A/N: Spoilers for AC2.
Life inside a skilled nursing facility was boring, especially when Lisa couldn't do anything. Sure, the nurses talked to her, her mother read to her from young adult books that she approved of, and her little brother watched television with her. But at the end of the day they went home and Lisa stayed, heading towards another lonely night, hoping that the drugs they administered would be enough this time. She knew that an addiction to sleeping pills was bad, but so were the nights of lying awake and wishing that she hadn't ended up like this. Those were probably worse for her psyche than a craving for a sleepless rest.
But as it stood, she'd never get better anymore. She probably wouldn't even make it to her twenty-first birthday, seeing as that was six years in the future. Patients with locked-in syndrome had been kept alive for longer than that, but they at least could move something. Lisa had nothing, apart from her eyelids.
She'd gotten over the shame of being bathed, fed, her waste taken out of her as if she was one of those 'realistic' baby dolls, now with refillable containers! Lisa knew that sooner or later her mind would give under the strain of constant boredom, and she'd beg for release. No, she didn't have to use euphemisms on herself; she'd beg for death, for a way to get rid of the nagging pain of bed sores, the reliance on sleeping pills, the crushing knowledge that she would never get to ride a horse again. She hadn't reached that point yet and her family was working hard to make sure that moment wouldn't come, but Lisa knew that that moment was inevitable. And so much sooner than she'd dreamed of. Hell, she had hardly ever thought about death – she was fifteen, who else but suicidal teens think about their own deaths at that age?
Lisa got ripped from her thoughts when her father entered the room. A peculiar looking nurse trailed behind and together they pushed a chair inside. The chair was blue and rather large, curving around the edges to make sure the occupant stayed on the seat. Blinking blue LED-lights littered the head-rest and there was some sort of wrist support with a display screen on it. It looked like a high-tech dentist chair.
She was so preoccupied with the chair that she hardly heard her father talk. But she did notice when he lifted her from the bed, making sure not to tangle the various wires inserted into her body. Lisa blinked some Morse code at her dad to ask questions, but he ignored her as he began hooking up the wrist computer to the nearest outlet.
The nurse helped make sure that Lisa was comfortable and Lisa noticed that this was a new nurse. She had brown hair with one streak dyed purple. She wore a lab coat, but underneath that she wore black jeans and a red hoodie. Definitely not a nurse from this home, then, those women were still stuck on the fashion of the seventies.
"Think of it like a computer game – that you can experience yourself!" her father ended his spiel. Great, if he could do it all over again, Lisa might actually pay attention to what he had been saying.
"Are you ready, honey?" he asked, and this time he saw that Lisa signaled 'no' to him.
"Don't worry," the nurse said, "it won't hurt. It's like a movie, but you're along for the ride inside your mind. We've used your DNA to find an ancestor, and we isolated the part where the woman goes on a journey to London in sixteen-hundred sixty five. So just relax, close your eyes and wait for the Animus to load."
The word 'Animus' triggered something inside Lisa's mind. This is what her father had been talking about before, a way for her to relive someone else's memory. Excitement burst forth within her – this could finally alleviate her boredom! She wouldn't have to wait for her little brother to turn the TV on, she could delve into the mind of women and men from her own ancestry!
Her father hadn't been sure if he could get his hands on a machine like this, because they weren't officially tested and approved yet, but she knew he had connections in places he'd rather not talk about. And now she was finally going to reap the rewards from those connections-
The transition was sudden and overwhelming. She stood, on two young legs (but older than her fifteen-year old self), in front of a fire. She heard the fire crackle, the smell of burning logs and hay and body odor and stone, heavy upon her mind, assaulting it all at the same time. Her vision was blurry, the voice coming from her left indistinct and fuzzy.
"The synchronization is not yet optimized," she suddenly heard the nurse explain in a clear voice. "When you stay with her a bit longer, it'll get better. Now, enjoy."
Lisa had no idea what to do or even how to speak, her body hadn't been able to produce sounds for so long. But the memory knew, the woman she rode along with stepped away from the fire and spoke. And Lisa felt ready to weep with joy. How she had missed this, the simple feeling of legs listening to her commands, her larynx working flawlessly. Fingers grasped a letter, fine motor skills made sure that the woman pointed at a certain paragraph written in black ink.
The Animus gave her information about the time period, about the buildings around her. Gradually her sight and sound got better the longer she stayed with the woman. She had no idea how long she controlled the small movements, how long the memory guided her into doing whatever had happened to the woman. All she knew was that she was going to regret the moment she got thrown back into her own, invalid body.
The moment that indeed happened, maybe days later, Lisa cried. Her father hugged her as he transferred her back into her bed and stroked her hair until she had calmed down a little. But the weight of her useless body settled heavy down upon her.
"How was it, honey?" her father asked, but Lisa felt too betrayed to answer him. "We kept you in there for five hours, and then your heart rate began to speed up, so we got you out."
Yeah, stupid, of course her heart rate had sped up – she'd finally been riding a horse again inside the Animus! And he had torn her away!
"C'mon, Lisa, go to sleep. I promise that tomorrow I'll let you continue your adventure into sixteenth-century London." Her father kissed her forehead and left, leaving the chair behind as if to mock her inability to make even that small trip and secure herself inside that perfect world once more. As she felt the world getting dragged away from her by the sleeping pills she kept her eyes trained on the chair until it faded away into a blur of blue.
The next day it was her mother and the nurse (Miss Palmer, Lisa learned) that helped her into the chair. The memory flawlessly picked up where she left off, having her riding a horse along the road to London, twenty pence held in her hand to pay the pavage grant.
And so it continued, day after day, Lisa living alongside the woman, through the inns, the markets, feeling the rough cobblestones through her worn soles, smelling the fish lying side by side in the stalls. It was a heady feeling, being able to actually live again, even if it was in a time period where deodorant hadn't been invented yet.
Miss Palmer monitored the connection every time, without complaint. Lisa stayed inside the Animus for as long as possible, but she still had family in the 'real' world who wanted to spend time with her as well. So she listened to her mother reading to her, dutifully she watched dull movies with her brother, but every moment she longed for the sights and sounds of sixteenth-century London. The one place where she could feel like a human instead of a vegetable.
There were times where Miss Palmer skipped ahead in the memory. One of those times was the moment the woman got cornered by two men in an alley. Lisa blinked once and all of a sudden she was inside a hospital, a nun telling her that the amount she owed them was two shillings.
There was the matter of experiencing pain inside the Animus. It got dulled, but it was still there. Once, the woman cut her hand deep while preparing food, and it had hurt about as much as a paper cut. So when Lisa felt pain between her legs, she knew what had happened and didn't blame Miss Palmer for skipping that particular scene. It was one thing to ride a horse, getting beaten up (and worse) by two men was another thing entirely.
She was halfway through the journey this woman had undertaken when she began to notice something in her real body. Breathing came easier and blinking didn't take as much effort. It was almost as if her brain was remembering how to move again, her nerves responding to signals the English woman had sent. When she could lift one pinky again, her mother cried and her father hugged Miss Palmer so tightly the poor woman couldn't breathe properly.
"The Animus is working! It's actually working! I can't believe... I didn't dare hope..." her father said, trailing off, tears beginning to form. "The company said that they hadn't tried it out on patients with locked-in syndrome before, they said that it probably wouldn't work. But look at you!"
Lisa still couldn't lift her head, though, so she assumed that she looked healthier. For the first time in a long while she dared hope that she would make it to her twenty-first birthday, maybe even beyond that. One pinky wasn't much, but it was enough to operate the remote control, call for a nurse, use another, less exhausting form of communication than blinking.
So she spent even more time inside the Animus, sometimes up to twelve hours before Miss Palmer pulled her out.
That's when the ghosts began to come. They started minor at first, a call from afar in an accent Lisa couldn't place, one that she could easily ignore. Someone calling a name, selling fish, a crying child. She didn't tell anyone, because she knew what her overprotective mother would do - she would pull the plug. Not on her, no, she would get rid of the Animus. So Lisa stayed perfectly quiet about the outlines of people she could see darting around, not bothered by the walls of the nursing facility.
When the woman's journey ended when she came back home, Lisa cried. She could now move her right pinky and ring finger, frown and lift her eyebrows and wriggle her big toe. But the memory had ended.
"She'll stay inside most of the time, taking care of her child and marrying as quickly as possible so her family won't find out that this was a bastard child," Miss Palmer told her. "I doubt you'll enjoy that. But your father told me that he's found a special kind of memory. It doesn't belong to any of your ancestors, but you'll still be able to relive it. Now, in the meantime I need to patch the software so it doesn't show any glitches whenever you look into the mirror. D'you want me to put a movie on?"
Lisa signaled that she was fine, she could mentally relive the last session for a while until it was time for her to sleep. She wondered what kind of memory her father had found.
Being a man inside the Animus wasn't much different from being a woman. He moved a lot more fluid than the woman, though. Every day Lisa spent in the Animus translated to improved movement of her real body. So she followed the man around as he climbed, jumped, swam and fought his way across Florence, Rome and other Italian cities she could now pronounce the names of as if she was born in Italy.
She could move her head and her entire left hand, so she began to look up things she experience inside the Animus to see if they had really happened, or if her father had someone create these memories for her so her muscle control would improve. Because anybody who experienced those thrilling leap of faiths would get better at moving around, locked-in syndrome or not.
But the ghosts of the memories got worse as well. She could hear the people speak now, even if they remained glowing outlines at the edge of her peripheral vision. She had no trouble understanding Italian and caught herself starting a sentence in one language before finishing it in English. Miss Palmer grew more concerned when Lisa had trouble focusing on her after an intense Animus-session. She'd infiltrated a castle and had just been discovered when Miss Palmer yanked her from the Animus. Lisa cried out in protest and realized that she could once again talk!
The outline-people encouraged her after that, making her recovery even swifter. Her father told Miss Palmer to pretty much keep her inside the Animus until she was fully recovered. So whenever Lisa surfaced to eat something and get her seven hours of sleep in, she was able to move more and more of her 'real' body. She'd probably never achieve the level of ease the assassin exerted so naturally, but at least she could live her life.
She still kept her mouth shut about the outline-people, the fact that her dreams were now entirely in Italian and that she had trouble understanding English. Her bodily progress was far more important than some muddled memories of where she grew up and the favorite TV-shows of her little brother. Hell, she'd gladly sacrifice her ring finger on both hands if it meant that she'd be able to walk again.
Which happened soon after she assassinated the pope. Miss Palmer cut the connection and Lisa, obeying an instinct she thought long-forgotten, got out of the chair, stretching out the kinks in her back. Only when she looked at her mother's wide eyes did she realize that she now stood on her own legs! That shouldn't be possible, she needed to go through months of revalidation, her muscles had atrophied while she was locked-in...
Her father found out that the Animus didn't just make you relive memories, the body responded with minuscule twitches corresponding to the movement inside the Animus. In a normal human being they had little result, but for someone with locked-in syndrome, it meant that muscle tissue got rebuilt.
Lisa chose muscle over memories of herself any day. She still lacked fine muscle control, she couldn't hold a pen or walk without her right leg developing a funny twitch, so she still spent most of her days inside the Animus until she regained control over that as well. It was far, far quicker than regular revalidation, and a lot more fun as well. Who else but this Italian man got to experience hugs from Leonardo da Vinci, climb the Coliseum or take down twenty guards in a single fight?
The line now really began to blur between reality and history inside Lisa's mind. But she didn't care, she could move, she could write, she could dance and sing and enjoy life to its fullest. The few friends she still had left were astounded when she showed up at school, backpack casually slung over her back as if she had never left for an entire year. She clearly remembered the splitting headache which had set her off to the school nurse, and as a consequence down the path to locked-in syndrome, but she could no longer remember where her locker was or how she got from the English classroom to the cafeteria. But she was accompanied by the lady of London, so at least she spoke English to her teachers. This time.
Lisa loved her life, and even appreciated her homework. Cheerfully she set to work, wrote an entire essay in three hours about the role of media in politics and when her mother asked her about it, she showed her first draft with pride. She was back in action, full-time!
"Honey," her mother began, and Lisa's good spirits dampened when she saw the look of confusion and realization dawn on her mother's face. "It's in Italian."
"Is it?" Lisa blurted out. She took her essay back and looked over the words. Nonsense, she could read it without problem. "I know I've got bad handwriting, but even you can't mistake it for English!"
Her mother looked from her essay to Lisa and back before she walked away without saying another word.
"Mom? Mom!" Lisa yelled after her, but her mother hurried to the study, where her father sat, reading the newspaper.
Thus started Lisa's path down therapy.
"So she's bilingual now, I don't really see the harm," Lisa heard her father say one night, a week after her first therapy session. The therapist was nice, but it was clear he was out of his depth. The Animus-machine wasn't an acknowledged medical procedure and few people had experienced the sensation of being an assassin as thoroughly as Lisa had.
"She doesn't even know whether she's speaking English or Italian!" her mother argued back. "I think she's forgotten other things as well... The other night, she asked me where I had put the bananas! She knows we keep those in the fridge, not in the cupboard!"
Lisa heard her mother putter around the kitchen, throwing the cupboard open and exposing its contents to the light. Lisa cringed, because she had put all of the fruit inside the cupboard. There had been no fridge in either Italy or London, so she had kind of forgotten that some people stored their fruit in there. Instead, she'd piled it all into the cupboard. Even from her spot on the couch in the living room she could smell the sweet stench of decaying apples and overripe bananas.
"This is exactly why we're paying a therapist, right? So we can start healing Lisa. She went from pretty much comatose to completely functioning, there's bound to be some backlash."
Judging by her tone, her mother immediately whirled around to her father and snapped: "That's not what you promised me! You said that it was harmless, that she'd be able to live another life, not that she'd forget her own brother's name!"
"She did?" her father asked in a soft, hurt tone. Lisa realized that was her cue to get out. The glowing people accompanied her as she ran, lured her into the backyard. There she collapsed against a large fir, and cried for the first time since she'd regained her ability to walk. She hadn't meant to call her brother by another name, but she'd just... forgotten! He looked like Federico, he truly did. Soft whispers assured her that it had been Federico, her parents were wrong. She had a little brother, hanged from his neck when he was twenty years old, and it still hurt her after all these years. She had avenged him so many times, but every stab of the hidden blade meant another brother or sister or mother or father got killed.
When her parents came looking for her, she used the skills she had picked up from countless hours inside the Animus to blend into her surroundings, disappear from sight and make her way up onto the roof of her house.
Here, she stayed for several more hours, alternately crying and cursing and letting her mind wander. She saw the life of the lady in London laid out before her, as clear as any memory she'd experienced in her own, simple life. She hadn't traveled much, she had just spent hours in school, learning about history instead of experiencing it.
Lisa realized that she could start today, this day was a new beginning. She would no longer go to therapy - she no longer needed it. She was healthy, she was happy, she was whole. The voices in three different languages inside her head told her so. She was going on an adventure, she would start today.
Slowly she got up from her crouch and walked over to the edge of the roof, looking down. It was a long way, but there was a cart over there, filled with hay. The Italian assassin pointed it out to her. If she jumped just right, did the proper front flip, she'd land safely and be able to start her own adventure. Maybe some descendant of hers would one day ride along inside her memories and know that this was the day she turned it all around. She was no longer poor locked-in syndrome-girl, she was Lisa. Lisa the assassin, Lisa the traveler, Lisa the girl who was going to make a name for herself.
She heard voices down below, but paid them no heed. Moonlight crawled across the roof, also illuminating the cart of hay, making it shine in the darkness. She had never done a leap of faith in real life, but Lisa knew she could let her memories guide her. She took a deep breath, spread her arms wide and jumped.
It was a perfect leap. Slowly she toppled forward, making sure her back hit the hay first.
Inside her memories, she had often experienced surges of adrenalin. Whenever the assassin got chased, when the London lady got cornered in that ally, Lisa had been along for the ride. So she knew that a big enough rush of adrenalin slowed everything down in her perception. She could once count the hairs on someone's arm when the sword the guard clutched missed her by an inch. Of course, the next second she'd brutally murdered the man, but for a second, she had been vulnerable.
So she had plenty of time to reflect upon what she'd done when the cart disappeared in a flash of false memory.