#this is explicitly

“Ava, can you step a bit to the left of the statue so I can screenshot the detail on the back. You never know where some symbol or maker’s mark might be hiding, and understanding the provenance of-”

Her voice, so captiving when it’s Ava’s body and its particular habits of response doing the listening, falls flat against her ears. She is too used to the silly Italian-accented English that the animus feeds her through its filter. Beatrice’s accent, which ordinarily strikes her as charming, can only be jarring when it finds her in this broad-shouldered body.

Still, she steps obediently aside in Ezio’s body, cloak caught in one hand to stop it from brushing the stone. Almost speaks just to hear the low hum of his voice, its mechanism of sound in her throat. She has been reading a little about what makes this body different from her own and this particular thing is thicker vocal cords. It feels like speaking through honey, bright-dashed on her tongue.

Not that Ava dislikes her own voice, but there is something intoxicating about inhabiting this body. Its sweat and sweetness.

Beatrice asked how much of a filter she wanted on the language right in the beginning, when Lilith still glowered and Ava’s body felt strong in its own right. Abstergo’s strings unraveled fast. By the second day her steps across the room were shaky. By the end of the third she couldn’t walk. Beatrice and Lilith had finished arguing, the latter running Abstergo’s memory core through the strange red-upholstered animus, the HALO, as Lilith called it.

“Like the video game?”

A black look not at all offset by the clearly thrifted shirt that hung off Lilith’s frame and bared collarbone. Beatrice was out doing laundry and making tentative enquiries into how one might hack Abstergo’s subscription-based leg implants so Ava could walk again.

“Not remotely like the video game.”

Beatrice helped Ava into the animus and approached the issue of translation with an embarrassed frown.

“So, ah, have you read any Chaucer?”

“Is that the guy from A Knight’s Tale? the blonde one?”

Beatrice's expression of blank incomprehension and Lilith’s death-rattle of a laugh in the background. Lilith who is biting and unfriendly at every opportunity and also very gentle with Ava when she pulls her from the animus late at night while the others are sleeping. “Here, let me put some gauze on the insertion point. and this gel,” cool on the inside of her wrist which is raw and constantly bloody from the USB-like cable they use to keep her sedated and also hooked-up to the animus and, in turn, the memories in her blood.

“Why does ours work like this, and not the one in Abstergo?”

“The difference… is about 5 billion US dollars. give or take a nonetheless functionally inconceivable amount of money.” Lilith with her strange tempers, her eyes on Ava’s wrist and her legs spread in concentration, "I wasn't lying when I said Abstergo had deeper pockets than us.”

“just understating.” Ava, tired, didn’t try to keep the mingled pain and longing out of her voice. Not with Lilith to whom there seems no point in lying.

Ava doesn’t care if this particular girl judges her.

dark eyes flicking up, granted a strange flat effect by the monitors still gleaming like belligerent lighthouses in what Ava can only describe as a loft room turned… something else. “Beatrice described the bleeding effect to you.” It's a statement. It is also a question.

“Are you trying to ask if I'm hallucinating?”

“They're not hallucinations, really. More like echoes.”

It doesn't feel like a comforting distinction to Ava, but she looks around the dark space obediently.

just beatrice snoring lightly on her little floor-pallet made of blankets and cardboard and scattered books. No shadows, no play of light between real and not-real.

A slow shake of her head and Lilith’s blunt sound of acknowledgment. A long pause between them.

“Since you won’t ask, yes, I do hate it when you pull me out.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.” Lilith is calm about terrible things. Not so much as an intake of breath at the sight of the scars on Ava’s legs the first time she was the only one around when Ava needed to pee. A strange thing to do with someone she essentially dislikes and also wants to taste in a very vague way that feels distinct from the more honest crush she has on Beatrice.

Ava scoffs. “Does it disappoint you, at least?”

“Do you want it to?”

Lilith finishes applying the weird, ice-cold gel that discourages scar tissue but seals blood in the cut. lets Ava’s silence wash over them both before looking up, darkly serious in her coldly beautiful way. Ava braces for a lecture, but Lilith just takes her in for a long moment.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Lilith stands, offers her hands as she always does before she carries Ava anywhere. Like there’s a choice in the matter. She speaks only when Ava is pressed flush against her, the tensile strength of Lilith’s arms evident in every step they take together toward the double bed, “Just be careful.”

Ava thinks of how often she’s exploded into pain and pixels, slipping off rooftops in Ezio’s body. Of the guard who opened her up from neck to navel with a huge axe. Of leaps of faith slightly misjudged.