Of a Templar and a Native
by AAR
Disclaimer: Assassin's Creed belongs to Ubisoft, as do the quotes below. Haytham would also be alive and exchanging banter with Connor if I owned it anyway.
Haytham is only a little surprised that the native woman is the only one out of the cage instead of in it. Perhaps, he muses, she is simply special. He exchanges his navy blue clothes for the eye-searing red the troops insisted on wearing, takes up the reins, and attempts to start a conversation with the woman.
He feels the need to clear the air of tension, but it's sadly obvious that his inherited charms will not work on her. The convoy moves onwards, his allies moving in to kill the patrols swiftly.
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She helps herself down and away from the convoy, sprinting the minute he says to her, "You can go."
Somehow, Haytham is not surprised at her eager retreat.
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Church kills Silas with the grace of an archer.
Lift. Aim. Shoot.
The resounding thud of bullet against skin doesn't make its supposed imprint on Haytham's brain. Ruefully, he thinks that he's been in the business too long. An hour later, he leans against the parapets of the fort and surveys the release of the native slaves with an apathetic glance. Then, he is frozen into a block of stone when he sees the woman helping them.
So she returned.
She glances up at the right time to meet his stare, and he offers her a shy grin. (It's at this point Haytham remembers why they're helping the natives; to obtain their help.) His perfect eyesight allows him to see her smirk back at him.
He ignores the butterflies in his stomach in favor of doing business.
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Charles Lee is a slight man, and he is more suited to doing less inhumane things, like what Haytham does. Nevertheless, he seems determined to join his little group, so the Brit is obligated to spur their horses onward to save Lee from catching a cold.
They arrive on the abandoned campsite minutes after the woman has left. He utilizes his tracking skills, meager as they are, and struggles through the heavy blanket of snow with the persistence of a tracking dog. Haytham's breath catches when he sees her crouching in the snow and the wolves surrounding her. He bids Lee to wait, but when the man shoots the wolf (an echoing sound in the eerily quiet woods), the woman runs up a tree and proceeds to show Haytham exactly why he cannot even think to catch her.
He runs after her anyway, shouting that he is not her enemy. He vaguely realizes that wearing heavy wool clothing is detrimental to him catching up to the woman, but continues either way.
She stops momentarily at another campsite.
He encounters a group of wolves he could have done without.
Haytham finishes slaying the wolves (slaying is too eloquent to describe the brutality of his techniques) and has to run after her, again. The snow is almost up to his knees at this point, so he hopes the woman can understand his frustration.
"You are trying my patience, woman!"
She pauses at a clearing, and asks him if he's insane.
He is breathing heavily, so he ignores her and tells her—slowly—that he comes in peace.
The woman perceives his breathlessness in the wrong way and counters in fluent English, "Why are you speaking so slowly?"
He doesn't flush, but he does reply to her 'what do you want'.
"Your name, for one."
The woman says something that he can't even hope to repeat (he tries), so she complies with his unspoken plea and shortens her name to Ziio.
(He cannot even pronounce this at first, but after another attempt, Haytham finally has a name to pin on the woman.)
Haytham hands her his amulet, the greenish little trinket that has practically settled him in the colonies, and she snatches it from him with a curious question not far behind. When she tells him that she cannot speak of where she recognizes the symbols, well, he loses all of his temper. "I saved your people; does this mean nothing to you?"
Somewhere in his head, he recognizes that he's acting childishly so he hastens to say afterwards, "Look, I am not your enemy."
Ziio tells him to meet her at a hill overlooking a town.
Inevitably, he follows.
She's taken his amulet—or that's what he prefers to reason his pursuit anyway.
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They argue lightheartedly about his trustworthiness, and when they reach the tavern's doors, Haytham can hear the telltale sounds of drunk men.
She manages to negotiate past his argument and enters the tavern either way, tossing her head. He sighs, and Haytham Kenway wonders, exactly, what has been keeping her alive.
He eavesdrops on the men bemoaning sea life, and Haytham chances his Eagle Sight to see where Ziio has disappeared to. Funnily enough, she is doing the exact same thing he is—eavesdropping on men bemoaning army life.
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"Oi, where are you goin', cully?"
"Me?" asks Haytham innocently, inwardly cursing his ability to attract attention.
"No," said the drunken soldier, "the other cockrobin."
"Well, I was, uh, leaving?"
"And what are you doing now?" asks the man belligerently. Haytham's apologetic look changes into some mischievous, and Ziio has this sinking feeling written in her body stance.
His mocking reply: "Well now, I'm going to feed you your teeth."
Next to him, Ziio mutters, "And you were worried I was going to be the problem." Haytham refuses to glance that way, but by the little amused quirk of his lips, she can guess what he's thinking.
Men, she thinks despairingly as Haytham throws himself into a bar fight. He has the upper hand the entire time, and when the drunken man punches him smartly on his cheek, Haytham shrugs it off and returns the blow vigorously.
He ducks under a violent swing and pulls the man into a wooden table, splintering the weakly built piece of furniture.
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They're sitting next to the bar on stools, watching the bartender attend to his injured customers with a sort of apathy and motherly scolding. "You're hurt," she points out, eyeing the blood drying on his cheek.
Haytham dismisses the injury, but he is sort of ruing his hasty reply because he can now feel the sting. Apparently his adrenaline has receded, and with it, its natural painkillers. He presses two fingers gingerly to the torn skin.
Ziio sniffs at him and grasps blindly for a bottle of alcohol sitting behind the bar. She opens the bottle and pours some onto a piece of clean cloth. "Here," she tries to say brusquely. "This should stop the bleeding."
He allows her to apply the cloth onto the injury, and he only hisses slightly when the alcohol reacts to the cut. "That wasn't necessary," he begins, "but thank you."
She looks uncomfortable, so he allows her to back away and say, "We should move on. Meet me at Braddock's camp when you're ready."
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He is, frankly, a little worried about the snowstorm Ziio shows to him so gleefully. So when the opportunity arises to avoid the storm in a wagon, Haytham takes the easy way out and hides in the supplies while he waits to be transported inside the fort. Once inside, he takes a moment to calm his insides, and then slithers out of the wagon to hide in a pile of rotting leaves.
His nose wrinkles at the stench, and through clenched teeth, he manages to whistle loud enough for a guard to investigate. Like a spider, he springs forward and drags the man into the pile with him.
It is unlikely he will wake before Haytham finishes his job.
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Haytham finishes eavesdropping on the duo and retrieves the map. When he returns to Ziio, he is only faintly surprised as how fast she can plan out their ambush. She confidently tells him that she will get him, not the other way around, when she has gathered enough tribes.
He isn't about to argue. She knows the woods and the lands better than him. It would be useless to try and find a native in their homeland—even if he brought others.
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The first month, Haytham has nothing to do. He wanders Boston, occasionally seeing an almanac page soaring a little over his reach on the rooftops. Sometimes he tries to grab the pieces of parchment, but the Brit is often apprehended by the rooftop guards right before reaching it.
"Damn it," he curses under his breath when another page dances out of his fingers. He pushes off the building's roof and continues running, intent on reaching the paper before another guard sees him sprinting across the rooftops.
The second month, Haytham interacts mainly with the townsfolk, watching them gripe about prices of food and tea. He is fascinated with the domestics of colonial America and likens it to the rural countryside he spent his childhood summers in.
Complaints about prices and the like, it seems, are not limited to England's inhabitants. He walks past an amorous couple in the alley—they don't even notice the imposing presence Haytham seems to bring when he's around his friends. His hand twitches at the sight, and he walks right out of the alley, ignoring the sounds of the meaningless platitudes the man says to the girl.
By the third month, Haytham resigns the task of keeping himself busy with chores and starts to frequent the docks with some haunting frequency that piques the dockworkers' curiosity. There is no reason for a smartly-dressed man to sit on a crate to watch the ocean and the ships it brought in the bay. He begins to make acquaintances with the dockworkers, learning about their families (Maurice has a sharp-tongued wife and two precocious boys), loves (Johnny would like to propose to a young lady), and wishes (Thomas wants to leave America for adventure).
Haytham watches them when they're all huddled in a tavern, paying close attention to their slurred speeches and (secretly) their rough handling of their wives. He does notice that their wives are not entirely incompetent or weak, though. The women fight back using words or with heavy-handed slaps that makes the Brit wince, but affection always seems to follow behind.
At the fourth month, Haytham retreats to the frontier, intent on seeking some sort of comfort in the new shoots of grass standing green in the brown dirt and the trees that she could sprint on easily. It makes him a little envious that he cannot climb a tree here in colonial America. After all, trees existed back in England (the rural countryside of it, actually), and as a young boy (dressed in lighter clothing than this heavy wool coat), Haytham could climb them with the agility of a squirrel.
He stares at the opposing tree with hard eyes.. Haytham throws away his tricorn hat, keeps his coat, and considers the rough trunk that later smoothes into something his boots cannot hope to gain traction on. After another minute, he kicks off his boots and socks as well. Not climbing this tree will be an injury to his ego—not climbing to the top will be an injury to his pride.
Five months after promising Ziio he would wait, Haytham sits in another tavern with new and old friends.
"Hard at work, I see?" some flirtatious and easily recognizable voice says behind him. Haytham spins in his chair, his eyes wide as he faces the woman's grinning face.
He splutters—he hasn't had to deal with witty questions for five months, give him a break—something incomprehensible back at her, "How did you…?"
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He's about to die—of course, he's expected to die in the midst of battle, but certainly not while something is holding him down.
She tackles Braddock off his horse for him, and he is inexplicably relieved at being saved.
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Haytham is brought by Ziio to a cave inscribed with angular lines and circles. It glows for just a second—and then it fades. Just like that, it retreats from his hungry gaze. "No!" he cries out indignantly, his hand outstretched as if to yank the glowing yellow lights back. Sometime later, Ziio enters the cave and asks him quietly if he expected anything.
He expects he has this hurt and betrayed look in his eyes, but he answers her honestly that the expected more.
He gets a lecture in return, a story, if he had to tell the truth. And as she tells him the little legend her people have passed down, her hand trails across his back.
For some odd reason he refuses to entertain, he doesn't like his heavy wool coat at the moment.
(He's never been a lustful man like Hickey. Goodness no, never like Hickey. For him, there had to be something lighting the flame instead of a beautiful body, or just a body. There had to be mutual affection. The women back at England were insipid, and the few that were smart were shrewd and catty with their husbands. He's never been attracted like this before.
This. This is new.)
Chivalry incites him to say that he should go, and he is reluctant to admit that he thinks she will let him.
He gets the kiss of his life instead, and, well, he melts (inwardly) and embraces her tightly in this cave.
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Haytham is still giddy at the memory, and a week after Lee is initiated into the Templar Order, the slightly-built man points out that he is unusually cheerful.
fin