Disclaimer: I hereby disclaim everything that isn't mine, which is to say, pretty much everything. Except Lilia.
A/N: Don't you just love Assassin's Creed?
One
Bluish white mist suffused her vision, then solid ground formed under her feet, and she was lost within the memories.
Lilia shifted from foot to foot. She had been crouched in the same position for hours, now, the only movement that of the gentle rocking of the ship. She checked her watch; midday. She had another twelve hours to wait; twelve hours to remain hidden; then, enshrouded in darkness, she would slink her way through the bowels of the ship until she found her mark – and he would die.
Just as all those before him had died, and all those after would. She had been trained in the martial arts since she could walk; she was the finest assassin in the world. She ran a finger down the smooth barrel of her Welrod, the assassin's pistol; the smooth, cool metal of the gun had a calming effect. She cleared her mind for the task ahead – the death of the commander of the USS Eldridge, pawn of the Templars, and overseer of the Philadelphia Project.
Experiments would be conducted all through the day – Lilia only hoped that tonight would not be too late. The Second World War was raging; it was, as ever, the duty of the Hashshashin to bring about peace, and the sooner she interrupted the latest Templar plot, the sooner she could turn her attention to the next name on her list; Adolf Hitler.
She sighed testily, angry with herself for allowing her concentration to wander. She took a deep breath, closing her dark eyes, and brought her focus back to the task at hand. But when she opened her eyes, her vision began to blur – the bulkhead in front of her seemed to lose cohesion; it was fading.
Heart rate increasing, she stood up in the dark. I'm too late! She thought. The Templars had made a breakthrough: it was now or never! She exploded into action; sprinting to the bridge where the commander was no doubt directing the tests. But as she ran, images began to race through her head…
o0o
Lilia came to. She had been running through old memories in the Animus again. Trying to take her mind off the task that lay ahead of her, but as her mentor entered the laboratory carrying the artefact, she realised that nothing could possibly prepare her for what lay ahead.
There would be no soppy farewells, no 'good lucks', no tears.
"Goodbye, Lilia." He said. "Do not fail."
He lifted the lid of the container housing the artefact; Lilia stretched her hand out towards it, feeling the pulsing energy. One finger connected with its smooth surface, and the universe collapsed in on her.
Time flowed backwards, spinning and spiralling, like a film played backwards. Lilia felt as though she was being spun around by the ankles, blood rushing to her head. Then, slowly, the world began to form into one solid vision, the unbearable pressure in Lilia's head began to ease, and she became aware that solid ground was once again under her feet. Blinking in the glaring sunlight, she looked around.
Dusty streets were framed by sandy coloured buildings, some colourfully painted. Merchant stalls lined the streets; people thronged, going about their daily business. There were no cars, no street lights, no commercial shops at all. "Ladies and Gentlemen, we will shortly be arriving in Damascus, the local time is… god-knows-when," she muttered.
People were beginning to stare, she realised. And she couldn't blame them; she was dressed in a figure hugging black outfit with a utility belt and twenty-first century weapons, and a backpack. And she supposed her half-oriental features must have seemed strange to them as well. Suddenly extremely uncomfortable under mass-scrutiny, she turned hastily to retreat into the shady back alleys.
Out of sight for the moment, she leaned back against the wall. She had been preparing her whole life for this moment – this was her raison d'être, but now that she was here, she felt oddly at a loss for what to do. I need to know when I am, she thought. Then it was just a matter of locating the assassins.
The soft sound of approaching footsteps interrupted her meditations, and she lifted her eyes to see a man, hooded and robed in white, walking towards her, head bent. Unable to hide without drawing even more attention to herself, she simply remained still as the man passed her by.
As he left the alley, he turned slightly, observing her from under his hood. For a second their eyes locked – her liquid black orbs with his deep brown. She felt her pulse quicken; never had she been looked at like that, almost as though he could see into her very soul, like her mind was an open book for him to read.
He seemed to be having similar thoughts, as he paused for a moment. That was when Lilia saw it – a missing finger!
She made to run after him, but as she left the alley, someone shoved her from behind and she was flung into a wall. She turned to see who had pushed her, and was shoved again; harder this time, by the giggling madman. She stumbled backwards, knocking into women carrying pots, and landed on a merchant's stall, shattering vases and ornaments. A passing guard came to investigate the ruckus, and immediately drew his sword.
"Infidel!" cried the guard.
"Kill the assassin!" another joined in, and before long there was a veritable crowd of guards all clamouring for the woman's blood.
"What?!" she yelled. "You cannot be serious! It was an accident, how do you know I'm –". Thunk! An arrow embedded itself in the wood of the stall a few inches to the right of her head.
She turned and fled, but not knowing the layout of the streets, and being more than a bit disoriented from her 'journey', it wasn't long before the guards had the assassin cornered. Lilia drew her shinobi gatana, and took down ten of her pursuers in quick succession; fluid martial arts moves coupled with expert swordsmanship was obviously something they were unused to, but a series of nicks and cuts from her attackers were beginning to take their toll, as her movement began to slow, and there were still twelve guards for her to deal with, including one archer.
Sweeping her blade across the chest of one guard, she spun round to impale another, but, being presented with the assassin's back, one man behind her seized the opportunity and threw all his body weight behind his blow, slamming the hilt of his sword between the assassin's shoulders.
Lilia yelled in pain, back arching, her grip on her sword slackened for just a moment; a moment that her assailant snatched, knocking the assassin's sword to the ground. Reaching for the sidearmstrapped to her leg, she paused just a little too long, as an arrow pierced her shoulder.
Realising that she was beaten, the man in white leapt down from the roof and landed on the chief guard like a cat, hidden blade extended into his jugular. Drawing his sword, he whirled through the nine remaining guards on the ground as swiftly as the woman assassin had done before.
As his final stroke fell, a shout caught his attention:
It was the archer, but he was no longer on the roof, but standing next to the assassin in black, with a blade to her throat. Swiftly, Lilia brought her left hand up as if to uppercut the archer, but at the last second she activated her own hidden blade, impaling the archer through the jaw and into the brain.
The man in white eyed the woman with a mixture of awe and caution as he approached her. Lilia brought her left hand to her chest, missing ring finger displayed to show she was a friend. The man looked at her, incredulous.
"I did not know our order admitted females," he remarked. His dark eyes drank in her strange features; her small nose, her straight black hair, those strange oriental eyes.
"Thank you for your assistance," Lilia replied.
The man bowed his head in acknowledgement. "How is it that you come to bear the weapon of the Hashshashin?"
"Could we perhaps save this conversation until we've left the area and I no longer have an arrow in my shoulder?" she asked, as acerbic as possible under the circumstances.
The man glowered at her for a moment; Lilia grew slightly nervous under that death stare, thinking she had pushed him too far, but he relented and said "You will come to the bureau, you can explain yourself there."
o0o
With slight difficulty, Lilia clambered up onto the rooftops with one hand, then dropped through the gap in the trellis into a shady courtyard. There was a pleasant fountain at one end, and a number of cushions and rugs piled in one corner. The man dropped down lightly behind her, and pushed her gently towards an open door leading to what appeared to be a pottery shop.
An older man dressed in midnight robes stood, paintbrush in hand, bent over a jug on his desk. "Ah, Altaïr. I trust you return –" he broke off, realising that Altaïr was not alone. "You bring a stranger here? And a woman, no less!"
"She bears the mark of the Hashshashin," Altaïr replied calmly. "I brought her here so that she could explain herself."
The bureau leader looked at Lilia harshly, and she brought her left hand up, missing finger plain for him to see, then activated her hidden blade. Though the design of the weapon was different; diamond edged carbon steel reflecting no light, the effect was profound. The Rafik gasped, taking a step back. "Explain," he commanded simply.
"I come from the year 2035, which is the year 1457 as the Hijri calendar reckons it," she spoke evenly. "I am from a time in which the Templars rule; the Assassins are now a small group of rebels, all but extinct. I have been sent back to correct a mistake that enabled the Templars to seize control."
Altaïr and the Rafik were eyeing each other out of the corner of their eyes, no doubt wondering if Lilia's madness was infectious, or dangerous.
"I understand you may find this difficult to believe, but how else do you explain this?" She pulled out her sidearm, pointed it at a distant vase, and pulled the trigger. In a blast of light, the vase exploded, showering the Rafik with dust. "Or this?" She took out her palmbook, switched it to camera function, and, with a flash that made him jump, captured the dust covered, gaping Rafik in a photo. She showed it to him, provoking a series of emotions to slide across his face, including shock, outrage, embarrassment, and amusement.
"Alright," he began slowly. "Suppose we do believe you, what is this mistake?"
"The Templars gain possession of a powerful artefact contained in a golden cup. This artefact allows them the power to control the minds of millions. I am here to prevent that." The Rafik held her gaze searchingly for a protracted moment, and when he finally broke the stare, Lilia could not tell whether or not he was satisfied.
He turned to Altaïr, "you must take her back to see Al Mualim; he will decide what must be done. This must take priority; I shall ask Malik to complete your assignment."
Altaïr bowed his head in acceptance, though Lilia saw a spasm of anger cross his features.
"Would someone kindly remove the arrow from my shoulder before we leave?" she asked as Altaïr gestured to the door.
With a somewhat sheepish expression, Altaïr nodded. "I'm sorry, I had forgotten you were injured. You hide your pain well."
"Conditioned response," Lilia smirked, mirthlessly.
Her last comment was wasted on Altaïr, but he gestured to her to take a seat on the cushions outside. She dropped her backpack in the corner, and Altaïr's eyes widened slightly as she took her top off, wincing as she pulled it along the length of the arrow shaft. Swallowing hard, he inspected the wound.
"The arrow has gone in too deep to pull out; I shall have to push it all the way through," he said, taking a firm grip on the shaft of the arrow.
"Wait!" she gasped.
"I'm sorry," he said, not waiting for her to complete her sentence. "There is no other option." He shoved hard, driving the arrow head out the other side of her shoulder.
Lilia gasped in pain and surprise. Through gritted teeth, she said "I brought tools for extracting arrows; they're in my backpack."
"Oh… sorry…" he muttered, putting a piece of linen to the wound, his face hidden in his hood. He examined the smooth skin of her back, fighting the urge to run his hand over it. "How is it that the assassins of the future bear no scars?" He murmured.
"When the bleeding stops I'll show you," she said, hooking her foot around the strap of her backpack, pulling it over.
"That may be a while." The off-white linen was rapidly turning bright red.
"Not to worry, just keep the pressure on." She fished around in her pack.
After a short silence, Altaïr's eyes fell on Lilia's discarded top. "You are very brazen for a woman," he commented.
"I'm wearing a bra," she defended.
"Bra?"
"You know, this thing," she pulled at a strap.
"Oh," he looked away. "That doesn't cover very much."
"It covers the important bits."
Altaïr's mouth twitched at the corner. "That's true." He pulled the blood drenched linen away slightly, but seeing that the blood was still flowing freely, he replaced it with a clean wad, and pressed firmly.
"So the Templars win in the end, then?"
"The end? We're no where near the end." Lilia paused, wondering how to explain temporal physics to an assassin from the twelfth century. "They haven't won. Not yet. That's why I'm here. This time things will be different."
"Why here, why now?" He asked.
"I don't exactly know when now is," she admitted.
"The year 582," he replied.
"That's… 1186 in Gregorian," Lilia murmured. "Five years too far back. Not too bad. To answer your question, we did not have time to perfect our use of the artefact, but we believe it is, by its nature, random. Saying that, it was possible to narrow the destination time to within about a decade of a certain point. We had to kind of aim for a time, and hope. I guess we missed, but at least the event hasn't happened yet."
"What is going to happen, exactly?"
"It's like I told you; the Templars will gain possession of an artefact that they will use to dominate the world in the future."
"If they gain it now, why does it take them hundreds of years to be able to use it?"
"It is complicated, and I don't have all the answers. Technology is a major factor; they send the artefact into space to orbit the earth and reach the minds of millions. They lack the technology now."
"Space…? Into what space? And what do you mean, orbit?"
Lilia was only just beginning to appreciate exactly how difficult this task would be. "You know that the earth is round?"
"So it is said."
"So it is. Space is what lies beyond; the nothing in which the earth, sun and stars are suspended."
"Nothing?" Altaïr frowned, trying to take in the idea of nothingness. "Like the air?"
"No, there is no air in space; there's just… nothing. You breathe air, feel the wind; air is something. Space is nothing. And 'orbit' means roughly 'go round'; like the moon orbits, or goes round, the earth."
"Oh."
"Don't worry about it, it's not important."
"What would happen if you killed your ancestors in this time?"
Lilia grinned. "We're not sure, exactly. But we think that I simply would not be born in the future."
"How can you come back to kill your ancestor, if you're not born?"
"The future doesn't exist in a solid state; it's not something that's either happened or not happened. All of time is changeable; it's just that the past rarely changes. But I no longer exist in the future, I only exist now."
"But how can you exist now, if you don't exist then first?"
"Once I left my time, I left the chain of cause and effect; my appearance here was more or less random, like a quantum event. I just appeared here, my existence is no longer dependant on what came before, because I'm before the before."
Altaïr's expression looked as though he had eaten something dreadful; he spoke carefully, as though not sure he wanted to hear any more. "Quantum event?"
Lilia laughed. "No, you really don't want to know. Suffice it to say that it's random, and really small."
"Your shoulder's stopped bleeding," he remarked, dryly.
"Ok," Lilia said, pulling out a cigar shaped object, and handing it to him. "Wipe off the blood, point this at the wound, and press down on the end."
Altaïr followed her instructions, eyebrows disappearing into his hood as a beam of light left the object; where the light touched, her skin mended itself without a blemish; just a raw pink area left where there had previously been a wound. He moved around and pointed the device at the front of her shoulder, determinedly avoiding her gaze.
When he was finished, he sat back on his heels, admiring his handiwork. "The wound's completely gone!"
"Ah, no. Unfortunately not," Lilia corrected. "There's not enough power in a small regenerator like this to heal the wound completely; it's just the skin that's mended; the internal wound will have to heal on its own. But this should stop it getting infected, at least."
"Oh," he sounded a little disappointed, which Lilia found strangely irritating. "The sun is setting, I think we should rest here for the night, and start off for Masyaf in the morning." Lilia nodded in assent. Altaïr regarded her for a moment. "What do you eat?"
She looked at him strangely before shrugging. "Whatever you've got."
He stared at her from under his hood for a moment longer, then nodded and stood, ran a few steps and vaulted through the gap in the roof; out into the streets of Damascus. Lilia watched him go, some unfamiliar emotion stirring in her chest.
"He likes you," the rough voice of the Rafik drifted out to her from the darkened doorway.
"Don't be absurd," she scorned.
"He's usually a rude and arrogant pig to everyone he meets, but not you. He saved you from the guards, did he not?"
"I'm having a bad day," she dismissed. "I would not normally require assistance."
"I was not implying otherwise, I simply meant to point out that the great and mighty Altaïr is not in the business of helping people."
This subject of conversation was making Lilia oddly uncomfortable, so she attempted to change the subject. "I thought you despised me for being a woman? Why are you suddenly making conversation?"
With a knowing smile, he allowed her to steer the conversation away from Altaïr, and answered "I do not despise women, I like women. I was simply surprised; we are not supposed to bring strangers here."
"I'm not so strange."
"Beg to differ, milady," he said with a smirk. "You should get some rest," he gestured to the cushions, and turned back into the building.
Lilia propped herself up against the wall, careful not to jolt her injured shoulder. She had studied Altaïr for half her life; the memories of Desmond Miles were engrained in her mind, yet actually meeting him seemed to change everything. She was no longer in the animus, no longer in the fortress city where she had spent her entire life; where she was protected from harm. She was lost, a billion light years in time and space from anything or anyone familiar. Never to return.
o0o
A cold breeze chased its way up her spine, a shudder trailing in its wake. Her eyes opened to find the silhouette of an assassin looming over her. Her hand flew to her sidearm instinctively, before she realised it was just Altaïr.
"That kind of thing will get you killed, you know," she remarked.
"Are you threatening me?" he asked, darkly.
"No, but I can't be held responsible for my actions when so rudely awakened."
"I was jesting," he replied, confused.
"Well jest off, I'm sleeping here," she grouched.
"Fine," he said, eyebrows raised. "I'll just take this pan fried duck inside and eat alone."
"Pan fried duck?" All grumpiness vanished with a growl of her stomach.
Now smirking slightly, Altaïr shrugged and turned back towards the dark doorway of the Assassin's Bureau. "I'll just leave you to your res–"
But he never got a chance to finish that sentence, as Lilia had leapt up and relieved him of the duck-bearing plates. Grinning, he lit a few candles and pulled up a cushion. He had to admit, he found this strange girl from the future – if she really was from the future – to be intriguing.