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teecupangel · 2 years ago

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Hi! I was thinking about your reblog of my AssCreed headcanon list and I got this idea... Adha and Desmond character swap?

Desmond just wakes up in the Levant without any reason while Adha gets transported into the future because of their weird Chalice connection.

Bonus points if the switch happens at a really awkward time, like Des wakes up in bed with Altaïr and Adha with Lucy/Shaun/Rebecca (... basically whatever modern day character you ship Desmond with, or maybe all of them if you wanna go the poly route)

And what do you know, maybe Desmond knows enough about the future to warn everybody about Al Mualim and Kadar gets to live, and maybe Adha is well-versed enough in Isu bullshit to save Lucy and the world (and also Clay, somehow? Can we fit him in there as well?).

The reblog in question and the tags I included:

#no 3 though would mean that calling adha the chalice meant, #she was similar to desmond miles, #maybe she was a failed version, #and there's a few like her, #with desmond being the final 'product', #i personally headcanon adha is called the chalice because she has a specific isu blood that can open something, #like maybe the lost city of iram, #also known as atlantis of the sands

Honestly, Desmond being reborn as Adha has been a Yew Branches idea of mine since last year mostly because:

The term Chalice would mean it’s meant to hold something (as @fanworldbuildingfun once stated) and considering the most famous Chalice is meant to hold blood, the idea that the title Chalice is connected to her blood is high and is similar to how Desmond’s blood(line) plays an important part in his story.

Adha means ‘sacrifice’ and Desmond ends up sacrificing himself. (While Adha was the sacrifice that needed to happen so Altaïr would become who he is in AC1)

Adha wanted to leave Levant and everything behind. Desmond wanted the same thing and did just that.

There’s a possibility that she was 25 when she died (unconfirmed) which is also the same age Desmond died.

Anyway, let’s talk about how Desmond and Adha swapping places would work.

Okay, so let’s go over what we’re sure will happen:

Desmond and Adha would switch places at very awkward times because that would be fun and we all love to make Desmond suffer (affectionately).

Desmond would end up saving Kadar and warn everyone about Al Mualim (and be believed, I guess?)

Adha would end up saving Lucy and the world

Optional: Clay will be saved as well

So, for this one, we’ll have to twist the timeline a bit. We never did get an idea of when (if he ever did) Desmond relived Altaïr’s memories of Altaïr’s Chronicles (although I do like to headcanon he dreamed of it while he was stuck in the trunk of the car as Lucy drives them to the Rome hideout) so we’ll throw that away and make Desmond only have vague memories of Adha because we are setting this in the timeline where Lucy is still alive so that means Desmond hasn’t reached a Synch Nexus with Altaïr yet.

I propose that they switch not after a night of passion but during it, like in the exact middle of it. The kind reason for this is that no one would mistake that some kind of nefarious switcheroo has happened or another. The mean (totally the main reason why I'm suggesting this) reason is… maximum embarrassment and panic for Desmond which I am all for. XD

Okay, so let’s focus on Desmond first:

The best time for Altaïr and Adha to have some quality time would be just after they reunited and left the sewers and before Altaïr went to Tyr to ‘confront’ Harash. For this, we’ll assume Altaïr didn’t leave immediately and, instead, decided to stay with Adha for one night. During that time, Desmond changes places with her and… there’s a long period of just the two of them staring at each other with growing surprise and whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck

Then Altaïr grabs him by the throat and demands to know who he is and where’s Adha.

And just as Desmond is starting to get lighthearted from the lack of oxygen.

He manages to blurt out.

“I’m Adha!”

And that… is how Desmond Miles, the Isu’s favorite chew toy and the unluckiest chosen one in the world, screwed up so badly that he now has to pretend to be the tragic destined-to-die lover of Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad.

Of course, Altaïr didn’t believe him at first but then Desmond started answering his questions, questions only Altaïr and Adha would have known the answers to and Desmond is pretty sure it wasn’t his Bleed of Altaïr that was giving him the answers.

Not when one of the questions made him say “Oh, that? Yeah. I lied to you back then. What? You were cute as a kid and you believed everything I say so I wanted to see if you’d be able to tell if I was lying! You never did, right?”

There was no way Desmond could have answered that unless Altaïr knew it was a lie. Altaïr had truly believed it which means…

For some reason…

He has Adha’s memories inside him.

Unorganized Notes:

Desmond got Altaïr to call him ‘Desmond’ because “it’ll be weird if you call a guy ‘Adha’, right? Also, the Brotherhood knows Adha and I don’t look anything like her.”

Desmond joins Altaïr in finishing up the remaining plot points of Altaïr Chronicles because something inside him knows something bad is going to happen if he doesn’t stay with Altaïr. Also, Altaïr wasn’t going to let him out of his sight because there were still a bit of lingering doubts about Desmond’s true identity which Desmond is like “yeah, that sounds about right”.

Altaïr Chronicles’ parts end successfully but Desmond gets a headache the day Adha was meant to die. He loses consciousness and Altaïr has to carry him off to somewhere safe until he wakes up.

When he wakes up, he knows where to go…

And now we get to Adha’s side of the story, in which she gets transported while Desmond was in the middle of a little stress-relieving session with Rebecca, Shaun and Lucy. All three of them immediately freaked out while Adha is momentarily confused before giving the same excuse Desmond gave to Altaïr.

“I’m Desmond Miles.”

Everyone is super sus at that but, really, they’re dealing with Isu BS and Desmond’s Bleeding Effect had been weirder than what was recorded (Lucy’s insistent “It can’t do this!!!” falls into deaf ears) and they figured the best way to check if Adha is Desmond is to put her in the Animus to check her genetic memories.

Lo and behold…

She has the same genetic DNA as Desmond Miles.

Not only that, the Animus ‘sees’ her as Subject 17 and the next memory to be played was the same memory of Ezio where they stopped for the day.

So, yeah…

According to the Animus…

Adha was Desmond Miles.

What the fuck.

Unorganized Notes:

Unlike Altaïr and Adha who did have an intimate romantic (most probably, fuck it, I’m headcanoning here, childhood friends to arranged marriage) relationship, Desmond’s relationship with Lucy, Shaun and Rebecca is primarily sexual although the feelings were starting to creep in.

If this was a fic, the narration would be more… vague. Less of Adha being an unreliable narrator and more of like the narration isn’t set in Adha’s eyes like with Desmond’s but in the eyes of the people around her although she’s the main focus.

She actually has a higher sync rate than any of Desmond’s past synchronization which is surprising.

Instead of going to the colosseum, Ezio’s memories stopped just as he had taken the Apple back from the Borgias, instead giving them the memory of Altaïr and everyone freezes when they saw Desmond with him.

They were underground and Shaun noticed that it looks a lot like the vault in the Vatican but… there are pillars, large and tall, piercing the dark ceiling above them.

After that memory plays, Adha slips into a coma and the Animus tells them that taking her off would endanger her so they keep her hooked to the Animus as it starts playing memories of Altaïr and Desmond.

During that time, Adha meets with Clay who calls her an ‘anomaly’ and Adha just smiles as she says “yeah, that sounds about right.”

Their conversation will be hidden from everyone (including the readers) and it will end with Adha waking up from her coma and telling everyone that they need to go somewhere else right now.

She takes them to the colosseum first to get the Apple but she tells Lucy to stay in the van for now. When Lucy tries to join them, the van locks by itself and Lucy freezes when she hears Clay’s voice coming from the laptop connected to the Animus.

When they returned, Lucy is oddly quiet and just asks Adha where to go next.

Adha gives them the location of a place they never heard from Ezio’s memories at all.

The Convergence:

The location in question is the lost city of Iram which has an underground Isu ‘temple’ named Iram of the Pillars.

The pillars there served as one of the many failed experiments of the Isu to protect themselves from the Solar Flare. The pillars were meant to store the data of all the Isus and the idea was they would be used to transfer the Isus forward a little bit after the Solar Flare.

The process of uploading the data itself proved to take too much time and Juno used the premise of this project and created the Mead to transfer the Isu’s consciousness instead of its entirety.

Iram can only be opened by a specific bloodline. To be more specific, the bloodline that Adha belongs to with an Isu ancestry that had been in charge of the Pillar Project (since this is a Capitoline Triad thing, I wanna say Minerva since she has a statue in Masyaf according to the novel but the idea of Juno and Aita having a child that would could be the Isu ancestor of Adha is a bit fun). This Isu ancestry is also in Altaïr’s bloodline thanks to Umar although his blood is more ‘diluted’ than Adha’s.

The Isu ancestry is why Adha is named the Chalice and why she ‘can turn the tide’ of the crusades since this is pretty much a teleporter of some sort.

Desmond is connected to Adha for one specific reason: he’s was Adha in his past life and now, thanks to whatever the fuck happened in 2012 that serves as the premise of all Yew Branches, Adha herself is the reincarnation of Desmond Miles after he died in 2012.

In other words, the Adha we’ve been looking at had been Desmond Miles who used Iram’s Pillar Project to switch their places because she, as Desmond Miles, wanted to save the people he couldn’t save in his previous life. And now, the pillars are ready for its final use.

By using the Pillars that have been upgraded thanks to Desmond in the past (and Altaïr) bringing the necessary POEs that would start the automatic upgrade construction that would need centuries to be completed, the Pillars could be used for one big moment where the entire world will be transported a few seconds into the future just as the Solar Flare hits. This way, the entire world would be gone and when it returns (without anyone knowing of the time and space displacement), the Solar Flare would have already been completed.

Now…

This is the conundrum…

Do we include in the idea that using the Pillars to save the world meant that Adha and Desmond would be stuck in their current time with Desmond with Altaïr and Adha with Shaun, Rebecca, Lucy and (digital ghost for now) Clay?

Or will the Pillars switch them back in their proper time?

What would count as a happy ending in this scenario?

Because Adha has Desmond Miles’ memories so she does love Shaun, Rebecca, and Lucy the same way Desmond Miles had and everything she had done was to save the world and save Lucy and Clay.

And Desmond has spent years with Altaïr at this point, growing close to him and Altaïr definitely realized that Desmond is more than just Adha.

So… really…

Would returning them to their original timeline truly be a happy ending?