflict with Lee; he had felt a parallelism between the two owners of the Homestead in that regard. For the first sixth months, he was unable to do more than limp down to Achilles' grave, or to go just far enough to the cliffs to see the Aquila and the shimmering, ever-changing waves below. Time went by, however, and after a year of hard, painful work, he was back to his old self, running through trees and able to perform all of the combat moves he had perfected. The moves went unused of course.
His war was over, the hatchet buried.
Well, hope you enjoyed it. Review, tell me how I did.
-Zeratide, out.