Chapter Text
He hadn’t checked.
How could he have been so foolish?
It had been many years for him in this game now, and he was no longer the brash young boy he once had been. Age and experience had taught him the virtues of planning, distrustfulness and paranoia. And yet, after he had thrown the last of his pursuers off the roof, he had not checked to make sure the man stayed down.
He had dispatched most of his enemies with his hidden blade, some with his sword, and one with a well aimed throwing knife. His form had been good, every cut precise, every life taken with care. Then only one had remained, and that one had been sloppy. The man had been lithe, bordering on lanky, and good with a sword, but clearly not built for long distance running. The race across the rooftops had left him winded and off-kilter, and it hadn’t been difficult for Ezio to get the better of him then. His opponent’s attacks having grown wide and unrefined, he hadn’t had to do more than look for his opportunity to grab hold of the other and turn his own attack into his inevitable downfall. Literally.
And then he had taken a moment to catch his breath after the fight, quickly stretched his back which had taken up the nasty habit of aching from time to time in the last few years. He had fished out a bottle of smelling salts to focus his mind away from the worst of his injuries, and then collected his one expended throwing knife. Then he had walked away.
The fall had been high, and from passive awareness of his surroundings he knew that there was nothing below to break it, nothing but cold unforgiving cobblestone to greet his enemy, and he had assumed—foolishly, stupidly assumed! Like an idiot, a child, a rookie!
And then, worst of all, he’d gone here. He had not sensed anyone following him, but of course they must have. They had burst in en masse as Leonardo was dressing his wounds, the scream of Leonardo’s latest assistant the only warning of the intrusions, the abrupt cessation of that same scream a yet more terrifying warning. Ezio’s armour had been neatly folded up across the room, his weapons just as carefully put aside. Oh, he had put up a fight, of course, but it had been a pitiful one.
And now here he lay, bleeding out on the floor. Leonardo lay across from him, less than an arms width apart. His eyes were glassy and unfocussed, but his breath still came in uneven, choppy bursts. Ezio tried to speak, to say what, he did not know, but all that came out was a sickening gurgling sound.
Years, years he had spent fighting the vilest and most formidable of men. A life’s work of killing and surviving, and this was how he went out in the end: stabbed to death by a man not significant enough for Ezio to even know his name. And he had taken Leonardo down with him. He had always hoped that when his time came, he would be alone. He had not wanted Leonardo to see his destruction. Now he joined him in it.
Distantly, Ezio was aware of the voices of the men who had killed him, of the stomping of their heavy boots around the room. Had he possessed more presence of mind, he might have registered them tearing the place up looking for the codex pages strewn about. But they faded to noise for him. Instead, in these last moments, his world narrowed down to the man across from him. Leonardo’s face was partially obscured by his hair, and Ezio ached to uncover it. He ached to reach out and brush back that precious soft curtain of spun gold, these days shot through with equally precious silver. He wished more than anything to touch that cheek, usually rosy due to such a pale complexion, now whiter than armour. More than anything he wished to be met by those magical blue eyes one last time, but they had already begun to fog over, just as Leonardo’s breath had already begun to quicken and shallow.
If only he could change this! If only there were a way to change things so that Leonardo could be spared. Ezio did not fear his own death, had long since accepted that he would not escape it once it saw fit to sink its teeth into him. He had had plenty of years to come to terms with his own mortality, but eternity would not be enough to come to terms with Leonardo’s.
As delirium set in, Ezio spluttered a wet laugh. His career as an assassin had begun with his failure to save his loved ones, and it seemed that it would end the same way. If only he could— He wished—
With the very last of his strength, he reached out his hand across the seemingly endless distance between them. Too weak to lift his head, he grasped blindly after Leonardo. At last, his fingers locked around the other’s upper arm. Drained, Ezio felt his eyes slip shut, and then he fell into oblivion.
* * *
A violent gasp tore from his lungs, and he bolted upright.
The first thing that registered was the complete absence of pain. The second was the soft texture of a bed underneath him, rather than the rough wooden floor of the workshop.
Before he had even commanded the movement, instinct forced his body to bolt out of bed and drop into a ready position. Again, there was no pain, even at this movement which should by all accounts have aggravated his injuries. He had to assume that time had passed since the attack of course, but he couldn’t fathom that he might’ve been out long enough to make a complete recovery. He hadn’t thought any sort of recovery was in the cards. He couldn’t even feel the old twinge in his back.
He stood that way for a moment, ready for any and all attacks, but none came. Eventually his heart slowed from its frenzy as the adrenaline ebbed, and he was at last able to take in his surroundings.
It had not been apparent at first, due to the darkness in the room, but his eyes had now adjusted to the dim and Ezio realised that he was somewhere quite familiar. The hangings on the bed, the shape of the window, the colour of the walls: every little detail seemed to confirm his whereabouts. But it couldn’t be…
Slowly, as if in a dream, he walked over to the window, but the night outside was darker still than the inside of the room, and all he saw was his reflection. His dark-haired, clean-shaven, smooth-faced reflection. His current location suddenly made both more and less sense at once. His hair held not a trace of grey, his eyes not a single laugh line, and every scar he had acquired over the years was as if erased. Not even the one across the side of his mouth remained.
Peering into the window in his old room in Palazzo Auditore, Ezio was faced with the reflection of himself, as he was at seventeen years old.