A/N: This is something that's been sitting on my computer, unfinished, for quite a while. I finally got the gumption to go ahead and finish it. I hope you guys like it :)
"Perhaps it's time to be rid of it, Altair."
The thing had possessed him. He remained, tucked away, day and night, searching. He searched it and himself. He'd searched history and philosophy and time. The Apple haunted him. Temptation and power all wrapped up in such a tiny, innocuous bauble.
When Malik enters his room, Altair has to fight to tear his eyes from the artifact. Even in the low candlelight, Malik can see the dark circles and callow paleness that haunt his face. The eyes that meet Malik's are lost. He shakes his weary head.
"Sometimes, Malik—sometimes, I think it could do so much good. Sometimes I think how blessed we are to have in our hands such a gift. But then... then I feel how weak I am. I feel how... how I can't pull myself from it. How I could so easily... so easily..." Words fail him. Strength fails him. His chin drops to his chest, because it's just too hard to lift his head.
Malik heaves Altair to his feet and has to keep his arm steady so that Altair might catch himself. "Leave it, Altair. Just for now. You will think clearer away from it."
"I can't." His voice breaks. "I'm afraid—afraid that without it I cannot think at all." He grips Malik's arm. The Apple is hardly a foot away and already he seeks it. Already he wants.
"Altair, you are stronger than this." Shaking him is not enough to pull him from his trance. "Weeks, Altair. No one has seen you in weeks. Come out of here. Sleep. If you keep this up there will be nothing left of you for the Apple to tempt!"
Malik catches sight of the papers—strewn across Altair's desk: orbiting the Apple. Notes. Frenzied scrawlings. Drawings and diagrams sketched in haste. All the while the Apple must have stared back at him, must have watched.
"What is this?"
"It's wrong, Malik. All of it. The way they've taught us the—the deeds we do. We prescribe to a philosophy we do not follow! We persecute liars and hypocrites only to be one of them ourselves! I cannot stand behind what we do any longer. Not now that I see." In his fervor he reaches out to grip the stump of Malik's shoulder. Only then do his eyes truly open. Only then does he actually see. His eyes widen and he lets go, steps back. Turns away.
"Look what I did to you, in my own arrogance. Under the influence of a ruthless and blind philosophy." He wobbles on unused and unsteady legs.
Malik sighs. "I've grown accustomed to it."
"No you haven't."
He watches Altair before extending his hand. "Walk with me."
Altair takes it, to steady himself, to reassure himself. He does not feel forgiven. Malik's arm braces his shoulders and holds him in place when he tries to totter to one side.
The Apple sits abandoned beside the candle, glittering whispers of corruption in the low, shifting light.
Malik does not allow Altair to sit down until they arrive outside where the breeze can kiss their faces and the moon can light their path. The man is sick and small from lack of sleep, weighed down by battle wounds not nurtured enough to heal. He has eaten almost as little as he's slept. His eyes look dim and weary. Malik sits beside him.
"I am uncertain," Altair says and shatters the silence.
"What man ever knows?" Malik says. "That is a privilege reserved only for the Gods."
"And the Apple."
Malik sighs.
"The more time I spend with it, the less I understand it. It was so simple, before. Just a weapon. Just an evil. It was something to be found and kept hidden away. But now... now, if we could use it without succumbing to it... but can that even be done?" Altair drops his face into his hands. Weary as he is, he might sleep if he remembered how.
Malik's hand falls on his shoulder, and he can't help but sigh into it. His side presses against Malik's, and it's so much warmer than the cold, hungry gold of the Apple. So much softer than the surface of his desk. After a pause, Malik's arm wraps around him.
"You should sleep."
"There are no answers in my dreams, just more questions. And I am tired of questions."
A soft laugh escapes Malik despite himself. "You are simply tired, my friend." He holds Altair just a touch tighter to him.
Altair's fingers fist in Malik's robe. He hauls himself up so that he can look at the man. Malik retracts his arm and the silence stretches tense between them.
Altair could attribute it to his own lack of sleep—the off-kilter nature of his mindset. He could attribute it to the loneliness, the confusion. He doesn't bother attribute it to anything. He grabs Malik's robe and cranes up to meet his lips with the slow, determined desperation of a dying man. There's no fire in the kiss, only years of companionship and understanding and a gut-wrenching need for something neither of them can name.
It takes just a moment for Malik to respond—to pull Altair to him: this man who once had power and death coiled in the muscles of his arms and now feels only of bones and long abandoned dreams.
They pull apart and Malik looks saddened.
"You are becoming a shadow of the man I knew." Malik speaks in barely a whisper.
Altair regards him for a moment: hurt, in spite of the truth in the words. A heavy sigh leaves his chest and he lays his calloused hand across Malik's.
"The shadow is all I have left."
So Malik holds on to this man—what's left of this man. He twines his fingers in his hair and plants kisses across his sallow cheeks. He worships the skin of a hallow husk; kisses for the sake of a man this body has forgotten.
He holds on with the hope that the man he knew is still sleeping in this shell—that the man he knew is strong enough, stubborn enough, to fight his way back to the surface.