It's been a while, I apologize! But here it is! An Epilogue will follow very soon. Thank you so much to those of you who have been reading this for the past couple of years! It's been hard, but we've nearly made it!

Burke was the first to regain sense of his surroundings. Grant was moaning about his stomach. Yusef was lying on his face, arms outstretched, trying very hard not to fall off the earth.

"Come on, people," he laughed to himself. "It's just a little time travel." They had the foresight to throw some of the softer materials they owned around the floor, to make sure they didn't brain themselves on the return impact.

"Good idea about duct taping your coat on the desk corner, right, Grant?"

He wheezed and brought a hand to the back of his head. "Yeah, you're telling me! I could've died!"

"But you didn't, so there."

Hanover twisted herself around, trying to pop her back. "So I suppose everything's fine? Or will be? Anyone feel different?"

They looked around their base of operations for a moment. Nothing looked different. The letterheads were still those of The Secret, as when they left.

"Can we just take a second, please? I need my insides to stop trying to escape," Yusef pleaded. "She's in the past, what we do won't matter just yet."

Burke was already combing the database, but looked up at his team. They all looked a bit worse for wear. He wasn't sure he looked much better. "Yeah, sure. Take a couple of hours I guess. Get reacquainted with gravity. Eat something if you can."

Yusef just gave a weak thumbs up, still on the floor.

Two hours became three, as everyone was still moving in slow motion. They had jumped through time and back and changed history, like Fitz had done. Was in the process of doing? Grant couldn't decide. He was contemplating going outside to see if the world had changed since his arrival. Maybe they were in some kind of crazy futuristic world now where buildings floated in the clouds and the new phone was so implanted directly into your back molar. Maybe it was a zombie apocalypse. Thinking that, he decided would be Schrodinger's Cat and be both and not know for sure.

"Burke? Come take a look at this," Hanover called. She had been poring over the database of The Secret for a while now, once she regained equilibrium.

"What've you got?" He sidled up next to her as she scrolled back up.

"Some old papers? From the Auditore era." She brought up an image. Someone had carefully photographed an old parchment. The ink was faded, almost as yellowed as the paper. "Think this might be her?"

Burke shouldered his way in to get a closer look.

"080315022230

V.^3rd. . Left. Cold Sleep.

B.M.U.S.

JF."

It didn't take him any time at all. "She's given us a date."

Grant took a look at the note. "That's just two days after. She can't have done it that fast. Something's gotta be wrong. She's got a holster, I sent her back with one."

"Maybe she lost it, or can't get to it to work? We don't know what happened to it."

"If something went wrong, we need her back soon, or we'll never find out. I can reconfigure Hanover's, take that back to Fitz. It'll take me a little while."

"What's Bee-Mus?" Burke scrunched up his nose and stared hard at the monitor.

Grant stared for a minute and laughed to himself. "It's 'Beam me up, Scotty!' The second line must be directions. Vatican, 3rd floor?" Hanover brought out the floor plan for the building as Grant decoded it. "All the way to the right, left?"

"East wing, maybe? It used to be used as guest apartments. See?" she pointed on the map. Must be this room, all the way east, on the left side of the hallway, around this corner here."

Burke nodded. "I think that's right. 'Cold sleep.' If it's a bedroom, under the blankets? Under the bed?"

"Fitz hates sleeping on the floor. You're probably right about under the bed itself."

The group reached a silent agreement. "Okay, Grant. You feel up to running this. She wants it done before…midnight, looks like, so you'll need to be in full stealth mode."

"You got it. I'll suit up and drop her replacement holster. Immediate return trip."

"Sounds good. Hanover, can you get the coordinates for that specific site?"

"May not be exact, but I can put him down here. A little bit more exposed, but less room for error. He can flash back to here from inside the room."

"Fine. Let's get him locked and loaded and bring our girl home."

Grant carefully re-calibrated the device, just as Hanover was inputting the coordinates into the program.

"I know you know how to run it, but let me check to make sure. It gets hinky sometimes. Doesn't like carrying the tens." A brief look okayed it. His holster was belted around him.

"Remember," Burke cautioned him. "This is just and in and out, B&E. No side trips."

"Don't worry. As much as I love the idea of punching a Borgia in the face, I can let Fitz tell that story.

This was it. She was going to die five hundred years before she was born. She couldn't lift her head, she was losing her strength to hold the compress in place. Even if she survived the laceration, the terrible medical practices would kill her. Yusef had told her that. Or was it Thom?

Then she had to get back.

Oh. Holy. Shit.

Where was the holster? She hadn't thought about it this entire time. Where did she leave it? She couldn't remember. How am I going to get home? The desk was on the opposite side of the room. Fitz sucked in a breath and tried to will herself to remove her hand from her throat and put it on the floor. Tears were burning her eyes as badly as the cuts and bruises did her body. With a cry she managed to turn herself on the floor and approach the desk. Sunlight was threatening to breach the high wall outside.

Fitz threw a hand onto the desk, feeling for any scrap of parchment or quill or anything that would get the message through time. She felt the ink pot slip out of her grasp twice until she finally managed to catch it. Her hands shook so hard it spilled onto her and the floor.

She swore at herself. Shock was threatening to set in. Blood rushed loudly in her ears and her nightgown was getting bloodier by the second. Fitz grabbed some scrap of paper from the desk. It was already smeared in ink and blood. A quill lay on the floor, apparently knocked off in the fight. She bit the end to sharpen it quickly.

Her brain was muddled with a hundred thoughts at once. This is it. What do I do now? I'm not going to make it back. The sunlight caught the dust motes in the air, swirling around her and Cesare's corpse. Time slowed down around her.

She knew.

Fitz brought the makeshift nib to her throat. After a second, she inspected it and put it to parchment. Her final message, written in her own blood. It took every ounce of resolve in her to carefully form legible letters. She couldn't remember what floor she was on floor a long time. Her head lolled on her chest as she thought. Just close your eyes and think. NO! Don't do that! The writing on the page wasn't making sense to her anymore. They were just squiggles with no rhyme or reason. Am I crying? Why does my mouth taste funny? What are they going to do with my body? What do they expect to happen?

Grant slammed back into the Animus full-force. Burke caught him like a football and held him in place until his joints came back to him.

"Did you get it set?" Hanover asked hurriedly. She wanted her girl home.

He nodded weakly. "Yeah, she should be good to go."

"Did you see her?" Burke barked.

"No. No one seems interested in her, but there's a lot of talk about some noblewoman who's gone missing. Think it's her?"

"Don't know." Burke frowned. His operation had too many loose ends. "Yusef, get ready. I have a feeling we're going to need you here in a sec."

"I went ahead and programmed the holster for her. She's just gotta hit send."

Third floor!

Fitz' senses came back into violent focus for a split second as she jabbed the pen into her wound to finish her message. She vomited from the pain. Or the blood loss, she wasn't sure. Her light headedness made her throw in a Star Trek reference in her message. Time travel, bitches… She laughed. It hurt.

She fell backwards, her head hitting the floor. Fitz couldn't really feel it. She could hazily see the outline of something under her bed, dangling between the cords that held the mattress off the floor. Was that it? Did they get the message?

Fitz crawled over to the bed, dying by inches. Bleeding out always goes faster in the movies…

Even though sparks filled her vision, she slowly recognized the holster Thom had built. She thought she was smiling. She couldn't feel her face any longer.

A smear of blood, both hers and Cesare's, ink, and vomit followed her across the floor like some unholy snail trail.

This…is how an ...angel…

Her breath only came in short bursts, causing bubbles of blood on her throat to form. Fitz' arms wouldn't pull her any closer. She couldn't reach it. She couldn't hear anything, except for that white noise whine of silence. She couldn't hear the door open, nor the Assassin slip inside. She couldn't hear him call her name.

She couldn't feel him pull her up.

She couldn't feel herself pull away and reach blindly for the holster.

She couldn't hear herself yell at him to reach under and bring it to her.

She couldn't feel the bed come up behind as he threw her on it as he dove under it to retrieve whatever she was babbling about in a language he could not understand.

She couldn't see him stare at it in wonder and fear.

She couldn't feel him press it into her hands.

She couldn't feel herself shove the blood-inked parchment into his.

The last thing she could feel was hitting the button and the rush of nothing that would follow.

This is how an angel dies.

"Jesus, Mary, and Yusef!" Thom shouted. She was a mess. She was covered in blood, bruises, her throat had been slashed. Hanks of hair were missing.

Burke stared at her. Yusef didn't know where to start. He grabbed at her wrist, her throat, anywhere trying to find a semblance of a pulse. Hanover brought a hand to her mouth to choke the sobbing that threatened to rise. Her pupils were fixed. There was nothing to be done. He just kneeled down beside the Animus cradle.

"No, there's gotta be something you can do!" Burke shouted.

"She's dead."

"NO!" Thom half cried.

"She's dead," Yusef repeated. He brushed the hair out of her face that was sticking to the blood and whatever else. "Justine's dead."

No one moved for a very long time. It was horrifying. They couldn't not look at her. Thom was the first to break the silence, screaming and knocking a load of papers and books from a desk, throwing anything he could find. None of them tried to stop him. Burke just wiped at his face and sucked in an angry breath. Hanover very carefully lowered herself to the floor and sat against a desk.

"So…so now what? Are we still part of The Secret? Or are we Assassins again?"

Burke shrugged ineffectually, staring at his shoes.

"You want to…look it up?" Hanover spat.

"Are we in a rush?" He returned. He threw the chair around and sat heavily in front of his computer. Hanover was wiping tears out of her eyes, lowering her head to her knees. Thom had run out of things to throw.

Burke looked blankly at the screen for a few moments, trying to think of where to begin. Nothing looked new or different from last time. He keyworded MESSENGER and returned to a familiar page. Again, nothing looked different.

"Anything?"

He didn't look up. "Not yet Give me a minute, please." It turned into an hour or two.

Yusef had been taking samples of Fitz' blood and emesis for study and catalogue. He tried to clean her up some so they could at least bury or burn her. Her will, which she was required to create, stipulated how she'd want to be disposed of, if her body could be recovered safely. He couldn't remember, he'd look later.

Thom had pulled a stool over to the Animus. He had been holding her hand for a long time now.