Work Text:
There were four left on the Nebuchadnezzar, and the decks were filled with ghosts.
Empty rooms. Shadowed passageways. The remaining crew rattling in the shared spaces, rarely able to gather together. Too much work, too few hands.
Trinity tried to be the first to get up in the morning. She didn’t always succeed. The bed was warm, the body next to her was warmer, and an arm would often follow her from under the covers, pulling her back. Another five minutes. Just another.
Unless he’d been on the night shift. Then he might be fast asleep, and she’d spend a moment just looking at him; his pale skin, his dark, unkempt hair; the long lashes against his cheek.
She touched her lips to the side of his mouth and dragged herself away and out into the chilly corridor.
The echo of laughter. Remnants of arguments murmuring in the empty spaces. And, sometimes, a touch. Just air now. Just a breath of air.
Her skin prickled at the cold. She closed her eyes and just listened, but all she could hear was silence.
She made her way to the Mess to start her day with tea and administration and a bowl of… they didn’t call it goop anymore. Single cell protein. Tasty wheat.
Trinity missed them. She missed Switch’s exuberant belligerence and Apoc’s civilised calm and Mouse’s debauched liveliness and Dozer’s transparent kindness and Tank’s loving determination; determination to live through gritted teeth, even as death slowly claimed him.
She even missed Cypher (fuck him and every bone in his rotting-in-hell body) – how he once was, before bitterness devoured him – which made his betrayal that day even more agonising.
-----
That day. That terrible, wonderful day. The day their crew died. The day he died. Neo would lie in the dark, remembering the day she brought him back and he realised that the partnership he had felt with her from the moment they met, was love. Balls to bones love. She was the reason he lived. They were the reason he lived.
But duty had got in the way. The wreck of the Nebuchadnezzar had crawled its way to Zion, its remaining crew battered, devastated and resolute.
She wore her composure like armour, but he had held her in his arms as she cried, and he’d been awed by the vulnerability she was willing to show him. Her pain was palpable; his comfort steered through the waves of her grief.
Then, her touch as he woke abrupt in the dark, the feeling of bullets entering his chest, the pain, the cold and the creeping shade of fatality. Her embrace reassured, guided, brought his shaking body home, and he found her kiss again.
They had made love for the first time in Zion. After Morpheus had introduced him to seemingly half the population, when they could finally be alone, he had returned to her, exhausted and weighed down with the expectation of being The One. Being tired and wanting to please was not a good combination. At the initial disastrous attempt, his inexperienced body beat his more experienced mind to the finish line, leaving her sticky and him contrite. It was the first time he’d heard her laugh, and he fell in love with her all over again.
A washcloth and a cuddle later and he’d fallen asleep in her arms. But then, in the hush of deep night they had drifted towards each other.
Sleepy kisses turning urgent. Fingers edging under fabric. Trying to slow, trying to breathe – exploring the landscape of her body, as she traced the topography of his. Trying not to come at her touch, trying not to come until he was inside. Feeling the swell of her orgasm under his fingers and then under his tongue, and finally allowing himself to enter her, hot and slick and tight around him. Wrapped around each other until they were one person.
In the chill of the Nebuchadnezzar, he found himself reaching more and more for her warmth, and she would welcome him, burning herself into him. The need to touch, to be one. Corners to hide in on the all-but-empty ship.
But too often work got in the way. Different jobs. Long shifts. Day, night. Too often, they could do no more than look, and their looks were fire.
-----
Sweat dripping in the engine room, lips slipping on slick skin. A near miss in the Mess, sliding off the counter as Link appeared. There had been that one time in the storeroom... Stripping clothes and the door squeaked open, Trinity vanishing up the stacks leaving Neo with his pants round his ankles.
Morpheus looked at him. “Neo?”
“Morpheus.”
“I thought I heard someone in here. What do you need?”
“Uh…”
Morpheus raised an eyebrow. “Underwear, perhaps?”
“No… sir, I mean… yes,” said Neo.
“You’ll find a few pairs at the back,” said the captain. He turned to leave.
He hesitated on the threshold, then called over his shoulder, “Trinity…?”
There was a momentary pause.
“Morpheus?”
“While you’re up on that top stack, could you bring me a battery charger please?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Oh, and Trinity…”
“Yes?”
“Put some clothes on first.”
It was with a mixture of manic merriment and cheek-burning shame that Trinity remembered walking down the corridor to the main deck, battery charger in hand. She dared not look at Neo for fear of losing herself to giggles. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt like laughing so much and loved him all the more for it.
She had stopped grinning when she’d seen the shadow of Mouse out of the corner of her eye, hugging the wall as she passed, his eyes bright with humour. His eyes, no longer bright. She looked away and scurried to Morpheus, who took the charger with an attempted frown.
-----
So, they learned not to touch while in the Neb’s shared spaces. It was too much for them. Too much for Morpheus or Link to walk in on a… warm situation.
Only if it was in the line of duty, or they were saying goodbye. Goodbye, and please come back to me.
Instead, Trinity took to wearing Neo’s sweaters: a part of him grazing her skin, the scent of him enveloping her. Neo, in turn, would take hers, to feel her tight against his body. And then, without discussion, they’d swap again.
Sometimes, Trinity thought she heard Switch laughing at them. She would give the finger to empty air.
Two out of four nights they would spend apart, each of them taking their turn to keep vigil while the others slept. Watching ersatz lives in the green rain of code; monitoring the vast, echoing wastes of the sewers; padding down the adumbral passages of the Neb, listening to their voices, listening to their peace.
Trinity had asked Morpheus if they would be filling the other crew positions.
“I’m looking,” he’d say and that was it.
There seemed plenty of those who wanted to serve alongside The One, but for some, when it came to signing on the dotted line, they’d remember the reputation of that ship. Others who were willing didn’t meet the surviving crew’s high standards. They weren’t as good as them. They weren’t them.
Only Link had made it, but then, Link understood.
In the meantime, the four lived and worked and worked and worked; and thought they heard voices in the dark. With respectful stillness, they served alongside their absent comrades. It was easy to feel like ghosts themselves. Sometimes it felt as if they were fully crewed.
Their primary task seemed to be to stop the Nebuchadnezzar from failing. The Neb had needed regular maintenance before the sentinels’ attack. Now it seemed almost constant. Morpheus and Trinity were the only crew members who understood the intricacies of the old ship, experience that no download could replicate, and the bulk of the work fell to them.
Morpheus would be heard gently talking to it as he worked, encouragement, maybe prayer, maybe secrets. But, increasingly, it was Trinity that could be heard swearing under her breath. It would be she who took the greater share of the labour, as her captain excused himself for paperwork, diplomacy and shouldering the complaints from Zion.
Generally, it would be she who patchworked metal, wielding hammer and welding torch, to ensure the rust and rot were held at bay until their next trip home. Neo could be seen hovering, hoisting steel plates as she bonded sheet to sheet, handing her tools at her bidding.
Generally, it would be she who uttered determined “I’m fines”, as she sucked another cut or burnt finger into her mouth. Neo would want to kiss them better, and surreptitiously, he did.
Generally, it would be she who ventured out into the cavernous dangers of the sewer system, lightning rifle strapped to her body, wrangling some antiquated electrical sub-system in the belly of the ship, while bitter currents of air seemed to seep through to her bones.
Until one evening in the Mess, in an unusual fit of pique, an exhausted Trinity muttered that she’d spent more time under the Neb than she had under Neo, which caused Link to lose half his tea and Neo to take her firmly by the hand and lead her to bed. A little while later she slept, and Neo started the night shift.
-----
To Neo, the night shift on board the Nebuchadnezzar could be a strange dreamland.
He missed Trinity during those hours.
He would, no doubt, be thinking of her when he would catch Cypher at the Operator’s desk jumping and turning off the screens. It would always stop him in his tracks, before slowly sitting himself down where Cypher had once sat, and wondering, as he always did, whether he saw him because of guilt: that he should have known, somehow; or whether because a part of him was also dead.
He would turn the screens on. Morpheus would leave instructions: to study a specific target, to monitor a situation, just to watch. Sometimes he could hear Tank repeating them, adding to them.
Neo could read the code more skilfully than anyone on board, and on those small screens, the Matrix looked more understandable and transparent than the nebulousness of reality. But he could also see the trap: the honey of ignorance, the venom of subjugation.
Sitting on the Operator’s chair, a blanket round his shoulders, a mug of tea in his hands, he watched images of people, playing their lives out as if they were in a video game, but with no real control of their moves. All power with none of it. And he remembered the dizzying sight of rows upon rows upon columns upon columns of hundreds of thousands of pods.
He closed his eyes.
It was different when he was in the Matrix. Neo flowed through the Matrix. The code was water, and he was the current.
Ironically, his freedom seemed far more obvious when he was jacked in. He could fight. He could fly. He could play his own game, play them at their own game.
He and Trinity shadowed Morpheus like bodyguards. Neo didn’t mind that. It was an easier role to accomplish than that of The One. He was still struggling to understand the politics around him, recognise names and faces behind the shades. It was simple just being the muscle.
There were times when he felt omnipotent. When he was with Trinity – whether simply practicing with her in the dojo, or when they fought together side by side in the Matrix – he felt like a god. A god worshipping a goddess; a goddess on a motorbike who could cut through the tide, even with him on her back.
He had returned the favour, flying her up and away, relishing the sheer joy of the two of them soaring through the air, away from everything but each other. Her laughter had rippled against his body.
But he was starting to feel a counter current. Sometimes… something was… pushing… back. It was becoming an overwhelming relief to open his eyes to the grubby ceiling of the Nebuchadnezzar. To turn his face and see that relief reflected in her eyes, the smile of joy behind her serious demeanour. His honey.
Neo always missed her during the night shift.
He would spend time in the cockpit, legs stretched out under the navigation instruments. This space was becoming as familiar as any on the Neb. He seemed to enjoy flying both in and outside the Matrix, and as Morpheus and Trinity could cajole the craft when it wasn’t working, he could cajole it when it was. He could still hear Dozer explaining the difference between downloaded training and experience, watching his hands as he caressed the controls. He wondered if he understood the Neb because it was a machine.
It was Neo who had got them safely to this bolthole. He’d stare out from their nocturnal hiding place, trying to make out any movement, anything, in the yawning space beyond. Trinity’s whisper remained in his head, warning him of what was out there. The darkness was oppressive, and it was hard not to feel the weight of earth above them. He would be reminded of the death they had experienced, the dead who were around them. The Nebuchadnezzar, a sarcophagus in its hidden tomb. Although the sentinels would still rip it apart if they could. And there were more of them, now.
He would double check the outside sensors before leaving the cockpit. He always checked.
-----
Once, something had moved outside. He had felt it initially, rather than seen it. Something had made him turn round and look again, a scuttling metallic horror in the dread of the dark. He had hit the silent alarm. He was surprised how quickly they had joined him, wondering if any of them had been asleep, or whether they had somehow known.
“There,” Trinity had murmured, pointing out into the gloom at the shadow of movement.
“I think there’s another,” Morpheus whispered. There was the tiniest blink of luminescent red. He pressed the comms, “Link?”
“Ready.”
They waited, staring into black, waiting for movement, waiting for attack.
Power offline.
No one moved.
Breath held.
Ghosts surrounded by the vault of earth. For just a moment, seeming forever, the only life on board the Nebuchadnezzar was the touch of Trinity’s hand against Neo’s, and it felt like the brush of skin on skin was loud enough to bring death down on them.
Another moment.
Another moment.
Movement.
Sudden.
Scurrying red, zigzagging fast across their eyeline.
Closer.
Closer.
Bright red blinding.
And then it was gone.
Black ringed with blood in their vision.
Morpheus had glanced at Trinity and nodded. She’d gripped Neo’s hand and led him from the cockpit. Briefly, she’d glanced down at his feet, and it was only then that he’d noticed that she’d arrived in socked feet. He shucked his boots off, carrying them as the two of them had stolen along the stygian passages to the sleeping quarters.
Neo remembered holding her in the frozen dark, pretending to reassure her, when it was him that needed the reassurance. He wanted to kiss her, lick the pulse on her neck, make her cry out as he sucked bruises into her skin. Instead, they’d remained still. In the dark, it was easy for Neo to imagine he was back in his pod. But at least it was with her, huddled together sharing each other’s quietness, each other’s quiescence. Now he understood how sound, how movement, how every breath of life could bring them closer to the end.
-----
This night, there was nothing. Yet he could still sense the outside dangers as he walked away.
On a visit to the washroom, or to get a hot drink from the Mess, he’d sometimes detour and crack open that one door as quietly as he could and watch her sleep. Just watch. Just for a few seconds. Just a few more.
He didn’t know that she often woke at his presence; could feel it in the night, feel it as surely as if he’d wrapped his arms around her.
She fantasised about flinging duty to the winds and drawing him to her: taking his hard length into her mouth, sucking him into herself, feeling the wet between her legs and his fingers running through the curls there...
Instead, she drew his presence round herself as if it was an extra blanket.
Trinity loved Neo. She would lie awake, bathing in the feeling and silently repeat her mantra, “Neo, I love you I love you I love you I love you…” and hope that he felt her adoration. You hear me? She would long for the night shift to end, for those brief moments after one duty finished and another started and they could be alone.
-----
Hiding in the light, hiding in the shadows, hiding from the living and the dead. She missed them. She wanted to stop seeing them.
The only place where she never saw them was her own room. It had always been her sanctuary. Now it belonged to them both. Their room. (She wasn’t sure if Neo had been back to his room since… that day.)
There they could be them. There they could be real.
Alone, together, they would become elemental.
They never started slow. The moment the door closed, it would be a rush of hands, lips, tongues. Boots were kicked across the room; clothes wrestled off and left crumpled on the floor; down, down, safe onto the bed, one on top of the other – it didn’t matter which. The rush of skin against skin. A nipple licked, sucked into a mouth, a finger run along the labia, a tongue tracing around the edges of a jack, a thumb slipping over glans. Little noise, but breath – harder and faster – and gasps, and the slight sounds that Trinity made at the back of her throat which Neo loved so much, and yesses, and sudden, exhaled invocations to a long-dead deity…
...and she would open herself up to him, and as his cock pushed into her, they would slow...
...slow...
...stop.
And just feel. Savour. Luxuriate.
There would be a moment when they looked into each other’s eyes, deep into the warm-brown-blue-ice.
Together. Connected.
One.
Then Neo would start moving – always Neo, he never could help himself – and Trinity would smile and tighten around him, unyielding inside as he tried to withdraw himself, and she’d gasp as he would drag himself out. Feeling every inch of their hard and wet and giving.
That noise in her throat that almost made him come right there. The sensation of her touch; he could feel determination and duty and devotion, her life in the roughness of her hands and, in those moments, she wrote them into his delicate, pod-born skin. She would bury herself into the crook of his neck and breathe in his innocence, cradling him with her whole being; then open herself again and he would slide back in, silky and rigid, in thrall to their rhythm.
They danced to a different rhythm in Zion, different even than the drums. There they had time, mostly. In Zion they could be leisurely, tender, drawing out every moment of excruciating pleasure.
On the Nebuchadnezzar, there was always the possibility of interruption even in their own private world, so it would not be long before Trinity would find herself starting to come and she would let herself shatter around him, as he burst inside of her. It felt like a star exploding. They could see the radiance behind their eyes.
Finally, their ardour now glowing embers, they would lie in each other’s arms, sometimes silent, sometimes talking.
They whispered, although they didn’t need to. Little sound permeated that thick metal door that separated ‘out there’ from their small space. But they whispered because it was their prosody.
The getting-to-know-you conversations. The smiling-secrets conversations. The trusting-each-other-with-the-rawest-of-emotions conversations.
They would talk about the past: their so-called lives before, hers not so different from his. The events that had never happened that still lodged in their heads, although it was a long time ago for Trinity. Only once did she admit the one thing she missed.
“The sky,” she sighed, with a wry smile. And he would find the sky caught in her gaze.
They rarely talked about the future. More and more it felt as if there would only be one end. Sooner or later.
But their frustrations, their everyday hopes, their dreams…
Neo dreamed. He’d dream of waking up in a grimy apartment, words on a computer screen skipping bright across his eyes. He’d dream of waking up underwater and feel like he was drowning, until he sat bolt upright in bed, gasping for air. He’d dream of fighting an assailant who he would defeat, but they kept coming back… and back… and back. He dreamed of dying.
He had started dreaming of Trinity. He didn’t tell her of those dreams. Couldn't tell her. But she reached out a hand and he would hold on. Hold on for her dear life.
And in the dark of the night on the Nebuchadnezzar, they’d settled into the arms of sleep.
Sometimes he’d wake – lying with her, flush against his body, his arm around her, his hand held tight in hers – and listen to the silence. The soft comfort of her exhalation, inhalation, exhalation, inhalation…. He could lose himself just in that. No other sound in their room, just the contentment of her breath.
Slowly, slowly, beyond the thick metal door would be the old ship, settling into its own slumber, maintaining basic systems with the quiet creak of metal on plate, further still the movement of humanity – Morpheus or Link on watch, kept company by fallen comrades, fallen family. A few hours more and it would be their turn. Finally, behind everything, the green-tinged white noise taciturnity of confined code. The Matrix, kept at bay by a muddled assortment of screens.
-----
Trinity would always wake early and try to get up. She didn’t always succeed; it was hard to leave Neo and the warmth of their bed. If she did leave her lover sleeping, she’d tidy whichever clothes had found themselves scattered to the four corners of the room; climb into a fresher sweater, which still smelt of him; place his boots neatly by the chair; brush her fingers through her own lengthening hair, then mirror the gesture through his unruly mop; kiss him gently on the cheek and open the door as quietly as she could. Stepping out into the freezing air of the corridor, she’d remind herself to ask Apoc for darning thread; remind herself that Apoc was dead, and she’d have to get her own darn thread.
She made her way to the Mess.
There were four left on the Nebuchadnezzar, and the decks were filled with ghosts.