Title: Requirement
Author: ateanalenn
Fandom: Assassin's Creed I /Harry Potter
Characters: Harry Potter, Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad, Malik Al-Sayf
Rating: Gen, PG, a few swear words.
Word count: 3350 words
Author note: Post the current world situation, I've been writing a lot of journaling and stream of consciousness, but fiction writing has taken a huge backseat in the last months. And as usual, stopping for a while make it feel like I'll never be able to write fiction/dialogue again. I had no ideas or creativity, no clue where to start/which fandom or character to use. So I turned to fan-flashworks for a prompt. And for the first time in weeks, here is an actual, complete ficlet. It's nonsense, there's barely a plot and it barely has a sense, but it's complete! Also, not beta read at all. I started writing two days ago, so it didn't leave me a lot of time until the end of the challenge. I'll edit in a few days before posting to AO3.
AO3 link: pending
Summary: 4th Year is a pain in his ass, so Harry hides away in the Room of Requirement and daydreams about wishes of a new life away from all this mess. Word to the wise: making wishes in a place swimming in magic? In a word: don't.

 

—

"This is a nightmare," Harry whispers under his breath. Then he ducks behind a boulder as footsteps grow closer.

"Where's the intruder!" The... soldier? barks over the sound of armor grinding as his underlings halt in front of him.

"We do not know, sir. No one saw him since he landed in the courtyard."

At least, risking magic in order to force a translation spell from one of the soldiers to his brain helped a lot. Not a single man around even twitched at the wave of magic either, so Harry's relatively certain that they're only muggles. Muggles who mentioned Damascus though, and while Harry isn't big on Geography, especially as Hogwarts basically ditched all basic classes, he still knows that's nowhere near England. And that no one still dresses like that, Middle East or not.

Falling asleep in the Room Of Requirement is feeling more and more like the worst idea he's had in his small life, even if it helped him escape the sneers and accusations of cheating from badge wearing assholes.

"Search again! The man has to be an Assassin, find him!"

An "Assassin"? Weirdly, Harry has the feeling that the leader used that word as title, instead of the expected slur.

Questions or not, time to go.

Harry waits until the leader paces across the courtyard, then slides away. The Cloak of Invisibility is good and well, but he's still leaving tracks behind and he can't think of any spell that would erase his steps discreetly. A great buff of wind does not count as discreet. He' just lucky that none of them has glanced down yet.

—

He made it up and over a couple of low buildings, picking his way away from the courtyard and keeping his fingers crossed that he's going in the right direction and not straight in the center of power of those soldiers, when he stumbles upon the man.

Well, he doesn't stumble so much as jerks to a halt.

On the other side of the rooftop, in the shadow of a chimney, squats a man. He's wearing a white fitted robe, blending almost perfectly with the white-ish buildings. The hood is drawn up, shadowing his eyes from the harsh sun, and yet he's staring straight at the point where Harry invisibly stands.

There's a steel sword at his side, a couple of suspicious stains giving the whole encounter a rather sinister shade.

Harry resists the urge to take a deep breath in order to calm his nerves, and slides a couple of steps to the side, being particularly careful to move soundlessly. He's had enough practice for that while pacing up and down Hogwarts at night.

The man's head follows his movement.

Harry does not swear aloud, but it's a close call. He has the worrying thought that he might just have found the Assassin that leader mentioned.

"Dead body! Dead body, the Assassin is here!" Someone cries out way too close from their position, and just as suddenly a great bell rungs above the city. Cries of "the Assassin" rise from the streets and somewhere the leader screams to "check the roofs, find him!"

The one who found that body way too close starts climbing the ladder hooked right next to Harry.

Harry, in particularly Gryffindor way, panics.

He dashes across the rooftop, slides to a stop next to the man—Assassin?—, and swings his Invisibility Cloak over the both of them. He hunkers down just fast enough to hide their feet from the soldier appearing over the rooftop.

There's a blade poking uncomfortably just under his ribs.

"Clear!" The soldier calls out, then runs across a couple of planks and over to the next rooftop, searching. The entire area is crawling with soldiers now.

—

Harry spends an uncomfortable who-know-how-many hours crouching on that rooftop, hiding under his cape with a stranger, the hot sun beating on their heads and freezing up every time a soldier dashes past their hiding place. They're just lucky that most people don't have much to do near a chimney. The blade is still poking at his skin, sharp enough that the fabric of his casual clothes parted around it like butter. He can feel the pinpricks bleeding sluggishly, but there's nothing to do about it. He doesn't expect the man to react well if he were to try to push away the blade or some other bright idea. At least he wasn't wearing his heavy, woolen uniform to sleep in the Room of Requirement.

About the only thing he can do is try to come up with an explanation for his sudden spacial misplacement. But there's not much about that. He fell asleep in the Room of Requirement, day-dreaming as he's been doing a lot since he was a child, and with renewed enthusiasm this year as the whole school turned their back on him, that he had a place to go, people to trust at his back, and a clear path in front of him instead of the incertitude of Voldemort-will-he-won't-he. The obvious answer is that the Room found a way to fulfill his requirement. Now, the question would be, is this permanent or a dream.

And also, why did Harry feel an immediate, visceral distrust of the men wearing armor and a red cross on their breast, just like he cannot stand the sight of the Dark Mark?

One word keeps ringing through his mind. "Crusades." He can't tell if it's the vague remnant of Primary School History classes, or knowledge supplied by the Room.

Either way, he isn't particularly in a hurry to find out. He doesn't remember much, but he's pretty sure that the time of the Crusades was a time of horror stories of various religious people fighting each other and the current powerful people from about everywhere, while the civilians where stuck in the middle.

Bottom line, he is not qualified to survive here.

The blade resting against his side retracts with a little "snick" and Harry is shocked out of his contemplation. Night is falling over the city, the soldiers finally giving up and heading back toward their headquarters. Consensus seems to be that the "Assassin was long gone before they even started looking" and they'd never find him in the dark when they can't even catch him during daylight.

"Come," the man orders.

Harry goes.

—

Harry goes, which goes as well as you'd expect, after watching the white hooded man jump over a hallway straight to the next rooftop, while Harry stood on the other side with his mouth hanging opened.

The man doesn't say anything, but he radiates a very clear "Why me" and "Can anyone be that incompetent" vibe. Harry carefully makes his way over planks and trellis, most of the time on his knees, clinging to the wood. He has the vague feeling that they might be going in circles, either to confuse him, a potential enemy, or to avoid the actual enemies. Or probably both.

Eventually, they reach yet another roof, this one with a little enclosed patio set in the middle of the building, another wooden trellis with a trapdoor protecting it from invasion from the roof. The man in white jumps straight down.

Harry sits at the edge, feet dangling above the patio, then turns around, gripping the wooden frame, and lets himself drop down. When he's stopped swinging, he releases the trellis and falls down the last meter or so, staggering as his heat weakened body doesn't appreciate the maneuver. His cloak is hanging sideways and back by now, so Harry simply pulls it off and stashes it into the expanded pocket of his jeans, next to the little bags of non-perishable food that he keeps there at all time.

The man stands near the entrance to the building, staring at Harry under his hood, then says, "come," and turns around, stalking in the building like he doesn't have to worry about Harry escaping. Granted, he isn't the best climber ever, so getting back up on the roof would probably take him more than a moment. Definitely.

Harry rolls his eyes at himself and all the bullshit adventures he keeps stumbling into head first, then steps into the building too.

—

"What is the meaning of this, Altaïr!"

Altaïr—apparently—ducks his head and stares sideways at the new man from under his hood.

The new man is wearing a black over-robe, one sleeve empty and pinned to his torso. He wears his dark hair cropped close to the skull, which Harry silently envies, given the relentless heat, even as the night falls. Nights in the desert might be cold, but the heat doesn't just evaporates away as soon as the sun disappears.

"Malik."

"What. Is. The. Meaning. Of. This, Altaïr?!"

"He appeared from nowhere in the middle of the Templar's local headquarters and then disappeared away under a piece of clothe that made him invisible to mundane eyesight."

Implying that Altaïr—and possibly Malik—had not so mundane eyesight. Which makes almost sense. That or he can sense magic, to be able to track Harry that precisely.

"Invisible? What nonsense are you spouting now!"

"Show him."

Harry frowns, glances once at Malik, then glances at Altaïr, then resigns himself to the fact that he couldn't take down Altaïr and run away even without accounting for the blades. And one arm missing or not, Malik looks like he could retaliate with barely a second of delay, in case of attack. There's of course the fact that Harry knows fuck all of why he's here, how he's here, or even where "here" is.

He pulls out the cloak again, throws it around his body in a practice move, then stares at Malik.

The man's eyes are unfocused for a brief moment, his eyes roaming once around the area where Harry disappeared, then he frowns and suddenly is glaring straight at Harry, just like Altaïr had done hours ago.

"Explains," he orders Harry, this time.

Harry hesitates, grimaces, then throws up his mental hands. "Magic," he blurts out.

"Magic."

You could bottle that much skepticism, it's even stronger than Snape's.

"Magic. I'm a wizard."

"A wizard. A child wizard who made such a powerful artifact."

"Ah, no. It's an heirloom, I got it from my father. I think it might have been crafted by an ancestor."

"And the magic still goes on even now and enables you to twist the sight of men."

Malik and Altaïr exchange a knowing look which rather confuse Harry. "I don't think there's much "sight twisting"," he says. "As far as I know it does nothing to your mind? Just hides me from sight."

"But you yourself don't know for sure."

"Well—"

"Never mind that. What are you doing in Damascus. Why invade the Templars?"

"I didn't mean to? I think I fell asleep in... a magical place, and then I woke up as I landed, some soldier time screaming at me. I panicked and hid."

"And then kept on hiding."

"They didn't look nice."

"And Altaïr looks nice?"

Altaïr is scowling under his hood, making silently know exactly what he think of his supposed "niceness".

"Well, more than the soldiers anyway."

"You panicked when you saw the Templar Cross."

Well, one thing going for him, Altaïr was certainly observant. Harry hadn't even realized why he'd panicked until well after he'd been hiding away.

"I... did." Harry shrugs. "To be honest, I don't know why I did. They just... felt like they weren't friendly?"

"Hum." Malik stares down at Harry, piercing eyes making him squirm on the spot. Then he looks back at Altaïr again. His eyes make the circuit a couple of times, then he grimaces at Altaïr. "He doesn't look like your son."

"What?" Harry yelps, "no! Of course, he's not, I'm not even from—" Well. Harry clamps his mouth shut. There's no way he can finish that sentence without making himself sound like a lunatic. He's lucky that they haven't killed the crazy "wizard" already.

"No, you're obviously not from here," Malik says, looking him up and down. "But you have the gift."

"The what now?"

"The gift." Malik hesitates. Next to them, Altaïr stands silent and unhelpful, but Harry feels like it might simply his default setting. "A sort of... intuition, I suppose." He stares at Altaïr.

Altaïr keeps his silence for a time, then sighs. "It depends," he tells Harry. "It runs among family lines, but it doesn't manifests exactly the same way. It is a double sight for me, with people marked with a color depending on if they are allies, enemies, or no-one. My father, from what I learned, could tell who was important and who was dangerous, but dangerous doesn't mean enemy and important doesn't mean ally."

Harry nods to show that he understood the distinction, keeping his instinctive denial trapped behind his teeth. He's never seen colors like Altaïr speaks of, but... He's always been very efficient at knowing who to trust of not, hasn't he? That is, until he's started listening to Hermione's "logic" and pathological trust into authority people.

He'd thought that it was a manifestation of his magic, like some people have facilities casting charms versus transfigurating, for example, but...

Could he have a "gift", like Altaïr? Is that why the Room sent him here? He'd been wishing to be with people he could trust and have a clear enemy. Did the Room sent him to family in a time where the enemy wore its symbol proudly on a uniform?

What a nightmare. (but also, possibly, maybe, what a dream.)

—

He wakes up in a dark room. For an eternal moment, Harry doesn't know what happened, where he is.

Then he feels rough thread under his fingers and the scratch of a quill farther away, possibly in the next room. The door must be open. This is not his bed in Gryffindor tower, but there's no reason why someone would be scribbling while he slept in the Room of Requirement. And where else would he be, when the whole school seems to have turned on him with forceful outrage and a strong air of "I always knew that".

Harry shivers despite the blanket spread over him, and rolls up to his knees. A wet, room temperature rag flops down from his face and lands with a pathetic splat on the floor. The scratching stops.

He's barely managed to untangle himself from the blanket when a voice startles him so badly that he throws himself sideways and about brains himself against the wall.

"What the fuck!"

"Come," Malik repeats, his expression hidden in the dark. "And lower your voice, before you wake up the whole street."

Harry feels about half a foot tall when Malik is finished. He folds his blanket haphazardly in the dark, then gropes his way around the room and through the open archway. He still cannot hear any footstep, but once he's past the archway he can see the very soft glow of a barely visible candle behind the counter.

He goes toward the light slowly, wary of a half remembered low table that he thinks was sat in a corner of the room.

"I don't remember going to sleep," he whispers once he's reached the counter.

Malik lays down something in front of him and Harry tilts the plate and his head, trying to focus enough in the near darkness to make out what the dark shapes on the plate are. Dates, he think, possibly a piece of cheese? Maybe a piece of semi-hard cake too.

"Eat," Malik says. "And drink. You passed out."

"Why?"

"The sun. Altaïr said you spent the afternoon hiding under the sun. Didn't you feel queasy?"

Harry thinks back for a moment as he slowly eats his way through the offerings, in between sips of mint tea. "Yes, I think. But honestly, I thought it was all the running on rooftops and crossing over the streets on flimsy planks. I don't appreciate being very high up when I'm not in control of the potential fall."

Malik doesn't say a word for a long moment.

Harry finishes his plate while attempting to ignore the burn of the man's invisible stare. Malik is both extremely intimidating while also giving him the feeling that Harry would hate making mistakes and letting him down.

"You have very careful not said a word about where you come from." Malik remarks.

Harry shrugs.

Malik stares again, then asks. "When are you from?"

"I— What?"

"You do not wear clothes from this time or area. You keep looking around, lost. You did not know about the Crusaders. You are too careful with your words to not have things to hide."

"And what, your mind went straight to "you are not from this time"?"

"I have seen weirder."

Harry feels his eyebrows mate with his hairline. Weirder than a boy landing in the middle of a courtyard full of soldier, with a piece of clothe able to hide him completely from view?

What the hell kind of things has Malik been experiencing? Though now that he thinks about it, Altaïr was remarkably able to just... go with the flow, wasn't he?

Speaking of. "Where's Altaïr?"

"Sleeping," Malik tilts his head toward the enclosed garden.

"Oh."

"When are you from?"

The man is like goddamn Norbert with a bone. "I—"

"Stop lying and obfuscating, and answer my questions." Malik smacks a small, tightly closed jar on the table between them. "Or I'll use methods that you will dislike."

"Hum—"

"When are you from?"

Harry glances at Malik, then at the counter and the ominous jar, then he... caves like wet paper.

"1994? I don't know which year it is right now."

"1994." Malik takes a long, slow breath. "It is the year 1193."

"Holy crap."

Harry clamps his mouth shut at the glare Malik gives him for his use of profanity, but, wow. That's eight centuries in the past. And Hermione who kept saying that you couldn't even use Time Turner for a full day in the past. Guess when you use a device, or in this case, room, which has stewed into the ambient magic thrown around by hundreds of children almost year round for centuries, it's magically strong enough for a eight centuries jump into the past.

"Will you be going back to your time?"

"I— don't know? I'm not even sure how I got here. I was just in a... space full of magic, and I was hoping that, well— stuff. And then I was here."

"Hoping for stuff," Malik repeats with a pointed glance.

Harry shrugs.

"Hoping for family, maybe," Malik asks.

"I— Well. Yeah. Among other things, but. Yeah. That'd be nice, to have family and people like me who'd welcome me. I know it sounds crazy, but..."

"It sounds crazy," Altaïr says suddenly from behind them.

Harry jerks around, almost falling from his seat, and finds him standing in the archway to the garden.

"But," Altaïr murmurs, "we have seen many strange happenings." Altaïr looks at Harry a good long time, then slides closer. He tilts Harry's head, staring at his eyes for a moment. Then he steps back, one hand resting heavily on Harry's head. "Welcome to the Brotherhood, son."

Harry gapes wordlessly, then slams his eyes shut as they start to water. Could he...?

Maybe. Maybe not. But between staying in a place where two men who barely knows him would welcome him, despite his differences, just because he has a gift like Altaïr and therefore must be somehow of the same family line, or a castle full of two faces assholes who turn on him at the slightest hint of fake scandal...

Well. Maybe in First Year he would have been eager to go back to Hogwarts. Right now, living in the twelfth century sounds like a goddamn dream come true. He might come to regret it, but the idea of being mentored by Malik and Altaïr, of maybe even making a family with them.

Harry wants that.

—