Shay's head ached when he finally woke up, and something—everything, really—felt wrong. His body didn't quite fit him, and that should be something he was used to after how many universes he had been through by now. But in all those worlds, Shay had still been himself. Older, younger, sometimes sick, sometimes too skinny or too fat, but always himself.
And thinking about his time in those other worlds made Shay realize what else was wrong. His universes were gone. Just… gone. And he did not mourn their loss, apart from one thing. Hope.
His Hope. The one he had caught in another world through his own mistake, and who was now… what? Those worlds were gone, did that mean they were just out of his head, or were they completely gone? Hope was due to be executed in a couple of days, but that was an entirely different kind of death as an entire universe winking out of existence. And there were all the other people in that world—good people, like that world's Shay, who had helped him, or Arno. Or what about the billions or trillions of people on all the worlds that were (or had been) in his head?
He sat up, head spinning, and knocked his knee into the other person sprawled out unconscious next to him. For a second, Shay thought it must be Arno. He could dimly remember Arno's urgent, worried voice pleading with him to do… something, before Shay had woken up all the way. But while this boy was around Arno's age, he was stockier and somehow rougher, and Shay's mind went absolutely blank as it reached unsuccessfully for some kind of explanation.
But then the boy groaned and rubbed at his face as he sat up unsteadily, and when his eyes focused on Shay they were bright blue. They were Arno's eyes, and they were lit up with a fierce, excited happiness Shay had only really seen from Arno a few times in his life.
"Arno?" he asked, hesitantly, and his own voice sounded upsettingly unfamiliar in his ears.
"It worked," Arno said. He sounded excited, and Shay could see no reason for that, the way things stood now. "Do you still have your universes?"
"No!"
Arno let out a cheer of triumph, and hugged Shay tight. Shay, still confused beyond reason, did not return it. "What's going on?" he demanded. "What did you do?"
"I—" Arno pulled away, frowned at Shay through that unfamiliar face. And yet… maybe unfamiliar wasn't the right word. When he really looked, Shay could see bits of Arno here and there on this new face, and the rest of him looked… Shay couldn't place it, but he almost looked like someone he'd used to know. "It was the animus potion. If you don't have any universes inside you, Hope won't want you. She'll leave you alone, Shay! It's the perfect solution."
Except that it wasn't, because—"No, Arno," Shay said softly.
"But it is!" he insisted, and his stubborn determination fit Arno's new face well. "What's she going to do to you now that she can't run her experiments?"
"Probably kill me," Shay said bluntly.
"That seems like a pretty extreme escalation," Arno said, crossing his arms. "Experiments are one thing, but murder?"
"I haven't been entirely honest with you," Shay admitted. "Hope doesn't belong here. She's… years and years ago, when I first hurt her, I didn't just hurt Hope's brain physically. I switched her mind with a Hope from another universe. And I didn't know it for a long time, not until after I was back here." The words were coming faster and faster, and Shay couldn't have stopped them even if he'd wanted to. "I'm still seeing them, Arno, or—I guess that's over now. So I was. Every time I fell asleep. And I found my Hope, and she… she's been in prison ever since she switched with the Hope that's here now. On death row, actually, because that other Hope was a murderer. A psychopath, a serial killer. And my Hope has been sitting in jail for those crimes, while the one that actually committed them walked free. Here."
"You never told me," Arno whispered. Then, louder—"You never told me!"
"I didn't want to worry you."
"How do you think I'm feeling now?" Arno demanded.
Shay didn't answer. It was a fair point.
"So if she's a murderer," Arno said, "Is she the one that killed Kadar?"
"It's more than likely, yes," Shay said. "That's her style."
Arno groaned, rubbing at his face with his hands. Shay thought he might have been wiping away new tears. "Come on," he said, pulling at Shay's arm without looking at him.
"Where are we going?"
"Anywhere. I don't know. But I didn't come this far just to let you die now."
"We'll never get out of here," Shay objected. "She has guards everywhere."
"And we have two psychics," Arno said calmly.
"Ezio's here?" Shay asked, and Arno gave him a confused look.
"No."
"But you said— who's the other psychic?"
"It's genetic," Arno said, like this was supposed to explain everything. It didn't.
"And?" Shay demanded impatiently.
Arno's response was to pull out his phone and open the camera. "Here," he said. "Look at yourself."
Shay almost dropped the phone, he was so surprised by what he saw on the screen. The man picked up on the phone's camera was a stranger, eerily similar to Shay's mental image of himself but off somehow. Honestly, he looked like an older version of what, or who, Arno had become. Every feature had a tint of something… else. Of something—
Of Arno. But it was not until Shay saw his eyes that he put it all together. He must have known it, on some level. That was what the potion did, after all, took two people and combined their DNA. But he hadn't really realized what that meant until now, that there were pieces of himself in Arno and pieces of Arno in him.
Shay's eyes had turned pale, icy blue. A psychic's eyes. "Oh."
And as if this were a signal of some kind, the visions kicked in. Shay dropped the phone and groaned like he'd been punched in the gut. Everywhere he looked, little pieces of the future were playing out in front of him, scenes of things that made no sense to him without any context.
"It's okay," Arno said. "Are you—" he hesitated, then pulled at Shay's arm. "Are you okay?"
"How do you do this?" Shay asked.
"Lots of practice. I'll help you, like Ezio helped me."
"How?"
"Just focus on one thing at a time," Arno said. "Like—look." He pointed Shay's gaze toward the door. "Do you see that?"
He saw Hope, shouting in wordless rage as she rushed through the door. Shay flinched away, despite knowing it was just a vision, it couldn't hurt him. Yet. "Yes."
"That's a good vision."
"She looks pretty pissed."
"Because she just came in and found you gone," Arno said. "So come on, let's go!"
And Shay allowed himself to be led away without protest. And the farther they got from the room, the more insistently his mind turned back to Hope. His Hope. The Hope he would never be able to see again.
-/-
Shay was gone when Hope came back to his room. Just gone, and the guards didn't know where (or even when) he left. Useless bastards. Hope growled and shouted until one of them pointed out that well they did have security cameras, after all. Maybe if she wanted to know what had happened so badly, she should look at that.
Hope put the guard on her mental list of people that need to fucking die and made a mental note to track him down later. He'd die for his rudeness alone. His family would die because he'd lost Shay.
But she looked at the security footage anyway. She saw everything—Arno's rescue, the potion, the loss of almost a million universes. Including Hope's own home. And that loss… hurt. In a way Hope hadn't expected it to. She'd never wanted to go back, but she'd wanted it to be there.
Well. If Arno thought this little game, this stupid little trick was going to save Shay, he was wrong. All this had done was put him on the kill list next to Shay. Maybe in front of Shay. Hope momentarily debated whether it would be more satisfying to make Arno watch her kill Shay, or to make Shay watch her kill Arno. Both had their merits.
She'd figure something out. Maybe kill them both at once (she'd never done two at the same time before). Hope usually wasn't a fan of cliché supervillain moments, but she was starting to consider some extremely elaborate plans for the two of them.
She was just heading off after them when William Miles came hurrying toward her, anger etched across every line of his face. "You went and lost him," he said. "After all the money and time we spent on getting Cormac back, you lost him."
"Miles, trust me," Hope growled. "This is not the time—"
"No," he snapped. "You've had him for all of two hours, and—"
She hit him, then, and would have done more, wanted to do more, but as she was reaching blindly for a weapon someone kicked her hard in the head. Hope reeled back, clutching at the place where her head was suddenly radiating pain. But she was a fighter, a hunter, a killer, and she wasn't planning to go down easily.
Hope swiped out blindly at her unseen attacker, but she was on the ground and they were stronger. A second hit made her vision start to swim, and the third was enough to send her at once into a dark unconsciousness.
-/-
Desmond looked at his father, then back down at Hope's body.
For once in his life, William looked gob smacked. "Desmond?"
"She was trying to kill you," Desmond said. "Arno told me." It had been the only semi coherent thing Arno had said, when he stopped by the house to demand the animus potion. "Your father's in danger, Hope wants to kill him."
And Desmond could tell by the scowl that his father both knew who Arno was and didn't much like him. Well, big surprise. Who did the man like? But even he couldn't argue with a psychic.
"Did that psychic tell you that you had to come save me?"
Desmond didn't answer immediately. He had crouched down over Hope's body, and started to dig through her bag. He wasn't sure what he was looking for—a weapon, or some kind of explanation, or… something else. But something else was exactly what he found. A heart in a jar, and Desmond knew at once whose it was. Kadar's. And it ate at him, the sight of the heart, and the memories of the little boy he'd taken into his home, the man he'd grown into.
"Arno didn't tell me what he'd seen me do," Desmond said softly. "I just decided to come."
"Why?"
"I don't know. I really don't."
William took a breath. "So she's… Hope—"
"A serial killer from another world," Desmond said. "Yep."
"Well," William said. There was a long moment of silence, as they both studied Hope where she lay. Then he kicked at her a little. "What a bitch."
Desmond cracked a smile. For the first time in his life, possibly, he agreed with his father wholeheartedly.
-/-
Shay was not doing very well by the time Arno actually got him back home. There was no question of taking him anywhere else, not when Shay was suddenly shaking under the shock of visions, and anyway he… he could see them going to Arno's house, as plain and as true as the present moment.
"What happens after this?" Shay asked, when Arno had settled Shay somewhere safe. He had no plans whatsoever. No ideas. Nothing.
"Dunno," Arno said. "I'm going out."
"Stay."
"I can't," Arno said reluctantly. "I want to." He sat down next to Shay and touched him—hesitantly, on the forearm, then drew back. Shay wished he wouldn't, and put his arm across Arno's shoulder to pull him close. "I want to stay here and pretend everything's back to normal. I want things to actually be normal. But Hope killed my best friend. She can't keep walking around free. And your Hope—"
"She's gone, Arno," Shay said dully. And it hurt to admit, but it was true. Lying to himself wouldn't make anything better.
"Never know," Arno said, in a tone that was almost cheerful. "So I'm going out again, to follow my visions and… see where they take me, again."
"I'm coming with."
"You're staying here," Arno said insistently. "Where it's safe. Well—safeish. Dad's here. And he remembered where he's from so I don't think he'll like you being here too. But you don't really look like you did the last time he saw you so…"
"So I'll just look like a home invader is all."
"You're smart," Arno said. "You'll figure it out."
He got up and started to go, but Shay pulled him back. "Hey," he said. "If you have to go, come back safe."
"I promise," Arno said, hugging Shay hard. "I love you."
"Love you too, kid."
But then Arno was gone, and Shay was blessed with all of five minutes alone before Charles Dorian came down the stairs. Shay gripped the back of his chair, uncertain what to do. He wasn't the only one that looked changed; Charles was physically the same, yes, but the way he carried himself was suddenly transformed. "Cormac?" Charles asked.
"Yes."
"You look different."
"Magic," Shay said, and watched Charles flinch at the word.
"Because that's real here."
"It is," Shay said, and he was already braced for Charles's inevitable anger. Instead, the man sat down (in the farthest possible seat from Shay, but still) and shook his head.
"I don't know what to make of my mind anymore," he said. "I hate the man you are in another world, but that's not you. I hope."
"It's not."
"I have a son that isn't my son," Charles went on. "A boy that looks like me, but isn't mine and doesn't want me."
"He doesn't look like you anymore," Shay said. He didn't know if that was supposed to make things better or worse, but Charles looked relieved. Like Shay had just lifted some burden of responsibility off his shoulders.
"What does he look like, then?" Charles asked.
"Like me."
Charles nodded. "I can't say I'm surprised," he said. "Maybe I'm—I'm glad."
"Glad?" Shay asked. "You haven't trusted me since you woke up from your coma."
"And now I know why," Charles said. "It's a relief, honestly. I could never figure out why I thought you were bad news. Now I know I must have been thinking of the other you."
"I'm not him."
"You're not. And Arno trusts you," Charles agreed. "He's not… he's not my son. But he is a good person, and he trusts you. You're good for each other."
"And you?" Shay kept his eyes on Charles, and the shadows of another world dancing around him as visions. "What would be good for you."
Charles sighed. "I just want to go home."
"You—" Shay's breath caught in his throat as a new vision, bright and clear against the pale flickers that had come before them, suddenly lit up the room. And it shouldn't have been possible, but there it was. "You will."
And if Charles could get home, maybe it wasn't too late for Hope.
-/-
Arno had no idea where he was going until he was almost there, and then he didn't know why he was surprised. Because they were trying to find a way into another world, and Arno was vaguely aware that Shay had been working with some team at work to figure out what was going on with his powers. The powers he used to have. (Part of Arno's mind wandered off on a tangent at this point, thinking about how Shay had basically traded in a million universes for being psychics, and how this time Arno would get to help him figure out how everything worked. He pulled himself firmly back onto track. There were other things to worry about at the moment).
Like breaking into the mage tower where Shay worked. It was no good trying to walk in the front door, the guy at the front desk now was nowhere near as understanding as Gist had been when Arno was a kid. He'd hold things up and delay until it was way too late. Arno used the deliveries entrance around the back, holding his breath against the harsh smells of chemicals and magical plants stored in this part of the tower.
An electronic keypad blocked Arno's way onward, but yes, psychic, and it only held him back for a few moments. Then he was running upstairs, all the way to the lab where Shay worked these days. It wasn't empty, he'd known it wouldn't be, but crowded with people.
Arno looked to Altair first, the most familiar to him out of everyone. "Hey," he said. Then—because the confused looks the others were giving him had abruptly reminded Arno that he looked different now—he added, "I'm Arno."
"What happened to you?" Altair demanded, and Arno shook his head. He
"Doesn't matter."
"Why are you here?" Altair asked. He looked tired, and Arno thought with a twinge of guilt about what Altair must be going through at home. Kadar's burial. Malik's grief. It was a wonder he'd managed to come into work at all. Maybe this was how he coped, maybe he couldn't be around his family at the moment. Whatever the reason, Arno simply chose to be grateful.
"Because—" he took a deep breath, praying that they would believe him, then went on all in a rush. "Shay lost all the universes inside his head, but apparently the Hope in this world is a psycho mass murderer that's supposed to be in another universe but got switched with the one from here and we need to put them back. I had a vision that I was supposed to come here so please, please tell me one of you knows a way to help."
He stood there, panting slightly, until the woman next to Altair (oh, and the visions Arno got from looking at the two of them, doing things together that made Arno turn bright red) nods. "We were close to finding a way into other worlds a little while ago," she says. "But when we went to Shay, he told us to stop looking. He said it was dangerous."
"Oh. So you—you don't know how to do it?"
"Well." The other woman in the room, darker, with a smile like the Cheshire Cat, crossed her arms and leaned back against a work table. "Nobody ever really thought about listening to him."
"So you do know—"
"We can get you wherever you need to go," Connor says firmly, from a far corner of the room. "What about Shay?"
"He's busy adjusting to being psychic," Arno said. Then, as everyone opened their mouths more or less at the same time, added—"Don't ask why he's psychic. Just help me. Please?"
A moment of silence, and then Altair's friend nodded. "Come with me," she said. "We'll get you where you need to go."