I stood with the Dead, so forsaken and still:
When dawn was grey I stood with the Dead.
And my slow heart said, 'You must kill, you must kill:
'Soldier, soldier, morning is red'.

- Siegfried Sassoon

January 2020

Altaïr Ibn'La-Ahad cursed as he saw the last member of his team fall in a graceful arching of limbs and a spray of blood. He ducked down behind the wall of cubicle and felt the soft breeze of a bullet whizzing past his ear a split second before he took cover. Oh, how he missed the days when all he'd had to worry about were arrows and swords.

He held the device with the information upon it, all that they had come here for, clenched tightly in his left hand, and used the brief moment of cover to slip it into the inside pocket of his jacket. On a mission like this, at the very heart of one of the Templar's strongholds, he hadn't dared to bring the Apple along. He had a gun, and his hidden blade of course, but as soon as the alarm had sounded the guards had seemed to descent upon him in their dozens. Altaïr had brought four other Assassins along with him - good men and women - and they were all dead now. He was the last one left, crouched here, with enemies closing in on all sides. He heard them shout, and began crawling, head ducked low, along the rows of cubicles, past the many Animi held here.

Altaïr had been born in one of these - born again, anyhow. Perhaps if he died here today, it would be fitting.

Not that this was any reason to do so.

Drawing his gun with his right hand and triggering the hidden blade on his left, he gripped the edge of a partition for leverage and swung his body up, plunging the blade deep into the body of the guard who had been about to round the corner. Heart's blood dripped down his arm as the man gurgled and fell, but Altaïr only shook him off impatiently. Taking a moment to centre himself, to aim, he emptied the rest of his clip into the guards and when it clicked quiet there were still too many of them there. Worse still, he had felt a bullet punch through his jeans and graze his thigh.

Retreating back along the row, Altaïr clamped his left hand over the wound to staunch the flow of blood. When he was a good distance away he stopped, breathed for a moment, and watched the red liquid flow over his hand, his fingers, and over the modest band of gold that adorned one of them.

"It feels strange."

"Stranger than having no finger at all?"

"Different."

"'Different'. I love you, kid. Promise me you'll come back."

"I always do."

Clay. Oh God, Clay. What Altaïr would not give to keep that promise now. He remembered with crisp, precise detail how Clay had looked just after the ceremony, just before they'd parted: his hair that was starting to streak with grey and the quick, brave quirk of his rare smile. Altaïr thought about Clay waiting forever, about what would happen if he realised that the return would never come.

A bullet thudded into the wall just beyond Altaïr's head and jerked him away from his memories. He slammed a new clip of bullets into his gun and continued his stilted journey towards their entry point: the window in the ground floor office which had been carefully dismantled, the glass laid down on the ground outside. If he could only make it that far, then the journey wouldn't have been for nothing.

He could do it. He was stronger now. When he'd first woken up alone in this body, it had still been so weak, and it had seemed to take forever to build up Desmond's strength to a place that Altaïr felt comfortable with. This body, this man he'd become, would be thirty-three in a couple of months, if he lived that long. Eight years since Spain. Six since he'd returned to Clay with his confession: that he was no longer sure of who he was, this unprecedented entity of an ancestor trapped inside a descendant, both of them somehow alive in the same space.

He'd come to Clay in the hope of a final judgement: someone to tell him, truly, whether he was Altaïr or Desmond. He'd never found that answer, but Clay had finally said that it didn't really matter.

"Call yourself whatever name you want to, but if you ever begin to doubt who you are, just come back here."

"I can't promise I'll be here all the time. I can't. The Assassins..."

"I know. I understand. Just ... whenever you're able to."

"It's not enough."

"Desmond..."

"Marry me. If we're married we will be bound together truly. If one of us leaves this world before the other, we'll be able to find each other always. Even in the darkness."

"Is that what you want? Really?"

"Yes."

"Fine. You already know what my answer is."

Altaïr - Desmond - whoever he was - gritted his teeth into a fierce grin and surged forward. He leaned against the wall, dragging himself along it as he staggered and ran, blindly firing at those in his wake whilst moving ever onward towards his goal. Perhaps he would make it this time. Perhaps he wouldn't. But they would see each other again either way.

It was fate.