2012
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It was late, and dark out by the time Desmond stopped for a rest, and by that point Shaun was staring at him like he'd never seen anything quite like him before. "You're telling me you just… just accidentally traveled through time?" He threw his arms out in an uncharacteristically expressive gesture. "How does that even happen?"
"I have absolutely no idea," Desmond said flatly. "I didn't know then and I don't know now."
"And that doesn't bother you?"
Desmond snorted. "Not as much as it apparently bothers you," he said. "I was five, Shaun. I kind of just went along with it."
"I cannot believe you," Shaun said. "I really can't. You- I mean, why-?" He glared as Desmond started laughing. "Why didn't you tell me earlier?"
"I'm telling you now, aren't I?" Desmond asked. "And I've never told anyone, so…" He shrugged. Honestly, he didn't quite know why he was telling Shaun now. In the two decades since he'd first woken up in a time not his own, he'd never even been tempted to explain the strange, twisted story of his life. Jenny had known all along, of course- she'd been there from the beginning, so there hadn't been much point in hiding from her. But to actually go out of his way to explain the whole thing…
"I'm going to bed," he said suddenly.
"Oh come on!" Shaun protested, a little too loudly. Desmond shushed him quickly, glancing at the door to the room where the other two were asleep. "You can't just tell me that much and then stop," Shaun continued, now in a whisper. "I know there's more."
"There is," Desmond said. A lot more. "But it's late and I've said as much as I want to right now." He thought Shaun might still argue, but he just sighed and shook his head.
"Fine," he said. "But I do want to hear the rest of this. Soon."
Desmond nodded and shuffled off to sleep. He felt drained, like he had gotten rid of some heavy load, one that he'd been carrying around for so long he'd completely forgotten it was there. He slept that night without dreaming, and woke feeling refreshed.
Shaun gave him a considering sort of look, but said nothing since the girls were up by then, too.
"Morning," Lucy said cheerfully when she saw Desmond. "Ready for the animus?"
"Not really," he said. "But I guess we should get it over with, right?"
And so the rest of the day was spent in the animus, which was exhausting and not a lot of fun. Desmond was finally released sometime around six, and while Lucy and Rebecca were both distracted, Shaun dragged Desmond away.
"We have a couple hours before they come looking for us," Shaun said. "Probably. I want to hear more."
-/-
1719
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Desmond waited until the house was almost deserted before slipping in the back door and climbing the stairs as quietly as possible. Technically, he had never been banned from the Scott house, but only on the understanding that he would never actually spend any time there. Jenny said it was just because he was staying with her father's mother, and that was kind of a sore spot with her mother's family.
"Jenny?" he called, softly. Softly because he knew her mother had been sick and bedridden for a long time, and he didn't want her to hear him. "You here?"
She came running out of her room and nearly crashed into Desmond, who just barely managed to stop the two of them from falling down the stairs. "What's the matter?" he asked.
"I'm sick of being shut up in here," Jenny said, and now that he had a chance to really look at her, Desmond saw that she was smiling brightly as she said it. "Come on, let's go!"
So the two of them ran back downstairs, shushing each other loudly every few seconds and trying not to laugh. It was rare that they got to actually see each other, and they'd been planning this for weeks. Usually Jenny went with her grandparents when they went out of town, but this time they'd decided she would stay behind with her mother. Which meant, of course, that she'd spend most of her time in the fields with Desmond.
They wasted the day doing what they pleased, wandering first in one direction and then another, talking and running and generally trying to cram everything they could into a single day. Tomorrow, Desmond would be back on the sheep farm with a load of unfinished chores to catch up on, and Jenny would go home, back to where her mother's family would expect her to behave like a proper young woman. Whatever that was supposed to mean. Desmond had no idea, and Jenny never seemed to care at all.
Sometime in the early evening, just as the fireflies started to come out, blinking lazily as they flew past Desmond and Jenny, they ended up on the banks of a tiny creek in the middle of nowhere. Desmond stuck his toes into the cool water and wiggled them. Tiny fish swarmed to the movement, nipping and tickling his feet. "We should do this more often," he said, and Jenny snorted.
"If my grandparents had their way, I'd never leave the house at all," she said. "I hate it."
Desmond looked up from the fish and over to where Jenny sat next to him, her arms wrapped around her legs and her chin on her knees. She looked completely miserable, and Desmond frowned too. He knew exactly how she felt. Before he'd come here- however he'd come here- he'd spent his whole life on the Farm. He'd never once been allowed to leave, and even his time inside the Farm had been strictly controlled. It had been a sort of prison, and Desmond hadn't eve realized how true that was until he came to stay with Linette Kenway.
It was true that a sheep farm wasn't the best place on Earth. There was a lot of work, and the sheep smelled awful. But there was open sky, and room to run, and Jenny-
"Let's run away," Desmond said. It was a kind of impulse, with no thought at all behind the words. "Go on an adventure."
"An adventure?" she asked, managing a tiny smile.
"Yea." Desmond nodded. "We can find pirates, and buried treasures on secret islands-"
"I'd like to meet a pirate." Jenny sighed wistfully and unfolded herself enough to start poking around for sticks and leaves that she crafted into a sort of ship that she dropped into the creek. It floated a few seconds, before gradually flooding with water. "But I have to stay here," Jenny added. "My mother's still sick."
"She's always sick," Desmond said, but didn't argue any farther. It was a silly thing to ask, anyway. They couldn't run away, of course they couldn't. He was still needed on the farm, and Desmond knew Jenny would never leave her mother.
"Someday," Jenny said. "When we're older, okay?"
"Sure," Desmond said. "Someday." His gaze wandered back to the sinking boat of leaves, his mind still filled with dreams of pirates.
-/-
He didn't sleep well that night. His dreams were filled with images of thunder and blood and blackness, and feelings that everything that could possibly go wrong already had, but that somehow the worst was still to come. He woke shaking like a leaf, curled in a tight ball under his blankets, eyes squeezed shut. He could hear distant shouts and the creaking of a ship, but slowly these faded. Desmond opened his eyes again, relieved to find nothing but the same familiar four walls, and to hear nothing but the distant noises of the sheep.
"It's not real," Desmond told himself. "It's not."
-/-
1738
-/-
Haytham reluctantly followed Jenny to a café nearby, but he did follow her. That was sort of a relief- she could see he didn't much trust her, that he blamed her in some way for being gone when their father died. She'd spent quite a few years blaming herself for that anyway, so that wasn't much of a stretch.
But he was willing to listen, for now at least, and she was willing to take as much of an advantage of that as she could.
"Do you want something?" she asked. "To eat, or-"
Haytham shook his head, and Jenny shrugged. "Suit yourself," she said.
He fidgeted a little, and she waited while he frowned and considered her. Eventually though she got tired of waiting and said, "You frown too much."
"What?"
"You've got little frown lines," Jenny said. "How old are you, like fourteen?"
"Thirteen," he said. "Um…"
"Yea?"
"Is anything you told me true?"
"Every word," Jenny said. "Want to hear more?"
Haytham nodded, and so Jenny went on with her story.
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1719
-/-
Jenny had never been good at sitting still, but lately she'd been doing a lot more of it lately. As her mother's condition got worse, Jenny found herself spending most of her time at Caroline's bedside. She was waiting for her mother to die.
She was six years old. She barely understood what death was, only that her mother was going to be taken away from her, forever.
Her grandparents tried to drag her away more than once, but Jenny never let them. They were the ones that wanted her stuck inside the house (so she didn't 'end up going the same way as her mother'- whatever that meant). They would just have to live with her spending all her time with her mother.
There wasn't much to do there but think. The doctor had warned Jenny that too much noise or excitement could make Caroline worse, so she spent most of her time staring out the window and thinking. A lot. The days blurred into one another, with nothing at all to tell one apart from the others. Until the day her mother turned blue.
Not really blue, of course. That would have meant more doctors and more worry, and this was different. More than anything, it was a feeling of… of friendliness, maybe, that Jenny could sense when she concentrated hard, along with a kind of blue glow.
After that, Jenny had something new to keep herself entertained during the endless hours of waiting at her mother's bedside. She spent days staring out the window, watching people pass on the road in front of the house. She found that if she concentrated very, very hard, she could see people in a rainbow of different colors. Blue, of course. Like her mother. Some people were white, and Jenny could sense they were people that could help in some way. Not exactly friends, but people whose help could be paid for, with enough gold. Then there were the people that shone red, and those people she did not like. Most of them were the kind of people she already knew were dangerous. A few of the nastier town drunks, one or two men that always seemed to be in and out of prison.
And then- there was Desmond. She saw him out the window, just once, passing by and glowing gold like nobody else did. She wanted very much to talk to him about it all, but it was no secret that Caroline Scott could not last very much longer. Jenny didn't want to risk leaving, and coming back to find her mother gone forever. She could wait, as long as it took, before going after Desmond. So she didn't talk to him. But she did wonder.