PROLOGUE

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"We have a problem"

HE had a problem!

It was wrong...everything…

Everything was wrong.

The woman's voice sounded out omnipresent...it emanated from someplace above and all around him. The disembodied voice was only a small part of the intense 'wrongness' that caused Desmond's heart to race and the blood in his ears to rush so loudly that the sound threatened to drown out the din of the unnatural crowd that surrounded him.

The crowd…

The people surrounding him were terrifying. Figures somehow both very tangible... and yet also horrifically indistinct made up the unholy mass, they wandered around his shaking figure on the way to some impossible destination. Rivers of these faceless, nightmare-creatures flowed past Desmond on both sides, crowding him from every direction. It was with a terrified sense of uncoordinated desperation that the bartender moved through the mass…. he brushed past them roughly. Pushing through clusters of 'pseudo people', striking out in an effort to cause an escape route so he might put distance between himself and the overwhelming feeling of panic that had started to rise from his core and threatened to drown out all sane thought.

"Desmond I need you to try and relax…"

A man's voice this time…equally disembodied and doing nothing to inspire the reaction it was attempting to inspire. Part of his subconscious mind registered the voice, the request…but it would go unheeded. Most of the young man refused to focus on anything besides the sound of his own footsteps pounding the unnatural landscape as he ran…. darting first one direction and then another in his rush to find an exit from this madness. The word 'relax' did penetrate his growing panic however and it was met with a spike of disbelief.

Relax?

He had to be kidding. Around him the world flickered, blue tinged and hazy as it was already unnatural enough, but when images …buildings, cities, and landmarks too blurred and fractured to identify flashed in front of him forming a stream of blurred nonsense, all hope at 'relaxing' effectively vanished. Prior to the pulsing and shifting images Demsond would not have thought it possible…but somehow the return of the blue-tinged anonymous and literally faceless crowd struck him as fractionally comforting…not that this was saying much…

He had to find a way to get away from this place…to get back to the normal word…

"I'm going to try and stabilize him…"

Her voice again, the woman who had spoken before. Who was she? He didn't recognize he, didn't know the voice…should he?

He didn't know.

"Focus. Listen to the sound of my voice. Recognize that what your seeing isn't real. Just a picture of the past. It can't hurt you." The man was speaking again. But what the hell was he talking about? It wasn't real… It wasn't real?! The voice was wrong. This was somehow very real despite its wrongness. A faceless man in the crowd bumped harshly into his shoulder causing his upper body to jerk to the left. He felt it. His shoulder ached, and the pounding behind his eyes intensified. This was plenty real enough...the unknown man didn't know what he was talking about. A wave of nausea caused his stomach to spasm. His head pounded, a steadly growing pressure behind his eyes now adding to the pressure applied to an already strained mind.

"Damn it! it's not working!"

"Give it a moment. He'll adjust. The first time is never easy.

"We are losing him!"

"That's enough…"

"We need to pull him out."

The blue tinged landscape was fading in and out, but he hardly noticed the change over the pain behind his eyes and the spinning sensation. Desmond couldn't even separate the people from the landscape anymore…it was just…all blurred together. And for some reason…even if he closed his eyes …the images still surrounded him.

He couldn't block them out. Why wouldn't they go away?!

"Alright Desmond, we are going to try and bring you out now."

Everything faded into white. And he had never been so happy for painfully bright eye watering white. White was safe. Formless. Stationary. The ceiling came into focus above him, and a skylight with bright sunlight glared through opalescent glass. It was an object he could identify, and he almost cried out in relief. But he couldn't make a sound…there was no air in his lungs. Desmond gasped and struggled to breathe for several seconds. It felt like he had been underwater, holding his breath for far too long. That had been his first time. The first time his word was torn away from him. And his situation had not gotten any better after reality returned. Upon 'waking up' from the distorted 'nightmare' Desmond had been told, in no uncertain terms by his kidnappers, that he would cooperate willingly. He was informed he would help them get some information out of his head using …unbelievable sounding technology out of some science fiction movie…or be placed into a permanent coma…and become essentially living-dead.

And how were they going to get what they wanted?

Genetic memories.

The…Doctor…and he used the term lightly, told him that what people called 'instinct' was influenced by genetic memory. And the machine... which they called the 'animus' read those memories coded into your DNA...passed down from your ancestors and brought them forward for examination. They were after something in his very DNA…some memory, some information from the lifetime of a distant ancestor. But the memory they were looking for was apparently so traumatic and alien to Desmond's subconscious that his mind refused to cope and struggled against the Animus, keeping the information locked away…so it was decided they were going to start farther back, and 'ease' him into the memory they wanted. Meaning he would have to relive his ancestors life for some unknown length of time while his captors looked for something that was kept secret from Desmond himself.

After all HE didn't need to know what they wanted, the bastards would know when they saw it…all Desmond had to do was try not to go insane or die before they were finished.

It was like some twisted joke.

Desmond had run from his past in an effort to be free…and ironically the past had become his life and his prison in a very, very, big way.

They put him back in. He didn't have a choice.

The first few minutes of his second 'trip'…were not as bad. Unlike the first time he wasn't really 'there' enough to panic…it was more like watching an involuntary slide show…a very long and tiring, headache inducing, slide show.

And then … things slowly began to change.

He started to change...