"You do not look good," Rebecca informs Shaun, handing him a cup of coffee as she does so.
"Don't I?" Shaun asks, with a biting sarcasm that's actually reassuring. If he's still with it enough to be sarcastic, he's obviously not as far gone as he looks. "I wonder why that would be." He takes a sip of the coffee and makes a face.
"I know, I know," Rebecca interrupts, before he can say a word. "You hate coffee. This is a hospital, you're lucky they have any kind of drinkable caffeine." She sighs and collapses more than sits down in the empty chair next to his. It's quiet here, quieter than anywhere else in the hospital. During the first day or so, the constant beep-beep-beeping of medical equipment had been like a worm digging into her brain, but by now she's so used to it she barely notices.
"Anything interesting happen while I was gone?" she asks, nodding at Minerva. She isn't expecting anything to have changed- she's only been out for an hour or two, and Minerva has barely moved since they brought her in a couple days ago. The girl's healing amazingly quickly considering how badly she'd been hurt, most likely because of the unusual circumstances around her… birth, but that only means she'll need days instead of months of recovery time.
But to her surprise, Shaun nods. There's a look on her face he can't quite read. "Good or bad?" she asks.
"Good for us, I think," Shaun says. "I mean- well, first of all, she should be waking up soon. Maybe even sometime today. But there's also some bad if anyone else starts connecting the dots."
"What dots?"
"Here-" Shaun pulls out his phone and shows her a picture of an x-ray. It's a small picture, so the details are hard to make out, but it looks like there's more in the picture than there's supposed to be.
"What am I looking at?" Rebecca asks. "I don't get it."
"She's finally healed enough for the doctors to start taking additional x-rays," Shaun explains. "This is her back."
"And...?"
"I'm not a doctor," Shaun says. "But if I had to make a guess, I'd say that is what a pair of wings look like when they're inside someone's back."
"What?" Rebecca takes a second look at the picture, squinting at the shape. Now that she knows what she's looking for, she can kind of see it. Only they look like they've been squished and crumpled and forced into a space that's way too small for them. "That doesn't look good. It looks like it hurts."
"Of course it hurts," Shaun says.
"But… Minerva doesn't have wings."
"Ezio does," Shaun says. "I do. We don't know that it's not genetic…"
"Huh," Rebecca says. "Well, that's pretty cool, I guess." Then she frowns. "Why are you looking at me like that?"
"I just- how are you okay with this?" Shaun asks. "Assuming we're right about Minerva, that makes you the only one without wings."
"Oh." Rebecca thinks this over. "I guess."
"And you don't care?"
"Not really," Rebecca says. "It just seems like it causes a lot of problems. I'm happy with who I am, and with where my life is. Not really at this exact second-" she gestures around them at the hospital in general. "But most of the time, I'm pretty happy." She hesitates, then asks, "Are you?"
Shaun's gaze wanders back to Minerva before he answers. "Like you said, not right now. But most of the time."
Rebecca considers saying something. Once upon a time, she had assumed that she and Shaun were going to end up together. At some point, when they got around to it. But that hadn't happened, because Shaun had gotten himself magiced into some impossible family of his own, and Rebecca had somehow ended up with Haytham. But life goes on, and there's no point bringing up the way things used to be.
"I'm going back out," she says instead.
"Bring back some food this time?" Shaun calls, and Rebecca snorts.
"I hope you like stale potato chips," Rebecca says. "Because that's all they have in the vending machines, and the cafeteria food here is just cruel."
Shaun groans loudly, but Rebecca waves him off and leaves. She feels more cheerful than she has in quite a while, despite the promise of several hours' worth of pointlessly wandering the halls. Even two full days of exploration hadn't helped her figure out where anything was, and she was sick of getting lost again and again.
She wasn't even sure what she was supposed to be doing- looking for Juno in this maze? There's no way she'd ever spot her, there are too many hidden hallways and corners and-
"Rebecca."
She jumps a little and turns around, surprised to hear a familiar voice calling her name. "Bill," she says. "Wow. What are you doing here?"
"Someone at Abstergo is buying up bomb parts," William explains. "I got the reports from one of our moles, and traced it to here."
"A bomb?" Rebecca says. "Here?"
"Yes."
"In a hospital?"
William nods, looking somehow even more grim than usual. "Which is why I'm here," he says. Then something seems to connect in his brain. "But you didn't know about the bomb, so- someone's hurt, aren't they?" When Rebecca nods, he somehow manages to look even more upset. "Is it Desmond?"
"No," Rebecca says. "Minerva. She- well, it's kind of a long story and apparently there's a bomb around here somewhere, so we should maybe deal with that first?"
"We?"
"Yes!" Rebecca hisses. "Look, if there's a bomb, I'm pretty interested in making sure the whole building doesn't blow up around us! So- who was the guy buying the bomb parts?"
"John Standish," William says. "He definitely had the bomb earlier, but then he came here to visit someone, and when he left, the bomb was gone."
"Shit," Rebecca hisses. "Standish- John- that's Juno's boyfriend."
"Oh."
"Yea. So where exactly was he?"
"Come on," William says. "I'll show you."
It's three stories up and right next to an elevator, so for once they get there without wasting any time on being lost. Rebecca risks a look in and there she is, just sitting there like she's a perfectly normal patient. And there's a backpack on the floor next to her.
"That's it," William says, as the two of them leave the area, as quietly as possible. "The bomb."
"Shit," Rebecca says for a second time. If he'd been anyone else she might have hit him. "How did you not notice her?"
"The last I heard, she was dead!" William hisses, managing not to raise his voice. "It's not my fault if nobody keeps me in the loop!"
"Fine!" Rebecca says. "Fine. So we, um… wait right there."
Rebecca's been an assassin for several years now, and this is not the first time she's had to steal some patient's hospital records. Still, she's so nervous this time that she almost messes it up. "Here," she says, when she gets back to William. "According to this, she checked in with-" she makes a face. "God, those symptoms sound made up. But she's been here since we checked Minerva in. She must have figured out we'd have to take Minerva to a hospital after what she did to her, and decided to get in before we'd have time to set up a guard. Then she just sits her and waits for John to take the bomb in and- boom."
"I'm definitely missing a few steps here," William says, blankly.
"Doesn't matter," Rebecca says. "We have to stop her before…"
The hairs on the back of her neck start to stand on end, and Rebecca turns around, very slowly, to see Juno standing right behind them. Because of course she'd noticed, because Juno was an evil woman but also intelligent and observant, and a hundred other things that made her so hard to kill.
"Boo," Juno says, and kicks something heavy at the two of them. "I wasn't expecting you here, but… well. Have fun." And she runs, laughing, as everyone else in the hallway turns to stare, first at her, then at-
"The bomb," William says, already down on his knees and examining what Juno had kicked at them earlier. He starts barking orders at the people around them, who conveniently enough are all paying attention to them. But even while he's calling for a full evacuation, he never takes his eyes off the bomb. When everyone's moving, Rebecca crouches down next to him.
"How long until it blows?" she asks.
"Fifteen minutes."
"That's not enough time for an evacuation."
"No it is not," William agrees. "Get out of here. I'm going to stay and try to defuse the bomb."
"Do you know how to defuse a bomb?" Rebecca asks.
"Not one this complicated," William says. "But I highly doubt there's anyone better suited in this building, and the police won't get here in time. This is our only chance of saving every person in this hospital."
"But-"
"Rebecca," William snaps. "I really need you to leave, now, because if I don't make it out of here, I need you to explain what happened. And-" Finally, his voice broke a little. "I need you to tell Desmond… tell him."
Rebecca nods, and puts a hand on his shoulder. "I'll tell him," she says.
"Not if you don't leave," William says. "Now."
So that's what Rebecca does. She turns on her heel so quickly she almost slips and falls flat on her face. The entire hospital is chaos, but she only needs to make it down three floors- she fights the crowds just long enough to get back to Minerva's room.
"What's going on?" Shaun demands, as soon as Rebecca bursts through the door.
"Bomb," she says. "Downstairs. We need to get out of here, now." She turns to see if Minerva is well enough to carry, but to her surprise the girl is actually awake, wide eyed and scared.
"There's a bomb?"
"Yea," Rebecca says. "We have…" she glances at her watch. "Six minutes left."
"That's not enough time to get down," Shaun says.
"Are you-" Rebecca rolls her eyes. "Shaun, the two of you can fly! You'll be fine."
Shaun frowns at her, and Rebecca knows they're both thinking about their conversation from earlier, when they'd talked about how she was the only one that didn't have wings. She can tell he's about to say something, but Minerva interrupts before he can. Her voice is high and scared, and Shaun moves to her bed to explain about the x-rays and their theory that she has wings because he and Ezio do.
As Shaun starts walking her through the process of how to bring her wings out, Rebecca walks to the window and calls Altair. The rest of the assassins are all on the rooftop, waiting for Juno to show up, with no idea that she's already come and gone and done her worst. She explains only the bare details, but it still takes way too much time. When she finally hangs up, there's barely a minute left.
Something slams into her side, and Rebecca shrieks in surprise and pain as she goes straight through the window. Shards of glass cut at her exposed skin and she can feel a sickening sensation of falling. Then she feels a pair of arms wrapping around her stomach, slowing her down and pulling her back. She looks up and there's Shaun, struggling to bear their combined weight, and Minerva a little above them. Her eyes are closed, and she looks like she's doing something more like a controlled fall than actual flight.
And then the bomb actually goes off, and everything after that is sort of a blur. The next thing she really remembers is being on the ground, surrounded by the other assassins, with the sound of screams and panic in her ears.
She doesn't really listen- people are talking, but with everything else that's happened in the last half hour, Rebecca chooses to just tune out an ignore it all. She can't risk it being more bad news, not when everything else is going wrong.
After a little while, Haytham kneels down in front of her and it's like a dam breaks inside her at the sight. She wraps her arms around him, burying her face in his shoulder and her hands in the feathers of his wings, and sobs. But they're tears of anger and frustration, because Juno should not have been allowed to do this.
And she will not be allowed to get away with it.