Chapter Text
Death is blinding light.
Death is peace and pain.
Death is waking up suspended in a water tank with what feels like tubes running into his arms and not a fucking clue as to why.
Desmond doesn’t get to think about that last one very much when the world is so terribly bright and new and vivid. His eyes burn like they’ve had acid poured into them, the sensation accenting the kaleidoscope of colours pouring into his mind, and he can feel the tubes spasm where they’re inserted into his skin. It's at this point that Desmond realises he can’t breathe. He thrashes and pulls and kicks instinctively and there’s something non metallic to his front that brushes against his knuckles as he searches for a catch or release or something that will give way. He moves on reflex and hammers it with his fists and soon the barrier gives, cracks and shatters with one final surge of effort and then, finally, he can breathe.
The water drains away through the new opening in a rush and Desmond is carried with the torrent to meet the ground, his knees buckling as the liquid that had managed to slip past his lips comes back out in coughs and spurts. He gulps down the available air and shudders at how his body feels like one big bruise - tender and fragile and foreign feeling of all things.
He can hear voices - something being spoken in what sounds like Italian - muffled and slowly coming into focus as his sight does the same and the feeling of something wet and metallic registers underneath his feet and hands. What the hell happened? It's a question that grows in its demand for an answer when his eyes bring the ground into crisp colour and Desmond recognises the distinct grey and glowing blue of Isu construction.
Is he in the Temple then?
The voices ring out again, now in perfect detail and Desmond strains his neck to look in the direction they’ve come from. The voice belongs to what he quickly realises, to his disbelief, is a Borgia guard and not just one - he’s surrounded by men draped in their colours and armour and he doesn’t know how to reconcile their presence with his memories of the Eye from the fucking modern day . Another Animus glitch like the one on the island ? Maybe, but the feedback from his senses seem far too vivid for it to be that.
“It looks like a man!”
“Keep your distance!”
He hears the voices - the fear that laces every word - and tries to shake his head to dispel the illusion because none of this makes any sense. The guard stubbornly remains in his sight and Desmond absentmindedly realises that he’s practically naked save for the tubes that are still connected to his limbs and the opaque pseudo skin that hugs his lower half. He grits his teeth and grips the tubes on his left arm - hissing at the pain as each one fails to rebuff his strength as he pulls them out - quickly repeating the task with the ones on his right arm.
The action seems to make the guards nervous with every hiss the tubes make as they come loose and Desmond can hear the shifting of armour and the unsheathing of swords clear as day. He ignores it as he looks at the aftermath of the last tube falling to the floor. The skin around the entry points doesn’t gush blood - it simply grows anew and seals the multitude of openings in seconds and somehow it's that detail which freaks him out enough to shakily stand and try to make sense of things.
“Stand down! Do not dare harm the creature!”
A new voice comes through, stark, familiar and dredging up memories of sheer hate as Desmond hones in on it immediately. Rodrigo Borgia is somehow standing a few feet across from him clear as day flanked by men in full battle plate. He almost staggers back to his knees because this has to be a dream or some fucked up Isu memory disc simulation. The alternative is that life after death is a serious Twilight Zone clusterfuck.
Rodrigo approaches him slowly. The sheer greed radiating from his eyes as he rakes them over Desmond’s body sends his fight or flight response into overdrive and his breath quickens with the familiar rush of adrenaline kicking in. Strange, Rodrigo isn’t dressed in Papal garb and the staff is nowhere to be seen - the coal-black robe that epitomized his tenure as Templar Grandmaster is what adorns him now and there is a lavishly designed sword hanging from a scabbard on his hip.
“Can you understand me?” The Templar asks.
“Yes.” Desmond replies automatically and feels unnerved at how alien Rodrigo Borgia looks with a smile on his face. The older man approaches him with deliberate, measured footsteps - his guards slowly moving to envelop Desmond in a semi circle as he does so. His mind is screaming at him to move and not let these lesser beings dare think that they can control him. The thought throws him off enough for the Templar to get within arms length of him - close enough that Desmond could grab a hold of his soft flesh and crush the weak bones hiding beneath his face.
“A simple expedition and we stumble upon you here, right under our noses this whole time.” Rodrigo shakes his head. “Would that we were always so fortunate.”
Desmond forces his face to remain neutral at the words. His mind blares demands for him to strike the man down and beat him into an unrecognisable mess of blood and bone but he can only stare in frozen disbelief. Naked desire is uncontained in Rodrigo’s every word, his facial expressions and in his stance, like Desmond is all the power in the world made corporeal.
“Why are you here?” Desmond asks and hopes the illusion cracks at the question.
“To hear the truth from you.” Rodrigo answers immediately. “For you, oh Creator, to tell us what the messages you left behind did not.”
“The truth?” Desmond questions after a moment of pause to consider the implications of the word creator and why the hell it's being used to describe him. “Which truth?”
“The Apple and its purpose.” Rodrigo answers just as quickly as before. “And where more of your artifacts are hidden.”
This is too off the rails to be an Animus fuck up - no ancestor to piggyback a connection off of and he’s pretty sure that the Templars never found a place like wherever the hell this is. It looks like a Temple but more well preserved - glowing lines of cyan light blaze around them in this cavern that they’re in and he can see a vault interface a few meters behind the Borgia guards. Wait, how the hell does he know its a vault interface? Jesus Christ he needs answers to all these fucking questions.
Desmond snaps his head back to face Rodrigo. “What year is it?” He demands and straightens his posture to exacerbate the now obvious height disparity between the two men.
“The year?” The Templar looks momentarily confused. “I do not know how your kind kept time or what difference it makes but by our calendar the year is 1476.”
Holy shit.
That’s. . .
“Not possible.” Desmond replies. His knee meets the ground and Desmond feels fire course through his veins, hot and heavy as the implications of the Templar standing across from him addressing him like Ezio did with Minerva weigh him down like nothing else ever has. He’s here, in the past somehow very much alive and the Grandmaster of the Templar Order is right there in front of him.
If this really isn’t some fucked up coma dream and he’s actually here then. . .
Desmond rises to his feet, grabs the sword from Rodrigo’s scabbard and runs it through the man's heart. It cuts through the soft flesh easily - a croak of surprise and the wet sound of warm blood spurting from the fresh wound accompanies the crimson stain spreading outwards on the Grandmaster’s doublet. He twists the sword once for good measure before steadying the impaled man with his free hand and withdrawing the blade. The Templar staggers back in stunned disbelief as he watches Desmond with doomed eyes move to the nearest of his guards and cut the man down through an opening in his armour plate.
The guards are disciplined and rapidly rally to contain the new threat. Desmond slaps the counter attacking sword swung at him aside with his own like it isn’t even there and brings it down across the joining of the next enemy’s shoulder and neck with all the strength he can muster. He nearly stops in surprise when the blade bisects flesh and steel on it’s diagonal path to exit the guards hip neatly, cutting him in two, and the momentary hesitation nearly earns him a polearm through his side.
He dodges the spike even as the attached blade knicks his flesh and grabs a hold of the wooden length behind it - pulling suddenly and dragging the guard holding it into a neat impalement with his sword. The man has the courtesy to only collapse after Desmond has withdrawn his blade and blocked another being swung at his side - fist connecting with the new opponents chest hard enough that he can feel the sternum break through the armour plate.
It's easy to slip into the reflexes of three master Assassins, easier than he ever remembered it being. Block, parry and slash - stab, kick and punch. He doesn’t even feel the usual tug of his lungs devouring air like they normally do in a fight or the strain of his muscles as Desmond takes advantage of the wet surface to slide under a sword thrust and run his own through the attacker’s armour and organs like they aren’t even there.
He steps inside the guard of one of the Borgia men and punches upwards into his jaw as hard as he can. A crunch of broken bone being driven upwards into his cranium and the guard is dead before he even hits the ground. Desmond’s hand doesn’t even hurt.
He doesn’t question it as he methodically bulldozes his way through the half dozen guards that remain with unnatural speed. Armour fails, swords are parried with ease and hot blood mixes with water to decorate the temple floor in an ever expanding crimson pool until Desmond neatly slices the last mans neck open with his stolen blade.
The body drops with a clang of armour meeting ancient alloys and suddenly the cavern is deathly quiet.
Desmond drops the now ruined sword from his hand with a look and regards the carnage with equal parts appreciation and disbelief. He has never moved like that before, not even during the little incursion into Abstergo to rescue his father from Vidic, and he sure as hell doesn’t remember any of his ancestors dispatching people with such ease.
His eyes fall upon the lifeless form of Rodrigo now laying in the center of fresh corpses and he makes his way over to stand above him. The older man's face is frozen in shock while his hand has slipped from where he was clutching his heart and the detail of it all dispels any remaining doubts he had about the authenticity of the reality he’s experiencing. It all smells and looks to real for an Animus to have rendered it.
Fuck, he’s really in Italy in 1476 and he just killed the leader of the Templar Order.
The thought lingers as he tears his eyes from the Grandmaster and looks around the cavern. This must be some kind of hidden Isu temple, he muses as his eyes sweep from the tank he emerged from and towards the interface he’d spotted earlier. A Temple that wasn’t on any map they’d found in their mad dash to save the world. Does Juno know of this place? Did he somehow get sent back through fucking time and she found out and sent the Templar's here?
Has he fucked history just by being here? Well of course he has, Rodrigo Borgia is fucking dead.
He looks to his hands and tries to make sense of it. His fingers almost look like how he remembers them being- same shade of skin but curiously no cuts or blemishes on his palms. It doesn’t even look like he has wrinkles where his phalanges join together and he looks to his arm to see the tattoo is gone as well. This body, whatever the hell it is, looks like it has all the weathering of a newborn and yet he’s clearly a full adult if the height is anything to go by. He’s not even going to think about how the hell he has such prominent abs now after he’d been getting all those fat jokes from Sean.
God he needs a mirror or something. Desmond feels the blood seep between his toes as he walks barefoot towards the vault control and the soft cyan lines cutting through the walls reflects off his eyes. His steps are met with a coalescence of glowing circuitry pooling and reforming around his feet with each new step and it feels. . . pleased?
The lights around him flicker, glow intensely and burst with clouds of holographic Isu characters that he can somehow parse into words, numbers, sentences and most important of all, meaning. It's not a temple he’s in but a forge - one built by the Isu Hephaestus before he was killed in their war with humanity. Desmond strains at the information flow and reaches for the console for support. They were experimenting with ways to overcome their slow reproduction - exploring the concept of cloning a host body for their minds to ‘resleeve’ into if they were ever to fall in battle. The lights must think - they thinks he’s one of them. It even supplies him with an image of his face when he thinks it and Desmond stares back at a version of himself he hasn’t seen since he looked in a motel bathroom mirror after escaping the Farm. There’s even a scar cutting through his lips.
What the fuck .
….More, he needs to know more. The information impresses itself upon his brain in a flood that is altogether too much and not enough. This body that somehow looks exactly like him, it's what the forge was built to produce and protect before the sun seared the Earth with flames and the facility was lost to the winds of time. He’s a hybrid like the humans that rebelled but yet more, enhanced with precursor science and kept alive all this time in stasis to wait for a master that would never come.
Until somehow his mind was sent back in time and downloaded into it.
Desmond commands the connection to end but it refuses to obey. The words necessary and melding procedure are all that he’s given as the console begins to shift and reconfigure before him. The interface subdivides into impossibly small sections that retract and recede into the wall, revealing a glowing rectangular chamber that houses what Desmond knows unmistakably is a Piece of Eden.
It's no Apple, it has none of the glowing Tron lines and golden alloys that characterise each one - it looks a lot more like a belt for clothing - a simple dull silver band with scaled notchings along its surface. Its glows briefly before rising off it’s pedestal with nary a whisper, expanding in length as it covers the distance to reach Desmond. He struggles against the invisible force that’s suspended him with all the effort he can manage but the grip is too strong, too precise in where it holds him to give any leverage or advantage.
Desmond tries to scream as the belt opens and wraps around his hips before suddenly shrinking into his skin. He’s being seared from the inside or something close to it as the belt disappears beneath his flesh entirely. Tendrils of silver suddenly burst forth under his skin and colour it in ever expanding lines that ripple like waves across his ribs and connect around the middle of his back.
The pain is blinding and Desmond stops looking at the lines, trying to merely keep himself from passing out. It hurts like the Eye hurt, unshackled energy consuming and destroying his insides while his nervous system turns to mush from the overload of feedback.
And then the pain simply stops.
He hits the floor hard as the force field ceases suspending him. Everywhere the tendrils of silver had spread tingles with energy - the lungs that had betrayed him now greedily devour air and his heart feels ready to burst with how fast its working.
Melding successful.
The words appear in his mind and then suddenly the meaning behind them becomes clear.
Hephaestus made this forge - this Pandora’s box hidden away from prying eyes - to build weapons meant not to control but to destroy. No dalliance with synapses and mind controlling neurotransmitters like the Apple, no subtlety or grace to the purpose with which this place had been constructed. Desmond’s body is a weapon in a war long since lost and forgotten and the belt - Herakles - is his armour.
More than human and more than Isu. Their strengths combined and their weaknesses discarded in a cocktail of genetic manipulation and bleeding edge technology. The first of a line of promised champions that never saw the war they were meant to win.
Olympians.
The new tattoos running under his skin glow blue and hot as crackling tendrils of energy erupt from them and outwards to envelop the dead Borgia guards - eating away at the armour and cloth hugging the corpses like a corrosive acid until they lie naked and bare to the open air. Desmond watches in abject fascination as the material breaks down in pools of light and flood back along the crackling arcs of lighting to coalesce and take form across his own skin. Cloth, comfortable and form fitting transmutes into actual clothes and Desmond recognises the look of a streamlined version of Ezio’s Mentor outfit taking shape around his chest and arms - midnight black in place of eagle white. There’s armour plating hidden in the fabric as it assembles itself - a flexible gold in place of amber steel and its woven into every inch of the material that forms his new outfit. Slowly, Desmond watches the lightning complete its work as boots form around his feet - crackling with the smell of ozone before the the display cuts out and the tattoos return to their dull silver origins.
Desmond takes a breath, then another and rises to his feet unsteadily, carefully, like the clothes and armour now adorning him are a mountain’s worth of weight instead of a feather’s. Twin blades hidden on his wrists now there where they weren’t a minute previous- he can even see the damn gun attachments on both as he steadies himself and twists his arms to look. They're real, all of it. He’s got a Piece of Eden that can transmute raw material into clothing and weapons buried under his skin - Isu skin - and he’s in a body that makes human beings look like wet cardboard in a sword fight.
“Fucking Macguffin bullshit.”
Rodrigo, arrogant as he may be, is - was - a practical man and Desmond needs to get the fuck out of here and think this shit over. The guards Desmond had taken care of were probably Rodrigo’s most loyal lackeys and he’s doubtless got more stationed outside the forge waiting for him to get back with whatever he’s found down here. A quick check of his new clothes to make sure that yes, they are real and he’s not crazy, and a pilfering of the cooling Templars corpse reveals a map hidden in the pockets of his robe.
It’s recently drawn - the cartographer who made it most likely going for accuracy of the area around where the Forge entrance was theorised to be, while leaving out any superfluous details outside of a marked area. Huh, he’s about a days ride from Florence by the looks of things, hidden in the mountains that lead to Romagna and the rest of Tuscany. Isn’t that handy?
Was this place always here and Minerva found it and kept its existence a secret somehow? Did she fuck with time and the Eye and send him back to this failsafe? He isn’t sure, not with how he knows deep down that he died with the feedback from Juno’s little trap but he isn’t going start questioning third chances now.
“Bitch.” Desmond says as the thought of Juno leaves his mind and he looks at the map’s legend, memorising the mountain route out towards the main road because apparently that's something he can just do now. He shoves the map haphazardly into his new breast pocket anyway and sighs - searching for an exit with his equally new and very upgraded sixth sense. It glows gold incessantly and Desmond takes the time to scoop up a fresh looking sword that hadn’t been immersed in First Civilisation energy bullshit in one hand, and a bloodied polearm in the other before making a beeline for it.
The cavern is a winding mess of Tron lines, mist and platforms that suddenly shift into place at his coming to form stairs that ascend steeply into the mountain rock. Desmond takes them in leaps and bounds and the narrow cavern walkways soon branch outwards - rays of daylight streaming in where the mountain meets the open sky.
There’s a pair of guards leaning lazily across the rectangular entrance, clearly bored with the thrilling minutiae of life happening outside the dull looking forge entrance and expecting the footfalls of plated boots to be warning enough of their boss’s return. Desmond doesn’t give them a chance to regret the error as he rams the spike at the end of the polearm straight through the back of the one to his left and buries his new sword clean through the others neck.
They don’t even scream, they can’t when Desmond has severed one’s spine and the other no longer has vocal cords to scream with. They drop with the all the grace of dead men as Desmond’s weapons retreat from their flesh and he walks out into the Italian sun. Its irritatingly bright and the beaked hood saves him from the worst of its assault - his eyes adjusting after a few moments to show a company of very surprised Borgia guard noticing the clunking sound of their now very dead comrades hitting soft earth.
Oh good, Desmond thinks as he surveys the assortment of them, they have horses and supplies. That will do very nicely he muses as he readies his sword and flips his grip with the polearm, sending it flying into the chest of one very unlucky guard before leaping to kill the rest.