He opens his eyes and he sees swirls of colours and a green hue off to the side of him—he's not sure where it's coming from, the light burns—and he squints, hoping, praying, please—

And he can feel the panic and bile rise up in his throat, constricting and drowning and he can feel the cold, cold brisk of frontier air on his cheeks and can feel Rebecca's hands shaking his shoulders. She's speaking, and her lips are moving, and her pupils are dilated and darting around, and her face keeps blurring familiar and unfamiliar and he can feel the familiar shicck by his left hand more than he can hear it, and something makes him freeze as she screams—Desmond, Desmond, Desmond.

Desmond's not here, he wants to shout, and on his lips he feels the name Ratonhnhaké:ton gurgle about; and he wants to spit his feelings out but he shuts it all down, pushes it all down, shoves whatever he feels deep into his heart and throws away the key and stiffens his quivering upper lip and clenches, unclenches, clenches his fists. He sees a cavern in his peripheral, no, he sees trees and sprawling shrubbery, he sees red coats in their two lines, he sees Shaun and then he—

He screams. And everyone in the room is jolted, all at once, as if held up by strings for some invisible, anonymous puppeteer's play, dancing along to some coordinated ballet. Shaun's the one that breaks the silence after the scream, the shout, the, the wail, and he slaps the man in front of him, hoping that this man is still Desmond and that something just hasn't irrevocably broken. And a hand shots up to grab Shaun's wrist, grip tight and unrelenting, and the man's eyes are a flint-lock kind of gold streaked brown, exotically mad and glowing, some sort of ethereal, ephemeral light that makes Shaun think Desmond, or Ratonhnhaké:ton, is using Eagle's Vision—or maybe it's the leftovers of the Animus, still running its course through Desmond's body.

Someone's speaking and the words are a muffled mess, rattling around his head, Shaun let go of him and is now walking farther and farther away, back to the source of the green light that burns his eyes, and he can hear words that anger him, words that frighten him we don't have time, we need to put him back under and he just gets up to get some room to breathe. And everything, everything is still bathed in that white, that annoying, Animus-Abstergo-whatever-the-hell-it-is white, and his skin itches, and his blood boils and the thought, and he just wants to walk out and leave and never look back; but then he wants to stay and keep looking into the pit, wants to play this dance around the edge and skirt the line of standing up and falling down, falling down into something he doesn't know and doesn't understand but he needs if he wants to save the damn world.

He's got to give himself, he's got to jump into the pit and he's got to endure the white, the white that haunts him in his dreams and in his waking moments and in his ancestral moments and the never-ending white, the never ending cacophony of do this, do that, do what I say—

And so he walks towards the green light that still burns his eyes, flips his father off, who he's still not sure is his father yet, because William sounds wrong, and Haytham sounds right, but then Haytham sounds wrong and William sounds right, and he plops himself by Shaun, who for some reason reminds him of a painter or an artist, or he sees flickers of paint scrubbed into Shaun's cheeks and he hears things ringing around his head in Italian for a few moments.

Shaun looks at him, for a moment, and then turns back to the wall of green light, and they don't say much, except for when, for when the Assassin, the man that doesn't know who he is anymore pipes up—just, just let me be Desmond.

And neither of them say anything but they know that he'll only be Desmond for but a moment more and then, and then—

But they don't speak, and the man and Shaun look into the green, the man with the wild, gold flint-lock eyes squints and he keeps looking in, and he starts muttering in some mix of Arabic and that's when Shaun gets up to go back to his books, and that's when William comes over and leads his son back to the Animus, and that's when Rebecca closes her eyes and presses sync and that's when Desmond has jumped into the pit, he's gone straight into the darkness with a Leap of Faith and his faith's been misplaced because nothing's at the bottom to catch him after the fall.