Chapter Text
When he is finally able to embrace death, Connor only feels cold; it is a physical ache that has been with him for years that encompasses his entire being, leaving him with a desperate need to rest.
He hears his mother's voice calling his name, and smiles. Yes, he thinks, eyes readily closed, I am coming.
Then he is slapped hard across the face. It barely stings his cheek; he suspects he's already too far gone to the spirit world, until he feels another, accompanied by a familiar voice piercing his ear.
"Connor, open your bloody eyes!"
And he feels his heart beat two trying beats. Worse, he feels the ever-present wound burn in his side. Unwillingly, he forces himself to lift his lids a fraction. They are heavy, along with the rest of him.
All he can make out is a dark hood and a pale, frowning mouth shouting, "Stay alive boy, do you hear me?"
Dimly, Connor thinks he could laugh. Of course Haytham would want to make him suffer longer; he was a tenacious man, with an ambition that was too large for one life to fill. (Like father like son, he thinks bitterly.) If Connor would kill him before his time, then at least he should make some use of the life he stole back, no matter how many years have passed since Connor bade him farewell.
This time, the thought of Haytham would not stop him. He lets his eyes slip closed again.
"Don't you dare!" Haytham roars, backhanding him once more. It registers in his mind then that a spirit's hand should not be able to touch him before he is free of his body's pain, which means--but that's impossible.
"Look at me, son," the pale face demands, and Connor can't help but try. His vision slowly focuses. "Keep your eyes open."
"Why?" Connor attempts to say, but to his ears it sounds like an incoherent groan. Still, Haytham appears to get the message.
"Just do as I say, for once in your bloody life!"
Never you mind. Just do as I ask! The words are different, but the tone is almost the same. He can't process what it is that is missing from Haytham's voice at the moment, but he knows it's an important piece.
"Stop wasting time!" Ista's voice snaps, "We must get him back to the village!"
"I wanted to make sure I wasn't carrying a corpse," Haytham snaps back. Connor can't lift or move his head, so he's helpless to change views as he's lifted and faced with Haytham's neck.
His left arm dangles uselessly, but his right is draped over his stomach, and the palm feels wet. Connor manages a soft grunt of confusion; his wound closed up years ago. Why is it suddenly so fresh?
"Ra...ké:ni," he manages to murmur, though his lips are reluctant to move as he wishes. "How..."
"Do not strain yourself, Ratonhnhaké:ton," his mother soothes, putting her small hand on his head. His eyes sting from the feel of her touch. "You have been in the cold with your wounds for a long time."
"It's a miracle you're alive," Haytham says, "What were you thinking--"
"Haytham, now is not the time."
As if to demonstrate Ista's point to his father, Connor shivers, his teeth clacking together. To his surprise, Haytham's hold seems to tighten around him, like his mother did whenever little Ratonhnhaké:ton injured himself. He is worried?
The implications behind this discovery are also too much for Connor's mind to handle right now. All he can say is that his father is warm, his mother is touching him, he is cold, he is in pain, and he is so very, very tired. Anything beyond these questionable observations is lost for some hazy, improbable future.
Later--he cannot tell the passage of time in this state--familiar scents and sounds prod at Connor's senses, though he doubts their existence as well. They blur together in a buzzing mass Connor can't make sense of. Coming to this, he thinks that perhaps this is all a dream or hallucination before his imminent death; perhaps in his heart, he's always wished to be taken to the afterlife by his parents since they perished.
Something flaps, and everything is a shade or two warmer. The sounds and smells are barely muffled, but it is enough.
"He tried to stop the bleeding on his own," Ista tells someone. She sounds strained with concern for her child, and Connor has a fresh wave of grief washing over him. "He collapsed not far from the village."
Connor is set down with a gentleness he never thought Haytham capable of towards him. Rough and soft furs tease his numb cheeks like unwelcome needles, and that's all his mind is able to stutter through without slipping. The world fades in and out after that, a thick fog of voices and smells, black and blurry visions that make little to no sense at all. He doesn't know if he says anything or makes a sound throughout; he can barely register a twitch of his muscles.
Over an insurmountable amount of time, the cold eases off him.
Then there is nothing but white hot pain.
After being swallowed by agony, Connor vaguely remembers waking twice for a few brief moments, during which he gleaned nothing but more faint voices and images. However, the third time he opens his eyes, it is to glaring consciousness.
That is when it settles into his worn bones: he is not dead, nor will he die soon. He knows what being alive feels like, what stark reality's constriction is. Suddenly he wants to scream, kick, claw, punch, maybe shed a few tears--just something to express the terrible pain of his realization. Until he truly starts to see what's around him.
He is lying on a couple of furs, with his blue blanket covering him up to his wound, in a longhouse. However, it's not just any longhouse from the village he remembers; it's the one from his childhood, slightly changed, but fundamentally the same. It's almost as if it never burned to the ground. On top of that, when Connor slowly turns his head to the side, testing out the sore muscles, there is a fire pit still blazing, with a pot hanging over it. Belongings are settled in their places; some blankets are rumpled, probably by children; in conclusion, this place is not the abandoned shell he'd come to know as where his village use to be.
Yet he is very much alive.
"How can this be?" he whispers to himself. His lips crack and his voice is hoarse, but he ignores them in favor of attempting to sit up. Connor's wound might somehow be fresh again, but that is not going to stop him from gathering as much as he can from this situation. There has to be a logical answer, a vital piece that will explain how--he's naked.
Connor pulls the blanket up to his chest like the women he'd often heard about in taverns. Feeling his cheeks heat up at the comparison, he gradually lowers it again until it pools at his hips.
So, he is without clothes for the moment. No matter. There has to be something lying around...
There is nothing that resembles clothing in the longhouse. Connor sighs; there's no way he can walk out in front of women and children with a simple, thin blanket around him. Which means his best option now is to wait for someone to come in so he can ask questions (though at the moment he has no idea where to begin).
Gingerly lying back down, Connor sighs again. Staring at the ceiling, he remembers how Ista would do this whenever he was too ill or injured to leave the house. She'd take all his clothes and hide them, knowing that even though her son was a bold one, he had consideration towards others and himself. The memories cause a flash of his mother's hand on his forehead from...last night? Two nights ago? He cannot be sure when, only that it had been dark.
A hallucination from the cold, he thinks, it has to be. Ista is dead.
And yet, a small voice, one that had gradually fallen silent over the years, whispers in the back of his head, you are in an inhabited longhouse.
Another tribe? But no, there's his mother's special necklace peeking out from under the dirt in the same spot she always leaves it. And there is her blanket, atop it his only toy as a child: a rabbit from when his mother went to Boston one year, for reasons she never explained. He'd been practicing his English, so he named the rabbit Friend. Ista would keep him for Connor; she has a sentimental side for her family.
"What is happening?" he murmurs, "I am not dead, yet--"
"Yet you came dangerously close."
Connor curses himself for starting, twice over for hissing in pain as the movement irritates his wound. His fighting instincts flare immediately, though he knows he is far from optimal condition to defend himself against the approaching figure of Haytham Kenway. His father's arms are crossed, expression tight; he is without his hat, which is an odd sight to Connor, as the man was hardly without it in public.
"I'll spare you the lecture for now," he says, crouching down to peer at Connor's wound. "But I won't give you to luxury of not answering the obvious question." his eyes snap to Connor's, blazing with barely contained anger and something else Connor can't name. "What the hell were you thinking, going after the Grandmaster by yourself?"
The...what?
"Uh," is Connor's eloquent answer.
Haytham glares at him. "Don't play dumb, boy. Our contact in Boston told me mere hours after I carried your sorry arse back here. Charles Lee was found in his home, dead from a stab wound to the neck. This was no doubt your doing, so I ask again: what the hell were you thinking?"
Not one word makes sense to Connor. He knows he misjudged his father after reading his journal, but to hear him talk about 'our contacts' and going after 'the Grandmaster', one that was not himself despite his apparently being alive...Connor can only repeat, "Uh."
Haytham pinches the bridge of his nose. "It would seem smaller words are in order..." looking Connor dead in the eye again, pointing to him, "You. Kill Grandmaster. Alone." pointing to himself, "Me. Want to know. What. Were. You. Thinking?"
Finally, Connor scrounges enough English to reply. "You speak of this Grandmaster as if you despise him."
Really, Haytham doesn't just speak the word Grandmaster with disgust; it's almost as if he spits it out every time, and there's a certain anger in his body language that speaks of some kind of vendetta or otherwise personal hatred of the man. Why? Charles Lee would never usurp him; Connor had only relied on word of mouth and expressions, but it had been more than enough to know that Charles had practically been panting after his father. Anything that would cause Haytham anger caused Lee twice as much. There's also the matter of Haytham's personal influence in the Templars; the Grandmaster is not so easily defied and overthrown.
Connor's confused musings come to an abrupt halt when Haytham regards him incredulously and says, "Of course I despise the Templar Grandmaster. He is a Templar. How long were you out in the cold?"
This...this is not right.