Spring (Season 3)

            He could hear his mother calling him, distant and soft, barely more than a whisper in the breeze, but Sirocco’s hands were on his body and her tongues were in his mouth and he had missed her so much. 
            They were in his bed – comfortable cotton flannel sheets and the weight of the raw silk quilt a former student had sent him from China against his skin, scents of hyssop and lavender, Madonna lilies and myrrh, and the briny musk of sex and desire and satisfaction and safety – and he was drunk with the feeling of being wanted and welcomed and loved.  Warm.  Everything he touched was so warm and soft.  Hotter still her body as she sheathed him, her tongues in his mouth, her heat pouring down his throat, warming his heart and pumping through his body with his blood.  Warm, he felt truly warm for the first time in months.
            Altaïr…
            Her voice hit him like a splash of ice water, closer, louder than before; she was calling him and he never disobeyed.  Sirocco pulled him back against herself when he tried to move away, to obey his mother’s call.
            Don’t follow her, Altaïr.  Stay here, with me.  Let me take care of you.  Do you ache, my love?  Do you need me to make it better?  Her hands were on his body – caressing him – and it felt so good he didn’t want her to stop.  I’ve missed you, my beloved.  Haven’t you missed me too?  Tell me that you have, my love, my Assassin, tell me…
            Please, please Siro.  I love you.  I love you.  He pressed his face against her neck, hungrily breathing in her scent.  I need you.  I love you.  Don’t leave me, don’t leave.  Please stay, please, please, forever…
            She hummed low in her throat, soothing him.  You’re mine.  You belong to me.  You’ve always belonged to me.  No one could ever keep me from you.  The tip of her tongue nudged the seam of his lips, encouraging him open for her, and her hands were everywhere, touching him all the places and ways she knew he liked best.
            Altaïr…
            Louder, stronger.  His mother’s voice was a chain between them, lengthened link by link but never broken, and he couldn’t disobey; he didn’t know how.
            Help me, Siro.  It hurts.  I’m frightened.  I love you, please, I love you…  Her hair ran through his hands like a river of silk, her skin pressed satin against his own, and where she sheathed him was hot-wet velvet and thorns – pleasure and pain plied so tightly together there was no separating the two.
            Together, forever, she promised him.  As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, forever and ever, world without end.
            Insha’allah, he whispered, back arching and toes curling.
            No, Altaïr.  Your god has no hold here, not over me, over us.  Hers is the only will that matters.  She was all around him, everywhere inside him, and he was catching her fire.
            Altaïr…
            His orgasm woke him.

            Augustine watched with disinterested disapproval as he lifted the covers and swore under his breath.
            “Don’t look at me like that,” he snapped at the cat, ashamed of the ejaculate smeared across his skin and on his sheets, going cold and sticky.
            Augustine blinked slowly and yawned before following him into the bathroom.  He turned the water on and let it run for a moment to heat up before soaking a washrag and scrubbing at himself.  After a few moments he gave up with a sigh, turned off the water and threw the rag into the sink before drawing his blade with a well-practiced flick of his wrist and carefully shaving off the clumps of seminal fluid enmeshed in his growing out body hair.  It reminded him why he usually sugared his body in the first place.  Augustine playfully attacked his calf and he swore when he nicked his scrotum at a particularly exuberant love-bite.
            “No, August.  No biting.  Bad kitty.”  He shoved the cat away with his foot and Augustine retaliated by biting his toes.  He growled in annoyance, scooped the cat up, dumped him outside the bathroom and quickly closed the door.  Augustine immediately began scratching at the door and protesting loudly.
            “Quiet, August,” he scolded before returning his attention to cleaning himself up.
            The wounds on his thigh, irritated by his scrubbing near them, had reopened and were oozing infection-thickened fluid.  He sighed and grabbed a fresh washrag.  This will be easier under the shower.  The wounds hurt horribly to clean, far worse than he remembered it hurting as a child when he scrubbed the cuts his mother had given him.  She had been more careful with it though, cutting then cleaning and bandaging.  He’d been cutting and using his blood instead of ink to write to Sirocco, dipping his quill in the wound over and over again, before stumbling off to bed; he only cleaned and bandaged the cuts he’d made in the morning, when he was getting dressed for training.  His mother would not have been pleased he was being so careless.  He turned off the shower when the water started to go cold, chastised himself for forgetting to warm his towel over the radiator, and then berated himself for forgetting to turn the radiator on in the first place as he dried his cold body.  He sighed and rubbed his face before grudgingly applying ointment and bandaging his thigh.  He was beyond exhausted when he finished; hands shaky, unsteady on his feet, and he might have considered going to sleep right there on the bathroom floor if the room was ten degrees warmer.
            Augustine’s protests had escalated to unearthly, hair-raising yowls and the door was rattling from the cat’s frantic onslaught by the time he finished washing and bandaging.
            “You’re such an old woman,” he scolded as he opened the door.
            Augustine shot into the room, coat puffed up nearly twice his usual size, before skidding to a halt and looking at him with wide, wild eyes.  It was extremely unsettling.
            “What’s wrong August?”  He looked over his shoulder, in the direction his cat’s gaze seemed fixed, and saw nothing out of the ordinary.  “Is something the matter?”
            The sound Augustine made started as a growl, low in his throat, before rising sharply to a yowling crescendo as he shot past Altaïr, out of the bathroom, and out through the window overlooking the Garden he almost always left cracked open for him.
            He sighed.  Sometimes, he really didn’t understand his cat.
            Altaïr…
            He went perfectly still, heart hammering and breath caught in his throat.  His skin prickled uncomfortably and he suddenly noticed how cold the room had gotten.
            “Mother?” he whispered.  The wounds on his thigh ached and his eyes felt dry and gritty every time he blinked.
            It smelled like the morgue in Syria when he closed his eyes.  He was falling, sinking into the familiar nightmare and he wanted it to stop, needed to get away, to not go back there.  He jerked himself awake and stumbled towards his dresser for a fresh pair of zir-šalvar, teeth chattering.  Kadija.  He drew his blades and scraped one against the other.  Kadija.  He concentrated and scraped his blades again.  Kadija.  There was a vibrating hum emanating from his blades when she responded.  He sighed with relief and pulled on the zir-šalvar, not bothering to find the rest of his clothing before shrugging on his outer robes; Kadija’s chambers were just down the hall, right next to his; he wouldn’t be going far.  Her door was unwarded.
            “Labiwa?” he called softly as he shut the door behind himself.
            “It’s the middle of the night, Aquila.  What’s wrong?”  His sister’s voice was roughened and raspy with sleep; she hadn’t bothered to get out of bed and her rooms were pitch dark.  He had to use his second sight to see her; she glowed a beautiful pale blue.
            He winced.  He’d woken her; of course he’d woken her.  He cursed himself for his unthinking selfishness.
            “Aquila?  What’s wrong?” she repeated.  Her bedding rustled as she sat up.
            “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.  I shouldn’t have woken her, shouldn’t have come.  I should go.  His feet were inexplicably rooted to the floor.
            “Why aren’t you asleep?”
            His throat felt tight as he swallowed.  “Syria,” he managed to whisper.
            She sighed and he heard the blankets swish as she folded down the bedding and beckoned him over.
            “Come on then, quickly, before all the heat’s gone.”
            He skinned off his robes and threw them over Kadija’s button-tucked leather ottoman before slipping into her bed and pulling the blankets up around them as he cuddled against his sister.  She pulled him tightly against herself in a firm hug and he felt some of the tension melt from his body.
            “She was calling me,” he said softly as he rubbed his thumb over his mother’s Ferrymen’s ring, worn on a chain around Kadija’s neck.  “I heard her voice.  She was calling me.”
            “It was a dream, jeegaram,” Kadija soothed and rubbed warmth into his shoulders.  “It was just a dream.”
            “I heard her,” he insisted.  “Clear as I hear you now.  I wasn’t asleep.  I heard her.”
            “She’s dead, Altaïr-” Kadija reminded him gently.
            “I know that.  But I heard her.  So did August,” he added as an afterthought.  “Something spooked him and he ran out the window.”
            “Nothing spooked him.  He’s a cat; he just got a case of the midnight crazies.”
            He hummed noncommittally in response and squirmed closer; Kadija always made him feel safe.
            “Why are you alone, Labiwa?”
            “I’m not alone.  I’ve got you in bed with me, stealing all my blankets and body heat.”
            “I’m not,” he protested, trying to contort himself smaller as he cuddled even more closely against her.  He missed the way he had fit in his mother’s arms, how he used to fit in Kadija’s, when they were younger.
            “Roll over and I’ll hold you like a spoon,” she commanded with a series of pointed nudges.
            “No, why?” he mumbled, pressing his cheek against her sternum.  His muscles felt like stringy taffy.
            “Because I don’t like your man-parts rubbing against my thigh,” she retorted, shoving at him again.  “Roll over.”
            “I can’t help it,” he grumbled as he shifted position.  “They’re just there.”
            “I know.  Go to sleep, jeegaram,” she murmured.  Her breath was warm against the side of his neck and she slid an arm around his chest to hug him tightly against her.
            “I don’t want you to be alone,” he mumbled drowsily, pressing his spine more firmly against her sternum.  “You should have someone else to love you.”
            “Don’t you start too,” she sighed.  “I’m perfectly happy on my own.  Besides, it’s not easy finding lovers for someone like me.”
            “You should talk to Tārā.”  He turned his head slightly to rub his cheek against her forehead.  “She also is attracted to other women, and she thinks you’re pretty.”
            “What?” she sputtered.  “How do you – what makes you think she thinks I’m pretty?”
            “She agreed with me when I said that you are beautiful.”
            “Why were you discussing me with your students?”
            “I don’t remember how it came up, but I said you were beautiful and she agreed with me.”
            “You’re her mentor; she probably felt obligated to agree with whatever you said.”
            He shrugged.  “Irika didn’t feel obligated to agree with me.”
            “Is Irika also attracted to other women?” she asked waspishly.
            “I don’t believe so, but I can ask her.”
            She pinched him, hard.  He grunted in discomfort.
            “What have I told you not to do, especially not to your students?”
            He sighed.  “Not ask inappropriately personal questions; I know, Labiwa.  I remember.  I didn’t ask Tārā.”
            “Then how are you so certain of her gender preference?”
            “I figured it out.  I’m not stupid, you know.”  He hated himself for sounding sulky.
            “I know you’re not stupid, Aquila,” she soothed, pausing a moment from rubbing comforting circles on his chest to press her palm over his heart.  “Go to sleep.  You’ve got a long day tomorrow.”
            “Planned by you, no doubt.”
            “I’m your older sister; I only plan what’s best for you.”
            He harrumphed sleepily in response.

            Something rubbed against his lips, flicked the tip of his nose.  He groaned in protest and shifted to bury his face against Kadija.  She chuckled and tugged his hair.
            “Time to get up Aquila.”
            He slung an arm around her ribs and cuddled closer, not yet ready to face the coming day, to relinquish the security and comfort he took from being near her.
            “No.”
            “Yes.”  She expertly extracted herself from his clinging grasp.  “We’re far too old for you to still come crawling into bed with me when you have a nightmare.”
            “Says who?” he grumbled as he stretched.
            “Everyone.”  She sat up and stretched her arms up above herself, rolled her head from shoulder to shoulder to loosen the muscles of her neck.
            “Since when have you cared what everyone else thinks?” he asked, folding his hands behind his head and watching her with narrowed eyes.
            “Your breath stinks; it smells like something died in your mouth.  You haven’t been flossing, have you?”
            “I floss.”  He rolled each of his ankles until the joints popped with a loud, satisfying crack.
            “Not regularly.  You’re going to get cavities,” she scolded, reaching over to pull his armpit hair.
            “Your breath stinks in the morning too,” he retorted and quickly dropped his arms to his sides, folding his hands across his chest defensively.  I need to make a sugaring appointment.  For my upper body, at least.  He’d been letting that slip as it became clearer that Sirocco might not be coming back to him.  The thought of her sent a bolt of white-hot pain through his veins, momentarily obscuring the constant dull ache emanating from the wounds he’d inflicted on his thigh.
            She leaned over and blew in his face.  “Get up.”
            He huffed in annoyance and rolled off the side of the bed, landing on his feet.  “Do you ever get… lonely?” he asked, looking down as he dug his toes into the velvety-plush piles of the rug beneath his feet.  Kadija always had the very best carpets.
            “I don’t have time to be lonely,” she replied, rolling out of bed after him.  She scuffed the soles of her feet against the carpet’s nap before striding over to the bureau.  “Let’s find you more to do; there’s plenty of work to keep your mind off things.”  He heard the rasp of her nails against her scalp as she combed her fingers through her closely shorn hair.
            “Shouldn’t you put on a shirt, cover your 'awrah around me, since you now care what other people think?” he asked, hating how sullen he sounded, how hungry he was for attention.
            “I am as covered as I need to be around my mahram,” she retorted.  “What is and is not 'awrah is between me and Allah; you know better than to have an opinion on what other people do with their bodies.”  Her tone was sharp; he clenched his teeth at the rebuke and made a study of the pattern of the rug he was standing on.  “Besides,” she added with a self-deprecating smile he could hear in her voice, softening her scolding.  “My chest is almost as flat as yours, and most certainly flatter than Ezio or Ibrahim’s.”
            He unwillingly smiled at that and glance up at her.  “Labiwa-”
            “Go get dressed for yoga; we’re running short on time for breakfast,” she interrupted him, pulling a fresh kameez over her head.
            “I’m going to skip yoga,” he replied with carefully constructed nonchalance as he retrieved his outer robes from the floor where they’d fallen off the ottoman and shrugged them on.
            Kadija turned and leveled a hard look at him, eyes narrowing suspiciously.  “Why?”
            “I’m going to see if Nisrin has time for me this morning,” he replied with an uncomfortable shrug.  “I’ve let myself go for too long already and there won’t be any other time for it today if I go to yoga.”
            Kadija’s lips parted in a calculating smile.  “Of course.  Have her thread your eyebrows too.”  She approached him and carefully smoothed his hair back from his face.  “You’ll need a haircut soon as well.  You’ve been looking uncared-for this last couple weeks.”
            I am uncared-for, he thought as he shrugged off her ministrations.  “If Nisrin is too busy, I’ll have that done instead.”
            “Don’t be silly,” she scoffed.  “Nisrin adores you like the son she always wanted.  I think she’d cancel on Al Mualim himself if you walked in and wanted something done.”
            He shrugged and gave a noncommittal hum.  He’d gone to Nisrin for sugaring approximately every two weeks for the better part of the last ten years; he’d developed a tolerance to her touch and she was respectful – and protective – of his privacy.  They had an understanding.
            “And she’s been worried sick because she hasn’t seen you in so long,” Kadija added.  “She asked after you when I saw her last week.”
            He sighed.  “You should have said.”
            “I’m saying now,” she retorted, fastening her šalvar and stomping her feet into her boots.  “Make sure you eat some breakfast, you’re getting boney,” she added as he unlatched the door.
            He swallowed his annoyance.  “Yes, Labiwa.”

            “You’ve gotten thin,” Nisrin exclaimed as he pulled his kurta off over his head.
            He slid an annoyed look towards the diminutive middle-aged woman, but bit back his ready retort at the sight of her round smiling face, illuminated in the bright early morning light streaming through the thin white curtains of the room’s windows.  He doubted Nisrin had ever been svelte, even in her youth, and the passing years had only made her rounder.
            “Is that the first thing you say to me?” he demanded, with a regretful shake of his head.  “Haven’t you missed me?”  The room was filled with the same scents there always were, the smells he associated with Nisrin herself – syrupy-sweet with a hint of lemon from the sugaring paste, the powdery scent of talc, whisper soft hyacinth and hyssop-fresh laundry.  The sameness was comforting.
            “You know I have, aziz-am,” she clucked, motioning him to recline on the cushions she’d set out.  “You need more looking after; why hasn’t your lady friend been keeping you on schedule and fed up.  She’s neglecting your needs.”
            “Kadija and Al Mualim think that she has left me; I haven’t seen or heard from her in weeks.”  His throat felt tight and he couldn’t bring himself to meet her eyes.
            “What do you think?” she asked as she smoothed the sugaring paste across his chest.
            “I don’t know,” he sighed.  “She just left, abruptly, without a word – that’s just not like her, not at all – and she hasn’t responded to any of my letters, which isn’t like her either.  I don’t know what to think.”
            “What does your heart tell you?” she asked as she pressed a strip of fabric against the sticky paste and removed it quickly, pulling out a swath of hair down to its roots.  He’d been having sugaring done for so long it no longer hurt, but it was still a strange sensation.  Nisrin repeated the process, quickly moving across his chest, before moving on to his underarms and arms.
            “That something is not right.  That there is more to her absence than is currently known to me.”  He shrugged again and she tisked him softly under her breath for the disruption the gesture caused to her work.  “But that must be so; I don’t know anything, except that she has not come to me or responded to any of my letters.”
            “I’m sure she’ll return to you shortly and this doubt and unhappiness will fade to just a memory,” Nisrin responded soothingly.  “After all, what woman could bear to give you up?”
            “Thank you, for being kind-”
            “Not at all,” she chuckled, swiping her thumb across his cheek affectionately.  She tactfully overlooked the way he flinched at the gesture; he didn’t like his difficulty with being touched commented on.  “I’d be besotted with you myself if I were fifteen years younger, aziz-am; you’re a very handsome man.”
            He forced a smile and ducked his head, avoiding her eyes.  “You embarrass me, begum.”
            “And so well mannered.”  She pursed her lips and rolled her eyes.  He coughed perfunctorily to cover his discomfort at her flattery and she smiled and patted his shoulder.
            “I forgot that you don’t like to be complemented; it’s been so long since I last saw you,” she hummed.
            “You and my aunt, always on about how neither of you see me enough,” he grumbled.
            She laughed good naturedly.  “That is always the way of old women, aziz-am,” she smiled at him.  “Are we doing your lower half today as well?”
            He narrowed his eyes and calculated how much time he had before the Masters’ weekly meeting with Al Mualim later that morning.  “Yes, I think so.”  I’ll have to skip breakfast – which was fine; he wasn’t hungry anyway.
            Nisrin smiled.  “Just in case?”
            “Because it is my preference,” he corrected her as he shoved his šalvar down his hips and kicked them off.
            She hummed disbelievingly and there was a shade of something to her smile that prickled uncomfortably across his skin.
            “I am allowed few choices about any part of my life – even my own body – there is no just in case; it is a preference.  I am allowed,” he bit out, surprised at the sudden heat of his own resentment and anger, as he jabbed his thumb into the waistband of his zir-šalvar.
            “You’re right.  I’m sorry, Effendi.  I should not have teased you.”  She didn’t try to touch him when she apologized – most people would have; he appreciated that about her.  He drew a slow, deep breath.
            “My apologies.  I have no right to speak to you like that; please forgive me,” he muttered, head aching with guilt and anger.  He hated feeling, hated the simmering resentment and anger, the overwhelming grief and sadness, and he hated the suffocating feeling of nothingness in his chest, compressing his lungs and crushing his heart.  He wanted it to stop; he wanted all of it to just stop.
            “Of course.  Take those off and we’ll finish.”  There was a slight catch in her breath when the poorly healing wounds on his thigh were revealed, but she made no comment.  He appreciated that.
            “Kadija said I should ask you to thread my eyebrows,” he said as he settled back and watched her spread the sugaring paste across his skin.  “Do you think you’ll have time?”
            “Of course, aziz-am,” she replied, smoothing paste over his thigh with a gently curved metal spatula.  “I’m not going to sugar the area around your injuries.  Those wounds look angry, Effendi.  Have you been to see the medics?”
            He gritted his teeth and scowled at the ceiling.  “There is no need.”
            He didn’t want the medics to know he was cutting himself with his blade; they’d tell Kadija, Al Mualim, try to make him stop.  Other people, they cannot understand, his mother had whispered to him, blade sliding across her skin and then his.  Strength is built upon sacrifice.  Embrace the pain, my treasure, it will only make you stronger.  Without Sirocco, his blade was the only way he could feel anything.  It was the only thing left of his own that the Order couldn’t take from him.  He didn’t want to give it up.
            There was disagreement in Nisrin’s sigh, but she let the subject drop.  He made the appropriate sounds of interest and encouragement, when required, as she told him the latest about her daughter and beloved grandson – how many teeth he had lost, how strong and fast and smart he was getting.  It was a comfortably familiar rhythm, the cadence of her chatter and smooth circuit of positions sugaring required to leave him nearly as bare as a houri.  She did his groin last, leaving him completely smooth except for the neatly trimmed rectangle of hair above his penis and the trail of coarse dark hair from his navel that led to it.  Sirocco liked it like that.
            “I’m sorry, begum,” he murmured as he strapped his blades back on.
            She didn’t bat an eye.  “I understand, aziz-am; I can’t tell anyone something I can’t remember.”
            The taste of regret was acerbic at the back of his throat as he pulled the memory of the wounds on his thigh from her mind and watched it dissipate on the hardwood floor before he silently finished dressing.
            “I almost forgot, I have something for Georg,” he said, fishing a package out of the pocket of his robes.
            “You shouldn’t have,” Nisrin beamed as she accepted it.
            “I saw it in the village and thought he might like it,” he explained awkwardly as she exclaimed admiringly over the carved wooden lion he’d bought. 
            It had been out on one of the tables in front of the woodworkers’ shop and he’d absently picked it up with the intention of sending it to Darium and Cyrus before he remembered that Malik’s twins were dead.  He’d stood there for what felt like ages trying to put it back down, the knowledge that it would never be held in their small hands, cherished and played with and fought over, sticking broken glass in his lungs.  It was beautifully made, sanded satin smooth, tightly jointed and strung with rubber bands, far more expensive than most people would be able to spend for a child.  Putting it back would be admitting that they really were gone, that there wasn’t anyone left in his life to buy toys for.  Then he remembered Nisrin’s grandson, a few years younger than the twins had been, and he bought it, taking comfort that someone’s little boy would play with the lion.
            “This must have been very costly-” she started with a worried frown as she examined the quality of the craftsmanship.
            “It deserves to be played with,” he insisted.  “Taken on adventures and made the hero of a child’s stories.  Wouldn’t your grandson like to be the storyteller?”
            “He’d love that.”  She looked up at him with a watery smile.  He watched a tear slide down her cheek and he knew that she knew about Malik, even though he’d never told her and she hadn’t asked.  “He already hero worships you, this will make you a veritable deity in his eyes.”
            “Tell him it’s from you.  Real heroes don’t kill people for money.”  He pulled his hood up.
            “You are a good man for a boy to admire, Altaïr Effendi; he’ll know you bought this for him,” she insisted.
            “Do what you will.  I’m going to be late.”  He hesitated and then squeezed her shoulder, hating how stilted and awkward he felt.  “As-salāmu ʿalayki.”
            She squeezed his bicep in response.  “Waʿalaykumu s-salām.  Take better care of yourself, sheereen-am.  I’ll worry if you get too thin.”
            He acknowledged her concern with a sigh and a defensive gesture as he turned to leave.  He hated being late.