Work Text:
Coffee
“There’s something I don’t understand,” he says.
Late morning, they’re still in bed together in their room in Io, holding each other close. She turns, resting her forehead against his. Feeling his breath warm her skin.
“You can change the Matrix now. You can fly.” He looks at her with wonder. “So you’re the One?”
She shakes her head. “The Oracle told me I wasn’t.”
“She said the same thing to me.” He pauses. “I’ve been thinking about something the Analyst told me. He said together, our bond was what made us too powerful to control, but on our own, neither of us was anything special.”
“The Oracle said…” She trails off, knowing she’s repeating herself and coming no closer to understanding.
“Morpheus always said she told us exactly what we needed to hear. She didn’t tell us the truth. She told us what we needed to know in order to discover the truth for ourselves.”
“Maybe,” she says finally, still unconvinced.
They rest in the stillness and silence for a long time.
What he says at last makes more sense than anything else they can think of. He says, “You want to get some coffee?”
The closest coffee shop is called Wake Up! Complete with the exclamation point.
They get their drinks and find a small table with two chairs in a corner. They sit next to each other with their backs to the rest of the room. Thankfully, people get the message and no one comes up to them. It is just possible that no one here at this hour even knows who they are.
She takes his hand. “This is nice.”
“What is?”
“Having you to myself.”
“I’m all yours,” he says, reverentially.
They clink their ceramic mugs and take a long slow sip. The coffee is so hot and strong that it makes her eyes water. She rests her head against his shoulder for a while as they listen to the sound of coffee beans grinding, water running, fluent routines and easy laughter. There’s nowhere else they have to be. It’s a silvery feeling.
Presently, he asks, “What exactly did the Oracle say to you, again?”
The first time they’d talked about what the Oracle told them was sometime in the long days that fused together right after Cypher’s betrayal, after Neo flatlined. After she told him that she loved him and he came back to life.
She still doesn’t know how she knew exactly when to act, and he’s still the only one who hasn’t needed any explanation at all. Their connection, she says wryly later, with a half-shrug that only seems to confuse people further. She’d unplugged him in what must have amounted to a split second before Morpheus fired the EMP in the cockpit. Thrown herself over him as the sentinels went slack and pitched forward like falling towers.
The stillness haunting her in the seconds it took to consider every worst possibility. That he’d be dead, or disrupted. It had happened before, with EMPs, and mistakes.
Then he’d looked up into her eyes, remembering everything. Gently reaching up to touch her face, yearning towards her, dispelling all her doubts. This time he kissed her first.
The look between them then saying they’d have a lot more to talk about later.
Hand in hand, they’d stumbled down to find Morpheus, unsteady amongst the collapsed sentinels jutting into the ship at hurt angles. Without power, without heat, they’d put a blanket around Tank’s shoulders and promised they’d take him to his family as he bled out and went cold. There wasn’t anything else they could do for him.
For who knows how many hours, the three of them went without sleep, working to seal the hulls that had been ripped open and repair as much damage as they could. They were ready to go by the time the Logos found them, jumpstarted their engine, and loaned them crew members to take a shift piloting the Neb so they could finally collapse.
Morpheus didn’t follow them to the crew’s quarters. They never discussed where he spent those last hours on the return trip to Zion. She thinks he either stayed in the cockpit or kept vigil at the bodies on the deck. Captains had gone down with their ship, but no captain had ever returned having lost so many of their crew.
So she and Neo had climbed up to the cabins alone. Looked at each other. Without a word, she opened the door to her room and pulled him in after her.
They sat next to each other on the bed, knowing they should sleep, but feeling too numb with pain and exhaustion to conceive of finding peace.
“Trinity.”
She turned to face him. His expression was so tender and resolute at the same time. “I heard your voice. When I was dead. I heard everything.” He swallowed. “The Oracle told you all of that?”
“Yeah,” she said, looking down at her hand in his. She searched his eyes. “Not what she told you?”
As he recounted his visit, realization dawned in his eyes. “She said, ‘Being the One is just like being in love.’ She knew how I felt about you. She knew I felt the same way about being the One. That it just didn’t seem possible.”
“She didn’t mention me?”
“Not specifically. She just said, ‘You’re cuter than I thought. I can see why she likes you.’ I said, who? And she said, ‘Not too bright, though.’”
That made her smile for a moment. “From the moment Morpheus said we were taking you to see her to the whole drive back, I was sick with nerves. I was afraid she was going to say something to you, and I was afraid she wasn’t. Most of all, I was so afraid I was wrong.”
“When we took you to the Oracle…” She swallowed, hardly able to believe that trip had been only days ago. “Morpheus said we’d be back in an hour. That was unusual. Most visits to the Oracle are brief. Mine took us an hour, though. I guess Morpheus figured she’d have at least that much to say to you. But we got back early. If we hadn’t…”
They think of Cypher, the covered bodies on the deck. They think of Tank, how a few minutes could have been the difference between saving them and slipping away.
She told him what Morpheus had said to her, over ten years ago. How he’d looked at her with that look he always had, that look that said he saw something in her worth saving.
“You’re the youngest person we've ever unplugged, Trinity. I didn’t want to do it. But it was as if you were ready before your time. If we hadn’t gotten to you first, agents would have.” Morpheus had shaken his head, but he was smiling in spite of himself. “The IRS d-base. You were fifteen years old.”
“How old were you, sir?” she’d asked. “When you were unplugged?”
“Old.” He’d let out a bark of laughter. “I always have been. To answer your question, I was closer to twenty-five.” He’d put his hands on her shoulders. “I envy you a little. The other captains are calling you the prodigy. They envy me. But I imagine it can’t be easy.”
She’d squared her shoulders. Made her voice steel. “Thank you, sir, but I’ve felt ready for a long time. I want to see the Oracle.”
“Loyalty.”
The Oracle said it like it was her name.
“Loyalty. That’s what Morpheus sees in you.” The Oracle turned around, smiling, looking and sounding for all the world like Morpheus’ grandmother.
Trinity held her hands behind her back, controlling herself. Not wanting to appear as tense as she was.
“Now, Morpheus doesn’t think you’re the One, and he’s right about that.” The Oracle lit a cigarette. “But for what it’s worth, he thinks you’re the cat’s pajamas.” Exhaled. “You’ll be his second in a few more years. He’ll need you. In fact, he’ll need you to save him one day. So try not to get yourself killed in the Matrix, jumping out of helicopters, smashing into buildings. Getting a little too close to agents.”
Trinity said nothing. Her last encounter with an agent had endangered them all.
“Look at you,” the Oracle said, chuckling. “Smart as a whip, fearless as hell. And you don’t believe this yet, but…” She winked. “Pretty soon, even you won’t be able to tell yourself you’re not much to look at.”
Trinity glowered at her.
The Oracle laughed. “Yes, Morpheus knows he struck gold with you. Everyone else certainly thinks so. You truly are exceptional. Granted special permission to join a crew even though you were underage.” She narrowed her eyes. “But you have a problem. You know it. Because you’re the one getting in your own way by telling yourself things that aren’t true.”
Who the hell was she to tell her there was something wrong with her? This program, or whatever she was? Wasn’t this everything she’d left the Matrix to get away from?
“What do you know about the One?” the Oracle asked, cutting through the fog of her rage.
It was like catechism. She knew how to handle catechism: impersonally. “Morpheus says that he’ll have the power to change the system from within, to remake the Matrix as he sees fit. To end the war against the machines.”
The Oracle tapped ash from her cigarette. “Do you really believe that?”
“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” she said.
The Oracle raised her eyebrows and fixed her with such a piercing look that for a moment, she couldn’t even breathe.
“Now, that,” the Oracle said, “see, that’s your problem talking.”
“Trinity, isn't it?”
It was the first time the Oracle said her name, as though she’d just walked into the room. Trinity felt her jaw tighten.
“I know why you chose that name.” The Oracle’s brow creased. “Do you?”
It was a feeling adjacent to being patronized. Not quite the same thing, but close enough that she felt justified in clinging to righteous anger and hypocrisy. She kept her face expressionless, her tone cool. “The first major job I pulled, I had to take down three different security systems at the same time. From then on, I started calling myself Trinity. Of course, everyone just thought I was a guy. But I kept the name because I wanted people to think I was a group of hackers working together.”
The Oracle raised her eyebrows. “Instead of just one fifteen year-old girl on a stolen computer, thinking that wasn’t enough.”
That blow hurt. She fought to keep her face impassive.
The Oracle leaned closer. “What was the real reason, Trinity?”
Willfully, almost spitefully, she shot back, “Aren’t you supposed to know everything?”
“You’re not telling it for my benefit,” the Oracle replied. “Right now, you’re keeping it at a distance from yourself, and you don’t even understand why.” She jabbed her cigarette at her. “That’s the other half of the problem we’ve been talking about.”
The room seemed suffocating and close, the cigarette smoke oppressive. Trinity started feeling uneasy. Morpheus had said they would be in an half an hour. This conversation going on so long – was that a bad sign? Oracle visits, she’d gathered, were meant to be the length of a doctor's visit, not a psychiatrist's.
She hesitated.
With an air of maddening patience and infinite time, the same bearing that had always annoyed her about Alice in Wonderland, the Oracle waved her hand at something behind her. “See that?”
Obediently, she turned and looked at the plaque above the doorway.
“It says, ‘We fear not knowing.’”
“No, it doesn’t,” Trinity snapped. “It means ‘know thyself.’”
Too late, she realized the trick, felt her own cheeks grow hot as a grin flashed across the Oracle’s face. “Bingo,” the Oracle said.
Back then, she would rather have died than admitted how much she loved Latin. She’d stayed up nights studying until she’d drift off and dream in its elegance, every phrase a riddle written as an equation, pristine, impeccable, pure. Later in Zion she’d found hand-copied tracts of Ovid, Horace, Augustine. And later than that, when she’d swallowed her pride and asked Tank, he’d found disks for the Construct, just for her. Whole libraries, including books that had been thought lost in the world of the Matrix.
Temet nosce. That was the moment she started to think there was something to the Oracle after all. If Morpheus had borrowed the Oracle’s mystique, she would adopt her hardline stance on bullshit.
“I challenged my religion teacher at school,” she said at last. “I said the Holy Trinity didn’t make sense. Something can’t be three and one at the same time. That’s impossible.” Immersed in coding orders and simulations from ones and zeros, she’d found this to be a personal affront.
It wasn’t the first time she’d lost her temper in religion class and been, frankly, an immature little shit, but that was the time that had stuck. Because instead of sending her to the principal’s office, that teacher – professing faith in miracles – had assigned her a research paper on the doctrine of the Trinity. Fifteen pages.
A week later, in spite of herself, she’d written fifty. Her teacher sent it in to some kind of inter-diocesan school contest and it won first prize. Congratulations, Catherine Anne Devereaux from Saint Ignatius. Fifty dollars and a fucking leather-bound copy of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica.
The Oracle smiled. “You look hopping mad. Remembering some old grievance?”
“The truth isn’t for winning contests and arguments. You’re meant to experience it for yourself. To live in the spirit of it.” The essay she had to write was objectified information. Worthless. “Naming myself was an act of including myself in the knowing.”
The Oracle leaned forward. “And what was it that you ended up knowing?”
“That the Trinity is about being in love,” she said, the force of it resounding in that tiny, cluttered, greenish kitchen that was and wasn’t real.
The Oracle raised her eyebrows and gives her a sly grin. “Sounds juicy. I can see why that got your attention. Well, go on.”
She remembers holding a page right up to her eyes in disbelief. Not just at the concepts she was reading about, but at the warmth of the voice blossoming in her mind.
Think about someone you love. Does the attraction of love with that person draw you beyond yourself in such a way that if you stopped loving that person, something real and tangible would die? If you have had an experience of love, then you have had some insight into the Trinity of love.
“The three members of the Trinity – Father, Son, Holy Spirit – can be thought of less as three separate persons and more as a unity. A communion of giving, receiving, and sharing love.”
One commentator had written, “Don't start with the One and try to make it into Three, but start with the Three and see that this is the deepest nature of the One.” Six months later, when she’d heard Morpheus’ voice on the phone for the first time, she’d had the spooky, scattered sensation that he was that long-deceased writer come back to life.
“Love, then, is a flow that has always been present in the very substance of the universe, in every creative notion. That energy is not located within each participant, but in the relationships among them. Not in the three particles of the atom, but in the interactions in the spaces in between.”
The Oracle rested her chin on her hand. “Mm-hmm. What else?”
“Logically speaking, one alone is not by nature love. Two, at best, can be face to face. However, two can also be oppositional, binary, split. But the two bond in their love for another as soon as they are joined by a third. Thus, three opens up the possibility of community. The Greek word for the Trinity, perichoresis, means something like dancing. The word choreography comes from this root. A third begets the potential of the Trinity to draw all others into the dance.”
(Ripples more than seventy years into the future: “I thought you should know that I’m here because of her.” Echoes back through millenia to the beginning, if there was one at all: “Can we understand the Trinity as an infinite emergent process? Because love is constantly changing itself as it evolves towards greater union.”)
And the fateful passage she’d memorized that had come back to her over and over again with painful clarity during the first weeks after she was unplugged. What ails humanity is our profound and painful sense of disconnection, from one another, from ourselves, from reality itself. We are imprisoned alone within a systematic loneliness that has numbed us to our longing for love. Yet here in the deep waters of our despair, a true understanding of the Trinity points toward reunion and reconciliation. It sounds our deepest instinct: that the foundational nature of reality is relational. A hand pulling the jack out of her head for the first time. The sound of boots on the metal decks, hurrying towards her. And the whole crew laying their hands on her shoulders in the mess hall when she’d broken down afterwards, the only time she’d cried in front of anyone else in this world stripped bare of dark illusions. The memory she most needed to remember in those days, and most wanted to forget.
The Oracle looked at her critically. “But you know all the baggage that comes with those beliefs. You’ve heard the stories. The blind see, the dead are raised to life. A promised messiah who sacrifices himself and is resurrected. A lot to swallow, isn’t it?”
“I never said I believed any of it,” Trinity said. Evading, which she knew the Oracle wouldn’t have missed. She shrugged defiantly. “I didn't find the iconography compelling. I thought Rublev's Trinity looked like three men at a tea party.”
“But you do believe in love?”
“I thought I did,” she said, trying to sound flippant, coming across as defensive. “But that was in the Matrix. I had all these memories, and none of it was real.”
“The Matrix cannot tell you who you are.”
“But an oracle can?”
The Oracle laughed loudly. “Don’t you start shitting me again now,” she said, more amused than angry. “After all that, do you really expect me to believe you’d accept anything I told you?”
The Oracle leaned back in her chair, looking satisfied. “Well, it’s been nice talking to you, Trinity, but you’d better get going back.”
She couldn’t move a muscle. While they’d talked, her smoldering anger had turned to begrudging respect. Now she felt herself tipping over the edge of disappointment.
The Oracle crossed her arms. “You were expecting something else?”
Revelation. “Yeah. I was.”
She stubbed her cigarette into the ashtray. “You already know that what you know will change what happens outside you. That’s all the prophecy you need, kid.”
But she thought she saw a hint of challenge in the Oracle’s eyes. A provocation.
“No,” Trinity said, staring straight back at her.
“No?” Smoke unfurled from her mouth.
“I want my goddamn prophecy,” Trinity said, feeling how loud and thin and awkward her voice was. She wondered if Morpheus could hear her. She felt sixteen years old, which she was.
The Oracle raised one eyebrow. She spoke slowly, deliberately, lingering over each word. “It might not be something you want to hear. Are you sure you want to hear this?”
“Yes.” Her chilly skepticism gone, her foundations of self shaken.
Then the Oracle smiled at her, with real fondness in her eyes. “You’re going to fall in love, Trinity. I can’t tell you how you’ll know, except that you will. Like you’ve never been so certain of anything else in your life. And that man, that man you love will be the One.”
She saw a grenade go off once, the last time she ran from that agent.
Felt herself exposed in the flash.
Her ears ringing with no sound.
It was like that now, the pain of being seen and known like that. Devastated by words that had slipped right past all her defenses. Where she had thought her heart could never be touched.
She felt the floor tilt beneath her. Grabbed for the edge of the kitchen table to steady herself.
The Oracle was shaking her head.
“Wasn’t trying to make it hurt, but I can see that it did, and I’m sorry about that,” she was saying. “But don’t worry. And as soon as you walk out that door, you’re just going to wish you’d kicked me in the head while you still had the chance. A little bit of anger feels good sometimes, doesn’t it?”
The Oracle stepped forward, holding out a tray of warm cookies. “Here. Take a cookie.”
“Wait,” Trinity said. Her voice sounded very small. “Will he love me back?”
The Oracle’s expression softened. “There’s only one way to find out. You’ll have to ask him to dance.”
She didn’t remember taking one, but there was a cookie in her hand when she stepped out into the room where Morpheus was waiting. Seeing her face reflected in his lenses, she looked away.
In the car ride back to the exit, he asked, “What did she tell you?”
She just shook her head. “I’ll tell you when we’re out.”
He looked concerned. “You should eat that cookie. You look a little pale.”
She ate the cookie in the car, but didn’t get much further with a plan. As Tank unplugged her, the nausea she’d felt during the ride back instantly tripled. She tried to stand, fell forwards onto her knees, and threw up on Morpheus’ boots.
They helped her back to her room, where she had a night to think about what to say. She herself felt that her privacy weighed little in the balance of the ship’s security, in terms of their captain needing to know whatever obviously momentous thing the Oracle had told her.
Finally, thinking like the Oracle, she figured it out. She told him, “She said that what she told me was for me and me alone.”
His eyebrows shot up. Her own eyes filled suddenly with tears. He was so proud. It became what he always said after visits to the Oracle. To a number of prospective Ones, all through the years right up until he found Neo.
She remembers the time Thomas Anderson bought her a coffee, at Simulatte.
They’d sat down on those awkwardly too-small, too-low chairs that should have felt too close together, but didn’t. He’d looked indescribably weary. “You look like you need another,” she’d said.
“I need...” He’d closed his eyes briefly, inhaling. “I don't know. Something else.”
He’d looked straight at her, and her breath had caught in her throat.
Haltingly, he asked, “Have you ever thought… have you ever felt like like you're drinking all this coffee, but you're still dreaming?”
“Only every morning for the last twenty years,” she’d said, and while she’d began it as a joke, something more serious connected in their locked gaze.
“The Matrix made us believe it was everything we wanted,” he says now, at Wake Up! “It made you feel like something was wrong with you to want to wake up to something better, because it told you that something didn’t exist.”
She lowers her gaze. “I used to think Cypher and I were completely different. I thought I’d never choose what he did. And then in the Matrix, I almost walked away from you.”
His expression is pained. “That’s different. You didn’t remember.”
“I was starting to remember enough.” She runs a hand through her hair, only to be reminded of how short it is still. “I never thought it would so easy to rationalize away the truth. For the lies to be so subtly truthful, at least on the outside. No one’s there handing you a blue pill every day of your life.”
“Uhh,” Neo said. “They did that to me, actually. When I started seeing things, or so I thought. That’s what gave me the idea to the blue pill in the first game.” Her eyes widen. “It seems too obvious, I know, but they knew they could do that to me and I’d just keep going. I really didn’t want to believe I was crazy. I didn’t want to wake up.”
“They did it to torture you,” she said, anger sparking in her eyes.
“They tortured you too.”
“That goddamned name,” she says bitterly. “But I wasn’t suffering the way you were. I loved my kids. I still feel like they are my kids. I wonder if the Matrix just erased me from their memories. Everyone I’ve talked to says this seventh version doesn’t seem to care much about coherence, and neither do the people still plugged into it. They’ve gotten used to feeling disoriented, cut up, and algorithmically reconfigured. Just like we did. But if my kids still remember me, I need to go back and talk to them sometime. When they’re ready. They have to make their own choices, just like I did. But they need to know they have a choice at all.”
He nods. “Was it them? That made you turn back? Or was it when Chad called you by that name?”
She thinks for a long time. “I think it was when he said, Tiffany, you have to come with us. And I thought, Yeah, I have to. It doesn’t matter what I believe.”
She meets his gaze. “It matters what people believe. That’s what the Oracle was telling me. What we believe changes everything.”
“Yeah,” he says, and her heart rolls over as he gives her that puppy-eyed look he’s only gotten better at as he’s gotten older. “I’m alive because you believed in me.”
“And you believed in me when I couldn’t,” she whispers.
“It’s never just been about me. I’ve always felt that.”
“I know,” she says, smiling.
“So,” he says. “The One. It’s not you or me. It’s you and me.”
A new strength fills her as she takes in the light in his eyes, requites it completely. “You and me.”
They have to hold hands again after that. They hold hands for a long time. The prerogative of finally having more than an unending cycle of world crises and first encounters.
“Your coffee’s getting cold,” she teases him.
“I think I hate it,” he says ruefully, staring at the grounds at the bottom of his cup. “I know it’s more badass to like your coffee black, but I really wish this were a cappuccino."
“Not a cortado?”
“I only started ordering those because I hoped you would notice me. The oldest, saddest trick in the book.”
She laughs. “Not so sad for me. It worked. I noticed you.”
“Thanks,” he says, sincerely.
“Don’t mention it.”
He swills his cup. “I wish there was some sugar here, at least,” he says morosely.
“Sure,” she says. “And biscotti on the saucer?”
He shakes his head. “No. I fucking hate biscotti. But Simulatte had good strawberry macarons.”
“I liked their chocolate croissants, myself.”
“Those were pretty good,” he concedes. He squeezes her hand. “I’m not complaining. This is better.”
She smiles. “You want to make this a regular thing?”
“Yeah, I do.” He leans in close, hips pressing up against hers. Caressing her thigh under the table. “I want everything with you, Trin. I love you.”
She shifts her weight until she’s essentially sitting in his lap. Shaking a little, and not just from the coffee. “I love you so much,” she says, kissing him back. Steady, brimming, and running over.