Chapter Text
5:11 PM - Waterloo Station - Thursday, Nov 7th, 2019
He ditches his plans for Zurich and scans the departure board for any train leaving the station immediately. Hytham can’t afford to wait anymore. Mindful to move with the flow of bodies shielding him from the various surveillance cameras, he rifles through the crowd as quick as he can. His heart pounds with every step he takes, the sound deafening against the distant barking of military grade canines. He’s honed his skills of escaping unseen for over a millennia, and yet, he’s never felt so out of his depth.
It was only a matter of time. He’d gotten complacent, too comfortable. The speed at which technology advanced in the last 20 years alone meant he was having to uproot his life more frequently than before. Once upon a time, he’d considered returning to Damascus, or even Baghdad, but that was before Abstergo tipped the scale of the 2000 US elections and eviscerated millions.
He didn’t just feel out of his depth, he was.
11:44 PM - Birkbeck University Library - Wednesday, Nov 6th, 2019
They are minutes away from locking the place up for the night, he knows, but he's so close he can taste it. Bent over a high table with his face stuck in a dossier, Hytham traces a steady finger right below a passage linking key MI6 and CIA operatives involved in the War on Terror to The Great Purge. He's scoured the cities' various archives (libraries, universities, museums, you name it), only to find remnants of the Templars efforts to eviscerate the Assassin's global cell divisions amidst the massacres the west campaigned across the MENA. Whoever orchestrated their operations had done so with such surgical precision that their activities were never formally captured in any database.
Hytham had a list of names, sure, but nothing to link them together.
He swipes a scrap piece of paper hanging off the side of the table inked with a dry coffee stain and furiously scribbles down his findings. He'd despaired the thought of finding anything tonight. Countless weeks, months, years—now nearly 2 decades spent passively looking for answers only to suddenly stumble upon something substantial? He's murmuring name after name under his breath like a mantra, kicking his photographic memory into overdrive and praying he can do something with his findings when he gets back to his flat to cross-reference what he's collected over the years.
Unconsciously, he flips open his burner phone and starts dialing a number with his free hand, bringing it up to his ear to pinch between his head and his shoulder. The phone rings a total of two times, by which point Hytham is already closing the dossier and picking up after himself to leave. "Nasir!" a familiar voice chirps. "What can I do for you?"
"Bishop," he whispers. "Does the name 'Stearns' mean anything to you?"
12:43 PM - Lambeth Secondary - Thursday, Nov 7th, 2019
He regrets, with every fiber of his being, the all-nighter he pulled. He'd arrived at home half past 1:00am and didn't waste another minute until he was sure his findings were conclusive. 2 cans of Red Bull and a hot shower later, and he was back out his front door and heading to work.
What he wouldn't do for a painkiller right about now, the library printer was going to be the bane of his existence.
“Heard you let Wesley off with a warning again.” His work colleague, Banhi, slides up behind him, loosely swinging the lanyard around her neck. He slaps the machine, willing it to work its magic before his next lesson. “Spare me the lecture, Banhi. The boy’s been through enough—” she laughs, "maybe if you pop the panel open and blow in it." Okay, Hytham chuckles too. "This isn't a 90s gaming cartridge."
"Could've fooled me with the way you just slapped it."
Hytham narrows his eyes at the guilty offender with barely concealed disdain, tempted to slap it again.
Maybe he can get his kids to learn their timetables instead? Postpone their quiz.
They'd like that.
“Anyway, I’m not here to give you a hard time." She says, picking up where they left off. “I wanted to thank you."
"Thank me?"
"It's nice seeing someone actually give a shit about these kids.”
He never intended to take the job, really. He moved to England to follow up on a lead with Abstergo, but over a year of dead ends dwindled his savings living off the grid.
The school was in shambles when he’d arrived. They hired the first poor soul who settled for abysmal pay, and he just so happened to enjoy working with kids. The superintendents got along with the school board well enough, so auditing was rarely done to improve faculty provisions. Students were shoved in tiny classrooms, overcrowded beyond reasonable conditions, leaving staff to fend for themselves. It wasn’t anything Hytham hadn’t already seen. Generation, after generation, the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
And every night, Hytham would try to peel back the layers of work and fail. The reality was that Lambeth was destitute. The children living in these parts of London were fighting an uphill battle, shouldering the hopes and dreams of their families on their backs, combating criminal poverty rates and systemic gang violence. Wesley was just one of several kids who deserved better than to come home to a drunk father.
Hytham had been vocal against the level of reprimanding used on the students. Most of the other teachers had kept their distance after the first incident, but Hytham never cared for it. Banhi was one of the few who continued to treat him normally. “You should’ve seen their faces.”
Hytham smiles, relieved. Every now and again he lives in these moments, basking in the feeling of doing something right. He's loath to admit they have become so far and few between.
“Nasir Darwish, to the principal's office. Nasir Darwish—”
They both groan.
“You jinxed me.”
“You can take it." She waves him off with a grin.
Hytham quickly drags himself out of the library. With any luck, he can get this over with before the end of his lunch break. The slap on the wrist is routine now, he knows the drill. A polite smile here, a white lie there, and off his merry way he goes.
What greets Hytham at the door isn't nearly as mundane.
“Mr. Darwish, this is—” “Leatitia England.” The woman interrupts with an outstretched hand. “A pleasure to meet you, Nasir—Can I call you Nasir?”
Hytham jolts the circuitry in his brain to function like a halfway decent human being and nods, clasping her hand with a forced smile. And God—try as he might, he can't reconcile with the fact that he's shaking hands with the Head of Operations at Abstergo Industries.
“The pleasure's all mine," he lies.
“I’ll leave you both to it. My assistant is outside if you need anything.”
“That won’t be necessary, Mr. Hudson. Thank you.” Laetitia says, smiling, eyes still glued to Hytham.
The door clicks shut behind them.
Tick. Tock. The wall clock taunts.
Hytham's time hiding is up.
Laetitia blithely rounds behind the principal's desk and takes a seat, assuming command over the entire room. Hytham, feeling like a caged animal, prepares for an exit strategy. The room is small, only able to accommodate a single office desk and 3 chairs. There's a tiny window on the wall behind Laetitia, too high up to escape through. The door behind him is looking to be his only shot out of here if things turn sour.
He would kill her here and be done with it, but his hands are morally bound by the hundreds of unassuming children in the school.
'Pull the fire escape—no that's stupid. Abstergo's probably armed to the teeth outside anyway.'
“Please, sit.”
He obliges her, sinking deep into the seat across from her and forcefully quells the unsettling prickle climbing up his spine. If she really wanted to kill him, she would’ve stuffed him in a body bag by now, or tried to at least, which makes the situation all the more alarming.
“You know who I am.”
“I do.” It'd be stupid to pretend otherwise.
She smiles, pleased, leaning forward atop the desk with her fingers laced together. “Then you know why I’m here.”
He leans back, palms glued to the arm rails of the chair. “Indulge me.” The chair’s too big, too comfortable for what they're discussing.
She studies him for a moment then turns away to open a briefcase. “I was really impressed—” she says, pulling a file and placing it on the desk, “with your submission to the New York Times.”
“Which one?” He hasn’t dabbled in any journalism for well over 20 years. “Your opinion piece on the Industrial Revolution in 1881.”
Hytham laughs, full-bellied, compensating for the sudden cold sweat washing down his back. “I beg your pardon?”
“Of course, you went by a different name back then,” she barrels on. “Emrys Rashid, was it? Here we are, desperate for DNA samples with ties to Crawford Starrick when all we had to do was delve a little deeper into our own archives.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“You can’t keep playing dumb, Nasir. It's written all over your face… literally.” She flips the article on a black and white photograph depicting a crowd in London from the late 1800s. It’s shockingly detailed for a camera functioning with an absurdly slow shutter speed. Undoubtedly, the picture's been enhanced, generating what it couldn't capture. He gambles that they’re relying more on blind faith for this conversation to hold any weight. “I’m in this photograph?”
“Clearly.”
“Do I look 100 to you?”
“We’re offering you an opportunity to come work with us."
“And if I refuse?”
She studies him again, as if toying with the idea, then leers with a predatory gleam, “I’ll give you 24 hours to reconsider.” Hytham has to physically suppress another shudder watching her smoothly pull away from the desk to make her exit. When she's in his personal bubble, her steps unnervingly slow, and she hums, voice low and deliberate. “We’ll contact you.”
The door clicks shut behind him for a second time, and Hytham’s mind is reeling. He immediately gasps for a breath he didn't know he was holding. The briefcase she brought sits atop the desk, baring his greatest secret for all the world to see, and he’s curious, so very tempted to take the briefcase for closer inspection, but doesn’t want to risk it. For all he knows, Abstergo's engineers are just waiting for him snatch it up, so he decides to leave it where it is.
Not like there’s anything groundbreaking for him inside anyway.
Hytham pulls out his burner phone from his pants pocket and starts disassembling it piece by piece, even going as far as snapping the SIM card in half and dropping everything in the bin. He doesn't so much as spare a glance at the secretary on his way out, making a beeline towards the school's front entrance.
He needs to leave the city. Now.
He's halfway through the door when a very powerful blast sends him flying out and across the walkway.
The light around him blurs into unrecognizable shapes. He clambers to shake off whatever just happened with laden limbs failing to push his face up from the concrete. He vaguely registers that he's hurt—bleeding even, but can't be bothered to find out how bad. The ringing in his ears is incessant and stubborn, making it difficult to think clearly. Hytham drags his legs up and scrambles to balance on his feet and fails, stubbornly glued to the ground. One, two, three shakes of the head, and the screams start to filter through with noise and clarity. His vision clears, only Hytham wishes to God it didn't.
The school has caught aflame.
His students are burning inside.
Hytham's eyes strain at the sight unable to look away, and a bone-chilling voice whispers low behind his ear, "Consider this your formal invitation."
It's the last thing he hears before something hard rams him over the back of his head, and everything goes black.
2:12 PM - Lambeth Secondary - Thursday, Nov 7th, 2019
“Any spark in the school could’ve set it off.”
“112 injured, 34 confirmed dead. Several are still stuck under the rubble.”
“Where’s my daughter? Where IS MY DAUGHTER?”
“The Lambeth fire department says they're working closely with authorities to root out the exact cause of the faulty gas leak—"
Hytham sits in the back of an open ambulance, wrapped in a trauma blanket with a thousand-yard stare. He watches Muhammad and Hamza sprint across the field towards their crying mother, the terror of tonight washing away in the safety of her arms.
Thanks to the robust escape plan Hytham drilled into his students, his kids were all accounted for, unharmed, and reunited with their families.
Lucky him.
“The BBC are asking for an interview—”
“Tell them to fuck off.”
The paramedic checking him for injuries huffs a dark laugh.
Eli, another faculty member that Hytham could never be assed to get to know, stands close by clicking his tongue. “This is what happens when you don't take your job seriously," he mouths, overlooking some of the other teachers, the ones that weren't so lucky. "Our students are alive today because of us.”
Hytham bristles, shooting Eli a glare faster than his headache can tolerate. "Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“Better us than them.” Eli nods towards a body being pulled out of the wreckage, and Hytham realises with abject horror that he's looking at Banhi's corpse.
He vomits his grief.
Banhi and those kids—they all lost their lives because of him.
Because he can’t die.