(no subject)

[salvaticus]

The suite of rooms they'd given him were unrelentingly white, spacious, and utterly devoid of anything that could be used as a weapon. For a jail cell it was absurdly luxurious, Haytham supposed, although the strange angular decor and the stark emptiness of the space served as well to unsettle him as much as a dank hole in the dungeon would have unsettled another man.

He prowled the length of the rooms helplessly, noiseless and irritatingly vulnerable in the simple gray clothes and soft slippers he'd been provided. Nothing, he'd already concluded, that he could wear in any sort of public situation without drawing attention to himself as either a prisoner or a medical patient, and the slippers deliberately too flimsy to give him protection or purchase in any attempt to climb. The lack of layers and the gaping looseness of the clothes annoyed him, and he'd been given only a flat stare by his escort when he'd asked, extremely politely, for a ribbon at least to put his hair back, hoping in vain that they might provide him something that might serve as a garrote. There were sheets on the low, wide bed and also pillows that he'd spent his first week in captivity passed out senseless upon, recovering from the trauma of what the white-coated men had called his 'awakening,' but nothing to double effectively as rope or a blunt instrument. All the fixtures in the rooms were quite firmly welded to the walls and everything arranged in such a manner that suggested the room had been designed particularly to hold a person such as him.

Or rather, designed to hold an Assassin. The man called Vidic had already apologized profusely (if insincerely, Haytham knew at once) for the measures taken against a fellow Templar, all protocols set in place to manage much more savage, unpredictable prisoners, whose presence was occasionally evidenced by the bruises upon the faces of his rotating roster of guards and the alarms that went off in the depths of this concrete tower he'd found himself entrapped in.

It made very little sense to him that these modern day Templars should go to such enormous expense and trouble just to resurrect historical figures into empty vessel bodies (a process that when proudly described by Vidic still sounded like alchemy, if not outright black magic to Haytham's poor 18th century mind), but a few delicately probing questions had rewarded him with enough evidence to put together the true answer: the Templars were desperately seeking three Pieces of Eden that had previously proven controllable by human hands; the Amulet, the Apple, and the Staff.











Haytham had already prowled their length thrice over before giving up in frustration, clamping down on the all-too-familiar feeling of panic attempting to rise in his gut. For all that the future form of the Templar Order was apparently in the absurd business of resurrecting long dead historical figures and cramming their memories into empty vessel bodies, it was still run by powerful, ambitious, and perfectly ordinary mortal men, and Haytham was well versed in dealing with their kind. If he had but patience, they would come to him and he would be able to fight or negotiate his way into a better position.

They wanted the Key






























"I see," Haytham said neutrally, keeping all expression from his face as he stared at the man in the white coat-- the Templar in the white coat, by his own explanation, who looked back at him with unconcealed greed and smug satisfaction, as if Haytham were some long lost treasure restored against all expectation to its proper owner.

"It's terribly unfortunate," Vidic continued, apparently encouraged by any response that wasn't a fist in the face, which, given what Haytham had gathered of the identities of his fellow 'guests' at the Abstergo compound, was likely the usual reaction to his attempted conversations. "There were others before you, of course, but not one of the prototypes remained stable enough to give us more than a few scraps of information. We went through sixteen iterations of the Altair identity before we finally found a way to keep it under control-- it infected the Animus controllers, refused to bond with the vessels we had prepared to receive its consciousness or bonded so quickly that it made escape attempts in the first few minutes of activation. Two went headfirst through the nearest window the moment we mentioned trying to locate the Apple..."

Haytham could not help a side glance at the nearest window in question, knowing exactly how far away the ground was from this height-- the buildings in this era defied all comprehension, built from glass and steel and towering higher than any man-made structure surely had a right to over the Earth. Vidic watched him and chuckled. "Easily remedied. Shatterproof glass, a cocktail of sedatives upon awakening, and of course the very effective presence of a secondary vessel."



















"The Apple," Haytham interrupted, seizing his chance to forestall another rant about the difficulties of subduing his former Order's great hero. "Were you successful in locating it? Is it here?"

Vidic smiled patronizingly, mistaking his interest. "It will be recovered soon enough. Now that you're fully stabilized within your vessel--" he gestured vaguely at the body Haytham had woken up, too young and unfamiliar around his bones, like a suit of clothes not quite broken in yet-- "I'm confident we'll be able to use the power of the Key to locate both the Apple and the Staff." The doctor's hungry eyes went again to the vicinity of Haytham's breastbone, exactly where the Precursor amulet no longer hung, and Haytham resisted the urge to raise a hand and cover .