Star Wars Headcanons

Thrawn x F!reader

Thrawn returns home after months in space, happy to reunite with you. Impatient, even. Daresay excited...

Tags: Domestic fluff, established relationship, smut, sex in the car, cunnilingus, fingering, P in V, missionary, creampie, Breeding kink,

Thrawn types his report, his back straight.

He lets out a sigh. His mission went swimmingly and his campaign in the region of the Empire is done. The Emperor will be most satisfied about his performance, as usual. And now, he 'earned' a leave.

I think I'm going to go pure TBOBF era for more fluff!! Too much anxiety to be a single mom for a few years LOL. Minors do not engage (although this is really just fluff!)

Pregnancy was the easy part. It came naturally to Boba to feel even more of a physical connection between the two of you, knowing that a part of him was growing inside of you. He actually enjoyed those nine months, watching your body grow and change to accommodate his child, taking care of you when you didn't feel well, and gladly preparing all those weird cravings you had to keep you satisfied...

But when the baby actually comes? What had Boba ever experienced in his life that could come close to this?

and boba just kinda

Rated: PG (all my works are +18)

Summary: Basim is trying to help reader regain her memories in the modern world of her past life as Sigyn. This takes place after the events of Valhalla. There also might be hints of havi and reader.

~

{ A/N: I suck at dialogue rip}

Inside the remote New England cabin, the air was thick with the scent of pine smoke and the low hum of cooling servers. In the corner of the main room, Shaun Hastings and Rebecca Crane were hunched over their monitors, their faces illuminated by the pale blue glow of encrypted data streams. William Miles sat further back in the shadows, hunched over a table, his eyes fixed on a map of the world that looked increasingly like a chessboard. Basim sat with his back against the rough-hewn log wall, feeling the vibration of the generator humming somewhere beneath the floorboards. Outside, the wet winds of the New England winter howled against the old window shutters, but inside, the fireplace cast it’s heat, the flames creating dancing shadows that made the small living room feel like a hall of old to him.

(Y/n) was warmly pressed against his side. Her head fell tiredly against his strong shoulder somewhere between his description of Yggdrasil and the binding of Fenrir, her head finding the hollow of his shoulder like it had in the past, as if her body remembered what her mind refused to acknowledge in the present day.

The pair were off in their own little world as clicking sounds filled in as background noise as Shaun Hastings tapped aggressively at his laptop across the room. Rebecca Crane went back to sorting ammunition at the dining table, the metallic clink of brass on wood rhythmic and precise. They were planning something—an insertion into an Abstergo facility, a data heist, the endless, honorable war of the Brotherhood.

Basim should have been paying attention to the others. But he did not care for them.

And they still did not fully see the fox lurking behind his eyes. They did not see the old god.

Basim did not care for their brotherhood.

He only cared about the woman breathing softly against him. He cared about the way her fingers had unconsciously curled into the fabric of his shirt whenever he spoke of Loki. He cared about the fracture in her psyche where Sigyn slept, buried beneath a lifetime of (y/n)’s new memories—her childhood, her family and friends, her initiation into the Creed, even her first kill.

The Sigyn he had once known would never have been able to cause harm to another, let alone kill.

But (y/n) was not Sigyn. Not anymore. She was now reborn an Assassin, a woman of the modern day who believed in free will and the Brotherhood's cause. And Basim... well Basim was only helping the cause because she was there. He would follow her into any war, wear any mantle, play the part of ally to these earnest, doomed humans until the stars burned out, if only she would eventually remember who she had been to him in their past lives. She had been his wife in a different life. Before the catastrophe, before the encoding of his memories into the human gene pool.

Basim was feeling like a man out of time, a ghost inhabiting a body that felt both like a masterpiece and a prison. He found his focus on her sharpened, a hunter’s instinct honed over lifetimes. This was it. Another chance.

“Sigyn,” he said, his voice a low, melodic hum. He shifted slightly, allowing her to settle more comfortably against him.

"The stories say," Basim continued, his voice lower now, intimate, "that when the Asguardians bound Loki with the entrails of his own son, Sigyn stayed. She stood beside him in that cave, holding a bowl to catch the venom dripping from the serpent Skadi hung above his face. When the bowl filled, she would turn to empty it, and the poison would strike him. He would thrash, and the earth would shake."

She shifted, her cheek warm against him.

"She stayed," she murmured, "Even then."

"Even then," Basim repeated firmly.

The fire popped, sending sparks up the chimney.

"She loved him, and he loved her." He continued, as he picked up the fireplace poker, and stoked the fire half haphazardly. They both stared into the fire, both deep in thought.

He watched her face out of the corner of his eye, searching for any sign of recognition, any flicker of the Isu consciousness he knew was dormant somewhere within her.

But he eventually continued on, telling another one of his tales of Loki and Sigyn’s love, and that’s when he finally saw it. A flicker in her eyes, a subtle shift in her breathing. It was there and gone in an instant, but he had already spent a past lifetime learning to read the subtle tells of her soul. It was the same look Sigyn would get when he’d return from a long journey, the quiet, profound relief that he was home. His heart ached with a fierce, possessive longing.

“She had held that bowl above his face,” he said, his voice dropping to a near whisper, “as an act of eternal, unwavering devotion. A love that endured torment. Her love for Loki was unconditional.”

The story hung in the air between them, a memory disguised as mythology. He leaned down, his lips brushing the top of her head in a gesture that was both chaste and deeply intimate. For a moment, he allowed himself to believe it was enough, that the stories alone would eventually be enough to bridge the chasm of time and trauma that separated her from her former self.

But then she shifted slightly, tilting her head up just enough to see his face clearly. The sleepy contentment in her eyes was replaced by a sharp, analytical glint of her inner assassin.

“Basim,” she said, her voice quiet but firm. “You’re leaving out the rest of the story.”

He stiffened. “The rest?”

She then sat fully upright, and leaned back to create space between them. The distance she created was minimal—merely the space needed to look at him—but he felt it like a physical blow. Her eyes were clear now, the soft haze of contentment, replaced by the sharp intelligence that had made her one of the Brotherhood's most promising operatives.

“Where he used her loyalty like a weapon. Emotional neglect. Infidelity. He expected her to just... wait. Forever. While he did whatever he wanted."

"Those sagas," he said cautiously, "were written by small minded men who needed someone to villainize, they needed Loki to be the villain. He was a complicated man, too complex for their simple mindsets, they exploited his wrongdoings into their tales.”

"Maybe," she mused. Her voice was gentle, but the blade was there.

"But the patterns are consistent. She was loyal to a fault, and he exploited it. He was selfish, Basim. He was devious, cunning, and selfish. She was nurturing, faithful, and compassionate. He didn't deserve her in my opinion. He simply wasn’t a good husband, Basim,” she stated, not as an accusation, but as a simple fact. “He was a serial adulterer. He fathered monstrous children with other beings, with the giantess Angrboða, with the stallion Svaðilfari. He brought ruin and chaos upon the Aesir, and Sigyn was the one left to clean up the mess, to stand by him while he was despised by all.”

Basim’s carefully constructed narrative began to crumble. He wanted to argue, to defend the man he once was, but the words caught in his throat. She was right. He remembered it all with perfect, agonizing clarity.

“He neglected her,” she continued on, her voice gaining a quiet intensity.

“He humiliated her with his affairs. He was emotionally absent, wrapped up in his own ego and schemes. And yet, she stayed. Her loyalty wasn’t noble, Basim. It was tragic. It was the loyalty of a prisoner to her cell. In the myths, Loki treated her terribly. You keep telling me these beautiful stories about their love, but you've skipped the parts where he abandoned her for years. Where he had children with other women—other goddesses, giants, everyone and anyone. Where he used her loyalty like a weapon. Emotional neglect. Infidelity. He expected her to just...wait. Forever. While he did whatever he wanted."she spoke carefully.

The words fell into the space between them like stones into still water.

The fire popped casually, a sharp report in the suffocating silence that followed. Shaun glanced up from his laptop, sensing the shift in the room’s atmosphere, but a subtle shake of Rebecca’s head told him to stay out of it.

Basim remained silent, and felt a wave of shame so profound it was physically painful. He had been so focused on the romanticized image of their love, that he had willfully ignored the centuries of pain he had inflicted upon her. He had once been Loki, the god of chaos, mischief, and deception, and Sigyn had been his biggest victim.

Basim was realizing, with a slow, dawning horror that crept up his spine like frost, that she was right. He had been curating the mythology, selecting the verses that painted Loki as the tragic romantic, the misunderstood genius. But the truth—the raw, historical truth of his own behaviour or as Loki—was uglier. He had taken Sigyn’s devotion for granted, a constant he could ignore until he needed comfort. He had betrayed her trust not once, but repeatedly, each affair a small death delivered to the woman who had given him her eternal allegiance.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he managed, his voice strained. He avoided eye contact with her and stared distantly into the fireplace.

He pulled his arm away from her, not in rejection, but because he suddenly felt unworthy of her touch. “The old stories are… complicated. They are not always what they seem.”

He continued staring into the flames, but the fire offered no comfort. It only illuminated the ghosts of his past. The image of (y/n)’s thoughtful face dissolved, replaced by the memory of Sigyn’s, her expression one of quiet, soul-crushing devastation.

~

The memory shifted, twisting into a new, more painful scene. He was imprisoned now, bound by magical chains that dug into his flesh. The poison of the serpent dripped relentlessly onto his face, a torment of fire and ice. And above him, Sigyn held the bowl. But her eyes were not on him. They were fixed on the great hall of Valhalla, on the figure of Odin—Havi—standing at the high table.

Loki’s rage, even in his bound state, was a living thing. He saw the way Havi looked at her. It was not the look of a king for a subject. It was the look of a man for a woman he cherished. Sigyn’s gaze was returned, a silent conversation passing between them across the celestial divide.

She had eventually left him. After discovering his ultimate betrayal with Aletheia, she had not simply withdrawn; she had actively sought another. And she had chosen the one being in all the realms who was his equal and his opposite. His own father, for all intents and purposes. His own jailer.

The injustice of it burned hotter than the serpent’s venom. Havi, the All-Father, the great lawgiver, who had fathered countless demigods and taken multiple consorts, had the audacity to take Loki’s own wife as his prize. He had punished Loki for his transgressions against the order of the Aesir, only to then build a new life and family with the very symbol of Loki’s domestic failure. Sigyn, who had once been his, now belonged to Odin. She had started a new life, a new family, with the man who had condemned him to an eternity of torment.

The rage was a black tide, threatening to drown him. It was the fury of a spurned husband, the wrath of a betrayed god, the bitterness of a man watching his own legacy be rewritten by his enemy.

~

“Basim?”

(Y/n)’s concerned voice cut through the memory like a shard of glass. The fire was just a fire again. The cabin was just a cabin. The chains were gone, but the phantom ache of them remained.

He blinked, his eyes refocusing on her concerned face. She had sat up, her hand resting lightly on his knee. The others were watching them now, their pretense of ignoring the pair abandoned.

“Are you okay?” she asked, her brow furrowed. “Basim, you did thing again. You went somewhere else for a minute. Your hands are clenched into fists.”

Basim looked down, surprised to see his knuckles were white. He consciously uncurled his fingers, taking a slow, deep breath to steady the tempest raging within him. The ghosts of Asgard receded, leaving only the quiet reality of the cabin and the woman before him.

He forced a small, wry smile. It felt brittle on his lips. “I was just thinking,” he said, his voice rougher than he intended.

“Thinking what?”

He met her gaze, his eyes holding a depth of emotion she could not possibly understand.

He saw her—this new assassin, she was brave, intelligent, and fiercely loyal to her own cause. And beneath her, he saw the faint, shimmering outline of Sigyn, the woman he had once failed so spectacularly.

“How much of a fool Loki must have been.”

Her expression softened with confusion. “A fool? Why?”

“Because he had a goddess who would hold a bowl of poison above his head for eternity out of her sheer loyalty,” he explained, his voice low and intense. “A woman whose love was a fortress, and he was too busy trying to break out of it to ever appreciate that it was also his only sanctuary. He was a fool not to see her value. A blind, arrogant fool. To have Sigyn—to have all of that loyalty, that love—and to squander it. To not appreciate the weight of what she gave him."

The silence that now followed was different. It was no longer comfortable, but charged with a new understanding. She stared at him, her eyes searching his, as if trying to place a familiar face in a crowd of strangers. For a fleeting second, he thought he saw it again—that flicker of recognition, a spark of ancient memory ignited by the raw sincerity in his voice.

But again to his disappointment, she shook herself out of the trance and it was then gone, replaced by a gentle, modern sympathy. She didn’t understand, not truly, but she felt the weight of his words. The suppressed memories of her past life were teetering on the edge of her mind.

“Well,” she said softly, giving his knee a gentle squeeze. “It’s just a story, Basim. A sad, old story.” She said as if trying to convince herself as well.

She studied his face for a long moment, her eyes searching for something—he did not know what. Then, slowly, she relaxed back against his side, tucking herself under his arm once more.

Her expression softened. She reached up, her fingers tracing the line of his jaw, a gesture so tender it nearly broke him.

"Well," she said quietly. "He's just a myth, isn't he? Stories in books. We're here now."

"Yes," Basim whispered back. "We are here now."

She settled back down, her ear pressed over his heart, listening to the rhythm that had beat through three separate incarnations of flesh.

"Let's stop telling stories about them," she whispered. "It makes me sad. Let us focus on the present moment."

"Yes," Basim agreed. "Enough talks of Loki and Sigyn."

She settled back against him, her head finding its familiar place against his strong shoulder, her body a warm, solid presence against his side. She seemed to accept his strange mood as nothing more than a historian’s melancholy. They fell into comfortable silence. The fire became the only voice in the room—hissing, crackling, surviving. Basim wrapped his arm around her shoulders, pulling her closer until he could feel her heartbeat against his ribs. She sighed, a sound of contentment, and closed her eyes.

But Basim could not sleep. He could not rest. The memories came unbidden, as they always did when he let his guard down. Basim swallowed his thoughts, and simply rested his cheek against the top of her head, closing his eyes. The rage and bitterness from his flashbacks still churned in his gut, a toxic residue of a life he was determined not to repeat.

He had been Loki, the betrayer, the neglectful husband, the selfish god. He had lost Sigyn not to Odin’s power, but to his own profound stupidity and cruelty. He had thrown away the greatest loyalty the universe had ever offered him.

But he was Basim now. A new man. And she was was a new woman. It was the universe giving him a second chance.

He would not make the same mistakes. He would not be the same man who took her for granted, who sought affection in other arms, who failed to see the treasure he held until it was gone. He would follow her to the ends of the earth, not just because her path aligned with the Assassins, but because his path was, and always would be, wherever she was.

He held her closer, a silent, desperate promise echoing in the quiet of his own mind.

I shall not hurt her.

Not this time.

I will not be the same fool this time.

Basim tilted his head back against the log wall and stared at the ceiling, staring at the old wooden beams, breathing in the scent of her mingling with the smell of the wood burning.

I will not mess up this time, my love.

The vows were silent, carved into the meat of his mind with the same violence he had once used to carve names into the world-tree. He would not be Loki—selfish, scattered, burning bridges behind him as he sprinted toward the next diversion. He would be better. He would be worthy. He was now Basim.

He did not need the Assassins and their war. He did not need their creed or their brotherhood. But he needed her. And if she needed them, then he would stand at their fire, he would aid their missions, he would smile at Shaun’s cynical jokes, and nod at William’s grim strategies. He would endure the modern world with all its noise and fragility, because it was the world where (y/n) now lived, and he would not lose her again to Odin’s memory, or to Aletheia’s ghost, or to his own stupidity.

He did not know if she remembered—if any part of Sigyn stirred in her dreams, recognizing the arms that held her as the same ones that had held her while the world ended. He did not know if, when she looked at him, she saw the man she had left or the man he was trying to become.

But as her breathing deepened into sleep, and her body became heavy and trusting against his, Basim allowed himself to hope. Not the chaotic, destructive hope of Loki, but something older, quieter. Something like fidelity.

The snow fell. The fire died to embers. And in the dark, Basim ibn Ishaq—who had been Loki, who had been a killer and a trickster and a god of chaos—kept watch over his future wife, and swore that this time, he would be more deserving of her.

~

{ a/n: i think I’ll eventually write something for Sigyn/reader character x havi/Eivor }

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.

~

(for the next couple of weeks — including other hcs and asks ofc 😘) these are literally just fics i have ready to be typed up :))

BABY BLUES — maekar targaryen x wife!reader

— In which, amid the happiness and chaos of welcoming your newborn, your husband feels a sense of jealousy and neglect on not being able to be alone with you for longer than five minutes. And he makes an effort to act on it. (smut, fluff)

THE STRANGEST THING — blind!baelor targaryen x wife!reader

— After the events of the trial of Ashford, Baelor is left mortally wounded and without his sight. As he regains memory and the ability to walk, he relearns you and your family all over again, and yet it’s as if nothing had ever changed. (angst, fluff)

THE GHOST ON THE SHORE — maekar targaryen x baelor’s wife!reader / baelor targaryen x wife!reader

— You and your brother in law are both haunted by the death of the one person who meant the most to you in your lives. Now you are left to pick up the pieces together, a new future, a new marriage, and something new blossoming under the surface. (angst, fluff, potential smut)

THE SHAME OF LIFE — bf’s dad!simon foster x reader

— When Tom starts neglecting you, his girlfriend, spending more time out late at night without a single text, his father finds ways to comfort you. Because who else better? (smut)

TELL ME WHO IS GOING TO TAKE MY PLACE — jack (good people — samverse) x ex!reader

— After stalking for months, Jack finally takes it upon himself to reinsert himself on the life of the person he just can’t seem to forget. Rather, unable stop ruining your life. (dark smut)

SMILE LIKE YOU MEAN IT — maekar targaryen x wife!reader, aegon ‘egg’ targaryen / mother!reader, ser duncan / reader

— Weeks after the arrival back to Summerhall, you and Maekar are left with a decision to wait for your youngest son’s and his hedge knight’s arrival without a single word, or search for him yourself. And going to find him on your own, the pair of you ended up with more than bargained for. AKA the time you and your husband end up on the road with Dunk and Egg. (fluff, minor angst)

A LITTLE RESPECT — ser duncan the tall x targaryen!reader, aerion targaryen x sister!reader (one sided)

— Dunk intends to prove how much he loves you, adores you, worships you, even if that means a certain someone in between you both, has to watch. (smut)

— —