There's a face haunting Shay's dreams.

It's not a particularly memorable face, and if not for the fact that it's literally haunting him at night, Shay would never have taken notice. But the face haunts him for months, every single night, until Shay has every inch of that face committed to memory. It starts to drive him a little bit crazy, it robs him of sleep at night, and then somehow it becomes just a normal part of Shay's life. He stops noticing it, and the face becomes just another part of Shay's life.

And then… Lisbon.

Even before everything goes to shit, Shay can tell there's something wrong. There's a strange feeling of being watched, and Shay keeps looking over his shoulder, fully expecting to see someone there. But no matter how quickly he turns, his invisible watcher is always just out of sight, on the edge of his vision or… or something.

The whole thing leaves him in a foul mood, and by the time he's opened the door to the secret room where the piece of Eden is hidden, Shay is in no mood to deal with any more strangeness. He mostly just wants to grab the piece and leave as quickly as possible, but he's only taken a few steps into the room when his whole body starts to shake. There's an impossible feeling of leaving some part of himself behind, and Shay whirls around, suddenly angry beyond reason.

There's a person standing there, a person with a face that Shay knows as well as his own. This is the man that's been haunting his sleep for months now, suddenly brought to life in front of him. He's ghostly and half transparent, and when Shay takes an angry swing at him the blade passes straight through. "Who are you?" he demands, barely keeping enough control over himself to avoid making a second attack. Clearly that's not going to work, and Shay does not want to be made a fool of, not today.

The man doesn't answer Shay's question, only throws his hands up and groans. "Not again," he complains, taking several steps away from Shay and kicking uselessly at the wall. "Seriously, every single time-"

"What are you talking about?"

"Nothing," the man says, resignation and frustration warring for dominance in his voice. "Don't worry about me, I shouldn't even be here."

"Something we definitely agree on," Shay growls. "But you are here, and I want to know why."

"It's a long story and I don't have that much…" the man's eyes wander past Shay, and widen suddenly as they fix on something behind him. "Time."

Shay, curious despite himself, turns to look as well.

He's been sent here for the express purpose of finding the piece of Eden, but now that he actually turns around and sees it, the thing looks nothing like Shay had expected. As much as he's been expecting anything at all, he'd thought it would be some dusty old artifact, falling apart and reduced to nothing more than a relic by the passage of time. He's certainly not expecting to see it glowing an impossible gold, bathing himself and the stranger in a light that somehow seems to reveal both more and less than it should.

"…that's not right," the stranger says softly, walking past Shay to examine the piece of Eden more closely. Shay follows at a slower speed, too confused to even bother demanding answers a second time. The phantom stranger stops in front of the piece of Eden, leaning over so his face is only a few inches from the light. He spends a very long time examining it in silence, until finally Shay gets impatient.

"What's wrong?" he asks, because he feels instinctively that the stranger is not going to answer questions like 'who are you' and 'what are you doing here'.

"This piece of Eden doesn't feel like any of the others I've seen," the man says. "It… doesn't feel like it's really here." He sounds distracted, like he's talking more to himself than to Shay, but he answers anyway.

"It doesn't feel like anything," he says. The stranger doesn't answer this. If anything, he almost seems to be purposefully ignoring Shay, shifting a fraction to put his back to the assassin and frowning down at the piece of Eden.

Shay frowns as well. "Hey," he says. "Are you just going to sit here and pretend I don't exist?"

No answer.

"I'm talking to you!"

When this too is met with only silence, Shay gets frustrated. He reaches out without thinking, grabbing at the piece of Eden. And this at least does get a reaction from the stranger, although not the one Shay would have expected. He jumps to his feet, eyes wide, blurting a protest that comes too late. "Shay! Don't-"

His hand closes around the piece of Eden, and everything around him shatters. The piece of Eden crumbles into dust under his grasp, and Shay's vision blurs. For a second he's seeing the world from two different points of view, he's thinking two different sets of thoughts. He's in both his own head and the stranger's (Desmond, he suddenly knows the man's name with a surety that almost scares Shay).

He reels backward, half falling, as his vision begins to stabilize. Shay presses his eyes closed, counts to five, and then opens them again. Desmond is gone, but this doesn't reassure him at all because-

"How does this always happen? I can't go half a week on my own without stumbling into someone else's head-"

Because he can still hear Desmond, inside his head, and it's freaking him out.

"Get out!" Shay growls. "Out!'

"I can't! If I could, I would. I don't need this happening again."

"What do you mean, 'again'?"

"Shay-"

Shay glares. Frustratingly, there's no one actually there for him to glare at, so he just narrows his eyes and stares at the wall.

"You can be pissed at me later, but for now you should seriously think about running."

And this is when Shay realizes that everything around him is shaking, and that the air is filled with a rumbling that can only be described as 'ominous'.

"Earthquake," Desmond supplies, less than helpfully. Shay is already running as fast as he possibly can. His body moves on a kind of terrified autopilot, and even as the earth rips itself below him, his mind is busy forming connections that are too terrible to be anything but true.

All this had started the moment he touched the piece of Eden. It caused all this. He caused all this. Shay hears the terrified screams of people dying on the streets around him, and knows that none of this would be happening without him. If he hadn't been stupid enough to play with some ancient technology he can't possibly understand- if he hadn't blindly followed orders- none of this would be happening.

This is all his fault, and not even unexpected weight of Desmond inside his mind can distract Shay from the horror of that realization.