Connor has brought strays home before. It's become one of his favorite things to do, bringing people to the Homestead simply because they have no place else to be.

No. Not because they have no place else to be—because they have no place else to belong. Aita (if that is his name, because even he seems unsure sometimes) is clearly one of those people. He'd just appeared, apparently out of nowhere, and either cannot or will not tell Connor where he has come from or why he is here, and the conversation between the two of them as Connor escorts the strange newcomer toward the Homestead.

"How many people live here?" Aita asks as they finally come close to home.

"About twenty," Connor says. "Sometimes more. People will pass through and stay at the Inn, and sailors from the Aquila will stay here when the ship is docked."

"You have a ship?" Aita asks.

"I can take you to see her if you want," Connor says.

"Maybe later," Aita says. They've come to the top of a hill, looking down at the settlement, at the wooden homes and the people working in and around them. "But yes. I want to see everything."

Something about his tone makes Connor turn to look at him. The way he says that, it makes Connor think of Achilles, when he wants to test Connor on some new concept or technique he's supposed to be learning. It makes Connor feel oddly defensive, because why does this stranger think he is going to come here and test Connor, and his Homestead, and the people that live there.

"Aita," Connor says, a little uncertain.

There's a brief pause, as Connor has noticed there usually is when he hears his name, before Aita says, "Yes?"

"Why did you come here?"

"Because you asked me to come," Aita says.

"No," Connor says, and turns sharply to him. He doesn't know exactly what he means, but he keeps getting the feeling that Aita is here for some purpose. "Why are you here?"

Aita looks torn, and doesn't answer for a long time. Connor doesn't push. He waits, because he understands how it feels to not quite know how to say what he means.

"I need to see," Aita says at last.

"See what?" Connor asks.

Aita looks out at the Homestead again. "The world that humans have made," he tells Connor, quiet and serious and with so much… foreboding that it makes the hair stand up on the back of Connor's neck. "Why?" Connor asks.

Aita crosses his arms loosely over his chest. "I need to… see if there's any good in it."

That should make Connor more nervous—instead it makes him less. "When my mother died," he says. "It was in a fire. There had been… men in the woods." He doesn't say Templars, because after all this is still a stranger. "They hurt me, they burned my village, and my mother died. Sometimes you need to go looking for the… good."

"And is it there?" Aita asks.

"Come and see," Connor says, and leads him down to the Homestead.

-/-

Aita falls back and lets Connor take the lead. He feels… not quite right, in a way that doesn't quite make sense to him. All his memories feel new, and he doesn't quite fit them. Maybe it's a side effect of the time travel, or maybe it's something else—he can't tell, but he's hoping it'll sort itself out soon. He remembers what he's doing here, he remembers volunteering to come here and see what humans would do in the future, and how dangerous they would become. And now he's here, in a world full of humans, with his head not quite right.

He's not sure what to make of the world he's seeing now. It's a lot more primitive than anything he's used to living with, but he's not going to make the mistake of thinking that primitive is the same as bad. No one is trying to argue that humans are as advanced as the isu. If they want to live in wooden huts out in the forest, it's not like that's a bad thing in and of itself.

It's just… unsettling, in a way, to see the world these people have made for themselves. Like a dollhouse come to life.

The people they pass greet Connor with genuine smiles, and a few of them start to reach out to Aita, too. He doesn't exactly know how to react to them—he's here to observe, not to make friends—and no one sticks around to try and talk.

"And this is home," Connor says, when at last they reach a house up on the top of a hill. It's… nice. Even Aita can see that it's nicer than the other wood constructions in the settlement. The Homestead, Connor calls it. Aita rather likes that word. It sounds… welcoming, in a way. "You can stay for the night," Connor says. "Until you figure out where it is you need to be."

"Thank you," Aita says. "I—"

"Connor."

An old man's voice interrupts him, and Aita and Connor both turn toward the house's front door. A skinny man, bent over a walking stick, looks back at the pair of them. He gives Aita a long look, and it's hard not to feel like he's being judged, and found wanting. It's sort of insulting—he's here to judge them, all these humans, not the other way around. "Who is it you've brought home this time, Connor?" the old man asks. "Where did you find… a Sage?"

The word should mean nothing to him. But an irrational shiver runs up Aita's spine, and he hears, like a half forgotten memory—

You will lose yourself.

He can't remember where he's heard the warning, or when, or… who it came from. He shakes it off, and forgets about it.

"Sage," he says. "What?"

He must have been lost in thought for longer than he thought, because when he looks up, he realizes Connor and his… friend? (They don't look related) are in the middle of what looks like an intense conversation. Aita frowns.

"Am I interrupting something?" he asks.

The two of them share a complicated look, and Aita reads skepticism and uncertainty between them. Fair enough. He's a stranger to them. But he can't quite stop himself from thinking that the look has something to do with him—with whatever a Sage is supposed to be.

"My name is Achilles Davenport," the old man says. "And you can stay here, in my home, for one night. And then you leave."

Aita raises his eyebrows, but doesn't argue. In the morning, he'll move on.

-/-

Thanks to Haytham and Shay, it's not long before Layla, Elina, and Amunet are all back together again. After Amunet follows Haytham to Shay's home, Elina leaves the others to talk, goes to bed early, and wakes up late. By the time she goes downstairs, Layla has already shared the Sage's list of people that are supposed to be able to help them, and the four of them are arguing over whether or not it's worth going after the only other person on the list that's alive in this point in history.

"Connor won't help," Haytham says.

"You know him?" Layla asks.

"He's my son," Haytham says, so… so casual and uncaring that Elina feels bad for this Connor she's never met. She wonders why his dad doesn't seem to like him much.

"Listen," Layla says. "I understand awkward family or whatever, I think we all do." She glances especially at Amunet as she says this. "But we're fighting something we don't understand, and we need all the help we can possibly get, I don't care what kind of weird relationship you have with Connor."

"Please?" Elina adds. She doesn't think she's going to actually be able to help any in convincing her, but to her surprise (and vague nervousness), he actually turns directly toward her and gives her his full attention.

Elina takes a step backward without even fully realizing she's doing it, until she feels Amunet's hand against her back, stopping her from backing up any farther. The woman gives her a slight push forward, and Elina tries to make it look natural.

"Why?" Haytham says. "Give me a good reason that I should take you to see Connor, and I'll do it today. Now."

What? How is she supposed to convince him when he clearly doesn't trust the Sage's… prophecy, or whatever it is. That's pretty much all they have to go on, that's the only reason they've been jumping from one century to the next, trying to track these people down. Elina looks up, and frowns at him. "You know what?" she says. "It doesn't matter. We need to talk to him, and if you won't take us, we're just going to go by ourselves."

"But from what I understand," Haytham says. "You need my support as well, to fulfill what this Sage told you."

"Yea," Elina says. "But I'm pretty sure Shay's on our side, and I don't think you'll let him help us unless you're part of it too You're on the same team. So… if we go talk to Connor, and convince him to help, we have all three of you."

There's a twitch of a smile around his expression that sort of surprises Elina. It's a good sign, though, probably? Maybe?

"Your father is a Templar," he says.

"Yea?" Elina says, not sure what that has to do with anything.

"That was a very Templar way to phrase your argument," Haytham says. "I approve of your thought process."

"So—"

"So I will help," Haytham tells her. "Yes."

"Oh," Elina says. "Okay. Cool."

Haytham turns sharply on his heel and strides away, hands clasped behind his back. "Are you coming?" he asks, without turning around. "I'd like to reach him before dusk, if we're going to do this."

"Yes!" Layla says. "Yes, we're coming!" She grabs Amunet's arm and starts a low, urgent commentary that Elina assumes is a translation of what just happened. Elina trails after them, a little confused by how quickly Haytham had changed his mind. Maybe Haytham had attributed it to a particularly Templar-eque way of logicking her way through this, but that's not something Elina had learned from her dad. What she has learned is that she should question everything. Don't trust the first reason people you give you for anything. They almost always have a second motive they're not telling you.

"I think he misses Connor," Shay says quietly, when they're the only two left in the room. "It's hard to tell, he keeps it hidden pretty well. But I've known Haytham a long time, and… even if he doesn't miss Connor, I think it will do him some good to see his son."

And maybe that's true, or maybe it isn't, but it definitely sounds more true than the feeble excuse Haytham had given. Elina decides not to question it. It's true enough, and after all they're doing what she wants, and sometimes that's good enough.

They have to ride there, on actual horses, which is… not something Elina is super good at. Sure, she'd gone through a pony phase when she was like nine or ten, but that had mostly been because it was what all the other girls were doing, and anyway all they did was look at pictures on the internet and draw very bad pictures on the back of their homework. Actually riding one in real life only reminds Elina that she's way too short, and has no idea how to ride a horse.

After less than half an hour of riding, they have to pause to move Elina off the horse she'd been trying to (failing to) stay on top of, and onto the horse Layla is riding. All she has to do there is kind of hang on and focus on not falling off, while Layla handles all the difficult parts of riding.

They move a lot more quickly after that.

At first there's not much conversation, but it's a long ride with not much else to do, and even Haytham opens up a little as they day wears on. He's mostly interested in Amunet, asking a series of increasingly probing questions into how she and Bayek had ended up founding the Hidden Ones, with Layla interpreting back and forth for them. After a while, when he runs out of questions and Amunet gets tired of answering, Amunet turns her attention to Elina instead.

With the same gentle, but insistent, prodding that she had used when she helped Elina climb a tower in Florence, Amunet starts to teach Elina how to ride—the correct way to sit on the horse, the correct way to distribute her weight. She even points out what each of the others are doing right—or wrong—as they ride.

"I… thank you for helping me," Elina says, after a while. "But why bother?"

She looks first at Amunet, and then at Layla, waiting for her to translate. When the answer finally comes, it's not something Elina had expected.

"She says she thinks you'll make a good Hidden One," Layla says.

Elina blushes and shakes her head, which makes Layla laugh.

"It's a compliment," she says. "go ahead and take it."

"But I… my father's a Templar," Elina says. "And I wouldn't be any good at it anyway, and what would that even mean? What am I supposed to do with that, just—"

"Fight," Layla says, and this isn't something she's translating from Amunet, because Amunet hasn't said anything. This is jus Layla's opinion. "I get where you're coming from, because this is all still pretty new to me, but it seems like the Hidden Ones just… fight. For whoever needs someone strong on their side."

"You just fight?" Elina asks. She doesn't want to argue it too much, because she can see that Layla is really sold on this, but… it just doesn't seem very noble, fighting for anything and everything.

"The world is full of underdogs," Layla says. "And people that need… I don't know, they need help, or someone to stand up for them, but they can't fight back. Why wouldn't you want to be that someone?"

Elina offers her a half hearted smile. "I mean it doesn't sound so bad when you say it like that," she says.

"Not to interrupt the career advice," Haytham says drily. "But we're almost there." And sure enough, he's already turning off the main road (although Elina has a hard time thinking of it as a road, when it's really just a dirt trail through the woods) and onto a smaller trail.

Shay hangs back. "I'm not exactly welcome here," he explains, when Elina looks at him and opens her mouth just to ask the question. "There's a place about half a mile that way where hunters camp when they're in the area. I'll wait there for you."

"What'd he do?" Elina asks, when Shay has pressed his horse on.

"Killed most of the Assassins that used to live there," Haytham says absently. "Come on. It's almost dark."

"Do you think… is he going to be allowed in?" Elina whispers to Layla.

"I mean," Layla says. "I think it's going to be really interesting."

And on they ride. It's not very long before they reach a small cluster of houses. Most of them basically looked like log cabins, but the one that they were headed for looked a little bit more refined.

"And there he is," Haytham says, in a tone that reminds Elina a little bit of a narrator on a nature documentary. "Connor."

Elina looks at the man that's just come out of the house, and she's surprised for a second just because he looks so completely unlike his father. If she didn't already know that Haytham clearly did not choose to be Connor's father, she might have wondered if he had been adopted.

Then she sees the second person that has followed Connor outside, and very nearly falls over her horse. "Elijah!" she shouts. "Elijah!"

Layla has to stop and help her off the horse, which is a little embarrassing, and then she practically falls flat on her face because she's been sitting on that horse for so long she's almost forgotten how her legs work, but after a couple of hobbling steps she manages to get herself together and run toward him.

He looks at her like she's gone crazy, Elina sees that right away.

It's not until she's right on top of him that she realizes that he's also looking at her like he's never seen her before in his life. Elina slows to a stop, and grabs at his shoulder. "Hey," she says. "Elijah, what's wrong?"

"Who are you?" he asked, and his voice is all wrong. It's not just the distance that his tone puts between them, it's the look on his face—the confusion and discomfort—and the way he talks. The words just sound wrong, like he's developed an accent out of nowhere, one Elina has never heard before.

"You know me," she says, pressing her hand to her chest. "Elijah—Elijah, come on." He looks at her, still blank but getting more and more uncomfortable.

"I'm not Elijah," he tells her.

"Yes you are—"

"My name is Aita."

And Elina freezes, mouth open, blood turning to ice in her veins, totally unable to deal with this.

-/-

Aita hadn't expected to learn his own future when he traveled forward in time. He hadn't expected to learn that Juno—who, from his perspective, is still someone he is just starting to get to know, someone he's just barely started to acknowledge he likes—is going to be his wife someday, is going to do horrible, unnatural things to try and keep him alive after he dies, is going to spend tens of thousands of years waiting, slowly going crazy, slowly losing herself…

"You're lying," he says, because the idea that this is the future is honestly horrifying.

"I don't have any reason to lie to you," Berg says. "The truth hurts enough, doesn't it?"

Aita turns around and glares at the man. He's starting to really think that he has a good idea of what humans are like in the future—and it's not a very good impression. "Then there must be a way to change what happens."

"How would I know?" Berg asks.

"Keep talking," Aita says. He's going to figure this out—he's not so sure, based on what he's seen of Berg so far, he's just not sure humanity is worth saving.

Juno is.

-/-

Guys I'm sorry this chapter has been so slow updating. Not sure if anyone's still waiting to read at this point, but if you are just know that I feel bad, but it's been 10+ hour days for about three weeks and I haaaate it and am exhausted. I know that's not that much work in the grand scheme of things so it's not much of an excuse, but it just really makes it hard to stay up and write, I'm sorry.