like. imagine you're a templar. you've seen what happens to those before you. mentors you looked up to can hardly remember you. and then someone says, we found a new type of lyrium and it will bring them back.

Desmond x daughter reader (Platonic!!!!!!)

Summary: Desmond’s daughter finally gets to meet her father, but not in the way she expected too.

~

The Animus’s chair cradled her, cold and uncomfortable, and somewhere in the humming darkness of the machine, her father’s memories were waiting for her. She had stopped feeling the persistent ache in her lower back and the hollow gnawing behind her ribs hours ago. She had been days without solid meals. Only nutrition bars, IV drips, and occasionally water. She had stopped feeling the IV in her arm long ago. She felt only the pull of her ancestral history, and the irresistible drag of Desmond Miles's DNA singing in her cells.

“Synchronization achievable. Memory corridor stable.”

Shaun Hastings's voice crackled through the speakers, distant as the young woman tried to fight to stay in the animus.

“Your vitals are spiking. We need to pull you out."

She obviously couldn’t answer. But her grandfather stood behind Shaun and his monitor, William’s silhouette was a rigid column of shadow against the blue glow of the screens. But William said nothing, yet she could feel his silence pressing against her soul, heavy with expectation. William had imported that silence from her father’s childhood, she thought. It was the same silence that had driven Desmond to run, to hide, to hate the assassin brotherhood that William had created, before finally, fatally, embracing it.

She was currently viewing the finale memories of her father. She was stuck in 2012, in the Grand Temple watching her father die to save a world that hadn't yet known her name. She was watching him for the thousandth time—watching his fingers tremble above the glowing pedestal, and watched the solar flares tearing across the sky, in the memories not her own but borrowed, inherited, stolen.

"(Y/n)!" William miles, her grandfathers voice called to her.

"Focus on the combat sequences. We need his muscle memory, not the melodrama. Your father didn't sacrifice himself so you could just stand around and do nothing."

“My father sacrificed himself because you never gave him a choice”, she thought but could not say.

But as of lately the bleeding effect had begun to grow. She could feel Altair's impatience, Ezio's recklessness, and Connor's internal anger merging into her bloodstream like morphine. But mostly, she felt Desmond, her father. She'd been inside the animus for almost three weeks straight, emerging only when Rebecca or Shaun physically disconnected the feeds, or when her mother's small hands—thin, and trembling, that had once held Desmond's face—pried her fingers from the armrests.

"Please," Her mother had whispered the previous night, her eyes swimming with the grief that never seemed to fade. She was watching the animus destroy her only child, just as it had done to the father of her child.

"You're fading away, my love. You're not eating. You're not here anymore." Her mother would plead.

But she’d always come back to reality hollowed out, her mind crowded with ghosts, her body a forgotten husk.

"Again," her grandfather, William Miles, commanded.

"William," Rebecca started, her voice carrying that particular pitch of technological concern. "Her dopamine levels are—"

"She's stronger than the others. She has his blood." He’d say.

Yes, (Y/n) thought, as she was getting ready to enter the animus. So do you. He was your own flesh and blood too, and yet he was never enough for you.

"Subject is entering the memory corridor," Rebecca Crane reported nervously, as her fingers danced across the interface.

"(Y/n), if you see the shimmer—if the edges start to dissolve—you pull out. Do you understand? The bleeding effect is—"

"I know what it is."

She knew better than anyone.

She had caught herself, yesterday, reaching for a hidden blade that wasn’t there, muscle memory ghosting through her fingers like smoke. She had looked at a concrete wall and calculated climbs that no human could make. She was drowning in her father’s skills, his deaths, his emotions, and she was starving for just one glimpse of the man who had held her mother’s stomach months before the world had almost ended, but was saved by that same man.

So she closed her eyes.

The animus stabilized, and her world faded away once again as she was swallowed whole.

~

One moment the young woman was watching Desmond argue with Juno, the holographic of the ancient god flickering across the temple walls.

The next, the stone turned to mist, the colors inverted.

She stood in a space that wasn't space, a cathedral of code and light where geometry disobeyed physics. This wasn't a memory. This was the buffer, the space between, the digital graveyard where—Something was off, she immediately noticed. Her senses had began to dull, she felt isolated and alone.

Instead of memory 16, she had found herself dragged into the grey.

The Grey did not exist in the computer data. It was not New York, Italy, Syria, or the frozen Colonies. It was the space between memories, the digital afterlife where consciousness frayed and reformatted, where the dead could dream they were still alive. (Y/n) had glimpsed it before—fractured moments where Ezio Auditore’s Rome dissolved into static, where Connor’s frontier became code—but she had never stepped into it fully. The Assassins had warned her. The grey was where minds broke. Subject 16 had painted his suicide there in digital blood.

But today was different.

Today, there was a shape in that grey void.

He stood with his back to her, dressed in the iconic white and red hoodie she knew from photographs, from the archives, from her mother’s tearful stories. The hoodie she'd seen her mother wear to bed when she was lonely, the large one that looked like a dress on her mother.

(Y/n)’s breath caught.

"Dad?"

The figure turned to face her.

She had prepared for this. She had rehearsed it in bathroom mirrors as a little girl, in the dark hours before dawn, practicing faceless reunions that always made her feel worse than better. But nothing prepared her for the specificity of him: the crooked tilt of his nose, the scar across his lip, the worry lines between his eyebrows that matched her own, the way his hands hung open at his sides like he didn’t know what to do with his gentleness and affection.

He was standing maybe twenty feet away, exactly as she'd seen him in the memories—dark hair, dark eyes, the scar on his lip that matched Altair’s. She'd seen her mother trace that scar a thousand times as they looked at photographs of him.

"My calculations put you at about eighteen, going on nineteen," he said calculated, yet softly, "You have her eyes, but my nose. But you're not supposed to be here yet. It’s too soon."

His voice stopped her heart.

She walked forward slowly at first, her assassin training warring with the raw, infant need of a child who had never been held by her father. But than she moved. It wasn’t trained Assassin speed, wasn’t the fluid economy of motion that Altair’s genetics had forced into her muscles—it was clumsy, human, desperate.

Desmond Miles smiled, and it was the saddest thing she'd ever seen. "Hey, kiddo."

She slammed into him with enough force to stagger them both, and his arms came around her, real and solid and impossible. She sobbed into his shoulder, her fingers clawing at the fabric of his shirt.

"You left. You left us. You left me."

"I know, (y/n). I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." His arms came around her, strong and certain, rocking her like the child she'd never been allowed to be.

"You should have never—" She pulled back, anger blazing through the grief.

"I know, baby. I know." His voice cracked. He cradled the back of her head.

"You don’t get to call me that."

But she held him tighter, her nails digging into the fabric of his sweater, terrified he would pixelate and dissolve.

"I needed you. Mom needed you. And you chose them. You chose the world. How could you just leave us? She tells me stories, you know. Mom. She tells me how excited you were. How you talked to her stomach. How you promised you'd teach me everything. And then you had to go and touch that stupid thing….and you—"

Desmond pulled back just enough to look at her, and she saw it then—the weight he carried even here, in in this digitalized afterlife. The cosmic horror of having touched Juno’s device, of burning from the inside out to save a planet that would never know his name. The fact that he had sacrificed his chance at a happy life, to marry the woman of his dreams, and the chance to raise his little girl.

"There was no other option," he said. Not defensive—resigned, "The solar flare would have scourged the Earth. Your mother was nine months pregnant. I had seventeen minutes to decide."

"You decided wrong."

"I decided for you, for the both of you." He touched her face, his thumb brushing away tears that shouldn’t exist in a server space.

"When I touched that pedestal, (y/n), I wasn’t thinking about the Assassins. I wasn’t thinking about humanity. I was thinking about the kid I’d never meet, and how I needed the world to still be spinning when she took her first breath."

"That’s not fair." She pulled away, angry now, the familiar Miles temper flaring hot in her chest—the same temper that followed through the blood of her ancestors had made Connor short tempered, and Ezio arrogant.

"I burned so you wouldn't have to. So your mother wouldn't have to. The solar flare would've wiped everything—every hospital, every crib, every possibility of you. I looked at the world, (y/n), and I looked at you, still growing inside your mother, and there was no choice. Not really. Any good father would have made the same decision. It was not one I took lightly."

"You made us love a ghost. Mom can’t say your name without crying. And him—"

She gestured wildly at the nothingness, knowing he could see through her eyes into the lab beyond.

"Granddad is trying to turn me into you. He’s pulling the same shit he pulled on you. He thinks if he pushes me hard enough, I’ll be the weapon you were. But I’m breaking, because I am not you dad."

His hand came up to cup her face, thumb brushing away tears that shouldn't exist in a digital space.

"He thinks I’m a hard drive," she spat.

"All of the assassins do. ‘(Y/n) has the closest DNA match to Desmond. (Y/n) can handle the bleeding. (Y/n) won’t lose her mind like Subject 16.’ But I don’t want to be your legacy. I don’t want to know how to kill with my bare hands. I just wanted..." Her voice broke, "I just wanted to know about my father, the one who I never got to know."

He embraced her in his arms again, knowing to let her have her moment to speak, and to be heard for once. The grey continued shifted around them, forming shapes—possibilities. A kitchen that smelled of coffee, with two parents and a little child eating breakfast. A park bench, that her parents sat and watching her play. The hospital room where he might have held her as a newborn.

"Grandfather says it. The others say it. 'Desmond Miles, the Sacrifice. The saviour of the Assassins.' But I didn’t need a saviour, I needed you! I needed my father, not a legend! Do you know what it's like? Growing up with a ghost? Mom crying on my birthday every year because you weren't there? I hate you for being a hero. I hate that you saved the world and took away my chance of having a dad!"

Desmond didn't flinch. He stood there with his daughter raging in his arms, accepting her rage like penance, and when she ran out of breath, when her accusations dissolved into hiccupping sobs, he opened his arms again.

"I would have been terrible at bedtime stories," he said lightheartedly.

"I can't sing. I have absolutely no rhythm." He smiled.

Despite herself, she laughed—a broken, ugly sound.

"By the way, mom said you danced like a drunk giraffe."

"See? She remembers the important things."

(Y/n) had her ear pressed against his chest. She could hear his heartbeat, steady and what should have been impossible.

"I’ve been watching," he whispered, "Not always. It’s hard, holding on. But I’ve seen you grow up from in here. The first time you climbed a building and felt the wind. The first time you lied to your grandfather about your training hours so you could read a book instead." He chuckled, sad and soft, "You’re terrible at following orders. Thank God."

"I'm not okay, Dad. I'm broken. They're using me like they used you. Grandfather pushes and pushes, and I let him because it's the only way I get to see you, but I'm disappearing. I'm losing myself in your memories. I can't sleep without seeing through your eyes. I'm not strong like they think. I'm just... lost."

Desmond's large hand settled on her shoulders, taking a step back to look at her—a gesture of paternalism.

"I know," he whispered. "I’ aware. In the spaces between the data, in the bleed. I see you fading, and it kills me all over again. Yet I can't interfere. The Grey is... it's a one-way mirror most days. But you're special, you are my daughter after all. Your DNA, the convergence of your mother's ancestors resilience and my... well, my ancestors stubbornness. It lets you see me. Lets you be here. But you're killing yourself to do it."

She looked up at him, seeing the lines of strain around his eyes that weren't in the photos of him and her mother.

"I don't care. I don't care if I burn out. I just need to see my dad."

"No you don’t. You only need yourself and your mother." He gripped her shoulders, firm now, the tone of a father drawing a line.

"Listen to me. I died in that Temple so you could live. Not live in that damn animus. Not just to exist as a data entry in an Animus log. I want you to live. Clumsy dancing and bad singing, and all the messy, beautiful things I never got to do."

"You don't get to tell me what to do," she said weakly. "You aren’t here with us."

"You're right. I’m not. And that's a wound that won't heal for any of us. But I am here now, in this moment, and I'm telling you: back off. Eat something. Sleep in your own dreams. Your grandfather is a hard man and he loves you, but he's wrong about this. You're not a tool to recover lost assets. You're my child, and you are magnificent, and the world is going to need you whole—not as a shadow of my memories, but as yourself."

"How long do we have?" She panicked as she watched the pigments of the grey start to stir around them.

"Minutes. Maybe less. The animus is destabilizing—you’re not supposed to be here, not like this. You’re killing yourself to reach me, (Y/n). Your body is shutting down."

"I don’t care."

"You should." He held her firmly, forcing her to meet his eyes—brown, tired, yet so alive.

"Listen to me. You’re special. Not because of my DNA, not because of William’s training. Juno has showed me things, especially when I was dying. A pattern. You’re part of something bigger than the Brotherhood, bigger than the Templars. You’re going to have a choice to make someday, just like I did, and I need you strong enough to survive it."

"Stop talking in prophecies," she begged, but she leaned into his him one last time.

"I knew," he said, "when your mother felt ready to tell me she was pregnant. And as I was standing in the Grand Temple, waiting to die, all I could think was how extraordinary you would be. But I don’t want you to be extraordinary if it means you end up here, in the grey, at twenty-five."

He stepped back, and the Grey began to brighten, to destabilize.

"I have to go. The connection is destabilizing your hippocampus."

"Wait!" She grasped onto her father’s sweater even harder.

"No, not yet. Please. I have so many questions. About your favorite color. About whether you liked coffee or tea. About if you would have been proud of me—"

"Green," he said quickly, smiling through the tears she only now realized he was shedding.

"Coffee, black. And my sweet baby girl..."

He pulled her close, kissed the crown of her head, his arms wrapped tightly around her in a big bear hug.

“I've been proud of you since before you were born. I knew, the moment your mother told me she was pregnant, that you were going to change everything. The Assassins think they understand the Isu, the precursors, the calculations. But they don't see what I see. You're the convergence, (Y/n). The future we fought for. Watch out for your mother. I know she's stronger than she looks, but she needs you whole. And when the time comes—when the real dangers fall upon humanity, not this bickering between Assassins and Templars—you'll know what to do."

"I love you," she choked out, "I'm not ready. I just got here. I'm not ready to say goodbye."

"Then don't." He was fading now, becoming translucent, light through stained glass.

"Just say 'see you later.' Because we will meet again, (Y/n). My calculations... the patterns in the Grey... they're converging toward something. You'll find me. Or I'll find you. But you have to live long enough to get there. Promise me."

"I—"

"Promise me."

"I promise," she whispered.

He smiled gently, and it was time for her to go.

"There's my girl."

He kissed her forehead. It felt like sunlight.

"Watch out for your mother," he said, "She’s stronger than she looks, but she’s been thinking of me for the last eighteen years. Tell her... tell her I’m sorry I missed the small things. The first word. The first steps. The first heartbreak. Tell her I love her so much. I love the both of you, and I’ll be here waiting, and watching over you both."

"Dad please don’t go," (Y/n) whispered. She was a child again, small and begging.

"Please. I’m not ready."

"You’re never ready," Desmond said, "That’s how you know you’re still alive."

The world began to fray at the edges, pixels dissolving into light.

"Don’t let your grandfather ruin you," her father said, his voice distorting.

"There’s more to life than being an Assassin. Run, if you have to. Be happy. Be fre—"

And just like that, her father was gone. The grey faded into complete darkness as she felt her consciousness slipping away.

~

"She's coding!" Shaun yelled.

"Get her out!" Her grandfather demanded.

"(Y/n)!" Rebecca's hands were on her face, shaking her gently. "Look at me! Focus!"

She woke with a startle. And reality crashed back in like a tidal wave. (Y/n), her body seizing as the Animus disgorged her consciousness back into her physical body. Her chest burned. Her eyes were still streaming tears. Around her, alarms screamed —vital signs flatlining, brain activity spiking, the machinery shrieking in electronic panic.

She then proceeded vomited over the side of the chair, she looked thin and yellow… she looked terrible, her body rejecting the animus from digital infinity to fragile flesh. The lab was spinning—white walls, fluorescent lights, the angry beep of monitors telling her what she already knew: her heart was arrhythmia, her blood pressure catastrophic, her mind skating on the edge of something irreversible.

She could hear her grandfather still barking orders, ordering them to reboot the sequence, to get her back under, to salvage the data.

"What the hell happened in there?" William’s voice, booming, authoritarian. He was at her side within seconds.

"The system crashed. We lost the feed. (Y/n), what did you see?"

Not caring what was being said, her fingers found the animus’s headset. Before the others could stop her, she ripped it free, taking some of her hair with it. The pain grounded her, anchored her to the present.

"(Y/n), stop!" Rebecca tried to grab for her IV line.

"Don’t touch me," she warned as she ripped it out.

"Sit down," Shaun yelled, already moving from his computer screen.

"You’ve been in eight hours straight. You’re going into shock—"

Without thinking, (Y/n) launched herself from the chair. Her legs buckled, atrophied muscles betraying her, but she caught herself on the lab table. Her vision only doubled. She saw her father’s hands. She saw Altair’s hands. She knew the bleeding effect was happening to her—but adrenaline flooded her wasted muscles. She scrambled up, and ran.

The bunker corridors blurred as she ran past startled technicians, past tactical maps of Abstergo facilities, past the history that had devoured her father and sought to devour her. She ran until she hit the outer door, until cold night air slapped her face, until she collapsed in the grass of the safehouse courtyard, gasping, sobbing, alive.

Behind her, she heard the argument erupting.

"You are pushing her too far, William! Just like you did with Desmond!" Her mother's voice, fierce and fractured.

"She's the closest match! We need those memories!" William had argued back.

"She's your granddaughter!" Her mouther shouted back.

(Y/n) simply curled into herself, pressing her face against the cool earth. She could still feel him. In the tremor of her hands, in the rhythm of her heart, in the genetic poetry that made her who she was. He was there, watching, waiting in the spaces between. Her hands were shaking with hurt and rage. She had felt him. She had heard his laugh—ragged, imperfect, real. And she knew, with the certainty of the bleeding effect crawling behind her eyes, that she would climb back into that machine. She would bleed herself dry, tear her psyche apart synapse by synapse if it meant one more minute in the Grey with the father who had died to save her future.

The door behind her opened. Boots on snow. She expected William’s angry reprimands, expected to be dragged back to the chair and sedated.

Instead, a soft, warm coat settled around her shoulders.

Her mother sat down in the dirty snow beside her, heedless of the wet, and pulled (Y/n)’s head onto her shoulder.

"He told me to watch out for you," (y/n) whispered.

Her mother’s breath caught, a shuddering inhale that (y/n) felt in her own ribs.

"He was always worried about other people. Never about himself." Her spoke quietly.

"He said he was sorry. For missing things."

"He’d be the perfect dad. He’d be much better of a parent than me." Her mother’s voice broke, but her arms were steel. "And I’m sorry. I’m sorry I let them put you in that chair. I’m sorry I let William make you into your father’s replacement."

(Y/n) looked up at the sky, at the grey clouds that threatened snow. The same grey. She could feel it calling her, digital and divine.

"I have to go back," she said.

"I know," her mother replied sadly, she sounded so tired.

"But not tonight. Tonight, you eat. Tonight, you sleep."

Her daughter knew that come tomorrow, she would go back into the animus again. Shivering in the snow with her mother’s arms embracing her tightly into a hug, leaving tears in (y/n)’s hair, she held onto the warmth of her fathers embrace, and the promise that some goodbyes were never truly final.

Somewhere in the space between the animus’s space, Desmond Miles was waiting. (Y/n) Miles, his daughter, his legacy, his impossible future, closed her eyes and for once allowed her mother to hold her in the cold, the only perinatal love she’s known.

She pressed her forehead into her mother’s chest, and whispered to herself, "See you soon Dad."

Above her, the universes stars formed in their ancient patterns, indifferent and eternal. But somewhere in the Grey, in the digital space between heartbeat and memory, Desmond Miles smiled—and waited for his child to return.

~

(also to me, but I'm in denial about turning 30 today)

Célia in Haytham’s outfit.

Like not in a sexual way, but the man was barely an adult and just suffered a super traumatic experience, and she took advantage of that.

Using his trauma and her higher standing, both as his boss and a more mature adult, to make him into her obedient servant.

Hi, thank you for the anon! I am going to use this to jump off on a little Cullen analysis I wanted to write for a while.

I am by no means an expert in grooming tactics, but I think the situation between Meredith and Cullen is more complicated than simply saying “Meredith groomed Cullen”. There’s no canon material suggesting that Meredith deliberately built a trust-and-exploit relationship with the intent to abuse or control Cullen for personal gain.

She does not isolate him, reshape his beliefs, manufacture dependence, or reward him instead of alternatives she controls. Cullen already belongs to the institution, already shares the ideology, and already has internalised obedience. On definitions alone, calling this grooming is imprecise. I would say that it fits more into indoctrination and religious extremism, of which she herself and all templars are victims of (because it is possible to be a victim and perpetrator). Meredith's role is more aligned with ideological reinforcement.

Claiming Meredith groomed Cullen flattens his own agency and downplays the role of the chantry in it's institutional indoctrination. Cullen accepts the promotion when he could have declined it. He enforces policies because he believes in order. He delays speaking out because he has blind faith in his superiors. Trauma + indoctrination explains his fear and rigidity, but it does not erase complicity which claiming that he was groomed into his role would do.