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The bureau was... Quiet.
It was the middle of the day, the settlement of Ravensthorpe was as busy and active as ever as the villagers worked their trades, yet his apprentice was nowhere to be seen. Ever since the little green building had been built, the Raven Clan could be sure to find him tinkering away with his scrolls within its walls. Yet today, he could not find him.
He had arrived with Sigurd a few hours earlier. Their return had been welcomed, the Wolf-Kissed seemed especially happy to have their brother by their side once more, however briefly, yet by the small crowd that had gathered, Basim had not seen Hytham among the friendly faces. He had, therefore, concluded that he was not aware of their return, or that he was waiting for him in the bureau. Yet, as the assassin peeked inside, he had seen neither hide nor hair of him. He couldn’t say he knew where to look, either.
Yet, look he did. In the longhouse, by the stables, and now he stood by the little square between the docks and the merchant-child’s tent, and while he began to grow a little worried, he refused to ask any of the Norsemen for the acolyte’s whereabouts. He could not let them believe that he had simply let Hytham run off, that he could not keep track of him, even if that is precisely what had happened. In all honesty, he began to feel frustrated. Yet he knew that it was unfair for him to assume that Hytham had been made aware of their arrival, and that his mentor’s struggle to find him was no fault of his own.
A flutter of white fabric passed the corner of his eyes. As he turned, he saw the tail-end of Hytham’s robes disappearing behind the corner, up the path between the trader and the bureau. It was undeniably him, he could recognise him anywhere. He called out for him, successfully gathering the attention of the villagers, but Hytham did not stop.
He hurried after him. While Hytham still limped, he was fast. He called his name again, he saw the acolyte’s head turn only slightly, purely by instinct, showing that he heard him, yet he continued. Basim would have to jog to catch up with him. Momentarily, he wondered if this was some sort of game, cat and mouse, yet as Hytham hurried his pace, the master assassin quickly realized that he was trying to lose him. It was harder in the small settlement of Ravensthorpe than it had been in the bustling city of Baghdad, yet he did his valiant attempt at moving between the buildings and keeping his calm, as if to not alert anyone or anything. Basim knew better than to take to sprint for exactly the same reason.
Perhaps he was lucky that Hytham was injured, even if that thought tasted bitter, as the younger one had no choice but to slow down once he came to the red-leaved tree in front of the stables. His steps haltered, slowed, and his laboured breaths echoed throughout the air. He seemed to have no choice but to stop fully, lean his side against a tree by the road, and wait for Basim to catch up.
“Hytham-” Still, his apprentice did not look at him, “what on earth has gotten into you?”
Hytham took a deep breath. Finally, when Basim cornered him against the tree, he had no choice but to look at him. For the first time, or perhaps the first time Basim could remember, the acolyte’s blue eyes felt like spikes of ice. As he spoke, aware of the interested eyes of the Raven Clan, he switched to their arabic mother-tongue.
“So now you wish to speak to me?” Was all he said, voice coming out in short wheezes while he still steadied his breathing.
“Am I not allowed to speak to my apprentice?” Basim replied, effortlessly so in the language only they knew. There was no denying that he was frustrated, to some degree mad. What right had Hytham to run from him, to look at him, to speak to him like that? “Have you forgotten that I am your mentor?”
“No.” He said simply. “Have you?”
He might as well have stabbed him clean with the blade on his wrist, and thrusted the cold metal between his ribs. Hytham seemed to recognise the momentary slip of expression, the way Basim’s eyes widened only slightly, the way his breathing hitched, the way his confusion became evident through the small changes only his own apprentice could recognise so close up.
“You take me to Norway,” he continued, “to kill Kjotve. Yet when I fail, you speak no word to me, you take me across another ocean to England, just to leave me with yet more silence. You do not speak to me, you do not look at me-”
He took another deep breath, a pause. And when Basim did not interject, he continued.
“-you leave me in my bureau as if I am an object to leave behind or a hindrance that will only slow you down. You run from me like a coward. If you wish to speak to me, then speak to me what is already on your mind. Tell me to my face that I am a disappointment, that I am your failure, and that the very sight of me disgusts you.”
In all their years together, he could never remember a time where he had heard the other’s voice drip with so much venom, seething with a quiet rage he could barely hold in, a vicious dog, cornered. Yet, of all the things Basim had imagined his silence to be caused by, his words surprised him. For the better part of a moment, he could do little else but to merely stare wordlessly at the other. Finally, he swallowed dryly.
“I cannot tell you that,” He said, “because it is not true.”
Wrong answer.
Hytham let out a frustrated growl, and used his last bit of energy to push Basim away from him. He did not run away, but he refused to let that man corner him and lie straight to his face. Basim was quick, skilled, silver-tongued, yet he felt helpless against the watchful gaze of his apprentice.
“Then what is true? Hmm ? You tell me nothing . How am I to know what is true when my very own mentor will not speak to me?”
“Hytham-”
“You run away. Every time, you run away. For such a blood-thristy man, you have done nothing but run away from me ever since Norway. You say it is for the Order, for our Creed, yet you leave me to pick up those pieces and hand them off to someone else. Instead, you run away with barely as much as a goodbye, an acknowledgement that you are leaving your very own apprentice behind.”
“I am not leaving you behind-”
“Then what are you doing?”
He wanted to sigh. He wanted to tell him that he was being ridiculous. He wanted to tell him that he cannot talk to him when he is like this, yet he knew very well that such words would only set the young one off even further.
He... He wasn’t sure what to say. And finally, as his thoughts ran away from him, attempting to find the words that would reel the other in, calm him, assure him, time ran out. His apprentice sighed.
“You will have an answer before you leave.” He said. “Or I will return to Alamut alone.”
With that, he stalked off. He seemed to care not for the pain it caused him, hurrying his steps, away from the conversation, away from Basim, who could do nothing but watch, as the observant villagers began to scatter.
--
Sigurd had decided that they would be staying in Ravensthorpe for a few days, until they next departed.
Somewhere, Basim was... Split. He refused to admit it, he swallowed the angry, bitter feeling within him, the admittance that he wished to leave immediately, dare Hytham to leave and return to the Brotherhood in Alamut, in disbelief that he would ever dare to abandon his mission. The other part of him, the softer part, the weaker part, ached. Yet his reasoning won over both his anger and his grief, he knew that, logically, Hytham’s departure would be a stick in the wheel for the destruction of the Order in England, and it would reflect poorly on him as a mentor if his apprentice returned home alone, injured, speaking of abandonment.
Cold. Calloused, perhaps, though he didn’t know if it was him or Hytham.
So, for the rest of the day, he attempted to... Figure something out. Hytham had, logically, burrowed in the bureau, he had closed and locked the doors and the shutters to the windows, clearly he did not wish to be disturbed, and Basim knew that angering the normally level-headed one further would only insite more violence. So he wandered. Away from Ravensthorpe, where he had no doubt that their conversation was and would remain the gossip of the week.
And as he wandered, he... Ached.
Hytham’s words, his insults, his threats, rang as clear in his head as if he was still there with him, spitting them out over and over. It was not like him. Hytham had always been soft-spoken and eager and gentle. He looked up to the Brotherhood, to Basim, as a worshipper would their god, with an everlasting faithfulness and the loyalty of a lapdog. Yet he had wronged him so majorly that he ran away from him, despised the site of him, and seethed in his very presence. He wanted to excuse it. He wanted to convince himself that it was not his wrongdoing, no, it had to be something else- did he perhaps not like Ravensthorpe? Or had one of the Norsemen wronged him?
He knew the answer. At the very least he did when he returned for the evening, exhausted and tired and weary, entering the longhouse for food, and saw how Hytham went from laughing in the clan’s company to quickly excusing himself and stalking off the moment he sensed Basim’s presence. As he walked past him by the entrance, he did not even look at him.
He had, against his better judgement, attempted to speak to the Wolf-Kissed. Yet they had merely looked at him strangely, almost suspiciously, surely having heard about their public argument, and stated that Hytham got along well and seemed to thrive with the Raven Clan. Further than so, they did not say, and Basim felt no need to ask more.
For two days, he haunted the settlement. When he was close by, Hytham practically barricaded himself within the bureau, and when he had deemed Basim far away enough, he easily slipped out and socialized with the Raven Clan, trained on the dummies placed outside the bureau, or merely cuddled the cats that roamed the settlement, even when he knew that Basim was watching. If he was far away enough, he did not seem to care. And so Basim extended him the grace of being the one to leave the premises during the evenings when the clan gathered to eat, so that Hytham would not feel the need to hide away and starve within his little cabin. In the end, as infuriating as that man was, a thorn in his side and an ache in his heart, he did not wish for him to hurt more.
That, he could not deny. He did care. He always had, in some way, even if he had to admit that it was true that he had not shown it lately. They were not in Constantinople or Baghdad anymore, where they could be side-by-side, fight shoulder-to-shoulder, jump from the same ledge and land in the same haypile. They were older, if only slightly. Perhaps that Hytham, that Basim, were long gone already. Perhaps this Basim was risking losing this Hytham, slipping through his fingers like soft sand.
Sigurd had announced their departure for the following day. If he would speak to Hytham, he had to do so now.
--
He jumped from the cliff ledge at which he had been perched, landing soft as always, and continued towards the bureau. It was dark, late into the night when the feast had died down, the glow of firelight in the windows of the various cabins already extinguished, but the light in the bureau slipped through the cracks of the closed doors and the shuttered windows. He knew Hytham well enough to know that he would never sleep with fire still burning.
He attempted to knock. No answer. And so he attempted to open the door, and found it unlocked. Perhaps Hytham had expected him tonight.
The apprentice in question was seated by a desk, his back turned to him, writing something. He knew he heard him, yet he did not acknowledge him, not even as Basim stepped inside and closed the door behind him. His writing, however, stopped for a very brief moment.
“Am I interrupting something?”
Basim did not need to see Hytham’s full face to see that he was trying to not roll his eyes. An ‘of course you were’ echoed in both of their minds, yet Hytham merely sighed, laid down the quill with which he had been writing, and stood up. He turned, and leaned the back of his hips against the desk, and crossed his arms. He said nothing, clearly waiting for Basim to start.
While he had spent the better part of three days attempting to decipher his own mind and formulate what to say, now, standing face to face with his apprentice, he could not help but feel mute. Was it shame? Guilt? Anger? He had never been one for emotions, and now they were nothing but a tangled mess of audacity and fear, and for every moment that passed in silence, Hytham’s expression soured. Finally, Basim stood straight, clasping his hands behind his back, a familiar position he had yet to tell who had gotten from who.
“Hytham, I...” Dear God, he could not begin to stutter now. He took a deep breath, and started over. “I apologise.”
This was clearly not what Hytham had expected. His eyes widened, his eyebrows rose, almost comically expressive with how they had been knit together just a moment prior.
“You are right. I have been a poor excuse of a mentor as of late. I should have communicated with you. For that, I am sorry.”
It felt... Strange, with how their dynamic had always been. While they got along like a wildfire prior to Norway, Basim did not apologise, he had little regrets in the life that he had lived, it was Hytham that made mistakes and apologised and was forgiven, but now...
Hytham moved to speak, but Basim continued.
“And I do not want you to think that I think of you as a failure. It is true I have treated you less than well since Kjotve, but not because I was disappointed in you. I will admit, I was mad, but above all, I was...” He hesitated. A mental lock that he did not wish to unlock, but Hytham’s mere presence held a key. “...Scared.”
“...Scared?”
“Absolutely terrified.”
His apprentice, his Hytham, looked at him with such confusion, like a lost puppy. Basim dared to take a step closer, and Hytham did not attempt to flee.
“When he threw you towards the cliff wall,” he continued, “I could have sworn that I heard your spine snap. And when you laid lifeless against the ground, I thought I had lost you for good within a few seconds. I thought I had watched you leap to your own death.”
Hytham... He did not know what to say. Not when his mentor was mere steps away from him, a distance not closed since Basim had returned, and cornered him against that tree.
“I...” Hytham swallowed, nervous, or perhaps merely shocked. Perhaps faced with a possibility he had not yet considered. “I apologise.”
“No.” The forceful tone almost got the apprentice to flinch. “I should not have encouraged you. You were following my orders, and for that, I punished you.”
He did, undeniably. He had barely spoken to him, and when he did, he had snapped, forced the poor boy to cower from both pain and the fear of his very own mentor’s anger. It was downright shameful. Hytham did not deserve that, he never did.
Basim took another deep breath. A short moment to gather his thoughts, swallow the inherent shame of the situation, the memories, and the conversation, down.
“I cannot claim that I can fully grasp why I have behaved the way I have,” he continued. “But I think I have... Underestimated the situation. You, as a skilled assassin, and my own fears that I might one day lead you to your death.”
“I know what I got myself into-”
“I know that you do. I know that you know that the life of an assassin is dangerous, and that the path I track is no different. But where my own self-preservation falters, it searches for you.”
Basim had never been an affectionate person. He was undeniably aloof in many ways, actively so in his mentoring, yet what he might have wished for as an apprentice himself was not what an apprentice like Hytham needed. Neither of them needed the secrecy, Hytham did not need a superior to simply watch over and judge him. He needed a mentor.
“I hope,” Basim continued, “that you can forgive me. And I promise you that I will do my very best to keep this from happening again, should you wish to stay. But I will also understand if you wish to go home.”
“...Promise?”
A voice so small, so soft. For a moment, Hytham was once more the little boy on the tower, trying to leap. Basim could not help but feel his lips twist into a small, reminiscent smile.
“I promise.”
The apprentice seemed... Shaken. And while he tried to brush it off, attempted to calm his breathing, Basim leaped. He closed the last distance, and with Hytham’s questioning words silenced, he wrapped his arms around him. A hug. Holding him close, as if afraid that he would disappear if he let go. An arm around his back, the other cradling the back of his head.
The ever faithful acolyte tensed. Both were ready to flee, yet, before Basim could let go, Hytham’s own arms wrapped around the taller one’s middle, burying his face into the crook of his neck. There, they stayed for multiple moments, until the smaller one began to dig his fingers into the older one’s robes, breath rasping, knees buckling. His body was exhausted, and he could hold on no longer.
“Basim- I-”
“Shhh,” He could not claim to know Hytham as well as he wished he did, yet he knew what was ailing him. He tightened his grip, and gently lowered the both of them, until Hytham was safe on the floor, legs no longer giving in under him, and the hug never parted from. Basim positioned them, he rested his own back against the leg of the desk, parted his own legs, and let his apprentice’s meager frame rest between them, against his chest, arms still holding him tight. He did not want to let him go, and Hytham let him. “I got you.”
They were grown. They were grown men, deadly assassins, with the blood of thousands upon their hands, yet now, as he held him, it did not feel strange. It felt like returning home, as he nuzzled against the top of his head, felt his soft hair against his cheek, felt the weight of Hytham within his very soul. And as Hytham finally allowed himself to relax, untense, and close his eyes...
“...I forgive you,” he murmured, somewhere against the fabric of Basim’s hood and his shoulder. “And I wish to stay, if you will have me.”
The mentor’s grip tightened. For the first time since Norway, it felt as if a burden was eased off of his shoulder, a grip loosening around his heart.
“I will have you.” He whispered, placing a soft kiss to the top of his acolyte’s forehead. Hytham let out a soft, content sigh. “We will make this right.”
Perhaps he could convince Sigurd that he could join the new expedition later. For now, his priority lay with Hytham. For the first time since Norway, they felt... Content. Even as Hytham’s exhausted body lulled him to sleep, even as Basim stayed, unmoving, savouring the moment for as long as he could.
He did not know for how long he would have Hytham by his side, but for now, he was content.