#anyone that actually reads this to the end automatically unlocks my willingness to die in battle 4 u because this is a mess

[obibail]

this is half a mess of FC5 timeline/Faith(s) & Megan & Ethan speculation and half me making one of my own original children Ethan’s half-brother and then fully committing and making him Ethan’s full-blood brother and Joseph’s youngest son and for that Finn sweetie I am so sorry,,,,,,,,, 

The Project at Eden’s Gate moves to Hope County somewhere between 2010-2011, if Faith’s saying she was 17 when she met Joseph is truthful and accurate. Somewhere around here Joseph has some sort or relationship Megan, who I’m pretty convinced would have to have been a Hope County local or an original Georgia congregant if Ethan was born within a few years of the Project digging its claws into the community. Given how much Megan seems to love Joseph, I’d bet money she might be an original congregant.

I’m of the mind that they had a Faith that came with them from Georgia, and that possibly the second Faith was also an original congregant. That’s not the point of this post but,,,, it makes the most sense considering there has been multiple in seven years and it would look insanely bad if three local women died or went missing after being involved with a cultish church that just invited itself to the area, but if one or two of those women were not actually locals and came with the cultist church? Might have made the community more willing to overlook how utterly sketch that shit was. 

Ethan is probably born somewhere between 2012-2014, likely closer to late 2013 as that’s when I think Rachel became Faith -- Megan left partially because there being a “new Faith” scared her, possibly because of the quick turnover between them, possibly because she knew the old Faith(s) from the original congregation, and hey maybe Megan was a candidate for Faith! Imma cover all those creepy bases, give this woman every single reason to think she should flee a community she claims to loves to protect herself and her child. Given Joseph’s weird comments about Faith, I have absolutely no trouble believing he might have been grooming multiple young women at the same time to take on that role eventually and that Megan got caught up in that in a bad way and she saw a glimpse of her future if she stayed in Rachel taking on the mantle. This makes Ethan younger than I think he looks canonically but we all know Ubisoft, multibillion dollar gaming studio, doesn’t know how people do, so,,,, 

(He was definitely born late in the year because Ethan is definitely a Scorpio and as a Scorpio myself you cannot change my mind. I’m willing to throw myself under the bus for this headcanon, I really am.) 

Megan left because she had some kind of fear for Ethan and herself if they stayed. Obviously someone knew something about Joseph’s wife and daughter, and it was a widespread enough rumor for Megan to have time to doubt what she was hearing but the actual contents of these rumors are never clarified - but given her reaction? At the very least she knows they’re both dead. 

So her leaving -- was there a rumor her baby was Joseph’s? Given the prohibition on sex in the cult, I’d assume there’d be speculation and suspicion if an established member just went “oh hey I’m pregnant and no I can’t say who the father is” 🤔🤔Did she think something would happen to her and her baby if this was revealed? What did she think happened to Joseph’s previous family - like how much is known of what happened to his wife, do people know he killed his own baby girl? He tells Rook easy enough but Ubisoft can I get some uuuuuuuuhhhhhh real fucking exposition? 

Megan’s initial letter implies that she left either while still pregnant or when Ethan was maybe a few days or weeks because she still hasn’t given him a name - she says “I’ll name him Ethan.” And even though Megan’s letters say that she left the cult, it never specifies in any of her letters that she left Hope County. So it’s possible she stayed with someone outside of the cult until she had the means to actually leave - I’m of the opinion that she hid for a while, laid low with someone she knew outside the cult who offered her a safe place. 

Which leaves me a window for the Finn boy,,,, and a whole bunch’a headcanons,,,,,,, 

Megan goes to David Rothschild, a defector and a deeply good man who left the cult when he started to doubt the goodwill of Jacob & John. He lives isolated in the Whitetails with his fiancee, even more off the grid than some of the most paranoid of the preppers in the county - Joseph’s Collapse rhetoric really took a toll on him. She plans to stay with him until she feels comfortable traveling with Ethan - with no friends outside of the cult and no family to speak of, she doesn’t have any cemented destination so she would need to build up a significant safety net if she means to set out on her own. A ride out of the county, a vehicle of her own from there, money for hotels and food. A car seat, baby food, blankets, diapers, bottles, everything. It’s a brutal few months of stashing and hoarding and working with David’s fiancee Ariel - a midwife - to make sure she’s ready to actually do this. 

But in those few months, she makes a mistake. She goes to see Joseph again because she’s young and foolish and in love despite every warning sign and she wants to see him again. And one things leads to another and uh,,, 

She learns she’s pregnant two weeks before she’s set to leave. The news blindsides her - the pregnancy is unwanted, accidental, utterly stupid, but she refuses to terminate it. But she also isn’t prepared to travel with an infant son while also pregnant so she makes the decision to stay in Hope County until she has the baby. Megan never says who the father of this second child is but she knows David knows. 

As it is, the three of them have their hands full raising Ethan, who is a sweet but colicky baby, and helping a local man - Roman Greenway - who has been battling with the cult for ownership of his land, a plot and small home not very far away from the Rothschilds. Roman is helpful with Ethan: although - in her opinion - he doesn’t have the temperament to ever raise a child, he knows how to change a diaper and soothe a colicky baby so he’s okay in her books. 

Finn is born January 17th, 2015 and in the days that follow Megan makes the hardest decision of her life. Part of her wants to leave both Finn and Ethan with the Rothschilds but she can’t bear to leave Ethan behind. She finally decides that would be better off with a stable home and, given that she never saw Joseph again after that one stupid mistake of a night, Joseph has no idea Finn exists so whatever she worries about with Ethan might not apply. And she really can’t travel with a 1-2 year old and an infant. So she leaves week-old Finn with David and Ariel, who are honestly more than happy to take on a baby and leaves Hope County with Ethan and forces herself to not look back. 

Where they go from there is a mystery. Megan distinctly says she’s “gone south” looking for Joseph after she finds the ruins of the Project compound. Not back south, just south. So it’s possible they go to Canada but who knows!

The catch in all of this is that Finn is not as safe with the Rothschilds as Megan was hoping. The Peggie attack on David in May of 2015 is retributive and vindictive and will become a staple of how the cult deals with its defectors - he is perceived by the cult as a traitor and a sinner for leaving and when his land is marked as something the cult wants, the men sent to take the land are given carte blanche (by John) to do whatever they felt they had to in order to secure the land. 

But no one in the Project knows about the baby that David has adopted, so when David and Ariel are killed after a confrontation that turns violent, no one has any idea 4 month old Finn is asleep in his crib in the back bedroom or that he is shocked awake by the sound of gunshots. And because they were just sent there to clear the land and not the house, none of the cultists check for what they’re not expecting to find. 

But Roman -- who could still be loosely defined as a neighbor despite the fact that the cult found legal grounds to get him evicted from his home not two months before -- did know and after it happened he scrambled to get to that kid.

Back before Megan left, Roman knew the woman was a former cultist and he knew was running from something. And he probably suspected that Ethan’s was Josephs’ just given her level of paranoia the longer she stayed in Hope County. There was no other reason for her to be that scared all the time. And he suspects he knows who Finn’s father was too, but that has no bearing on him getting to that house and and getting to Finn and holding the kid he’d come to see as his godson to his chest while the poor thing wailed. Roman makes a peekaboo game out of covering Finn’s eyes - something Finn usually hates - so Finn is unable to see the bodies of his parents strewn out on the grass in front of their home when Roman takes him away. 

And uh, some New Eden thoughts: 

Ethan and Finn don’t have much of a relationship once they do actually meet and learn they’re brothers. They’re raised together for about ten years but they’ve been raised apart so long before that that it’s hard for either of them to see each other as a brother. Finn has his own adopted sibling in Heather, Jordan Richmond’s daughter who he is incredibly close with, and Ethan was raised as an only child who got his head fills with delusions of grandeur and religious bullshit and the promise of a great prophet father. 

Neither of them particularly like the other either even though if they worked together, they’d probably be a good team - their strengths and weaknesses would be a good balance for each other. 

For Ethan, Finn becomes a constant reminder of what Joseph would rather he be, and he’s under no illusions that Joseph would rather that Finn was the elder brother so that Finn could be his spiritual heir. Ethan seethes. 

In Ethan’s mind, there will always be a competition between them for their father’s approval. For Finn, this competition absolutely doesn’t exist: Finn doesn’t even think of Joseph as his father - that’s Roman and it always will be Roman. But the more he tries to explain this to Ethan, the angrier Ethan becomes at him (because Ethan cannot comprehend that, given how he was raised to think of his father Like That), so he stops eventually and just lets his brother play out their one-sided feud.

But sometimes their being so different is great because Ethan will be losing his absolute mind loudly and publicly about god fucking knows what and in the background you get to see a slightly smaller, slightly younger, less greasy version of himself going 👀👀👀 

Finn is Ethan’s last remaining brain cell