"—lijah. Elijah!"

He almost doesn't recognize his name, and it's not until something sharp hits him across the face that his eyes fly open and he remembers where and when and who he is. It had worked, mostly. His plan to learn what they need to know about Aita by almost but not quite allowing himself to become him.

"…Khemu?" he says, mumbling the name as his brain struggles to catch up.

"Yea." His best friend leans over and helps Elijah to his feet. It's a steady motion, grounding him in the here and now, and Elijah is grateful for it. He knows what they need to do now. He just needs to figure out how exactly to do it. "Elijah, we've been looking for you."

"I've been here," Elijah says. He rubs at his face. Wake up wake up wake up. He's still a step or two behind and he can feel his brain churning as he tries to catch up. "Why's everyone looking for me?"

"Because they're coming," Elina says. "Aita's people, or his army or whatever you want to call it—they're coming and everyone else went out to meet them.

"They're going to fight," Khemu says, and Elijah actually feels his heartrate surge up.

"No," he says. "No, no, no, no, no—"

"What's the matter?"

Elijah scrambles to his feet. "They can't fight," he says.

"I hate to break it to you," Elina says skeptically. "But…"

"They're going to ruin everything," Elijah says.

"What are we supposed to do then?" Khemu asks. The three of them are all rushing out of the house now, Elijah in the lead because he knows how bad this is. He doesn't know where they're going, though. His sixth sense isn't kicking in the way it usually does—too wrapped up with what he's just figured out—and he's feeling totally lost.

Which is why he has his friends. They don't know what's going on, because he's a horrible friend and he hasn't explained yet, but they're still helping him follow the people that have already left.

"It's going to take a little while to catch up to them," Khemu says. "They wanted to take the fight away from other people so I think they were headed out of town."

At least he'd have time to explain. "We're not going to win in a fight," he says.

"You think we're not?" Khemu asks. "Or you know—"

"I know," Elijah says. "Because even if we win the fight today, that's only going to make the isu more determined to wipe us out."

"What?"

"They sent Aita is a kind of… advance scout, I guess?" Elijah says. "Humans were just starting to think for themselves, and the isu weren't sure about that. They sent Aita here—he volunteered, technically, but he's here to find out if we… deserve to get here, if that makes sense."

There's a moment of silence, and then Khemu says, "So you're saying that if the isu decide we don't deserve to… think for ourselves…?"

"They'll probably just wipe us out like seventy thousand years in the past and none of human history will ever happen," Elijah finishes.

Elina curses with more creativity than Elijah would have given her credit for. "What do we do then?" she asks. "If we're not supposed to fight him, what are we going to—"

"I'm going to talk to him," Elijah says.

"What are you going to say?" Khemu demands.

Elijah takes a deep breath. "I… have an idea," he says.

"Is it going to work?" Khemu asks.

He's not going to lie to his friends right now. Not about something this important. "I don't know," he says. "Honestly, I don't even know what I'm going to say, but…" And this part, he knows from what he'd just done, sitting and learning as much as he can about Aita from within his own mind. "But he's not a bad person. He doesn't understand us, because he hasn't had a chance. He's just gone from one bad situation to another, so of course he's going to think we're all the same. I need to convince him he's wrong."

"Sure," Khemu says, but his voice is just ever so slightly doubtful. " Just… convince the homicidal maniac that our entire species deserves to live.

A spike of unadulterated panic flashes through him then. "Don't say it like that," he says. "I'm panicking already. And…" He's hesitating so much already, he doesn't know how he's ever going to manage to give Aita a cohesive argument. Still, he manages to get the words out. "And I don't think he is a homicidal maniac."

"Oh?" Elina sounds skeptical. "What is he, then?"

No hesitation this time—Elijah knows the answer to that particular question already. "Scared," he says, and hurries on as fast as he possibly can.

-/-

Aita knows there's a battle coming. That's the sixth sense talking, telling him what's going to happen before it does—not that he thinks it would have been that hard to see this coming, even if he was limited to only the five senses that humans have. This, from what he's seen, is how humans exist. They're in a constant state of needing to fight anything and everything that's different from them, and he is very different from them.

He paces as he waits, listening to the intermittent reports that they're coming, they're getting closer, they're almost here. Aita wishes, at this point, that he could just—go. Only he's not entirely sure how to find his way home again, all the way back through the tens of thousands of years separating his life from this time now.

Then, as Aita is pacing back and forth and trying to come to terms with the reality that people are going to fight and probably die here, and that one of them might even be him, he hears footsteps.

As far as he knows, he's alone in the main floor of the Temple. His people, the ones he'd forcibly recruited, are out waiting for the people that are coming here to attack. No one else should even know to be here, and yet…

Aita's first thought as he focuses his attention on the small figure running toward him is that he must be hallucinating or dreaming because the boy has his face. For a long minute, after the boy has skidded to a stop on the slick stone floor, Aita just stares at him. The boy (Elijah, his sixth sense supplies) is half bent over, hands on his knees, panting for breath. It would almost be funny, Aita thinks, if the situation wasn't so intense.

And then humor gives way to curiosity. There's something so exposed and undefended about Elijah that isn't like anything Aita has seen from humanity so far. He's nonplussed, and temporarily stunned, until finally little bits of knowledge start to come trickling through to him. So he knows, before Elijah is able to breathe normally and speak again, that he is thirteen years old, that he is more isu than any human Aita has met so far, and he is not here to fight.

None of that explains why he's here or what he wants. Aita waits, and eventually Elijah is able to pull himself together enough to talk, even if he is still shaking all over. "I need to talk to you," he says, in Aita's own language.

Aita's not sure how to answer that, but eventually he says, "Who are you?" He knows the facts, but he doesn't know who this boy really is. And he doesn't know why he's run all the way here just to talk to him.

"It's hard to explain," Elijah says. "I know you probably already know a lot about me."

Aita nods. Of course he does.

"But…" He seems nervous about coming closer, but eventually he does. Aita can't help feeling a little nervous about looking down at him, and seeing a boy with his own face looking back up at him. Sage, his sixth sense supplies. There's too much of you in him, and not enough of himself. "I want to tell you a story," Elijah says. "If… that's okay."

There's going to be a battle outside in a few minutes, and Elijah thinks this is a good time for a story, of all things? Still, Aita nods. He doesn't quite know where this is going, but he has a good feeling about it, somehow. It feels a little like a lifeline, a way out of a war he doesn't want to start.

"Okay," Elijah says. "So, I met this other Sage, in ancient Egypt. I mean… I guess it would still be the future for you, since you're from so far in the past. But he told me there were all these people that we needed to get together, to fight you basically." His voice is somewhere close to apologetic as he says this. "So we went looking for all these people. We went all over the place, to different centuries and different countries all over the world."

Aita reads a lot of complicated emotions coming off of Elijah as he talks about all these places he travelled to. Exhaustion, first of all. The kind of bone deep tiredness that you only get when you've done everything you can and you're still not sure it's enough. But he's also proud of what they have done, and caught up in the wonder of what he's seen in all these places.

"Gon on," Aita prompts.

"So we got all these people here," Elijah says. "And…" He's looking desperate now. "And I messed it all up because I didn't realize why we needed all those people here, I thought it was going to come down to a fight and so they all thought it was going to be a fight but that was never what we were supposed to—"

"Elijah," Aita says, nonplussed. "Breathe." He's not entirely sure what to make of this panicked human child standing in front of him.

Elijah makes a face. "You're here to decide what to do about humans," he says. "Which is… I mean it's kind of creepy, actually? We're people, and it's not up to you whether we get to keep living." His face is so much more open and expressive than Aita is used to seeing on his own face. "I thought I was you for a while," he says.

"What?" Aita asks, totally lost.

"It happens to Sages after a while," Elijah says. His tone has turned solemn, and Aita realizes this is something that he's struggled with and worried about. "We start to get more of your memories and personality and after a while we become you."

Aita cannot imagine this. Not only the general idea of someone not knowing who they are, but the specifics of them thinking they are him. Of… a lot of people thinking they're him, from the sound of it. He does not like this—he does not like the idea of being pulled into history like this, of his mind being… imprinted on generation after generation, down through the centuries, until…

He looks into the unsettlingly familiar eyes of Elijah Miles, and thinks—well, until we get here.

"When I thought I was you," Elijah says, with obvious care. "I didn't want to fight. I just wanted to learn everything I could about… humans." He struggles with the word, and the way it separates him from the rest of humanity. "And something my friend's mom said made me think there must be a reason why you were acting differently." He takes a deep breath. "But you haven't seen anything good since you came here, and so I thought about it, and then I knew… that's why I needed to bring all those Assassins and Templars here. It's not to fight, it's because they are good people."

His expression is earnest. "They're good people," he says a second time. "Talk to them, and you'll see. Humans can—we can be pretty terrible sometimes, but the people I brought back with me are… they're all fighting in their own ways to make things better for whatever time and place they live in. And they all came here, out of their own lives, to do whatever they could to help us, even though this is the future for them and it's never going to matter to them what happens here in the twenty first century. So I ran all the way over here because—because you need to talk to them. Let them show you that we're not as bad as you think we are. We don't have to fight."

Aita very badly wants to avoid a fight, if he's being honest. He's never been much of a fighter, and he doesn't even particularly like war. But. "I'm sure they're fighting by now," he says.

"Then we'll stop them," Elijah says. "Don't you want that?"

There's something familiar about Elijah—well, of course there is. Looking at him is like looking in a mirror, albeit one that shows him as he was when he was younger. But in a way… it almost makes him homesick. Nothing that Aita has seen, not in the whole time he's been here, has been as close to familiar as Elijah.

His shoulders slump, and he turns away, running a hand over his face.

-/-

Elijah watches Aita. He holds his breath, wishing he knew what Aita is going to say. The isu is basically a blank slate, and Elijah can't get anything off of him. All he can do is hold his breath, and pray.

Aita's voice, when he finally speaks, is quiet. "I…"

-/-

He gives up, or lets himself be persuaded—one or the other, but either way this fight was never what he wanted. In the end, what it comes down to is this. He needs a way out of this. He is desperate for a way out of this war he never asked for.

(Or did he? It takes two to fight, and while Aita has done everything solely because he wants to protect himself—he can see why Elijah doesn't see it that way)

"I want to go home," he says. "I didn't come here for a fight, I came here to learn what humanity is capable of." And far and away, Elijah is the brightest spot of hope he's seen since coming here, which is either high praise for him, or proof of how low the bar is here. "So let's call this off," he says, and Elijah…

Elijah bursts into tears. Relieved, joyful tears mixed in with genuine laughter. "Oh my God," he says, in English. "It's over."

He repeats it a few more times, until it finally sinks in for Aita. It just—it hasn't before, but now, all at once, he gets it.

These are actual people. And yes, they're human. They're not isu, and the humans he's used to back home are—they've always been there to serve. They're less than the isu, full stop, or at least that's how Aita's always understood it.

This is the first time that he has fully, completely realized that humans are people too, and that he has come into their lives and ruined… everything. Hesitant and uncertain, Aita takes several steps toward Elijah, who is busy trying to wipe at his face, which is almost painfully red with tears, and crouches down in front of him. Elijah is a scrawny kid that clearly hasn't hit his growth spurt yet, and the isu as a species are taller than humans in any case. Aita tries and doesn't quite succeed in pushing away the feeling of talking to a child.

"This is—'m sorry," Elijah says. "But I just want my dad back. I want to go home, I—" He manages a little bit of composure. "We should go see if it's too late to call this fight off before anyone gets hurt."

He turns, and is off like a shot before Aita even has a chance to say the I'm sorry that's on the tip of his tongue.

-/-

Khemu has been in plenty of fights by this point, but none of them were ever quite like this. There's a horrible feeling of wrongness, because he knows the people fighting for Aita aren't really fighting for Aita—they're apple controlled and that's kind of squeamishly wrong.

He can tell he's not the only one that feels that way, because nobody has died yet. Even Elina's dad, who Khemu knows for a definite fact has no problem with killing people, hasn't stabbed or shot so much as a single person. They're just defending themselves, while the other side fights without consideration for their own safety or the circumstances of the fight. And when one side is fighting to kill at all costs, and the other side is just trying to not die, it only takes one mistake for things to go horribly wrong.

So it's just lucky that nobody has a chance to make that mistake. Because before the one sided battle really even has a chance to go wrong—

Khemu looks up, and sees the (disorienting) sight of Aita and Elijah walking toward them, side by side.

Hope flares.

Aita's head turns slightly to one side as he examines them all, and then he smiles. It's not a scary smile, so even though Khemu's heart jumps into his throat at the sight of him with the apple, a tiny glimmer of hope remains.

For a frozen moment, he's not sure what's going to happen, and then Aita says, "Go home."

And just like that, the battle's over. Every one of the people that Aita had forced to be here just…. Drops whatever they're doing, and goes. They're not even completely out of earshot yet when Khemu hears them starting to talk about doing exactly that, going home—it sounds like they've already forgotten what Aita had forced them to do. Probably for the best.

He's still staring after them, guard down, shocked that the fight is over with as easily as that, when something runs at him from the side. Khemu almost strikes out just in sheer surprise, but luckily only manages some pathetic flailing.

"Khemu," Elijah says, latching onto him and not letting go. "I think it's all going to work out."

"No more fighting?" Khemu asks, slightly confused. "I thought… is Aita on our side now?"

"I think he's going to be, if he isn't now," Elijah says. "He's going to talk to everyone, and then—yea. Yea, I think everything's going to be okay."

-/-

I can't believe this fic ever got up to 21 chapters. I can't believe there's only one left!

Anyway, sorry this took an age and a half, I've been fully distracted by Odyssey.