They don't do anything at all that night. Nothing related to time travel or Juno or apples, anyway. All three of them are determined to do get started as soon as they can, but the best of intentions quickly give way to simple exhaustion. They've all been through too much today—Bayek has travelled from two thousand years in the past, Desmond has died and come back, and Layla has had a truly terrifying encounter with Juno. Once the initial adrenaline wears off, they crash pretty hard.
Desmond manages to hold out the longest, maybe out of a weird sense that he's supposed to be the host here. They're in his apartment after all, even if Desmond himself thought he would never be back here again. He's sitting up on one of the mismatched chairs he'd rescued from a secondhand shop, while Layla and Bayek sit next to each other on the bed, leaning back against the wall and talking quietly.
Desmond has no idea what they're talking about, but he can tell just by their body language that Bayek is trying to calm Layla down from whatever Juno had done to her. He's doing most of the talking, in a kind of slow, almost but not quite monotonous voice, like he's telling her a story, or just running on a long train of thought. Desmond watches, half because he's interested and half because he's too tired to do anything else. His hand, the one he'd used to touch the eye back in the temple, aches dully. It doesn't look injured, but Desmond can sort of feel it, like… underneath his skin. He rubs at it with his other hand, which helps a little bit. And it's not like it's a pain he can't live with, just a little annoying.
When the sound of Bayek's quiet voice trails off and stops, Desmond looks up from examining his hand to see what's going on. Then he smiles at the sight of both of them, only a few inches apart, both asleep. This has been a weird day, and he's glad to see it winding down. Hopefully Juno and the pieces of Eden and everything else will look a little more manageable in the morning.
The problem now is that he's getting tired—he hadn't realized just how tired until he sees the other two passed out at the foot of his bed. Desmond spends a few minutes trying to make himself comfortable on the chair. It really doesn't work.
He glances over at the bed, and after fighting with himself for a minute, gives in. Layla and Bayek are huddled down at the foot of the bed, and there's plenty of room for him to curl up at the head in a sort of ball. It's not the best place he's ever found to sleep, but it's way better than the floor of the temple, or (even worse) the animus. Desmond closes his eyes without even meaning to, and drifts off almost immediately.
It's not a long sleep, but it is a deep one. The day's been exhausting, and Desmond hadn't been sleeping well for weeks even before then. Too much time in the animus, probably. Or worry about the end of the world. Or seeing his dad again. Hard to tell. But either way, being back in a bed, in his own bed, quickly lulls Desmond into a deep sleep. This isn't the most comfortable bed in the world, but it's familiar enough that for the first time in ages, he lets his guard down.
But not for long. Desmond hasn't been asleep nearly enough time when he feels a hand on his shoulder, grabbing at him, jerking him abruptly out of sleep. He kicks out as he wakes up, lashing out madly at his unseen attacker. In this state of half-sleep, with someone grabbing at him, all of Desmond's time in the animus, all of his ancestors rise up in him to fight off the unexpected threat.
"Desmond," his attacker says, almost a warning, and then a second voice, higher and angrier, adding, "What do you think you're doing?"
Desmond comes back to himself, breathing hard and half pinned to the bed by Bayek. His eyes dart sideways to Layla's extremely judgmental face, and figures out what must have happened.
"Sorry," he mumbles. "Tell him to let me up, Layla, I'm fine now."
She doesn't say a word to Bayek, just crosses her arms and gives him a pointed look. "What happened there?" she asks instead.
"What do you think?" Desmond asks. "You startled me, I was asleep, I thought I was being attacked."
"You almost punched him," Layla says, an unmistakable protective tone creeping into her voice. In almost any other circumstances, Desmond would have smiled at the thought of Layla trying to protect Bayek. He's taller and broader and heavier than she is, and Desmond guesses she's a less experienced fighter, too.
"I'm sorry," he says out loud, which is true at least. "I should have warned you, I… do that, when I'm startled. It's the bleeding effect, from all the time I spent in the animus."
"You should have used a better animus then," Layla tells him. "Mine never gave me any of the symptoms of the bleeding effect."
"Yea, yea," Desmond mutters. He feels oddly protective of the animus he's spent most of the last several months sitting in. So maybe he's bleeding, and she isn't—he's done the best with what he has, just like she certainly has. "But the point is… I'm sorry, but I need to wake up on my own."
He ducks his head, face turning red, as Bayek backs off and asks Layla a question. Desmond's heard that phrase from him enough times by now to recognize that he's asking her to translate. He doesn't want to see his reaction when Layla tells him her version of his explanation. He knows it's embarrassing that he just tried to fight the two of them off for waking him up, he doesn't need to see their reactions. Impatience or disgust or worst of all pity.
"Sorry," he says again, when Layla's done explaining it all to Bayek. He risks looking up at them.
"It's fine," Layla says, waving a dismissive hand as she drops into the chair Desmond had been trying to sleep in before. "Anyway, there's a reason we woke you up—Bayek and I were talking about what to do next, and we thought we should get your opinion before we make any decisions."
"Thank you," Desmond says, a little surprised and trying to hide it.
"We're in this together," Layla says, voice serious. "And we're going to need everyone we can get on our side if we want to stop Juno, right?"
Desmond nods. "Right. So… what have you guys thought up so far."
"Well," she says. "I guess we figure that we need two main things. She holds up a finger. "First, some way to find out where Juno's going and what artifacts she's after." A second finger. "And we need a strategy for getting hold of the artifacts before she does."
"Okay," Desmond says, sitting up a little more—it's easier to push down his embarrassment now that the conversation has moved on from him. "Well, the second part is easy enough. We have Bayek, and we have the apple. He can chase her down once we know where she's going, right?"
"She has an apple too," Layla reminds him. "And the stuff she did with the apple before… you weren't there, but it was—I know it freaked me out." She sounds absolutely affronted that Juno could have gotten inside her head like that. "And something tells me it's only going to get worse if she gets hold of more artifacts—it's not like we can't exactly go around mind controlling people the way she can."
Desmond nods firmly. "We can't," he agrees. "But… I mean, that just means we have to be faster and smarter than her, right? We find some way of tracking her wherever she goes, and we just… do better than her."
"That's kind of what we were thinking, yea," Layla admits. She doesn't look very happy about it. "But it's pretty risky to just be chasing after her, and we were hoping you'd know something we didn't."
But Desmond doesn't have any brilliant new ideas, and he shakes his head. Layla sighs before turning to Bayek and rattling off a quick sentence or two of explanation. He makes a face and then nods.
"We'll figure it out," Layla says, turning her attention back to Desmond. Her face is set in a mask of stubbornness that makes Desmond absolutely believe her. "You're an Assassin and Bayek's a Hidden One, and I'm not planning to give up too easily myself."
"So I guess that just means we need to find a way to track Juno when she moves," Desmond says.
"Yea," Layla says. "That part we're kind of stuck on. Bayek took me for a quick trip through time before we woke you up, just kind of looking around." It's amazing, Desmond thinks absently, how quickly things like that have started to sound normal. "We were looking for any signs of Juno, but it's not like tracking someone through normal space. We couldn't figure out where she went. She could be anywhere."
"Not exactly anywhere," Desmond says, speaking slowly. A dim idea is starting to nag at him from the back of his mind, and he's a little nervous about scaring it away. "And not anywhen. We already know she's going after other pieces of Eden, so that probably means while she'll be trying to get at them while they're out in the open, not after they get hidden away. So that narrows it down to whenever the pieces of Eden get used, right?"
"I guess that means there's fewer places where she might go," Layla admit. "But still too many."
"But…" No, he really doesn't want to suggest this. It's the best idea he can think of, but it's still… well, it's going to suck, going through all that again.
"But what?" Layla prompts, and Desmond realizes he's just kind of staring off into space.
"Yea," he says. "Sorry. I just… I was thinking, we already know where a lot of the pieces of Eden are, don't we?"
"I don't," Layla says.
"No, I didn't mean specifically you, but like—we in general know a lot about the pieces of Eden. Because of the animus, right? That's basically the only thing anyone uses it for."
"That's true," Layla says slowly. "And it's only gotten worse in the last five years or so. More and more people are going into the animi, and you're probably right about them looking for pieces of Eden."
Desmond's not particularly happy to hear that there are more people after him that were forced into the animus, but in this case, it's kind of going to help his plan. "So what I was thinking," he says, "Is we use that to track the pieces of Eden. We all go in, and we watch for Juno, or for any signs that she's changing the past. Then, once we have her location narrowed down, we send Bayek back to whenever it was."
There's a strangled pause. Layla seems to be chewing this over.
"It's not great," Layla says. "That's a lot of people to track down, and we'll have to convince all of them to get back into an animus for us, but—" She takes a deep breath. "It's better than anything I can think up."
"So that means I have to get taken by Abstergo again," Desmond says glumly. "It's the fastest way to get back into the animus."
"And if we want you to change what happens on December 21, we might need you to replicate things up until then," Layla says. "Because while we're trying to stop Juno in the past from getting all these pieces of Eden… we should also be trying to figure out a way for you to stop the sun from burning up the world without also freeing her. Then when we catch up to December 21… you stop her. Somehow." She squints sideways at Desmond. "Does that make sense?"
"Yea," he says. "I think it does." He takes a breath. "So… I'll need to be here, in 2012. Bayek will need to be in the past fighting Juno for the pieces of Eden, and you—" He looks at Layla. "You're going to have to convince a whole bunch of other people to climb back into the animus and look for Juno."
"So we all have really terrible jobs," she says, already turning to Bayek to translate. "Fantastic."
"Hey," Desmond says. "Nobody ever said saving the world was fun." But… in a weird way, he can feel his heart speeding up, and it's not with fear it's with excitement. After all, he's done this before—gone on the run with a small group of truly desperate but also truly good people, doing everything they could to save the world. He hasn't known Bayek and Layla for very long, but Desmond already has a feeling that they're exactly the kind of people he wants at his side for a crazy mission like this one.
-/-
Urgh, sorry for how long this chapter took to post. I was hoping to have it up yesterday, and then a massive storm blew threw and we had power out for 22 hours, so... no typing, no posting... sorry!
Also, I keep meaning to say this but somehow I always forget-please feel free to let me know if any of the time travel stuff is confusing. Sometimes it's hard to get that right balance between underexplaining and overexplaining. So let me know if I ever need to be clearer!