Tishtar


"... Wonder what causes them."

Hytham looked up from his burner phone, glancing over at his partner with a distracted frown. "Causes what?"

"The headaches." Kass elaborated. "Both Sages and descendants get them… It has to be something we have in common - Oh! Eagle Vision."

"...You think EV is what causes Isu descendants and Sages to have chronic migraines?" Hytham side eyed her skeptically.

"Well it makes sense, doesn't it?"

"Hm. I mean, I suppose. I… I think it's… Their brains were …formatted differently than ours; that much I do know. Information was stored differently because of-"

"Because of the Sixth, yeah. Knowledge." Kass intoned.

"EV." she repeated triumphantly, then frowned thoughtfully. " ...And the nanites." she added.

" And the nanites," he agreed. "It's why the regressions sometimes go… wrong, I think. Trying to run Isu 'software' on human 'hardware' can… do strange things?" he ventured, sounding slightly unsure and baffled even as he said it.

"... I hate that I understand that analogy." she muttered, shaking her head. Hytham let out a bark of laughter alongside her and ruefully tilted his head in agreement.

"I fully blame your dad for that, by the way." she called back to the figure lurking above them. "And your mom." There was a series of dull wooden clunks on the cabinetry behind them and Hytham frowned at her.

"He ever talk about it? His regression?"

"Nope." Hytham snapped the burner phone closed and slipped it into his pocket. "Keeps prodding at his scar though. Looked into it once. Think it had something to do with his mentor."

"Roshan, right?"

"Yeah."

She sighed in consternation. "Well that's not very helpful."

[Above them, Desmond pressed himself further into the corner. He kept his gaze sharply fixed on the pair of strangers, and then reached out to the other side of the cabinets, groping blindly along the wall for the glimmer just barely visible in the corner of his eye that shone with the white-gold of a useful tool. A small, satisfied smile flashed across his face moments later as his fingers brushed across lacquered wood grain.]

A sudden pulse of alarm, a second-and-a-half of prescience and the indistinct awareness of movement behind them and something vaguely weapon-shaped [that sent instincts honed in battle millennia ago screaming spear! and move!] being aimed in their direction was all the impulse Kass needed to turn and bodily shove Hytham to the side, throwing them both to the floor.

There was a rush of air just behind them, and Kass allowed herself a moment of smug satisfaction that their assailant had missed their mark - and then there was a dull wooden thonk and then the clatter of the same object hitting the floor, followed by a click and the tell-tale slow hiss of hydraulic hinges. A square of warmth crawled onto her back, and she frowned. More commotion behind them - the cabinet doors rattling on their hinges, and then the squeak of sneakers on linoleum flooring. She struggled to untangle herself from her partner, still protesting her sudden reaction, and turned around just in time to watch a pair of sneakered feet disappear over the lip of the now open skylight as their patient made good on his escape. Kassandra gawked for a moment at the discarded broom handle as it dropped to the floor once again - and then growled in frustration and took off after the boy.


Hytham leveraged himself upright with a grunt, casting a worried, pained glance towards the ceiling as a startled yelp followed by a series of thuds announced that their daring patient had almost immediately lost his footing and started to slide off of the roof.

Kassandra was only using the tamest swears she knew, so she had likely caught the boy.

Desmond was fine.

Probably.

There was a rap at the door, firm but polite in a far different manner than the impatient pounding of the earlier enforcers.

"Master Hisan?" A woman's voice called indistinctly through the wooden door.

Hytham hesitated a moment, frowning up at the open skylight.

It had gone quiet on the roof overhead, and a brief flash of headache-inducing Eagle Vision indicated two watery gold figures crouched on the far end of the rooftop [and what, by all the stars, were they doing all the way down there?] so he could only assume Kassandra must have the situation well in hand.

He sighed and went to open the door.

The Farm's doctor stood in the hallway, wearing a look of bone-deep exhaustion and annoyance that Hytham immediately sympathized with.

"He escaped out the skylight didn't he?" The doctor asked flatly in greeting, leaning around him to eye said open skylight and the pole propped haphazardly against the window inset with a resigned look on her face that suggested this was a much more common occurrence than Hytham would have previously thought. He stepped back out of the doorway.

She pinched the bridge of her nose, and groaned tiredly as she stepped past him into the room. "There's a reason this room was unoccupied, you know." she muttered.

He raised an eyebrow.

"Uncooperative patients are a universal constant of medicine, Master Hisan." She said in answer to his unspoken question.

The doctor gestured frustratedly up at the skylight. "It's just that Assassin patients tend to be more …creative in their uncooperativeness than most."

He nodded hurriedly.

"...I'll send one of the enforcers to fetch a ladder," she sighed.

"Ah." Hytham finally croaked out in response, rubbing at his sore chest. Kassandra hit hard.
All that over a broom handle, he despaired.

"...Maybe not the ones with the enforcer whose ear just got bit?" He suggested pensively. "...He's already tried to taze Desmond once for it."

"That was from William's boy?" The doctor barked in sudden alarm, and then shook her head. The look on her face told him that the enforcer in question was likely in for the dressing-down of a lifetime. He couldn't find it in himself to pity the man. "Huh. Goddamnit. Idiot told me it was a wild dog."

Hytham wisely bit back the joking response that perhaps, in a manner of speaking, the enforcer hadn't been exactly wrong.


NOTES

so. anybody remember that old fandom theory that Altair/Ezio/Desmond were reincarnations because of their models' Same Face Syndrome?

yeah.