I'm surprised, but pleasantly so, at how many people read this. I'm not sure if it's re-reads or new reads, but every time I look, I see a lot of hits on it that I didn't have before. And I still get subscribers and such to it. I'm currently going over it, polishing up the grammar and editing out some plot holes or loose ends that aren't going anywhere as I'm mapping out the rest of it. I never really realized, but going back over it, it's got a lot of potential...

It's a work in progress, but it's been a slow one, and for that I apologize. I'm a little obsessive, and a little imaginative. I sometimes envision things that never come, or change as I'm going along, and they leave people who enjoy my work hanging. I don't really enjoy the Assassin's Creed video games anymore. They used to be my absolute favorite series, but have since gone so perpendicular that I just can't... I can't. It takes some time to get into it, but I do like interacting with the other fans of it, and enjoying my fond memories of older games, and thinking about all the things that could have been...

I've also been reading other works, and that almost always puts me in the mood to create some of my own. I still work at the night job that partly inspired the story, and that's where I am for tonight, so, for a while, I plan to edit and revise some, and post updated chapters. It helps to plan out future ones. Whenever the story's done, I plan on taking these notes and such out, if I remember...

But, here it is. Again, sorry for leaving everyone hanging who likes this work. No promises, but I'm going to try to make some headway on this before working on anything else. I like to write and I do it a lot, but a lot of it is not for this site, for a variety of reasons. I do have a lot of different ideas for this story and others for this site, though. Not all of them Assassin's Creed, but I'm working on it. :) Here you go.

It was cold out, but still much warmer than it should be for an October night. And here she was, standing on his front porch, soaked in rain, with a more genuine smile then he would have imagined possible for someone who looked as tired and cold as she did. The shock temporarily overrode his sense of chivalry. It was a good minute before he could pull his mouth closed again... And by that time, she looked slightly discouraged...

He shook himself and stepped aside, gesturing to the inside of his new, fancy-looking apartment. She stepped through with the same half-concealed hurt on her face as a minute ago. When he shut and clicked the lock on the door, she turned as if to ask him if it was a bad time.

But the words never made it out of her mouth.

With the same sweeping motion he hadn't used in more than the long two years since they'd last seen each other, he whipped her right up off her feet into a hug. It was moments before they were laughing, bouncing around... Soaking his apartment living room with all the rainwater she'd just absorbed on her long walk over...

They had survived, you see. Survived the war, survived the aftermath, and successfully kept it all under wraps. The people in the apartments around them had no idea they owed their existence to the man and woman reuniting happily on the light blue carpeting of the living room where he had eventually lost his balance spinning and they had tumbled. The six elderly women sitting around a table playing old board games in the apartment beneath them glared up and began to gossip about the noise level.

And it was all possible because of the objects of their complaint. But neither of those objects cared. It had been too long. Too long...

When the war had ended and the cleanup began, he had asked her to come live with him. He had no money, no aspirations at the time, no goals... Just to enjoy living for the time being. Just savor all that they had come through... which, for her, included a near-death experience; one that he had ironically caused and then corrected.

But at the time, she had said "no", because of the other man. The man that he had liked, the man that he had become fairly close friends with at one point... The man that had somehow been completely oblivious about his friend's feelings for his girlfriend. Everyone else had cottoned on. Her technologically-brilliant best friend, his Historically-obsessed best friend, his mother, his father... They all knew what was SUPPOSED to happen, but it didn't.

The nature of their lives had kept them fairly well out of the loop for a while. It was mid-January of 2014 when he'd first asked her, and a few weeks before that, they had both discovered the addictive joys of what her tech-friend called Facebook. Naturally, they had accepted each other's friend requests. They were nothing if not the best of friends, right? But that meant pictures. It meant email notifications every ten seconds about what statuses they posted, and what they did constantly. It was around the time that pictures of her and her kinda-sorta-unspoken boyfriend starting showing up on his newsfeed that he finally decided to ask her. And it was a few more weeks before he actually did it...

In the remaining months, both of them danced around the issue like it would bring about a second cataclysm if they didn't. How many times had she come across him sitting alone on the big windowsills at night in their hideout, looking out at the stars and moon...? How many times had he accidentally come into their workroom and found her crying...? How often did they completely ignore each other, even when it was causing them so much pain, and everyone around them could see it?

But they each came to a point where they decided enough was enough. Unfortunately, that point came when the cleanup and the celebration amongst the Assassins ended. After a night at a dance hosted by his father, largely in honor to him and his team, they were obligated to pair up and dance. Of course, it was going to be them... Their friends had played it smart. Their friends had just told each other of their feelings and let it be happily-ever-after. And after seven years of playing the same games of emotional hide-and-seek with each other, they deserved it.

But for both couples, the dance was life altering. So sweet that the British historian proposed to the tech-geek. So slow that it gave the Man of the World and his Light a chance to think... And though neither of them had said it aloud, they both wanted the fighting amongst them to end.

That was when he decided to do something about it, and rather than wait two weeks to tell her he was sorry, he went to her the next day, when he finally saw her for a moment without her boyfriend. Mid-conversation was when her boyfriend reappeared and they both announced to him that they were moving... out of state.

He'd tried to act happy for them, he really had. But he couldn't stop himself: after five minutes of listening to them chatter excitedly about their plans, that was when he'd hit her boyfriend and then stormed away, leaving her there to tend to her injured lover in complete shock.

The day that they'd left had been the worst of their lives. She was too upset about the way things had turned out between them to properly enjoy the moment. He was too regretful and ashamed to go to her again and try to make it right. They were both too prideful to admit that what they were doing, both to themselves and to each other, was wrong.

So, when the train had begun to pull away, after he watched her say her goodbyes to everyone, he stood back and watched the train leave. Her boyfriend had begun to read something, or at least, that's what he gathered from the glasses and the decidedly-turned down head. But she was staring out the window, somewhat forlornly.

Their eyes locked as the train pulled away, and he was overcome with an impulse to reach his hand out to her. And so he did...

It was at that point, finally, that she decided to do something about all their fighting. She reached back. Her hand flew to the window. And they watched each other till they no longer could. The tears came to their eyes afterwards, still too prideful to show each other – even though they were both certain that that was it for them, and any chance they'd ever had together – how they REALLY felt.

And now... she was here...