"No, no, but that's not how it works at all."

Desmond responds with a shrug and a laugh. "'S how it worked for me."

"That's different, though," Daniel says, gesturing with the bottle in his hand. "Seeing a 'flash' of something, whether it's some kind of premonition or just, like, weird deja vu, is not the same as it having already happened."

"Then where'd the flashes come from?"

"I don't know, I'm... I'm a physicist, not a parapsychologist." He sips his beer thoughtfully. "Maybe, some... Some alternate reality, a universe where things couldhave happened differently."

"So then, I changed over to thisreality."

"No." He points an emphatic finger. "That's my point, you didn'tchange anything, because that's not how time works."

"Let's just say I beg to differ, then," Desmond says with a shrug.

"No, listen," Dan begins, not willing to let it go. "Time is like– it's like..." He extends a hand toward the dark waves surrounding the boat. "Imagine a creek, okay, running water. You toss a rock into that creek, what happens?"

Another shrug. "I don't know, what happens?"

"Nothing." He punctuates the word with a hand on the seat, a bit too hard, and the laugh Desmond lets out is contagious; Dan can't help cracking a smile, but he continues anyway, "Alright? That's my point, you– you can't changeanything, the water will just wash over it regardless."

Desmond nods thoughtfully and throws back another drink of his own beer. "Well, what if you use a bigger rock?"

"Doesn't matter. Everything's still gonna wash right over."

"Alright, bigger, then." He spreads his arms wide to illustrate. "A boulder."

Dan chuckles. "Well, you– you can't."

"But let's say, somehow, you could," Desmond presses with a teasing grin. "What would happen then?"

"It doesn't matter, because it's not possible." Daniel pauses to take another drink. "Any variations that we could cause would just be... They'd be negligible, at best. I mean, humans, we're... We're barely even pebbles."

"Then what would it take? To actually change the future?"

"Are you stilltalking about this?"

The two of them look up as Penny approaches from the cockpit, pulling on a jacket to shield against the unseasonably cool night air.

"Care to join?" Desmond says warmly. She plops down beside him with a sigh, and he wraps an arm around her shoulders. "Charlie finally out?"

"Finally," she confirms, stealing a drink of Desmond's beer. "Only took three bloody bedtime stories. Next time, I'll bring him out here and have him listen to you both debating the mysteries of the universe," she adds, grinning. "Put him out like a light."

"Oh, come on, this is fascinating stuff." He gestures to Daniel. "Dan here was just about to explain how time works. Again."

Dan responds with a shrug and "Would it help if I use smaller words?" Penny snorts at that, and he takes a quick sip of his drink to cover his own laugh.

Desmond chuckles. "Mighty bold talk for someone who's only time-traveled once."

"Experience does not equal understanding," Daniel argues, and then he grins. "I mean, obviously, or we wouldn't be having this conversation again."

"Or maybe this is the first time we're having it, and the rest is all time fuckery."

"Desmond." Dan sighs and sets down his drink to gesture with both hands as he tries to get back on track. "All kidding aside, the fact is that you can't change the past, or the future. Whatever happened, happened. It's like– like a street, right?"

"I thought it was like a creek," Desmond interrupts with a smirk.

Penny gives him a small shove. "Let him be."

"What?" He holds up his hands in mock innocence and turns back to Dan with a smile. "Look, I am but a humble student. I only wanna know the answer to my question."

"But there isn'tan answer, that's what I'm–" Desmond's grin doesn't change, and Daniel sighs in defeat. "Fine, yeah, okay, let's say that you somehow did manage to modify the outcome of an event. And, again, I cannot stress enough how impossiblethat is, I mean, it– The sheer amount of energy that would be required for something like that, it would be..." He shakes his head. "Right. Theoretically... Yeah, you might be able to alter the flow. Slightly." He holds up a hand and adds, before Desmond can declare victory, "But even then, the change would... It would level out, basically."

"What d'you mean?"

"Even if you were able to take a different street somehow, you would still end up at the same destination."

Desmond stares back at him blankly, and he sighs, frustrated with his inability to explain.

"Think of it like..." He gestures vaguely toward the sky. "The universe, it– it wantsthings."

"It can get in line." Penny grabs Desmond's beer and throws back another quick drink before returning it to him with a mischievous smile.

"It wants things to be a certain way," Dan continues, undeterred, "And so the events that are supposedto happen, that havehappened, will alwayshave happened, no matter what we do. The universe, it– It has a way of..." He pauses to search for the right word, "Of course-correcting, basically."

Desmond's grin disappears. He leans forward, a strange expression on his face. "What...did you just say?"

Daniel blinks. "Which... Which part?"

"I..." He laughs, but still looks uncomfortable. "I've just got the strangest deja vu."

Of all the places where Daniel thought he might spend his last few hours alive, locked in the basement of a library at the University of Michigan would never have made the list.

And yet, here he is, sweating in the stale air and the too-thick fabric of his work clothes, his fingers going numb and his head still throbbing in tiny pulses from the bump at the back of his skull.

"So that's it," Leon says, leaning against the wall across from him. "You want me to believe that you came all this way, got a maintenance job under a fake name and scrubbed toilets for two months, just to take a peek at a bunch of old records, all on the off chance that you might be able to find some buried scraps about DHARMA?"

"That's...a bit of an oversimplification, but yeah." He fidgets with the tail of one of the zipties. "And, I mean, it– It worked, right?" he adds with a bit of a nervous laugh, nodding to the DHARMA logo on the box beside Leon's feet.

Leon glances down at it, then back to Dan. "Give me one good reason why I should believe you."

He lets out a frustrated sigh. "Okay, if– If I was here to kill you, wouldn't I have a weapon of some kind?" He holds out his empty hands. "You can search me, or look through my pack, I'm– I'm unarmed."

"Yeah, I noticed that." Leon bends down to pick up the backpack and starts to dig through it.

Daniel rubs his eyes. The pounding in his head still hasn't stopped. Neither has the twisting in his stomach, though he's not sure how much of that is simply psychological.

"Why do you have this, then?"

He looks up to see Leon holding out a familiar black vest. Charlotte's vest. "It…belonged to a friend of mine," he explains quietly. In all honesty, he's not sure why he kept it all this time. Maybe as a promise, a tangible reminder that he'll one day return it to her. He shakes his head; this is no time to get sentimental. "And she– She's still there, and so are a couple dozen other people, and that's– That's why I'm trying to get back, that's why I'm here."

"You wanna go back there?"

He gives a hesitant nod. "Yeah. I thought that… Isn't that what you're doing here, too?"

Leon scoffs. "No way. I've had enough of that place for a lifetime."

"You've been there before, too, then." Daniel shifts his weight to lean against the pipe he's tied to. "How... When did you..."

Another scoff, and Leon sinks into a sitting position, shaking his head. "My mom," he begins softly, staring at his hands. "She was a scientist. Botany, horticulture, that kind of thing. She had a great job at Oklahoma State, but one year, she did a bunch of interviews with this guy who offered her an even better one. Only thing was, we'd have to relocate. Somewhere way out west," he makes sarcastic air quotes, "Or so they told her. All expenses were paid, though. I mean, research grants, housing, school tuition all included. Too good to be true, right?"

Daniel gives a sympathetic nod and waits for the rest of the story, resting his aching head against the wall.

"So, we moved. Packed everything up and joined this overly ambitious research organization that no one had ever heard of." He taps a finger on the box. "DHARMA was gonna change the world. Or save the world. Something like that," he says with a shrug. "We moved at the end of the summer, right when school was about to start, and all that really mattered to me was how short the school days were on this island. Classes were done at noon, and then we'd have the rest of the day off. Sure, we didn't have cable or MTV or anything, but there was still so much to do. I got to hang out at the beach every single day." He sighs. "I remember thinking it was paradise. That lasted for about three months."

"What happened?" Daniel prompts when he doesn't say anything else.

"The hostiles happened." Leon's hands clench into fists. "I went to school one day, just like normal, only about halfway through the morning, the teacher gets this weird look in her eyes. Says we're going on a field trip. Which doesn't make any sense, 'cause we're on an island, right? But she piles all the kids into one of the DHARMA vans and sits up front with this guy that nobody recognizes, and away we go." He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath before continuing. "Didn't realize what was happening, not even when they started handing out the gas masks. Wasn't until that evening, when they finally brought us back home, that we figured out the truth." He looks up at Dan, pure rage burning behind his eyes. "They were hostiles. All along, the woman who stood in that classroom teaching math to a bunch of kids... She was one of the people plotting to kill all of our parents. Every single person that wasn't secretly one of them in disguise, died that day. Some of the younger kids didn't really understand, but I did." He swallows hard. "I was eight."

Dan exhales. "I'm...sorry," he says quietly, not sure what else to say.

Leon huffs out a humorless laugh. "The best part was, they expected some of us to join them after that. I guess they thought that since they were merciful enough to not murder a bunch of children, that we'd be grateful enough to do whatever they said," he spits. "I never found out what happened to most of the kids I knew. Supposedly, everybody that wasn't on their little recruitment list got shipped back to the mainland on a sub. Nobody ever heard from them again." He shakes his head. "I didn't want to disappear, so I fell in with their little cult and did what they told me to. For fourteen years, I did what they told me to. I pretended to be one of them, just waiting for a chance to get the fuck out of there, and then, finally, I got sent to the mainland on an assignment. They were trying to recruit some doctor in Miami, and so, the second that I had the opportunity, I ran." He pauses to take another deep breath and lets it out with a small shrug. "That's what I've been doing ever since, really, just trying to stay alive long enough to figure out what the hell happened to the rest of the people from the DHARMA Initiative – everyone still on the mainland when the Purge happened. Supposedly, DHARMA was headquartered here, in Ann Arbor. But whoever those people are, the hostiles, they've got good connections. I've never been able to find any existing records, any concrete evidence that DHARMA even existed in the first place." He places a possessive hand on the box. "Until now."

"That's why I'm here too." The words are out of Daniel's mouth before he even realizes he's speaking aloud, and Leon fixes him with a suspicious glare. "I mean, I'm– You already knew that part, right? That's why you and I are here, in the first place, because we were both looking for information on DHARMA, and..." He lets out a nervous laugh. "I know that I probably sounded like some kind of...crazy conspiracy theorist, asking you about all this in the first place. But neither of us would have found anything on our own, and now..." He gestures toward the box, a bit awkwardly with his hands still bound. "Now we have something, so why– Why wouldn't we help each other?"

"How do I know I can trust you?" Leon says. "You haven't exactly been telling the truth, Daniel."

He winces. "I'm sorry that I lied about my name. But...you're probably doing the same thing, right?" he guesses, and a slight shift in Leon's posture tells him that he's right. "You have to understand, that I'm– I, uh..." He hesitates and finally settles on, "There are people out there that I'm trying to avoid, too."

Leon nods thoughtfully. "That's why you faked your death?"

Daniel blinks. "Wh... What?"

Leon's surprised expression mirrors his own. "You didn't know?" He stands and steps through the doorway into the next room, leaving Daniel alone for a few seconds before returning with a creased piece of paper in one hand. "You're dead," he states, holding it out for Dan to see.

It's his name, alright, printed in impersonal black and white atop a Certificate of Death from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Daniel Faraday, 27 years old, dead as of December 8, 2005, informant... "What the hell?"

Informant: Eloise Hawking, mother of the deceased. Her signature fills the box neatly, not a penstroke out of place, above a handwritten address in Los Angeles that he's never seen before.

"This doesn't…make any sense," he breathes, around the lead weight that's settled in his chest. "Why would… I haven't…" He tries to reach for the certificate, forgetting for a moment that he's still ziptied to a pipe.

"This wasn't you, then?" Leon turns it toward himself to read it with a frown. "Weird."

"Yeah." The word comes out like a weak laugh. Daniel shakes his head and clears his throat to regain Leon's attention before trying again, "Listen, I'm sorry that I lied, okay? But I swear to you, I'm not a murderer. I'm a scientist. I don't want anyone to get hurt." He swallows and shifts his weight and adds, nervously, "In...cluding me."

Leon stares at him for a long moment. "It doesn't make sense." Then, finally, he sighs, "And the weirdest part is, I believe you."

Cautious hope blooms in Dan's chest. "You do?"

He nods. "You're a little too incompetent to be an assassin, I think."

Daniel lets himself laugh at that, slumping against the wall in relief. "Thank you."

"I'm not sure what to do now, though." Leon crosses his arms. "I did kinda give you a concussion."

"It– It's alright," Dan stammers out quickly, shaking his head. "I'm not, uh, the kind of person to hold a grudge, if– if that helps," he offers, and Leon doesn't look entirely convinced but nods anyway. "So, if– If you wouldn't mind," he adds after a moment, holding up his hands, "Could you...cut me loose, now? So that we can, uh. Figure out where to go from here?"

Leon doesn't move. "No hard feelings?"

He shakes his head again. "None, whatsoever."

It's the truth, for the most part, and it seems to be good enough for Leon; he steps forward to retrieve a pair of scissors from the cart.

The sound of a door opening, somewhere in the next room, makes him freeze. He turns toward the noise, his eyes wide and focused on something around the corner that Dan can't see. "What–"

A deafening crack splits through the stale air; a gunshot, Dan realizes in horror, when Leon stumbles back a single step and topples to the floor, one hand over the dark red stain spreading outward from his chest.