Desmond wakes to find Altair kneeling over him, their faces barely a foot apart. He jerks back, and Altair raises an eyebrow. "What are you doing here?" Desmond demands. Then he looks around. They're in a grassy field somewhere. He doesn't know the place, but they're alone. There's nothing in sight but the two of them.
And, on the ground between them, the apple of eden. Desmond stares at it, then at Altair. "What's going on?"
"You don't know?" Altair asks.
"Why would I?" Desmond asks. "Hallucination, maybe?" He stands up, and there's no pain. "This has to be inside my head. I should have the tar beat out of me."
"I know," says Altair. "I was there."
"You were there," Desmond repeats. "How-" then something clicks. "You killed those guards."
Altair half leans away from him, and Desmond recognizes the gesture. He's spent enough time in his ancestor's head to recognize that Altair doesn't want him to see his expression. "It seemed better than dying."
"Maybe," says Desmond. "Instead I'm stuck inside my own head talking to-" what? A hallucination? That's what this has to be, but it doesn't feel like one. It feels real.
"How did this happen?" Altair asks. "I felt you in my mind for weeks, and then I woke to find myself in yours."
"You felt me in your head?" Desmond asks. "But you-" He turns away. "You're not real." The other way of thinking about it, that somehow his time in the animus could affect Altair, a thousand years in the past, was not a good one. It was bad enough without dragging anyone else into it
"I'm as real as you are."
And Desmond looks at him, hard. And somehow, he knows it's true. "Shit," he says. "You are. You're real, and you're inside my head-"
"You were in mine first," says Altair. "How did that happen, exactly?" He doesn't seem angry, as Desmond would have expected. More curious, and maybe a little resigned. So Desmond explains the animus, as best he can.
"I don't know why you're in my head, though," he says. "It's like, somehow the animus got reversed... but that doesn't even make sense-" he trails off, because the apple has suddenly caught his attention. It rests on the ground between them, glowing gently, still in the same place it was in when he woke up. "What's this doing here?" he asks.
But before Altair can answer, he hears voices. Faint at first, then louder. And just as he thinks he can recognize them, he wakes up, back in the real world, and there are Lucy and Rebecca and Shaun, all talking at once.
"Thank God," says Lucy. "I wasn't sure we'd be able to pull you out."
Desmond mutters something, but he's barely paying attention, and he doesn't look at her. He can see Altair now, half visible, standing just behind the other three.
"Are you okay?" Rebecca asks.
"Yea," Desmond says, and forces himself to pay attention. "Fine. What happened?"
"Nothing," says Rebecca. She darts away from him, back to her computer, where she starts pointing to a series of numbers and data that mean absolutely nothing to him. "See, when I tried to hook you into your ancestor's memory, it sort of... rejected you halfway through. Like, part of your brain could sync to the memory, but the rest couldn't."
Desmond tries not to look at Altair.
"I'll run through the code tonight and we'll try again tomorrow." Rebecca sighs and rubs her face. "It might just be from all the time you spent going through Altair's memories. It might just be taking a while for your brain to switch tracks."
"I've never heard of that happening before," Lucy says.
"And the animus doesn't affect everyone the same way," says Rebecca. She turns to Desmond. "You might as well get some rest. It's going to be a long day tomorrow."