"This isn't happening, this isn't happening, this can't be happening! How the fuck is this happening? What the fuck!"

Altaїr was beginning to wonder if his capture knew any words other than fuck. He'd been listening to the same stream of foul curses and exclamations since he'd woken up. Blindfolded, he had no way to tell how long he'd been there. Gagged, he had no way to ask questions. With two of his senses deadened, he wasn't about to try anything brash, either. He could probably have fought his way out of a situation like this, but he couldn't be sure that there was only one other person in the room. The man was irate, often delving into fits of what seemed to be hysteria. Altaїr assumed the man had a gun, and he wasn't prepared to risk being shot again to prove he was right. Not even if his new abilities would heal him.

"You shouldn't be here. You shouldn't be here! You can't be here!" Altaїr heard a loud crash and something knocked into his chair. For a moment, he tottered on two of the spindly legs then toppled over, throwing all of his weight onto his shoulder and wrenching his bound wrists. He grunted in pain, but otherwise made no sound.

"Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!" the man muttered. He hurried forward, grabbed Altaїr's shoulder and his aching wrist and yanked him back up. As soon as he felt the madman's touch, Altaїr focused on the hunger that burned low in his gut, in his chest, in the very core of his being. He tapped into that hunger and felt tongues of mass shoot out from the points of contact, lashing at the man's flesh. He'd seen Alex do this several times, but had never thought to do it himself. It seemed wrong, and even as wicked barbs sank into flesh, sinew and bone, he wanted to take it back. He shouldn't be using this power, especially not to harm another person. What was wrong with him?

"What the hell!" the man shouted. So he did know other curses. Lovely. He shrieked in wordless panic that devolved into repeated cries of, "Get off of me!"

Angered now by the other's indignation, Altaїr's guilt all but vanished. He bit down on his gag and bared his teeth in a snarl. The man screamed again, writhing and yanking at his hands, trying to get away but only managing to tear his own flesh. One of his hands came free, but the other stuck fast, making Altaїr's arm jerk with every frantic tug. From the blood and pieces of skin he devoured, a thought that made him want to vomit, Altaїr figured the imbecile was doing more harm than actually accomplishing anything.

"What the bloody hell is going on?" a voice demanded. The lilt of the words and the softness around the syllables were familiar. He knew that accent. It was one that struck him in the gut and sucked the breath from his lungs. Maria's words were honeyed in the same way, though this voice was rougher, masculine, and the words he spoke were uncultured and careless. When he made the connection, his eyes narrowed and filled with tears. He sucked in a breath around the gag and turned his head to listen better.

"Desmond, what in the hell are you doing? Oh Christ, he's bleeding! Rebecca, help me."

"Get it off!" the man named Desmond shouted. He pulled desperately at his hand and Altaїr was loathe to release him. The surprised oof he heard in the Englishman's tenor voice gave the assassin a moment of pride before someone punched him. The blow was obviously wild because instead of connecting with his jaw, cheekbone, nose, mouth, or really any part of his head where it would have been the least bit effective, the fist clipped the side of his head and ear, pulling the blindfold askew.

Light blinded Altaїr, making him inhale sharply and immediately shut his eyes. He blinked rapidly, forcing his eyes to adjust. Through the angled space the blindfold created, Altaїr saw several towers of crates around him. There was a soaring ceiling, many flashing green and red lights, support beams that criss-crossed from one side of the building to the other, and he could see part of a loft that must have led to a second floor. It was a warehouse of some kind, and it was spacious enough to house many hiding places should he require them.

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph," the Englishman breathed. He was lanky and pale with strangely red hair and sharp blue eyes. Nothing like Maria. "Is that..." The man's eyes widened and his jaw dropped, his mouth forming a little 'o' shape.

"Shaun, that's Altaїr!" the raven-haired woman standing beside him exclaimed. She must have been Rebecca. She seemed strangely excited to see him.

Finally, Altaїr's eyes rested on the man who had been screaming. Desmond. Something about the name sounded agonizingly familiar, like he was overhearing some conversation he'd had in the past but couldn't quite make out the words. He probably would have figured it out if he hadn't been distracted by Desmond's features. From the man's short, light brown hair to his olive skin, from his nearly-golden eyes to even the pale scar on his lips, he looked exactly like Altaїr.

"Demon," the assassin whispered around his gag. His eyes widened and tears of rage and pure, naked fear filled his eyes. His body consumed the fabric of the gag and the blindfold, drawing a collective gasp from the other three people in the room. "Specter!" he snarled. "Devil! Witch! You've stolen my face, you foul demon! Be gone! You will find no sinner here!"

Without taking her eyes off of him, Rebecca turned her head toward Desmond. "You think he's okay upstairs?" she whispered, tapping a finger to her temple.

"Release me!" Altaїr roared. He struggled against the sticky, matte gray material that bound his wrists to the arms of the chair and had only just realized he could simply consume the restraints when he saw a crumpled form behind his captors. It looked remarkably like...no, no it was Alex. The scarlet designs on the back of the jacket were unmistakable.

"What have you done to him?" he asked. He met the eyes of the face thief and stood from the chair, disregarding the existence of his restraints entirely. He was several inches taller than the other three, and being able to tower over them only blew on the coals of his temper, flaring them into life. "What did you do!"

Shaun and Rebecca shrank back, avoiding looking at him. Only Desmond, the man who had just moments before been babbling incoherent nonsense, remained where he stood.

"La shaiq' waqee mutlak bl kollin mumkin," Desmond stated. His voice and eyes were clear, sharp, absolute. He stated the words perfectly, rolling the syllables off his tongue as if he had spoken the language all his life. And then he gave a short, respectful bow.

Altaїr's fury dissipated into confusion and then bewilderment. "Well met, brother," he forced past the lump in his throat. He studied Desmond for a long moment before rolling his shoulders back and allowing himself to relax just enough so that he didn't shake with rage. "You are of the Brotherhood?"

Desmond nodded once, but did not speak. Altaїr noted a fine tremble in the man's hands and watched dispassionately as the other man's eyes rolled back in his head and he crumpled to the floor in a heap.

"Desmond!" Rebecca cried. She knelt beside her fallen comrade and then looked back at Shaun. "Help me carry him upstairs."

"What about him?" Shaun asked, gesturing to Altaїr.

"I will be here when you return," Altaїr assured him, though his voice was none too friendly. "I want to understand this devilry."

"Devilry, sorcery, doesn't anyone ever think for just a moment that something might be science's doing?" Shaun muttered as he grabbed Desmond under the arms.

"Not the time," Rebecca huffed as she grabbed the unconscious man around his middle.

"I'm just saying, it'd be nice to get a little appreciation in the modern world. Did you know..."

Altaїr stopped listening to their words, but kept their positions in mind, tracking their steps even as he turned and walked toward Alex. "I suppose it would be too much to hope that their treatment of you had any kind of humbling effect?" he sighed.

"Naw," Alex drawled as he sat up. "Why would I let these jerkoffs teach me anything?" He grimaced and then looked up at Altaїr. "How'd you end up here anyway? Figured you'd be off looking for the Apple or brooding in some dark corner of the city."

Altaїr's cheeks and the tips of his ears flushed with warmth, and he looked deliberately away. "I'd rather keep that to myself if it's all the same to you," he said. He watched Alex study him and prayed the other man wouldn't press the subject. He would rather not share the tumble he'd taken off a particularly high building. Or the fact he'd wet himself on the way down. He still wasn't convinced that he could no longer be killed by mere impact.

"Well, while you were out sulking, I found the stupid thing," Alex said primly. "More than I can say for you, apparently."

"You've found it?" Altaїr demanded. He stepped closer to Alex, examining his empty hands and the conspicuous lack of spherical bulges in his jacket pockets. "Well, where is it?"

Alex opened his mouth as if to speak, hesitated, and slouched back, looking deflated.

"You've lost it, haven't you?" Altaїr sighed.

"Have not!" Alex retorted sharply. "I know exactly where it is."

"Then go get it," Altaїr said, setting his hands akimbo and looking down his nose at the shorter man. "I swear, you're worse than the dimmest novice I've ever had the misfortune of knowing."

"Don't you dare look at me like that," Alex snapped, and the harshness in his words nearly made Altaїr flinch. He obviously wasn't in the mood to be poked at. "If it wasn't for me, you'd have been dead in that alley. I don't remember you ever thanking me for that, by the way."

"Yes, thank you for introducing me to this new way of life. It is far preferable to my old existence," Altaїr retorted, feeling perfectly justified in his indignation. Alex had been needling him about this since he'd woken up in this nightmarish city, and the fact that Altaїr had been unable to stop himself from being picked up never seemed to come up when Alex chose to remind him of it.

"Get the fucking thing yourself," Alex snapped. "Carrot Top's got it."

"Oi, I've got red hair, thank you." Shaun and Rebecca descended from the loft side-by-side, each carrying a gun no larger than their hands. They held them pointed at the ground, but even with his limited knowledge, he doubted this was a sign of incompetence.

"You could have lime green hair and a sombrero on your ass," Alex said hotly, "and I wouldn't give a damn. Give me the Apple and we'll be out of here."

"Look," Rebecca started, but Shaun cut her off.

"Why do you want it?"

"Like I said before, I need to send tall, dark and dumb back to his own time," Alex said. "It's like I'm not even talking! Nobody listens!"

"Silence," Altaїr ordered. He purposefully avoided looking at Alex, because the irritation he felt pulsing from the other man in near-palpable waves was enough of an indication that he had taken things too far for him to get the message. Perhaps, though, this was good. He had been getting too close to Alex, allowing himself too much freedom where their relationship was concerned. He had forgotten his purpose in this time, and he refused to be drawn into the drama of the other man's life. If Alex wanted to run around the city fighting the military and whatever hellspawn had settled into this accursed island, he was welcome to, but Altaїr wanted nothing to do with it. He had a goal in mind, and he was close to achieving it.

"That man, the one you call Desmond. He shares my face. How is that possible?"

Rebecca and Shaun exchanged uncertain glances then looked back to Altaїr. "How about you tell us how you came to be here," the Englishman suggested.

He disliked the change in focus, but Altaїr shared his story regardless. He told them of the Apple and his studies, of the evening when he was ripped away from his home and cast into this foreign city. Whether they believed his words or not was their own prerogative, but he would have liked to be able to at least gauge their reactions. They were stony-faced and stoic, and as he ended his story with a solemn, "And now I have woken here, once again surrounded by unfamiliarity and hostility," they shifted uneasily.

After a moment of tense silence, Shaun spoke. "So, if I'm understanding everything that's happened so far, there are currently two Pieces of Eden on the island."

"It would stand to reason," Altaїr agreed. "You're certain you know where the one you possess came from?"

"Definitely not an apartment," Rebecca said, tucking her gun in the back of her pants and crossing her arms under her breasts. She shifted her stance again to keep Alex, who had stalked off toward a stack of crates, in her line of sight. "We lifted it off of a faction of Abstergo that had set up shop downtown. It was way harder to get to than we thought it'd be."

Altaїr nodded slowly, gathering together the trails of thought he was pursuing. "If this is true…" His voice trailed off and he shook his head, disregarding the theory. He didn't have enough information to start forming opinions or ideas, he would have to wait until he knew more. "The Apple you have in your possession," he said. "Does it glow when you look upon it?"

Rebecca and Shaun exchanged a look, then they both shook their heads.

"Have either of you touched it?" Altaїr pressed. "I mean physically touched the metal with your skin."

"I had to get it out of a glass case that was wired with three different alarm systems," Rebecca stated. "It just looked like any old metal ball." She frowned, then her expression tightened into panic. "Are you suggesting the one we have is a fake?"

Altaїr shrugged, glad he could honestly say that he had no idea. "The Apple I arrived with in this time has stopped behaving as it normally would. I do not understand time travel well enough to provide any theories as to why this might have happened, but I assume it has something to do with the existence of its twin."

"Unfortunately, humans haven't made any major leaps in understanding time travel within the last nine-hundred odd years, so we're out of luck there, mate," Shaun said. He crossed his arms, glanced at Alex, and then looked toward the loft. "I do wonder, though, whether...well no, that would be absurd."

"Please," Altaїr said, gesturing for the other man to continue, "share what you know. Your words cannot be any stranger than what has happened to me thus far."

Shaun smirked, as if agreeing with his statement, and then pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "The Apple that you brought from your time," he said, "when did it start behaving erratically?"

"Moments before it transported me here," Altaїr replied. "I had perhaps thirty seconds to react before I was blinded and incapacitated. When I opened my eyes, I was here and the Apple had stopped working."

"It just stopped? Just all of a sudden?"

"When I awoke, it was covered in a film of soot as if someone had rolled it in the remains of a fire," he said.

"It probably stopped working because two of the exact same thing can't coexist in the same time period in the same space," Alex interjected suddenly. He sounded excited, but when Altaїr, Shaun and Rebecca turned to look at him, he scowled and turned a cold shoulder on them.

"How do you know that?" Rebecca asked.

Alex shrugged and looked down at the ground. "I read a lot, I guess," he said.

"When do you have time to read?" Altaїr demanded of him. "What kind of books do you read that would lead you to believe something absurd like that?"

"It's not actually that absurd," Shaun piped up. "Think about it, what has every Sci-fi movie and television show released since Star Trek proposed when time travel is involved? If something is displaced in time, things inevitably start going wrong with it. The Apple was transported through time and space, and now it's wound up malfunctioning. It isn't that far-fetched."

Altaїr stared uncomprehendingly at the Englishman. He had either just said something truly brilliant, or he was speaking utter nonsense and the others were too frightened of him or too polite to point it out.

"We've gotten a lot more creative in our storytelling," Shaun explained. "Don't worry about keeping up with the conversation, this part isn't all that important. We're just speculating."

"Well, instead of spitballing ideas," Alex interjected, "how about we start trying to do something about getting him back where he belongs?" He jabbed a finger at Altaїr to emphasize his words, earning a grimace of displeasure from the assassin.

"What if...," Rebecca began, but her words trailed off and she bit her lip, looking down at the floor. Altaїr wondered why no one wanted to speak their mind. Was it commonplace in this time for everyone to hesitate before speaking? If so, it was quite an irritating trend.

"Go on," Shaun prompted her. "What is it?"

She shook her head, but seemed to overcome her reservations. "What if what happened to the Apple is happening to Desmond?" she said quickly, and her words tripped over themselves in their haste. "What if...the way it stopped working...I mean, it could happen."

"That would explain a few things," Shaun said slowly. He stared off toward the loft and seemed to shake himself, looking over at Altaїr. "We need to get this one back to his time immediately."

"I agree," Alex said loudly, throwing his arms into the air. "That's what I've been trying to say from the start. Now listen, I think if we tinker around with the Apple long enough we might be able to-"

"I'm sorry," Altaїr interrupted, turning to face the other, "but you seem to have invited yourself into this discussion. Were you not complaining just a moment ago about no one listening to you?"

Looking taken aback, Alex drew himself up, squaring his shoulders. "I was," he agreed. "But-"

"Then I suggest you take this opportunity as your leave," the assassin said. "After all, you would be hard-pressed to take time out of your busy schedule to help someone in need." His eyes narrowed and he continued in a cold voice, "Not without reminding that someone incessantly about the good deed you had done for him."

Alex stared at him, obviously shocked to be spoken to in such a way, but his indignation didn't last long. It was soon replaced with anger, and he opened his mouth as if to retort, only to be interrupted by Shaun's much softer and more reasonable voice.

"Listen mate, you've done your part," he said. "You got him here. You're off the hook. We can take care of things from-"

"Butt the fuck out, Limey," Alex snarled viciously, "I haven't forgotten that bullshit you pulled in the alley. I'm gonna get you back for that and it ain't gonna be pretty when I do."

Shaun balked at being spoken to this way, and his face twisted in an expression of fury. "Just you try it, you bloody Yank," he shouted. Admittedly though, even if he hadn't been at least six inches shorter than Alex, he wasn't the least bit intimidating.

"Enough!" Rebecca shouted, taking a step forward to put herself between to two.

In the resulting silence, Altaїr rounded on Alex and stared him down. He wasted no time, but kept his voice calm and quiet. "You will do no harm to these people," he said. "You have done nothing but serve your own interests since I arrived, and for that I do not blame you. Any man in your situation would do the same, myself included. But if you believe yourself so entitled to hurt these people who offer me aid, I urge you to reconsider. Because if you so much as raise a hand against them or myself, I will end you, Alexander. I will be silent, I will be ruthless, and you will not see me coming. Am I understood?"

Alex stared at him, his lips pressed into a thin line and his eyes hard as stones. His hands were curled into fists at his sides, but if he wanted to strike Altaїr, he controlled the impulse well. "Fine," he said in a tight voice. He looked from Altaïr, to Shaun and then Rebecca, finally settling on the assassin before him. "Then I'm out. I've handled your own special brand of crazy for long enough." He stalked forward, shoulder-checking Altaїr hard enough to knock him back a step. Then he left the building.

And Altaїr followed.

The second he stepped foot outside, he was grabbed by the shirt and shoved bodily into the side of the warehouse. "What the fuck was that about?" Alex snarled.

"That was us parting ways," Altaїr sneered. He lifted his arms up between the other's hands and broke his hold with a fist to each forearm. Then he snatched Alex by the hair and bent him back until his knees buckled and he fell to the ground, straining to stay upright.

"So I guess what happened in the alley meant nothing?" Alex panted, grinning in a pained way that showed too many teeth. "Just a sport fuck to make yourself feel good? Was my ass nice compared to your little wifey's? Did you like shoving me against those bricks? Or do you prefer-" Altaїr didn't get to find out what he might prefer, because he drew his arm back and punched Alex as hard as he could in the mouth, and when the other man fell back onto the pavement, he drove a heel right between his watering eyes. Bone caved under his weight, and he watched dispassionately as blood and thicker things leaked from the ruin of Alex's face.

"Recover from that," he said, wiping his shoe on Alex's shirt. When he turned and headed back inside, Alex hadn't stirred, and he felt a small thrill of fear shiver up his spine-what if he couldn't heal damage that severe? What if Altaїr had just killed him…?

He deserved it, a righteous and cold voice said in the back of his head.

Perhaps he did, but the looks of shock and horror on Rebecca and Shaun's faces when he walked back into the warehouse told him that what he'd just done had crossed a line, and he didn't think he could reclaim those last few steps.