#i more or less just finished my phd thesis after 471 pages and i might or might not be dead now

[heartoferebor]

He is twelve and the world is bright and difficult all at once.

‘So you want to be a sailor?’ his father asks and what is in his eyes is hard to define. Shay nods. Soon, the salty kiss of the sea becomes more familiar to him than the Boston air. The only thing he misses is, perhaps, Liam’s laughter; he often wonders about his friend. But it is good, the ocean and the wind and rough group of men who somehow accept him as one of their own. It is good – until the storm comes and greedily rips away the sliver of happiness he had managed to forge for himself.

*

He is twenty and the world is finally solid enough not to crumble in his hands.

Liam’s laughter is back and brighter than ever before. It is joined by Hope’s teasing and Kesegowaase’s gruff approval and Shay basks in all of them like in a warm spring; they are his brothers and sisters in the creed and although he will never be free from doubt, he has finally found a place where he belongs.

*

He is twenty-four and the world around him is aflame.

The ash is on his tongue and he will taste it for the rest of his life. The screams of the dying are a symphony of horror in his ears. When he shouts at Achilles it is because he could not hear his own voice over their clamouring otherwise. The innocents of Lisbon are not the only ones who die in these months; so does a life he thought safe, so do his dreams for a better world and belief in the words of men who claim to be building it. When the gunshot rings out and the bullet hits his shoulder there is a part of him that is glad it is over.

*

He is thirty-six and the world has finally settled, its waves no longer drowning him.

It is a strange sort of peace he has found; not the peace of the innocent or the boundlessly happy, but a peace that he can live with, even if the death he deals with his own hands will forever haunt his steps. But there is contentedness in the way the Morrigan cuts through the waves, in the sounds of Gist’s voice ringing across her deck and the smiles of the people at home he knows he helped feed through yet another hard winter. And, in its own way, there is even a piece of happiness where he had never expected to find it again, in the arms of a man whose kisses taste of blood and warmth all at once.  

*

He is fifty and watches as the world slowly turns grey once more.

Shay has long since given up on ‘what if’s and ‘if only’s, but even he cannot help but wonder what might have been, hadn’t fate stormed in once more and trampled it all under its bloody soles. The wrath in his blood and numb grip of loneliness wrangle inside him for superiority; but in the end he does not kill the ones responsible for ripping his happiness from him once more. Perhaps because he senses a soul he might have befriended in a different world; perhaps because Connor is now the only one left alive who carries a piece of Haytham. And so, instead of spilling blood, Shay simply watches the world around him lose all colour and keep on turning even though his own life has stopped moving.

*

He is eighty and the world is drifting away.

Somehow he has kept living, even as those around him slowly faded away. Gist died years ago, still a laugh on his lips even as the pneumonia took him; all the Templars he once fought with are dead and gone, most by Connor’s hands and Shay alone has escaped death again and again, carrying out his purpose to protect the Tree of Life as best as he could. But he is getting tired now and more and more often the spectres of the past are visiting him. He thinks he can hear Liam’s laughter and Hope’s chuckles sound through the forest beyond his home. He hears echoes of Gist’s and Monro’s voices in the salty wind that blows from the ocean at night and when he squints, he can see Haytham sitting at his desk in Shay’s room, intent on his writing and forehead creased in thought. It paints a smile on his lips.

*

He is eighty-two and the world has stopped.

Shay Patrick Cormac is laid to rest under a tree in a small graveyard in what was once Stuyvesant’s Farm. And perhaps it is chance, perhaps someone remembered, but he is not the only Templar to rest there; a former Grand Master’s grave is not far. There are whispers amongst the children of the neighbourhood that you can see two shadows standing on the roof of the small church when it is especially dark and you look hard enough; one wearing an old-fashioned tricorn hat and blue cloak, the other in clothes of black with a rifle on his back. They never speak but keep watch nonetheless; and under their eyes, it is said, the innocents will remain safe forever more.