Yay I'm baaack!!

Disclaimer: No matter how many times I keep asking, Ubisoft is not letting me own Altair...-cries in corner-

"Wake up!" they whispered.

And I did.

But there was someone actually there, wanting me to wake up. He was nearly a foot from my face, and he had a bright red mark across his cheek, and a look that could kill me. I froze in my spot, my eyes wide and horrified. Despite the fact that he was obviously plotting my murder in his eyes, he was quite handsome, in that rugged-I-will-kill-you kind of way.

Okay, it was morning. I screamed, right in his face. This surprised him, and he scrambled back, hitting the wall. "Who the hell are you?!" I screamed, pulling the covers over me. "Pervert!" I opened my mouth to scream again, but I was silenced when he rose up, his humongous stature towering over me. His eyes burned a hole in the sheets. I finally got a good look at who I had rescued.

He was wearing a giant white bathrobe, with a hood over his head that covered his eyes. I was in awe still at how tall he was, and how scary a single person could look. All over his body were straps, and attached to some; there were deadly-looking knives and pouches I didn't want to know what was inside. I was breathing out of my mouth, and I was hyperventilating. This was crazy, this was crazy, this was crazy. He gave off an aura of a powerful and controlling person, and it made me shiver. I realized I was naked just then, with only sheets covering me up. I blushed red, and then returned his glare. He jerked his left arm down some, and a knife shot out in place of where his ring finger should have been.

My self-control left me. I screamed bloody murder and shot off the bed, leaving the covers behind. I ran into the kitchen and seized one of the biggest knives I had, which was no match for his long sword on his hip. Maybe I could throw it…?

He burst into the kitchen. There was nothing between the two of us besides a table. I was vaguely aware of my nakedness, but nothing registered in my mind besides what the hell is going on. He stood perfectly still. "Put the knife down." He said sternly. I almost did, before I realized he was speaking in Arabic. My body started to shake, although from what I didn't know.

"No. Who are you?" I shot back. My hands were shaking, and adrenaline was coursing through my fingertips. "Speak, dog!" Come on, Lacrima. Dog?

"I will tell you when you put down the knife." He repeated. Something was rising up inside me. But what?

"When you put yours down. You're in my house, my rules." I stated firmly. He made no move to take off the blades and swords. "Then leave, scum!" I pointed with the knife towards the door. He still did not move. I adjusted my feet on the linoleum.

I jumped when he seemed to glide forward and move to take the knife out of my hands. I screamed and threw it in his direction. He shouted out in pain before the knife clattered to the floor. I hit him! Oh God, I don't have protection anymore. In the confusion, I ran under his arms and to the doorway of the kitchen. His hand went out to grab me, but all it did was slide down my back as I sprinted into my room. Locking the door behind me, I retreated onto the bed. I was breathing hard.

He banged on the door. "Open this door. You have nowhere else to go."

"No, you ass!" I shouted. I was angry now that I realized he was right, and I got up from the bed and started throwing clothes on. I snatched a blue shirt and a pair of blue jeans from under my bed (my closet's organization baskets had fallen over in the night, poor things) and slid them on.

"Tell me your name, girl." If he thought he was going to address me like that, he was wrooong.

"Go to hell!" I yelled, not cooperating in the least. He kicked the door, but I didn't jump. I doubled over in pain quite suddenly, and my entire body felt like someone had stepped on it. Was this from last night? I remembered falling down the stairs, and then running into the door, and then falling on my face…I touched my nose softly. Pain shot through my spine up to my brain. Ouch. I sat back on my bed, holding my stomach.

"Go to hell!" she yelled from inside the room. I sighed and kicked the door. Not hard, but loudly enough so that I could hear her retreat on the bed. At least she was afraid of me. That was the point. My shoulder was numbing, but small shards of pain ripped through me consistently.

"Tell me your name, and I'll leave!" the words were out of my mouth before I could even think. I wished I could take them back, but I could nearly hear her contemplating.

"…Lacrima." Teardrop? I thought. I wonder if she spoke any other languages than Arabic.

In Spanish, I spoke. "¿Usted aprende?" she hesitated before answering.

"¿Usted sabe a habla en ingles también?" she asked. I remembered all of my English.

"…Yes." I answered. Where was I?

"Oh thank God." She mumbled on the other side of the door. "Who are you? Why do you have all those knives?" she didn't know about the Assassins? But, the painting of the Bureau—

"What year is it?" I asked cautiously.

"2012. It's September. Don't you know that?" 2012? What happened to 1191? I felt very dizzy. "Hello?" she called when I didn't speak. I staggered back, and hit the wall. This wasn't real. But the gold…my thoughts were invading my mind and smashing everything I knew to pieces. "Are you still there?" her voice was scared.

I fell to the ground. My knees went up to my head. I bowed my forehead to my knees. My arm slowly bled onto the floor. I just traveled…821 years into the future, unless…"Are you lying to me?" I asked softly.

"Of course not! Why would I?" she peeked her head out of the door. I was too tired to even move. "Are you alright?"

"No I'm not! I'm not…I'm not from here!" I shouted at her. She shrank back into her room slightly. "Where is here? You speak too many languages and I don't recognize your dialect."

"This is the Protected United States of America. You sound like you're from Saudi Arabia, or…Syria, if I'm not mistaken." I nodded. "I don't mean to anger you, but who are you?" she swept her hair back over her shoulder. I could see she was fully clothed, although they were still strange to me. Well, maybe in the future, the styles were different.

"Since I don't know where I am, my name is Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad. I'm an assassin from the year 1191."

We sat in silence for over a half hour, waiting for the other to make a move.

"You're hurt. Oh crap, did I do that?" Crap? It must be some type of swear word, by the way she said it. I nodded and rose onto my feet. "Let me clean that up for you. Come in here."

I lead him into my kitchen, thinking how crazy was this guy? He thinks he's an assassin! I sat him down in a chair and scrambled to get the first aid kit out. Westin's first aid kit. He was a paramedic, and he had given it to me for Christmas last year. Such a good guy, until he tried to get me to sell The Bureau. I smirked at the note he had written on the white plastic: 'Stay safe!'

Sure, letting a madman in during a hurricane was the epitome of that.

I brought the box back into the kitchen, almost grateful that he hadn't moved. "So…" I can't believe I had just forgotten his name.

"Altaïr." He finished for me.

"Altaïr." I smiled slightly at how purely out-of-this-world the name was. Perhaps he was bluffing that he was an assassin. Any second now, he'd jump up and say "Got ya!" and then I'd most likely die. "How did you…get here?"

"I don't know. The last thing I remember was running over a hill in the rain…and then everything was gold, and black, and then I landed here. But…it was wet, and it felt like I was on grass. The air was horribly tainted with poisons, and I couldn't breathe. Do you know where that is?" this was amazing. He could smell the depletion of the ozone? Well, he probably was so used to fresh air that—no, Lacrima. Don't consider this a possibility. He was obviously lying, or mad.

"There's a park right outside. That's where I found you. You were coughing, and unconscious, so I had to carry you back inside before the eye of the hurricane passed."

"Hurricane?" Altaïr seemed confused. He couldn't possibly be bluffing. I mean, after Hurricane Richard in 2011…he's gotta be a poker player or something.

"Y'know, big storm, okay, huge storm…it's crazy." I trailed off after that. He breathed in loudly and I remembered that he was injured. "Oh, um, I need you to, um, remove your, uh…robes?" I tried.

"Very well." He started to take off his belt and when it was off, held it about a foot above the tabletop. "May I?" I nodded and he set the dark brown belt down. It looked as if it was made of leather, and the knives in the little holes looked real. Real deadly, that is.

He next undid the blood-red sash around his middle. "Um, do…all of…your kind…dress this way?" I asked as he started to slip off his outer robes, revealing a thin tunic that covered his torso loosely. I bit my lip to keep from blushing.

"Our Brotherhood has ranks, and in the ranks, the uniforms change minimally, but we all look mostly the same." He said uncomfortably. I noted the fairly deep gash in his clothing, the blood seeping like a red flower through the white. He took off the tunic, and I couldn't keep in my gasp of shock and horror.

All over his chest were scars and burns of different shapes, sizes, and lengths. Most of them were pretty old, but the quantity of them was astonishing. Where has any mental hospital been so cruel to its patients? My hands flew to my mouth and covered my little whimper of fear. The slash on his arm was still freely bleeding, and that's what rooted me in place. "Sit." I said. He sat reluctantly, not used to taking orders, from a woman, no less. I quickly turned around, and retrieved a washcloth from a cabinet. Wetting it from the faucet, I returned to find that his gaze was upon mine. His stare was smothering me, and I almost dropped the cloth. "What?" I asked as I broke eye contact, though I could still feel him staring. I sat on the chair parallel to him.

"Your eyes…they look familiar." I blushed. That's what most people said, except that they weren't particularly "familiar". They were usually "beautiful", "astounding", and "sexy". Men were such pigs sometimes. "Are you sure we're not in 1191, and you transported here?"

"This is my house." I said defensively. "As long as I have my shop, and—"

"You have a shop?" he asked incredulously. "But—you're a woman." His eyes grew large.

"In this time, women have higher standards than property. The quicker you learn that, the better." He was silent. I wiped up his blood with the towel, and put disinfectant on it (he had made a face when I had said that, and I wished I had a camera) before wrapping it up with medical bandages. I stood up and gathered his clothes into a pile. "You can use the shower. You're a mess." He looked at me as if I had spoken a language he wasn't familiar with.

"The what?" he asked. Oh, no way. He couldn't be bluffing that he didn't know what a shower was.

"The shower. The thing I left you in?" I sighed when I saw a flicker of recognition in his eyes. "Come on." I walked to the bathroom. I didn't realize he was behind me until I turned to make sure he was following me and wasn't in the kitchen. I jumped. "Don't do that."

"What? Walk?" he said with a flash of a grin on his face. My heart stopped beating. His teeth were surprisingly white. One reason he wasn't from the land of non-dental care. Teeth that bright weren't possible, except with airbrushing in magazines. I finally registered his face: high cheekbones, baked brown skin, those perfect honey-brown eyes that held everyone captivated at any time, the angularity of his nose, and those perfect, seductive lips that were curved now into a thin line now that he had realized what I was staring at (him). I was completely taken aback by his appearance, and his slightly longer-than-usual black-as-night hair was cropped up by his forehead. I wondered what it would look like longer…an image popped into my mind but was deflated by Altaïr's basilisk's stare.

"Sorry. I, uh…I mean, you had your hood on, and…never mind." I turned back around and opened the door, shaking with the feeling that this was so very awkward. His left hand (I knew it was his left by the lack of ring finger) curled around my wrist, stopping me.

"You don't have to be afraid of me." He whispered so low I barely thought that he had even spoken. His breath tickled my ear. Just think, an hour ago, I was chasing him around with a knife!

"I'm fine." I mumbled and opened the door. He pushed past me.

"Well, this is called a shower, and you—what the hell are you doing?!" he was bending down to the toilet, and scooping the toilet water (I almost threw up) into his mouth. Obviously his mouth wasn't as clean as I had thought…

"This is a well, is it not?" his look of naïveté was enough to make me laugh, although I felt thoroughly embarrassed at what I was just going to explain. My stomach turned over on itself.

"No! I mean, you shouldn't uh, do that…uh, just…" okay, he saw me naked. He deserves to know that he was drinking out of a toilet. "That's the equivalent of a chamber pot." His face blanched and he stood up, his face stony and hard. He cleared his throat.

"The shower?" he asked, his eye twitching a bit.

I explained to him how to use the shower and I told him where the towels and soap was, all the time keeping my head bowed so I didn't have to look at his face. His embarrassment burnt a hole in my head, but I couldn't help the trembling in my lip when I exited the room. I closed the door behind me and waited for him to turn the shower on. The shower curtain moved back into place, and I went out onto my balcony that leads down to the store.

I couldn't help myself; I laughed until it hurt.

I live for moments like that...

Love,

Bailey