My eyes opened reluctantly, not wanting to have to get out of the warm bed, and stare at the faded wooden table in front of me. After laying there for a minute, I become conscious of an unfamiliar warmth around my waist. I look down and see an arm, clad in red. Oh, that's right. I almost forgot Cicero was laying beside me.
I turn around carefully to see Cicero's sleeping face looking back at me. He looks so peaceful. Not a sound comes from his pale lips and his soft breathing brushed across my face. This is a side of Cicero I've never seen. A Cicero completely at peace, no bad memories or intrusive jokes to interrupt his thoughts. Normally I would have gotten up right away and gotten ready for the contracts of the day, but this time I decide to stay in bed for a bit, watching him with his arm tucked snugly around my waist. It was almost as if the warmth from being close to someone who was so at peace took away some of my haunting memories too. Gods know I have many of them.
It wasn't long before he woke up. His eyes open gently and look back at me. A faint smile creeps onto his face before he was fully awake. Once awake, his arm jerks off my waist and he sits straight up in bed, as if his spine become a steel rod. He scrambles for his hat and when he can't find it, hides his face in his hands. I can see from the parts that he wasn't covering that his face was a deep shade of crimson.
"Hey, Cicero, are you okay?" I ask him with my hand on his back, already knowing exactly what he was embarrassed about.
His eyes peek cautiously from between his fingers. He sees my face and giggles. He must have seen that I wasn't angry with him. He nods his head and pulls himself out of the bed without a word, just a smile plastered onto his face. The smile remained until we left the inn and began the journey to Solitude.
Little time passes before we arrive. Morthal isn't particularly far from Solitude after all. The iron gates moan as the guards push them open at our arrival and let us in. I examine my surroundings, as it's been quite a while since I've been in this city. It's a shame really, it's quite nice. However, I feel the people that live here aren't a fan of foreigners since they're under the reign of Ulfric Stormcloak, so I don't really make it a habit to visit. The large stone walls of Solitude almost seem to blend in against the dark grey clouds that formed above us. They loom over us, with the threat of downpour at any second.
"Cicero, we're going to have to make this quick," I point out. "I want to get back to the sanctuary before we get rained on."
"As you say, great and powerful Listener, hehe," he grins back.
Cicero is always eager to carry out another assassination. He's one of the few people in the world that was born with an exact purpose and knows precisely what is is; to kill in the name of the Night Mother. Conscienceless, strong, and deadly. The perfect man for his purpose.
The hunt for the thief takes longer than we had expected. We should have known that a thief, a fellow brother of the shadows, would be hard to find. But assassins' business is much more... demanding than that of a thief. Our careers depend on finding anyone we need to find, and because of that, we discover the thief in a hard to notice, claustrophobia-inducing alley. I believe he might have heard of our presence in Solitude from somebody before we began our hunt, because he was clearly hiding from something. Before we bother to ask what that something was though, the man got a piercing ebony arrow shot into him just above the bridge of his nose. Oh well, what more can you do.
Luckily for us, the clouds clear out. The threat of a storm is no longer over our heads (literally), so Cicero and I decided to grab a sweet roll at the general goods store and enjoy it while in Solitude.
As we sit down on a large stone bench, Cicero looks around aimlessly and lets out a deep sigh.
"Solitude... Cicero could tell you a thing or two about... solitude..."