By chance, he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror, just out of the corner of his eye, and he freezes, breath catching in his throat. Stumbling closer to the counter-top, he narrows his gaze, staring down the reflection with more than just a hint of desperation and hysteria, but no matter how long he looks at it he doesn't recognize himself anywhere.
He sees Altaïr in the scar on his lips and his short-cropped dark curls, sees Ezio in his brown eyes and the angles of his face, sees a hundred other ancestors whose names are unknown to him but who still live on in his DNA regardless.
The scariest part, the part that causes him to snap, acting out like he never would have before by recklessly slamming a fist into the mirror and shattering the glass, is that no matter how hard he tries he cannot remember if he resembles either of his parents, the family he actually knew in this life. In what is left of his memory there is nothing but a blur, a vague feeling of detachment and an obligation for fondness toward the people who raised him.
His mother and father are faceless phantoms to him, and he has no idea exactly when they disappeared.
It takes a moment for the sharp ship of broken glass piercing the skin of his knuckles to break through to his thoughts, and when it finally does, he simply pulls his hand back to his side and doesn't bother looking at the bloody cuts. No, instead his attention is captured by the broken mirror, how the glass has splintered around where he'd punched it and fractured in a way that splits his reflection up into a million different fragments.
It is incredibly accurate, he thinks bitterly; he isn't just Subject Sixteen anymore - the dam is slowly but steadily breaking, memories overflowing and erasing all that he used to be so that he is now too many people, too many faces, different and separate in their own ways but all still stemming from his blood in the end.
He looks down, sees a large, sharp triangle of glass laying on the ground next to his feet, and finds himself smiling for the first time in what feels like centuries.