Despite what Daniel had said, Desmond felt fine. His head didn't hurt at all, his heart had stopped pounding, and his stomach had stopped churning. He laced his fingers together behind his head and stretched out his shoulders as he stood at the door to the cabin. Then, with no real thought in his mind as to where he was going, he turned the doorknob and stepped outside...

And fell.

His mouth opened to scream but no sound came out, and when he hit the ground it didn't hurt, nor did his legs crumple beneath him. He looked around and realised that he wasn't in New Mexico at all. He was back in Rome, underneath the Santa Maria Aracoeli, and strange golden symbols were projected into the air, circling slowly overhead. Rebecca and Shaun were not there, no longer frozen in place, and Desmond realised with relief that their absence must mean they were still alive, somewhere. This was not a place for the living.

Lucy was there, though, sitting on the platform with her legs hanging over the edge, her left foot tucked tidily behind her right ankle as she peered at the ground far below. Desmond walked over and sat down next to her, their shoulders barely brushing.

'Hey, Lucy,' he said calmly, as though nothing had happened.

'Hi, Desmond,' she replied, as though he had not killed her at all. 'What are you doing here?'

'I don't know,' he answered honestly. 'Am I dead?'

She looked over at him, a strand of blonde hair falling down over her forehead as she did so. She tucked the lock back behind her ear and pursed her lips a little in thought as she looked him up and down. At last she said, 'I can't tell. Maybe. Do you want to be dead?'

'No,' Desmond responded immediately, before thinking the question over a little more carefully. 'No,' he said again. 'I'm real tired, Luce, real tired, but I don't want to die.'

She smiled, looking a good deal more relaxed than she ever had when she was alive. 'Glad to hear it,' she said.

Desmond thought about telling her that he hadn't meant to kill her, that it had been Juno who (what was that?) had forced him to do it (a memory of something, just out of reach), but he knew that Lucy already knew that. Instead, he reached out and laid his hand over hers, only to find that he couldn't really feel her skin beneath his. He looked back up at her face, concerned, and found that she was looking troubled as well.

'I don't know if I did the right thing, Desmond,' she confessed. Then she sighed, and shook her head. 'No, I know I didn't. I just ... I don't know what would have been the right thing to do.'

'Not selling us out would have been a good start,' Desmond pointed out, trying to keep his tone jovial.

'Should I have sold Warren out instead? At least when I was loyal to the Templars, it was my own free choice.' Her mouth twisted in sadness, and Desmond tried to squeeze her ethereal fingers in a sign of comfort. She looked up at him with a wry grin. 'Enough thinking in circles. Why are you here, Desmond?'

He was taken aback by the question. 'I just woke up here.'

Lucy socked him lightly in the arm.

'Ow!' Desmond protested, though it hadn't actually hurt. 'What was that for?'

'Think,' she scolded in her best schoolteacher voice, then repeated the words with greater emphasis. 'Why are you here? What am I trying to tell you?'

Desmond looked at her in abject confusion. 'I don't know. Why don't you just...?'

'That would be cheating,' she interrupted. 'That would be against the rules.'

'What rules?'

She sighed again and patted his hand, her touch like a phantom breeze. 'You'll get it eventually. I have faith in you.'

Desmond had no idea what she was talking about, and there was something more pressing on his mind. 'Can you forgive me, Lucy? For what I did to you?'

She contemplated him for a few seconds because smiling, a little sadly, leaning over and planting a soft kiss on his cheek, just by his ear, and whispering. 'No, I can't.'

Desmond sucked in a breath and closed his eyes, feeling hit tears pricking at the inside of his eyelids. 'Please,' he begged.

'I can't,' Lucy repeated, her lips brushing his ear. 'The dead can't forgive. I'm just a memory.'

And with those words, she pushed him gently off and he fell, tumbling slowly through the air, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, flashes of images appearing in front of him and disappearing just as quickly.

He stopped falling and found that he was sitting down again, his hands curled around a cup of coffee, a faint stain of nicotine-laiden smoke hanging in the air around him, and soft grey light filtering in through the grimy window of Harold Kaczmarek's kitchen.

Clay was sitting in the chair where he had died, his hands folded a little protectively over his torso as he sat, leaning back slightly, smirking at Desmond. 'Nice of you to drop in,' he said.

Not knowing quite what to say, Desmond lifted the cup of coffee to his lips and pulled in a mouthful, which he immediately spat onto the table when he found it to be ice cold, so cold it hurt his teeth.

'Sorry about that,' Clay said casually. 'There's no warmth here. Just cold. Sometimes it gets dark, too.'

Desmond forced himself to look up and meet Clay's eyes, and felt a welling of emotion build up in him, raw and painful. 'Clay.'

'Yeah?'

'I just fucking miss you, man.'

Clay tipped his head to one side. 'And you know I'm not really talking to you now, don't you?'

There was no holding them back now: tears tipped over Desmond's lower lashes and trickled down his cheek. 'Yeah,' he replied in a choked, miserable voice. 'That makes it worse.'

'You won't ever be able to talk to me again, and I won't ever talk to anyone else.'

Desmond involuntarily let out a burst of laughter through his tears. 'Geez, you could try sugarcoating it.'

Clay grinned. 'What's the point? You know I'm not really here, that I'm just a figment of your little drugged-up dream, and you know that I wouldn't have bullshitted you about that fact.'

Desmond scowled, brushing an arm over his face to dry it. 'I knew you way too well.'

'Maybe.'

A thought suddenly occurred to Desmond, and he looked at Clay pensively as the dead man dragged his cup across the table and nonchalantly took a sip of the freezing cold coffee.

'What were you going to say to me?' Desmond asked. 'When you stopped me outside of your old school, before you got distracted.'

Clay set the cup down and shrugged. 'Dunno.'

'Oh, come on.'

'Scout's honour,' Clay swore sincerely, holding up his three middle fingers. 'You don't know, so I don't know. Not really here, remember?'

'How could I forget, with you reminding me every five seconds?' Desmond replied sulkily. He was struck by another suspicion. 'Were you even a Boy Scout?'

Clay gave a mischievous smile. 'I don't...'

'You don't know, because I don't know, right,' Desmond sighed. He contemplated Clay, his morose mood returning. 'If I died, would I get to see you again? Really see you, I mean?'

A look of sudden sober concern crossed Clay's face. 'Don't talk like that.'

'Would I?' Desmond persisted.

'I don't know, and shut up about it. Don't even...' Clay broke off and rubbed a hand over his own face, as if trying to wipe the emotion from it. 'Just don't,' he concluded in clipped tones.

'But is there...?'

'Desmond, I don't know, alright?' Clay was clearly agitated now, and he stood up, the legs of his chair squeaking over the floor tiles. 'You're not in limbo, you're in your own head, talking to a projection of your own mind that just happens to look like me, and this projection of your own mind is telling you to stow it with the fucking suicide talk. What does that tell you?'

'It tells me...' Desmond's mind raced. 'Either it means I don't really want to die...'

'Good, you got it.'

'... Or it just means I know you would have hated the idea of me killing myself. It might not be a projection of my thoughts at all.'

Clay stared at him, poker-faced, then his body sagged a little, his weight resting on the hands that were laid flat on the table, and he hung his head in defeat. 'You're too good at this,' he said miserably. 'Look, you can find out whether or not there's an afterlife any time you like. You're going to find out eventually, no matter what happens. But until that day comes, you still have so much left to do.'

As Desmond mulled over Clay's words, he find himself squinting in a steadily brighteneing light, and raised his hand to shade his eyes. 'What's happening?' he asked.

Clay looked out of the window. 'Sun's rising,' he replied softly. 'You're going to wake up soon. You're already part of the way there.'

And as soon as he said it, Desmond realised it was true. Somewhere, a long way away, he could hear Daniel moving about the room, but he squeezed his far-away eyes tightly shut to delay the moment a little longer.

'I don't want to wake up!' he exclaimed fiercely. 'I don't want you to go.'

Clay reached over and patted Desmond on the shoulder. 'I'm already gone,' he reminded him. Then he moved his hand up until it rested just behind Desmond's neck, leaned down, and kissed his mouth, firmly but with incredible tenderness. Despite what he'd said earlier, the skin of his lips tasted very warm.

Wakefulness called to Desmond, but before he left he whispered into Clay's mouth, urgently, desperately needing to know, 'Who was that? Who did that? Was it me, or was it you?'

He felt Clay's lips curve against his own.

Then Daniel kicked the end of his bed to wake him up and Clay, the kitchen, and the kiss were all gone in an instant.

December 14th, 2012

'Good. Again.'

Desmond scowled and dropped his arm back to his side, the barrel of the pistol menacing the dust at his feet. 'If it was good, why do I need to do it again?'

'I said it was good, not that it was perfect. You need perfect aim even under stress. Right now you can't even manage perfect aim without stress.' Daniel nodded his head pointedly at the target that had been set up in the distance, the sun shining through the bullet holes in the man-shaped silhouette. 'Again.'

'You think I'm not stressed,' Desmond snapped, half-heartedly lifting the gun again.

By way of reply, Daniel raised his hand and flicked Desmond sharply and painfully on the ear.

'Ow! What the fuck?'

'Shoot the target,' Daniel said in a neutral voice, flicking Desmond's ear again, and then a third time, showing no mercy.

'Stop that!'

'I'll stop when you shoot the target.' Flick. Flick.

'Ugh, fine.'

Desmond pointed the gun at the target and fired, but he was distracted by the need to duck and lean away from the fingers attacking his ear, and even without looking he knew that he had missed the silhouette, striking an empty section of board.

'You see?' Daniel remarked. 'Not so good.' He flicked Desmond again on the tender, reddening shell of his ear and repeated: 'Hit the target and I'll stop.'

Desmond released a growl of pain and frustration and fired again with deliberate, sulky wildness, the bullet not even striking the board this time, instead vanishing completely into the desert. He cringed, but it did nothing to prevent the impact of Daniel's index finger on his ear.

'Shoot the target,' he heard again.

'Fine!' Desmond half-screamed, and he whirled the gun around and jammed it up and into the concave underside of Daniel's jaw, pressing the cold metal into his pale skin, finger loose on the trigger. He bared his teeth in a dangerous grin, breathing a little heavy, his gaze scanning Daniel's face carefully in an attempt to assess whether or not Desmond had succeeded in giving him a fright.

Daniel paused, his whole body stilling. He did not lower his hand, but instead straightened two of his fingers out into the shape of a gun and pressed the tips of them against the side of Desmond's head, his lips curving into a grin.

'Boom,' he said softly. 'You're dead.'

Desmond snorted. 'Is that some kind of dig at me for hesitating?'

'No. It's a dig at you for not remembering to count your bullets.'

The smirk slid off Desmond's face, and after a pause he lowered the gun away from Daniel's head, pointed it at the target in the distance, sighted carefully along the barrel and pulled the trigger, hearing the hammer click down on an empty chamber. Feeling a little embarrassed, he held his hand out for another magazine, only to find his fingers wrapping around the neck of a beer bottle instead. He glanced over at Daniel in confusion.

'You can take a break,' the ex-Templar announced, removing the cap from his own bottle with his bare hands.

'I don't need a break,' Desmond argued. He'd actually wanted one, but being offered made him feel as though Daniel suspected him of weakness, and he found the implication offensive. 'Besides, alcohol isn't exactly going to help my aim.'

'You've earned it,' Daniel said simply, taking a seat on the makeshift wooden bench, beside the rest of the guns and ammunition that had been brought out for target practice.

Desmond raised an eyebrow and removed the cap from his own beer with deft hands, the motion coming back to him naturally, as though he'd been away from Bad Weather for hours, not months. He took a swig of the beverage, finding it unpleasantly warm but not bad-tasting, and wiped the suds from his mouth with his forearm. 'I haven't earned this,' he stated bluntly.

'Sure you have.'

'You can quit being nice to me, it's just plain weird.'

Daniel grinned around the rim of the bottle as he took another sip of his beer. 'You want me to go back to hitting you and throwing you in freezing fucking rivers?'

'Don't you have, like, something in between those two approaches?'

Daniel paused for a moment, before deliberately changing the subject. 'We can't raid Abstergo yet,' he reminded Desmond. 'We have to hold out until the solar flares have passed. Plenty of time to perfect your aim.'

'Would go a lot faster if we had an Animus.' Desmond stared thoughtfully at the ground. 'I wish I'd gone through the memories of a more recent ancestor now, one who used guns. Ezio had a crossbow and this wrist-mounted pistol thing, but I guess they're too different to modern weapons, or I just didn't spent long enough...'

'Look, I wish we had an Animus too,' Daniel interrupted with rising irritation in his voice. 'Trust me, I'd like to crawl inside of one of those things for good, go back to having no responsibility at all, just reliving other people's decisions. But I'm stuck with you and we're both stuck in 2012 and our only way out of it is by putting a bullet between Rikkin's eyes and smashing that goddamn Apple for good.'

Desmond watched him, trying and failing to get a fix on what was going through Daniel's mind. 'And what will you do once Rikkin's dead? Do you get to be Alpha Templar? Is that how it works?'

'We'll deal with that when we come to it.' Daniel's expression was inscrutable.

'No.' Desmond's temper began to flare up. 'How about we deal with it now? I'm not risking my life just so you can stab me in the back once the deed is done. For all I know, you'll just take the Apple and start ruling the world for yourself.'

Daniel grinned at him slyly, and then picked up the pistol that Desmond had been practicing with, slotted a fresh magazine into it, and handed it over.

'Probably a good idea to perfect your aim, then.'