The forest where Lucy had met with Juno is silent as the Hidden Ones approach. They come at her from all directions, moving quietly but essentially making no attempts to hide themselves. That's part of the plan. They're not playing games anymore, they're not trying to avoid her. This is going to be, it has to be, their final battle.

Elijah moves with the rest of them, heart pounding as he cups the apple close to his chest. He knows that every single person needs to be here, they need their whole group to be here and be fighting if they want to really stop Juno. But Elijah's the only one here with an apple, and if he doesn't protect it as well as he thinks he can, Juno will have two of them. Since she'd manipulated Lucy isn't trying to steal the apple for her, Elijah can only imagine how bad she'd be with both of the apples.

Don't be afraid, Altair says, and that gives Elijah a little bit of courage. He's reassured to learn that he has an ancestor, a very far away and distant member of his family, that sounds as sure of himself and unflappable as Altair. This is a fight like any other.

I try not to get into fights, Elijah says.

His ancestor pauses, considering that. Then he says, I think it's a good thing you have me, then.

And a good thing it is, because as the group draws closer to Juno, surrounding her in a tight cluster like a net, it does very quickly become a fight. It takes Juno maybe five or six seconds to get over her surprise (clearly, she hadn't been expecting anyone but Lucy to find her here). Then she flies at them.

She doesn't literally fly, of course, but she's faster than she looks, and vicious, and not afraid to fight back now that she's been cornered. Two of the Hidden Ones go down before any of the Hidden Ones have a chance to react, and when she moves it's strangely, almost inhumanely, and it's the stuff of nightmares.

Elijah would have been completely overwhelmed if not for Altair. As Juno moves, he feels himself start to freeze and stiffen up, and his ancestor has to prod him into moving. You have the apple, he reminds Elijah, as if Elijah needs the reminding. She will want that more than anything else right now, and you need to get it away from her.

Elijah shakes his head to snap himself out of his fear. I need to lead her back to the Temple, he says. To trap her.

Yes.

The word is like a starting pistol, giving Elijah exactly the right motivation to get him moving at last. He takes off running, and knows he must be the least subtle person here. While the highly trained Assassins and Templars dart around Juno, trying (and occasionally succeeding) to hurt Juno, Elijah clutches the apple to his chest and takes off running back toward the road.

The next half hour is an absolute nightmare. Elijah has never run this long or this hard in his whole life, and the ever present threat of Juno just behind him doesn't help at all. Soon enough he's panting, his legs are burning, and there are tears just streaming down his cheeks from a combination of fear and exhaustion. He doesn't want to be here. He wants to be in the waiting room of the ER with his grandpa, waiting for his dad to wake up.

He's going to be there to see it, though, he's determined to be there. That thought gives him the strength to keep running.

Around him, the others are still fighting, but now they're protecting him. They're protecting him.

It's because of the apple, Elijah tells Altair, just because he can, because it doesn't use any oxygen for him to talk to Altair in his head, and because it's a good distraction from the demon at his back. Otherwise they wouldn't be doing that.

But at the same time, it's weirdly almost magical. By this point Elijah is back on the road, charging ahead as fast as he possibly can, and he's so tired he's almost numb, and he keeps catching glimpses of men and women dashing into view, getting in a blow or two against Juno, and then sometimes falling back, sometimes being hit, but always buying him just a little more time, just a few more steps…

And then he's back at the Temple. He stumbles down the first few steps of the incline at the beginning, then tumbles the rest of the way. His shoulders are bruised from the fall and the rolling, but at least it's faster than running would have been. Elijah scrambles back to his feet and looks back at the entrance, then freezes. Juno is so close to him, and they still need to hurt her before they can even try and trap her.

She sees him, and Elijah can't read her expression but he can see that she sees him, and more importantly she can see that he has the apple. And apparently Elijah's fight or flight instinct is extremely messed up because right now when he should be running, he can't even make his legs move.

And then Layla comes up out of nowhere (or apparently nowhere—Elijah's not looking at anything but Juno, so it's hard to tell where Layla might have come from). Her face is chalk white and she's obviously terrified, but she doesn't hesitate to step up while Juno's whole attention is fixed on Elijah.

And she stabs her.

Elijah takes a quick step back as his brain abruptly connects to his legs again, but he doesn't go far. Layla's blade had struck true, and Juno is visibly staggered. Elijah tightens his hold on the apple, and prays that he'll know how to use it to trap Juno when the time comes. Because it's coming soon, he doesn't have to supernaturally know things to see that Juno's badly injured.

Layla tears her blade back out, a smear of blood comes with it. Two or three of the other Hidden Ones catch up then, and Elijah has to force himself to keep watching as she dies. She's fighting it as hard as she can, and she manages to get two of the Hidden Ones before she finally falls. One goes down with a hard blow to the side of the head and doesn't move, and the other one she gets with her apple, and turns on the others in answer to Juno's almost frantic "Kill them!"

"Elijah," Layla says. She's panting still pale, and her eyes are wide. From her expression, she's not entirely clear on what Elijah is going to do now. "Are you—"

He nods, although he's not sure, and Layla shifts her attention to the Hidden One that Juno had mind controlled into trying to kill them. When this is all over, Elijah is going to have to see if he can help him, too. But right now…

He kneels in the pooling blood next to Juno, and forces himself to put a hand on her forehead. There's a slight, pulsating warmth coming from her, and Elijah doesn't know if that's normal for the precursors or not. It's almost like a heartbeat, gradually slowing as Elijah holds his hand there.

Her eyes fix on his face. "Aita," she says.

Elijah hates doing this. He wishes he could trust her to just die but he can't. She's looking at him and seeing her centuries dead husband because she'd done that, she'd created the Sages with Aita's face. Elijah is scared that she has something else lined up for after her death, some booby trap-ish surprise.

He makes a little noise, and opens himself up as a channel between Juno and the apple. Spreads himself to the Temple, and ignores her cry of protest as he starts to trap her back in the same place where she'd spent so many thousands of years. If she'd been anyone else, he would have felt bad about this.

But Juno's done some pretty terrible things. Some really unimaginably awful things. Elijah closes his eyes and steels himself against her reaction, and wishes that someone else could do this job.

When he opens his eyes again, it's because Juno's pulsing warmth has faded.

She's standing in front of him, a few feet away, a shimmering golden phantom with a look of indescribable fury on her insubstantial face.

So it's over. She's trapped. Elijah stares up at her from the ground, then stands up and shuffles over to the man Juno had mind controlled. It's so easy now to undo it. He's had too much practice. Elijah simply raises the hand that's not holding the apple and rests it for a moment on the man's forehead.

"Is there anyone else?" he mumbles, not looking at Layla as he lets go of the man's forehead.

"A few," Layla says. "But it's going to take some time to get them all rounded up and back here. Go get some rest, Elijah."

But he doesn't rest. He finds a place to sit down and lets things happen around him until finally the last of the apple controlled people have been helped. Then Elijah drops the apple—he never wants to see it again, he really doesn't—and goes to find the closest person with car keys. He really just wants to go see his dad.

-/-

When Desmond cracks an eye open, the first sensation that hits him is overwhelming pain. He groans, and forces his eyes open the rest of the way, because he's not entirely sure where he is or if there's any danger.

There isn't. He's in a hospital bed, and it's clean and calm and quiet. Desmond glances down to where most of the pain seems to be centralized, and sees a whole swath of bandages wrapped around his torso.

Then he looks over to one side, and sees his dad sitting in an uncomfortable looking chair, Elijah leaning against his side, mouth slightly open in sleep.

"Dad?" Desmond says quietly, and his voice comes out as a low croak that makes him wince. "Are you—"

"You're awake," his dad says, starting a little, then putting a protective hand on Elijah to keep him from waking. "Finally."

"Finally?" Desmond echoes. "How long—wait, Lucy stabbed me?" The memories are coming back, and they're painful enough that he almost wishes they weren't.

"She did," his dad confirms. "But if it makes any difference to you, she wasn't acting of her own free will at the time."

"Not… right at this second," Desmond admits. "No." He pauses, then asks, "Is she okay?"

"More or less," his dad says. "Elijah was able to save her, actually. He's done a lot."

"He looks like he's been busy," Desmond says, his eyes straying down to Elijah's sleeping form.

His dad gives him all the details of what's happened while he was out, starting with Elijah jumping on Lucy and ending with the trip he and Elijah had taken that morning to activate the eye in the Temple and keep the solar flare from wiping everyone out.

"And you're both okay?" Desmond asks. He gestures to his own left arm, which still throbs from time to time after his close brush with death on December 21.

"Well, Juno wasn't able to interfere," his dad tells him. "Elijah was the one that trapped her in there—he wasn't going to let her kill either one of us. Without her trying to hijack the process, everything worked out."

Desmond just stares at him for a minute, trying to process this. "So it's over," he says. "We won."

His dad nods. "Yes," he says.

"So… what happens now?" Desmond asks. He feels almost lost without a goal, and he's been chasing after Juno for so long that he's not sure where to go from here.

"Life," his dad says, and nudges Elijah awake. The boy resists sleepily for a second or two, then his mismatched eyes blink open, and Desmond grins at him.

"Dad," Elijah says, and almost jumps to Desmond's side.

-/-

"So are you staying?"

Layla and Bayek are in the warehouse, helping some of the other Hidden Ones with packing everything up. In a few hours, it'll be like they were never here at all. It almost makes Layla sad, honestly—this place isn't much, but the people here are something she's going to miss.

Bayek looks up at her when she asks the question. "Maybe," he says. "I don't think I'll be going back to Egypt, if that's what you're asking. Khemu's supposed to be dead there—he has no future in the past. But I don't know what we'll be able to do in this time now that we don't have a mission anymore."

He won't be the only one to stay in 2012—almost 2013 now—even though it's not his time. Layla plans to stay herself, even though there's another one of her running around out there. The Hidden Ones are split, about half of them wanting to go home, and the other half planning to stay. "You could stay with me," she says.

"And where will you be staying?" Bayek asks.

"That… I don't actually know yet. I can't go back to Abstergo. There's another me there."

"That would complicate things," Bayek agrees.

"So I don't know. I guess I'm going to have to figure it out, the same as you." She gives him an uncertain look, hoping he'll pick up on that. She really doesn't want to go back to being on her own. She really wants to stay with Bayek.

After a moment or two, Bayek sighs, then reaches over and squeezes her shoulder slightly. "Then we should stay together," he says.

"Good," Layla says. "Great. Thank you."

"And Layla."

"Yea?"

He smiles slightly. "I saw what you did when we fought Juno. I saw that you were the first one to injure her. You did very well."

Layla turns her face slightly away from him, to hide her embarrassingly wide smile. "Well," she says. "I decided it was time to stop being afraid of her. I'm not scared anymore."

-/-

Elina hasn't been given a choice about what's going to happen to her now that Juno is trapped in the Temple and the fight here is over. She's not in any danger anymore if she goes home, so she's going home. It's as simple as that.

She has her few possessions in a backpack, and her dad has everything he needs in his wallet or on his phone, so it feels like they're travelling with basically nothing. Elina stands glumly in the doorway, looking at the overcrowded (almost empty now that people have started moving out and moving on) room that has been home for the past few months.

"Elina," her dad says, coming up behind her and putting a hand on her shoulder. "It's time to go."

"I want to see my friends again," she says. "I want to see Khemu and—and Elijah." She doesn't look at him, not sure how he's going to react. He's never had a problem with Khemu, but until very recently, until Elijah basically saved all their butts, he'd had a big problem with Elijah.

"I think that sounds possible," her dad says, and Elina raises her eyes to look him in the face.

"What," she says. "Really?"

He doesn't answer, but he's never really been the kind to repeat himself when he's already given an answer. "Come, Elina," he says, and when she runs after to grab his hand and follow him out, it's safe in the knowledge that this isn't the last chance she'll ever have to see her friends.

-/-

"Dad. Dad. Dad!"

Desmond is in a car headed—well, he isn't exactly sure where—with his dad in the driver's seat next to him, and Elijah in the backseat, trying to get his attention. "Yea?" he asks, when Elijah's voice has finally gotten through to him. "What's up?"

He's expecting more questions about how he's feeling. The hospital hadn't exactly been excited to release him early, but Desmond's not about to sit there and let the Templars find him while he's sitting in a hospital. He's still in some pain, but he can live with it.

Elijah doesn't ask if he's feeling okay, or when he'll be back to normal. Instead, he says, "This isn't the end."

Desmond glances over his shoulder, and sees Elijah staring out the window, chin resting in his hand. "What?" he asks.

"This isn't the end of the Hidden Ones," Elijah says. "I don't know exactly what's going to happen, but… something is going to happen. We're going to see everyone again."

And he looks so serious as he says it that Desmond has to believe him. "Sure," he says. "But later. For now… for now, Juno is gone, and we're together, and all we need to do right now is figure out how to be a family."

And Elijah… Elijah turns to stare at him for a second, then breaks out into a smile wider than any Desmond has ever seen before.

-/-

So here we are, at the end. Technically I got to the end sometime late yesterday, but I figured I'd wait before I posted it to make sure it still made sense when I wasn't ready to pass out from exhaustion. Only now I'm not sure if it is or not, but I'm also pretty sure I can't write anything better, so... here we are!

So anyway, as you probably know by now if you've been reading my self indulgent author notes, I've been considering a sequel to this. I'm almost 100% going to do it, but I'm going to have to take some time off to do some planning (and speaking of planning-if there are any characters you'd like to see more of, now's the time to speak up and leave a review. I can't promise your favorite will make it in, but I'll at least think about it). I'll also probably do some Khemu-Elijah-Elina scenes in the meantime?

Finally, thank you for reading this far! Thank you for making this fic so much fun to write! Thank you for every review, favorite, and follow. You guys are the actual best.