2012

-/-

It was a few days before Desmond and Shaun had another chance to talk. It was sort of funny watching him get more and more impatient as the days rolled past, and they never once got a chance to be alone. Finally, there came a day when Lucy was out running errands, and Rebecca was engrossed in her computer, headphones blaring something loud and obnoxious. Shaun seemed to think it was as good a time as any to hear more, but Desmond was short tempered and angry. The animus sessions lately had been stressful and long- he was starting to see things that weren't there, and while the hallucinations weren't usually too bad they had started to scare him. It had been a very long time since he had been this afraid, and so when Shaun dragged him away, demanding to know more, Desmond only snapped at him in reply.

"Why are you so interested anyway?" he asked. "It's not exciting or anything it's just…" he trailed off here, shrugging helplessly. "I never saw anything important or historical-"

"That's exactly why it is interesting," Shaun said. "I mean, we have all sorts of records of wars and kings and big discoveries, but the ordinary people- history always forgets them."

"Well-" Desmond grinned a little, thinking of his time in the past, ignoring the way his scar throbbed with the movement. "I don't know if you could call the Kenways ordinary."

Shaun waved a hand dismissively. "Listen," he said. "You actually lived for- what, a decade? More?- in the seventeen hundreds. I don't care if you spent that time with a king in his castle or face down in a gutter. I still want to know everything."

"Fine," Desmond grumbled. "Only- I have a question."

"Yea?"

"Do you think it's possible to have something like the bleeding effect, without using an animus or anything?"

"I guess," Shaun said. "I mean, it's possible. The memories are all there in the DNA. I don't know much about all that, though. You'd have to ask Rebecca-"

"It's completely possible."

Desmond jumped, and Shaun swore loudly as Rebecca settled herself between the two of them. "Mostly just in dreams and things, but sometimes people will hallucinate and go crazy and things. Why?"

Because he'd been having dreams a long time before he'd ever heard of the animus, and now that he knew what the bleeding effect was, he'd sort of started to wonder…

"How long have you been listening?" Shaun demanded.

"A while," Rebecca said. "Your conversation seemed more interesting than what I was doing."

"You can't just eavesdrop on whomever you want!" Shaun protested.

"Come on." Rebecca rolled her eyes. "You were talking about time travel, of course I'm going to listen-"

"It's fine, Shaun," Desmond said wearily. "If she already knows there's no point in lying."

"Should we tell Lucy?" Rebecca asked.

"No," Desmond said, before he even had a chance to think about the question. "She's not… I don't know." He'd only known her a few days, but he got the impression she wouldn't take this information quite as calmly as Shaun and Rebecca seemed to be doing. "Maybe we can tell her later," he added, more to appease the suddenly worried looking Rebecca than anything else.

"Fair enough," said Rebecca.

"Yes," Shaun said impatiently. "But can we just get back to it now?"

Desmond shrugged, and picked up his story where he'd let off.

-/-

1720

-/-

Desmond found Jenny after the funeral, sitting next to her mother's graveside and twisting her hands quietly in her lap. She barely seemed to notice he was there, and he didn't know what to say. Her grandfather glanced over at the pair of them, but for once said nothing. Maybe he was too distracted by the death of his only daughter to drive Desmond away. Or maybe, for once, he was more concerned with Jenny's feelings than his own.

"I brought flowers," Desmond said at last. "Um… I guess that's what you do at funerals. Only it seemed kind of pointless to drop perfectly good flowers down a hole in the ground, so…" he offered up the white flower he'd been told to bring. It felt kind of stupid, giving a girl flowers, but Jenny wasn't just any girl, and after all her mother had just died.

She smiled a little, and reached to take the flower from him. For a little while she twirled the stem between her fingers, apparently lost in thought. Then she looked up at Desmond, a weird golden light in her eyes. "Do you still want to run away?" she asked. "Go on adventures, find pirates?"

"Sure," Desmond said. He hadn't given it much thought, really, after that one afternoon when he'd brought it up for the first time. "But- now?"

"I can't stay here," Jenny said. "Not with mother gone."

Desmond made a tiny noise that she didn't seem to even notice, luckily enough. He'd never much liked Caroline Scott himself. She had always seemed cold and sort of far away, but maybe that was just the sickness. Jenny obviously loved her, though, so Desmond didn't say anything.

"You'll come with, won't you?" Jenny asked.

"Of course," Desmond said. Jenny was the first person he'd met after leaving the Farm, and he couldn't imagine life there without her. But at the same time- he had a sort of life here, one that he liked a lot better than his old one, and he wasn't sure if he wanted to risk losing it.

Jenny jumped up, and Desmond followed a little more slowly. "Let's go then," she said. "Let's leave. Now."

Desmond shook his head. "We need to talk to your grandma first."

"What?" Jenny glanced over her shoulder, toward mother's mother, Elizabeth Scott. "Why?"

"Your other grandmother," Desmond said, with more patience than he felt.

"Oh," Jenny said. "Grandma Kenway. Yea, okay. She didn't come to the funeral, did she?"

Desmond shook his head. "She said it would make the Scotts angry," he said. "Because of- I don't know. Whatever happened with your dad."

Jenny sighed. "I wish someone would just tell me what happened to him," she said quietly, allowing Desmond to lead her away.

They found Linette Kenway in her tiny kitchen, a bowl of something that looked suspiciously like vegetables on the table in front of her and a sad look on her face. Desmond gave the vegetables a panicked look (he'd had enough of those in the last two years to last a lifetime), but to his relief the vegetables were quickly forgotten as Linette moved to comfort her granddaughter.

"I'm so sorry about your mother," she said, and Jenny sniffled a little, wiping her nose with a sleeve of her dress.

"We're going to run away," she said. "Me and Desmond. We're going to find adventure. Somewhere else. Far away."

"Really, now?" Linette said, and gave Desmond a look over the top of Jenny's head. You should know better, that look seemed to say. "Where do you think you're going to go?"

"Dunno," Jenny said. She crossed her arms and frowned at her grandmother. "Anywhere."

"Absolutely not," said Linette.

"Grandma!"

"I've already lost a son," she said. "I'm not letting you two run off as well."

"But-"

"And that's final," Linette said. "Jenny, I know you're upset. But you'll recover. The grief will pass."

"It won't," Jenny said, but there were no more arguments that day.

-/-

1738

-/-

"Your mother died?" Haytham asked.

"Yea…" Jenny wasn't looking at him now. She'd wanted this conversation to go differently. This whole day, really. She'd wanted to come back and rescue him from the templars that had managed to get their hooks into him. She'd thought maybe he would be resentful, that he could have been brainwashed already. But now they were just sitting around, talking over tea like this was an absolutely ordinary meeting.

"I'm sorry," Haytham said. "I never even wondered… I should have-"

"You were young," Jenny said. "You had your mother. And your father. Why should you be worried about me?"

"You're my sister," Haytham said, and Jenny frowned. He said it like it was the most natural thing in the world, but it had taken her nearly four whole years to come back to London after Edward died. She hadn't even thought about him, any more than she would any other distant acquaintance.

"It's getting dark," Jenny said, glancing out the window. "I should go."

"Oh." Haytham looked down at the table too, then up at Jenny, then very quickly out of the window. "Do you think- can we do this again?"

"What?" Jenny forced a laugh, on the off-chance he was being funny. "You want to hear more of my stupid stories?"

"Sure," Haytham said. "Why not?"

And that's when she realized- he was lonely. He was a thirteen year old boy with a dead father, whose sister had suddenly reappeared in his life. And she was going to leave again. He must be very lonely indeed if he was willing to listen to her babble on. "I'm staying with friends," Jenny said. "Not far from here. They'd be more than willing to put you up for the night, if you-"

"Okay," Haytham said, and Jenny sighed. Yea, he was desperate.

So off they went- Jenny was staying with an elderly couple, whose sons were both assassins. They had nothing to do with the order themselves, but they were sweet and always accommodating. When Jenny explained her brother had come to visit with her for a while, they were more than eager to have him over for the night.

There was room in the guestroom where Jenny was staying for Haytham, so that was where he ended up. "Are you going to tell me more?" he asked.

"Sure," she said. "If you want."

He nodded, and so they began.

-/-

Later, Jenny got a letter.

It wasn't addressed to her, but she read it anyway, because it had been sent to her mother and her mother was dead. It wasn't the first letter Caroline Scott had received after her death- there were all sorts of distant relatives and old friends who had written her before she died, and with post being as slow as it was, a lot of it came very late. But this letter was different.

It came from her father.

Her grandfather took the letter before Jenny had a chance to read it, but Jenny stole it back again and shut herself in her room to read it away from prying eyes. It was slow going, because Jenny hadn't been spending as much time with her lessons as she should have been, but she managed it in the end. The letter was written in a coarse hand, one that obviously didn't write much more often than Jenny read, and she felt a warm kind of glow inside her at the idea of having something in common with him.

The letter read-

Caroline-

I haven't written to you in a long time, and I'm sorry for that. I'm sorry for a lot of things, really, but most of all I'm sorry I went away for so long. When I left, I promised I would be back in two years, and it's been a lot longer than that. Well, I'm writing to tell you that I want to come home to you, if you still want me. I've made a lot of mistakes since we parted, I'll not lie about that.

It's time to come home.

At the bottom of the letter were a few scribbled lines explaining where letters could be sent, and underneath that, the name Edward.

Edward. Jenny repeated the name to herself over and over during the next few days, as she wandered the house in a sort of fog, her mind totally focused on this stranger who was her father. She'd never even known his name until the letter came- even her mother seemed happy to pretend he'd never existed, like he was a bad mistake, best forgotten and not talked about.

She waited two months before writing Edward back, two months of careful practice with her letters to make sure she could say what she needed. Even with the practice, it took her half a dozen tries before she managed to get it right.

My name is Jennifer Scott, the letter began. That was the easy part.

My mother's name was Caroline Scott, and I think you are my father. She tried this sentence over and over again, trying to make the words sound grown up. In the end, though, she gave up and wrote it straight to the point.

If no one's told you, my mother died three months ago. She never read your letter, but I took it from my grandfather before he could throw it in the fire. I thought… And Jenny spent a very long time thinking the next part over before actually writing it down. If you wanted, I could go live with you.

She signed her name and sealed it in an envelope. She still wasn't happy with the way the words looked, but they weren't going to get any better, and she didn't think she could wait any longer. Finally, Jenny took her letter and her father's to the Kenway farm.

"I'm sending this to my father," Jenny said to her grandmother, when she had handed over both letters for her to read. "Can you help me?"

Linette Kenway did not answer for a very long time, not until she had read Edward's letter several times, and then Jenny's several more. She looked very pale, and a little bit angry. At first, she assumed her grandmother would say no, but eventually she sighed and shook her head. "Alright," she said. "I'll send this on it's way. I don't think it's a good idea, mind you, but I'd rather see you with my son than with your mother's people."

Jenny nodded, and hugged her grandmother with as much force and excitement as she could manage. "Thank you!"

"Don't thank me yet," the woman said, holding Jenny tightly. "It might not work out as well as you think it will."

"It has to be better than being stuck up here," Jenny said, and heard her grandmother sigh.

"You really are your father's daughter," she said.

A soft noise behind her made Jenny look up, at Desmond standing in the doorway, frowning. "You're leaving?" he asked.

"Yes," Jenny said.

"Oh," Desmond said, and left without another word. Jenny didn't think about it again that day. Later, though, she would remember.