Categories > Movies > Matrix
Aqua
0 ReviewsTriNeo. At the beginning of their relationship, the scales of power are unbalanced. Half fluff, half angst.
Title: Aqua Title: Aqua
Author: elementalplatinum
Summary: TriNeo. At the beginning of their relationship, the scales of power are unbalanced. Half fluff, half angst.
Rating: M (R)
Disclaimer: I own nothing. NOTHING.
~
It was like aqua, he mused. He remembered a time, as a child, he'd been over at his Aunt Margaret's house for an afternoon. He'd sat on one of the dusty chairs - they'd irritated his asthma - staring at the aqua wallpaper, fascinated with how it was both blue and green, and yet neither at the same time. He'd never noticed it before. Every time he saw aqua after that, he'd been mesmerised by it.
That was what it was like reading the codes. It wasn't, as so many seemed to think, a matter of blinking his eyelids and seeing the world encrypted within the scrolling green. Or blinking again and having his sight returned to the way the others saw. He saw both at the same time. And could see neither, if he focussed too hard.
He knew better than try to explain it, really. The first few times he'd tried to describe it, the only one who seemed to get it was Trinity. Big surprise. She understood... everything, it seemed.
So, he supposed, the only one to know what he was going through right now would be her.
She was like aqua, too.
The first few days of knowing her - which, he'd admit, wasn't anywhere near long enough to discover the complexities of her personality - he'd thought she wasn't afraid of anything. That she was incapable of it. It was only after his first encounter with sentinels that he realised that there was something she could fear. After the thing had examined them and flown off, he'd looked to her, watching her reactions.
She was shaking. Her hands gripped the loose sleeves of her sweater in tight fists. Her chest was expanding and contracting beyond what was normal. Her entire being exuded fear, an adrenaline rush running its course. She'd tried to quietly exit to her cabin, but he'd followed her, cornered her in the hall.
"Trinity?"
"What, Neo?" He'd flinched at the brevity in her voice. She'd never spoken to him that way before. He didn't know why he cared so much.
"What... what just happened?"
She'd sighed - a short, exasperated noise. His heart had sunken in his chest from the sound. She was getting bored with him already. What was I to you, Trinity? Another part of him questioned silently. Just another rookie?/ Just one more line of code you could add to the long list of others you've unplugged?/
"We had a sentinel attack." She still hadn't turned to face him. Her back was beautiful. Fuck.
"I know, but...what does that mean? What would they have done if they had caught us?"
She finally turned. Her face broke his heart. She didn't look at his eyes. Instead, her gaze flicked from the ladder, the rivets on the wall, his boot buckles. She looked so lost. She swallowed. He watched her throat move, her jaw tighten. When had he started paying this much attention to her?
"They would have ripped open the ship. They would have searched every room, looked anywhere we could hide. And when they found us, they would have killed us." Her gaze found its way to his. Nothing summed up the war between man and machine better than what he saw in Trinity's eyes. She was desolate...broken. But still he saw the struggling spark of humanity that clung to him as she stared. "You don't want to see what those things do to human bodies, Neo."
And with that, she'd turned away and entered her cabin.
"Jesus." He'd muttered.
He'd prayed that that would be the last time he saw Trinity's fear. He never wanted to see that happen to her again. She didn't deserve it. And he could tell from the way she'd handled it that it had happened far too many times before.
She hadn't let him see it again until now.
This wasn't supposed to happen. They weren't in here for a fight. They weren't even here to interact with anybody. They were just there to pick up a disk from the Babel. Someone had spotted them.
"Neo!" The tone she'd yelled in had got his attention first. He'd heard the tone once before. On a windy Matrix rooftop one fateful afternoon.
"Trinity!/ Help!"/
It was his job to protect her, now. His job to see that no resistance fighter came to harm while he could prevent it. He spun around, his eyes locking on to hers, following her gaze.
Agents. Five of them.
His eyes returned to hers. No. Not again. The fear in her eyes translated from coding to image and back again before his gaze. He was angry with it. They had no right to make her feel like that. He went to stand beside her, sizing up the Agents approaching them.
He half-turned to her. "Go." She looked at him. "Trinity, I know what I'm doing, now - please - go."
He could see the frustration in her code, even if her face stayed carefully blank. He was in trouble later, he knew. She didn't argue, not verbally at least, but spun on her heel and ran for the exit. He breathed a little easier. The central agent looked at her retreating back. "Get her." He addressed the two agents on his left.
Neo moved in front of them as they began to run after her. "No." His hand shot out and gripped the throat of one of the agents, pushing his fingertips in further and further until blood - green then red then green - bubbled out over his palm. He felt the agent coding retreat and he let the body of a sanitation worker drop heavily to the ground.
One.
Two more agents approached him, their palms swinging in synchronization. He dodged backwards, and wrapped each hand around the extended forearms, pulling them backwards, then forwards, cracking the bodies like whips. He felt the bones crack in the arms, the ribs compress against each other, the spinal cords shift and snap.
Two. Three.
The bodies fell. They die so easily. Why is everyone so afraid of them?
He ran towards the last agent, flinging his leg out in a long, sweeping kick. The agent dodged, both hands coming out to grab Neo's leg, and swung him towards the wall.
Neo's body crashed into the bricks.
Don't get cocky, he heard Morpheus' voice in his mind.
Focus, Neo. That was Trinity.
His hand darted out and grabbed the approaching agent's hair, holding the program in place as he swung a tightly clenched fist into his face. He watched dispassionately as the skull fragments shattered into the brain.
It's over.
That was four. There were five.
Fuck.
He ran after Trinity. She was cornered in an alleyway, two streets and three stories away from the exit. The agent attacked, his fists flying toward her face. Neo would have laughed if it hadn't been Trinity in the situation - they were moving so slowly, it looked as if they were fighting in water.
He strode up behind the moving agent, gripping his chin in one hand, the back of his hair in the other. The twist was slow...seemed slow. He could see the vertebrae dislocate, though the skin on the outside remained as deceptively blank as ever. The body slid away, to reveal Trinity's scared eyes, her palms still raised defensively. Stop looking like that.
She didn't speak, but turned and began walking toward the exit. He followed a few steps behind her, sensing her anger, seeing it in the code. He knew better than to try and talk to her in here. She refused to utter anything but the most necessary of information while plugged in, keeping herself focussed on the task at hand.
Trinity lifted the phone first, keeping her back to Neo even as she was pulled back to reality. Neo watched impassively as her lines of code stripped themselves away one by one, her body disintegrating before his eyes. He reached out and caught the receiver before it dropped, carefully setting it back on the hook.
He wondered what she would say to him once they were alone. She was angry, there was no doubt about that. Not necessarily at him, but at herself, at her inability to fight her own battles. Usually, Trinity accepted his assistance in fights, not disagreeing with the fact that he was the better warrior, now. But... perhaps she felt he'd been doing it too often lately? She'd been training more and more each day, sometimes alone, sometimes with him. Even if her head could accept the fact that there was a new, more powerful force than her in her life now, her body wasn't ready to give up being the alpha of their little pack.
Neo had no desire to enter into a contest with Trinity. He loved her, she loved him - and it should have been that simple. But Trinity - fighting, hacking, wilful Trinity, couldn't comprehend that. He was afraid she'd begin to pull away from him more if this pattern of behaviour persisted.
The ring of the phone broke Neo out of his thoughts. He sighed, letting his fingers slide over the greasy plastic again - green to black to green - before lifting it to his ear.
~
She wasn't there when he arrived on the ship. It was Morpheus standing over him, sliding the jack out of his skull, unlocking his arm and foot restraints. Neo stood, subtly resting a palm on the arm of Trinity's chair, feeling it radiating a slight warmth. Her warmth.
"Where did she go?" He murmured as Morpheus moved to stand behind Tank, eyes fixed on the screens.
"Lower level." Morpheus replied distractedly, examining the coded record of their latest trip into the Matrix. If he hadn't been piloting when they needed to jack in, he'd have been in there too. He was becoming worried about Neo and Trinity - specifically Trinity's reactions to Neo's strength in the Matrix. Morpheus wanted to be there at the tensest of moments, to ensure that he could insulate the raw emotions between the both of them.
Neo moved towards the ladder and climbed down, listening for any slight sound Trinity might be making. He checked the mess - she wasn't sitting there with a half-drunk mug of water as she was prone to doing. As they both were. Nor was she lying on the bunk in their room, eyes closed, softly breathing, her palm curled up beside her face in a sweetly childlike gesture...
It was far too easy to see her when she wasn't there. She'd been branded onto his brain, burnt into his psyche.
He knew if he couldn't find her in the mess, or in their cabin, he'd take the best course of action by not trying to find her. He recalled a cat his parents had bought when he was a kid. After fights, it had retreated to places unknown to lick its wounds in private. It was only when it was healthy and happy that it would allow itself to be seen.
Trinity was like that cat. She'd only let him be around her when she was fine, together, all shields up. After that day... that pivotal day when his new life had begun, she'd closed herself off from him after their kiss. She'd kept ducking and dodging him - an easy feat, as she knew the ship much better than he did - kept blocking herself off from him emotionally, too. He remembered how he'd latch onto her whenever he saw her, following her, asking her things.
He wondered what would have happened in their relationship had he not made her endure his endless presence in those first few weeks. Had it weakened what they might have become? Or had it strengthened their bond, allowing her to know that now there was somebody there for her, that she didn't have to keep relying solely on herself anymore? It had been like a struggle, then, both of them pushing as hard as they could against each other. Trinity, to keep Neo from invading her life further than she allowed, and Neo, to break through her barriers, to try and undo the stoicism that the years of endless fighting and death had inflicted upon her.
He'd gotten angry with her for it once, when she wasn't around. Silently cursed her - but never spoken a word out of turn to her face. Neo knew that the respect he had for her bordered on fear. She held so much power in those perfect, strong hands of hers, so much influence over his life. At her command, he'd defeated death itself. If she'd ever gotten angry at him, flown into a true rage, he doubted he'd ever be able to recover.
Fortunate for him that rage was not her way. She always stayed so placid, so balanced, despite whatever emotions she might be feeling at the time. Their struggle against each other had ended abruptly on their first night together. He'd been closer to her then than he'd ever been with another human being. Not just physically, it had been more than that. For those few minutes, he'd been bonded to her soul, understanding what she was going through. But that had hurt.
It had hurt him to realise that she'd only agreed to being with him to get him to believe that she'd given all of herself to him. She'd tried to salvage herself emotionally by sacrificing her physical body. The whole process had happened subconsciously, he knew - she hadn't planned out a manipulative scheme, it had just...happened. He could feel how desperate she was, how scared that being with him was going to make her lose a part of herself. Become weaker.
Looking at her, he watched her face as she registered the pain in his eyes. She'd felt so guilty for putting him through that - and he'd felt guilty for making her feel guilty. He'd realised that if they weren't careful, they could easily fall into this self-destructive cycle. So he broke it. He smiled.
"I love you." He stated it as if he just realised the fact, and wanted to share it with her. He realised that it was the first time he'd actually said it. That revelation stunned him - how could he have gone this long without telling her that he loved her? He'd stated it over and over in his head a thousand times a day - every time he saw her, every time he thought of her, every time he touched her. Trinity equals love. Love equals Trinity. Trinity love. Love Trinity. Love Trinity. Love Trinity.
Her eyes had shut tightly as they kissed, and the hand that was cradling her face registered wet heat. He recalled the feel of each individual tear as they rolled down over the backs of his fingers.
"Trinity," /he'd murmured, /"Trinity..."
He'd been lost from that point on, pressing her down harder over and over again, devouring her mouth when she gasped. He still remembered the little cut-off exclamation she gave as she came, her body tensed and frozen. He remembered her breathing returning to normal and her muscles twitching against him. He'd been so close to losing it when his hand slid down and brushed against the plug in her upper arm and he'd realised how real she was, how totally and utterly and completely real, and he'd cried out to her as his body stiffened, then slumped.
Trinity's fingers were brushing the short fuzz of his hair when he finally returned to his senses. Shifting along her shoulder, he tried to move closer to her, burying his face in her neck.
"Can you breathe down there?" She'd asked, a hint of humour in her voice. Nodding against her skin, he'd silently tightened his arms around her. They'd laid like that forever, Trinity's fingers moving down and circling each plug in his back.
It was only when he woke up that he realised that he'd been sleepy. Still cushioned on Trinity's chest, he'd grinned as he rubbed her abdomen. I'm in love. And she's in love with me. And not just any 'she'. Trinity.
The 'she' in question had sighed quietly as she slept, turning her head towards his the slightest bit. Moving slowly so as not to wake her, Neo had shifted himself up the bed, settling his head on the pillow beside her and pulling her back into him. Yes, I'm greedy. I'm greedy and I love you, Trin. He'd grinned again.
After that, things had been relaxed. Easy. They could talk together, they could share a joke. His idolisation of her lessened enough for him to treat her like a normal human being, and that made it easier. Her apprehensiveness towards a relationship almost completely disappeared. And that was when they'd become not just Neo, and not just Trinity, but Neo and Trinity. Ass-kicking lovers, defenders of Zion. And Neo was glad of the title.
The silence in his cabin pressed in on his ears, harsher than sound. His fingertips circled the bolts on the side of the bunk as he stared up at the patches of rust on the ceiling.
"Trin," he whispered quietly, "I want to talk to you."
A few minutes later, the door creaked open. He kept his gaze fixed on the ceiling as she shut the door behind her. Then, she stepped over to the bunk and lay on her front beside him, studying his face. Gingerly, her fingers crept out and touched his arm. "Neo?"
He turned to look at her, his hand coming up to cover hers. "Trinity."
She shut her eyes and sighed. "Yes, I'm being idiotic." He smiled softly.
"It's not idiotic, Trin. I just wish you'd tell me what's going on."
She turned over on her back, mirroring him. "You know what's going on. I don't like... I don't like you coming and rescuing me every time I get into trouble."
"It was an agent, you couldn't have-"
"No, Neo." She squeezed his arm gently to make him stop. "I'm not angry at you. Not now, anyway." She took in a long breath. "Before you came I never seemed to get into these situations. Or at least, I got out of them quick."
"We're doing more difficult things now - now that I'm here."
"It's not just that. Neo, I want us to be - to be partners. Equals."
"We are-"
"No. That's just it. It's not you, but..." She let go of his arm and put her hand over her eyes. "I find myself letting you take the lead, just putting you ahead of me all the time, and then I get angry when you do take the lead, when you do go ahead of me and it's not your fault. So I can't even get angry at you." She turned to look at him. He looked confused. "And you're just the innocent bystander."
He turned on to his stomach, resting his head on his fist and touching her cheek with the fingertips of his other hand. "So what do you want to do about it?"
"I don't know."
Neo slid an arm around her waist, pulling himself closer to her and pressing his lips to her forehead. "Maybe," he whispered against her skin, "we should go through a sim. Fight Club style. Last one to fall, pass out or give up wins."
"Wins what?"
"Dominance."
She smiled, but pushed away from him so she could look him in the eye. "That's not going to help."
"I know. But at least you could have the pleasure of kicking the crap out of me." Their normal spars in the sims were relatively low-contact, not enough to seriously injure either of them.
She raised an eyebrow, silently asking him if he really wanted to challenge her.
"I'll do it, Trin."
She gave a slight nod of the head. "Okay then."
~
"You're not going to be doing anything freaky in there, are you? Cause I really don't want to see that stuff from you, Trinity."
She sighed. They got this speech from Tank, in one form or another, every time they wanted to run through a sim together. Though he had no reason to assume that they'd do anything while they were jacked in, making jokes about their relationships had become par for the course with him - it was his way of coping.
"No, Tank, we will not be molesting each other in the program." She replied. When Tank wasn't looking, Neo gave her a tragic look. She raised an eyebrow and smiled at him slyly. What the hell. This time, you may just get lucky.
He grinned at her. He knew that there was no way he'd get the opportunity to do anything intimate with her in a sim, or even on the ship. Privacy was nil, and the idea of having Tank watch them going at it in a digital environment was hardly arousing. He'd only realised the fact that they had to limit their encounters to when they were in Zion a few days ago - it had been cause for a quiet moment of contemplation followed by quite a loud expletive.
It wasn't that he /needed /that from her - Trinity was so much more than just that side of their relationship - but the connection they'd felt while they were making love... he didn't want to go without that for the months when they weren't in Zion. There was no way around it though. It was just... just another thing that this duty denied him.
He laid back and let the jack-in plug drive the thoughts from his mind.
As soon as he entered the sim, she smacked him in the face. His head snapped back with the force of her blow, and his eyes rolled back in his head.
"Ah! Christ..." his hands covered his face defensively as he got his bearings. He started to look at the code through his palms, working out where she was.
"No cheating." She said warningly. Damn, she's good. "I mean it, Neo, I don't want you using your abilities now." He loved how she called them 'abilities'. Tank and Morpheus were in the habit of calling them 'powers', but he recognised her unconscious objection to labelling him in such a deific way. Nevertheless, she usually still encouraged him to use his skills whenever possible so that he could extend them even further. She usually wasn't intimidated by the impossible odds facing her when she fought him like that - but now she wanted at least the chance to even the score.
He let his hands down from his face. She was standing before him, her arms crossed under her breasts...breasts made /very /obvious from the outfit she'd chosen.
"You said Fight Club." She said in response to his raised eyebrows. She was wearing a pair of jeans - a shock to the mental image he'd built of her; he'd never imagined her wearing something so average as jeans - and her chest was bare apart from a modest black bra.
He cocked his head to the side. "Weren't you unplugged before the movie came out?"
"Constant streaming in the core." She replied. "Once you get good at reading the codes, you can watch anything showing in the theatres."
"Handy."
"Certainly better than downloading at two ks a second." She remarked, and once again he had that feeling that she knew far more about him than she let on.
"Well I guess-" He swept his leg out in the middle of his sentence, catching her off guard. She began to fall to the ground, but managed to turn it into a none-too-graceful back flip at the last second.
"As I recall..." she began to speak, a little more breathlessly now, "the men in Fight Club didn't wear shirts." She smirked at him. He shrugged, and his shirt was gone.
"Happy?" He walked towards her.
"Deliriously." She mirrored him, pacing forward and clenching one fist. She swung at the same time as he did, resulting in them both dodging the other's blow. She was faster than him to recover, thrusting her other hand into his unprotected stomach. The air left his lungs in a soft grunt, but there wasn't really enough force behind her blow to injure him.
He caught her arm as she began to pull away, holding it in his left hand as his right slammed into her cheek. Her leg drove into his shin, and he let go of her, hissing in pain. Stoic./ Blank. Emotionless./ It was an unspoken agreement between them that neither would show any more evidence of pain than was unavoidable. Neither of them wanted to know that they were really hurting the one thing they loved over anything else in the world. They were sparring, playing. It wasn't real.
They continued to fight. It wasn't as graceful or delicate as their fights usually were; it was comparatively slow, and every blow had real power behind it. Within a few minutes, she was bleeding from her mouth and her eyebrow, he from the jaw and cheek. Both of them were limping, and Trinity was having trouble lifting her arm.
"You wanna stop?" Neo breathed heavily, a knot of worry forming in the pit of his stomach. She shook her head defiantly.
"No." She bit her lip and straightened up, like a rod of steel had been shot up her spine. He nodded. She ran towards him and knocked him down to the ground in one hit. Sitting on his hips, she grabbed a hold of his hair and slammed his head into the mat floor.
"I...I give up..." he managed to sputter out between blows. She paused, staring at him. Her expression was part anger, part confusion, and didn't look wholly human. She leaned down, coming nose-to-nose with him.
"Are you just doing this to let me win?" Her eyes were wide, questioning.
"No! Christ...I'm done, Trin, I give up. You win. /I lose./" She narrowed her eyes for a moment, examining him, then sat back and nodded.
"Okay." She looked up to the ceiling. "Tank!" She called. As soon as she spoke, they were pulled out of the program.
~
They did feel more balanced after that. Healthier. Something clicked where it hadn't before. They began to work in tandem. On missions, they were like mirror images of each other, moving with a shared purpose. When they were requested as back up for another crew a few weeks later, they single-handedly obliterated the three SWAT teams they confronted.
On the ship, neither of them spoke of it. It was just... there. The closest they got to mentioning it was late one night, when they were playfully wrestling with each other in their bunk. Trinity got the upper hand, pinning Neo down to the mattress with her hands on his shoulders. He laughed softly, raising his palms to cover hers. Then he quietened, still staring at her.
"What?" She asked, smiling.
"Your eyes." He murmured. She waited for him to continue. "They're... in this light, they're aqua."
She smiled, and lowered her face down to his. Didn't kiss him, though. Just whispered.
"I know."
And she did.
~ End
AN: If the ending seemed brief, there's a very good reason for it. I don't really think this is one of my best, and I knew if I left it any longer it'd just fester on my harddrive. However, I do feel that it deserves to be uploaded, and as a trix fangirl myself, I know how desperate we all are for new fic. If you enjoyed it, tell me! I hate review whoring, but hearing from you guys really does make my heart smile. :)
Author: elementalplatinum
Summary: TriNeo. At the beginning of their relationship, the scales of power are unbalanced. Half fluff, half angst.
Rating: M (R)
Disclaimer: I own nothing. NOTHING.
~
It was like aqua, he mused. He remembered a time, as a child, he'd been over at his Aunt Margaret's house for an afternoon. He'd sat on one of the dusty chairs - they'd irritated his asthma - staring at the aqua wallpaper, fascinated with how it was both blue and green, and yet neither at the same time. He'd never noticed it before. Every time he saw aqua after that, he'd been mesmerised by it.
That was what it was like reading the codes. It wasn't, as so many seemed to think, a matter of blinking his eyelids and seeing the world encrypted within the scrolling green. Or blinking again and having his sight returned to the way the others saw. He saw both at the same time. And could see neither, if he focussed too hard.
He knew better than try to explain it, really. The first few times he'd tried to describe it, the only one who seemed to get it was Trinity. Big surprise. She understood... everything, it seemed.
So, he supposed, the only one to know what he was going through right now would be her.
She was like aqua, too.
The first few days of knowing her - which, he'd admit, wasn't anywhere near long enough to discover the complexities of her personality - he'd thought she wasn't afraid of anything. That she was incapable of it. It was only after his first encounter with sentinels that he realised that there was something she could fear. After the thing had examined them and flown off, he'd looked to her, watching her reactions.
She was shaking. Her hands gripped the loose sleeves of her sweater in tight fists. Her chest was expanding and contracting beyond what was normal. Her entire being exuded fear, an adrenaline rush running its course. She'd tried to quietly exit to her cabin, but he'd followed her, cornered her in the hall.
"Trinity?"
"What, Neo?" He'd flinched at the brevity in her voice. She'd never spoken to him that way before. He didn't know why he cared so much.
"What... what just happened?"
She'd sighed - a short, exasperated noise. His heart had sunken in his chest from the sound. She was getting bored with him already. What was I to you, Trinity? Another part of him questioned silently. Just another rookie?/ Just one more line of code you could add to the long list of others you've unplugged?/
"We had a sentinel attack." She still hadn't turned to face him. Her back was beautiful. Fuck.
"I know, but...what does that mean? What would they have done if they had caught us?"
She finally turned. Her face broke his heart. She didn't look at his eyes. Instead, her gaze flicked from the ladder, the rivets on the wall, his boot buckles. She looked so lost. She swallowed. He watched her throat move, her jaw tighten. When had he started paying this much attention to her?
"They would have ripped open the ship. They would have searched every room, looked anywhere we could hide. And when they found us, they would have killed us." Her gaze found its way to his. Nothing summed up the war between man and machine better than what he saw in Trinity's eyes. She was desolate...broken. But still he saw the struggling spark of humanity that clung to him as she stared. "You don't want to see what those things do to human bodies, Neo."
And with that, she'd turned away and entered her cabin.
"Jesus." He'd muttered.
He'd prayed that that would be the last time he saw Trinity's fear. He never wanted to see that happen to her again. She didn't deserve it. And he could tell from the way she'd handled it that it had happened far too many times before.
She hadn't let him see it again until now.
This wasn't supposed to happen. They weren't in here for a fight. They weren't even here to interact with anybody. They were just there to pick up a disk from the Babel. Someone had spotted them.
"Neo!" The tone she'd yelled in had got his attention first. He'd heard the tone once before. On a windy Matrix rooftop one fateful afternoon.
"Trinity!/ Help!"/
It was his job to protect her, now. His job to see that no resistance fighter came to harm while he could prevent it. He spun around, his eyes locking on to hers, following her gaze.
Agents. Five of them.
His eyes returned to hers. No. Not again. The fear in her eyes translated from coding to image and back again before his gaze. He was angry with it. They had no right to make her feel like that. He went to stand beside her, sizing up the Agents approaching them.
He half-turned to her. "Go." She looked at him. "Trinity, I know what I'm doing, now - please - go."
He could see the frustration in her code, even if her face stayed carefully blank. He was in trouble later, he knew. She didn't argue, not verbally at least, but spun on her heel and ran for the exit. He breathed a little easier. The central agent looked at her retreating back. "Get her." He addressed the two agents on his left.
Neo moved in front of them as they began to run after her. "No." His hand shot out and gripped the throat of one of the agents, pushing his fingertips in further and further until blood - green then red then green - bubbled out over his palm. He felt the agent coding retreat and he let the body of a sanitation worker drop heavily to the ground.
One.
Two more agents approached him, their palms swinging in synchronization. He dodged backwards, and wrapped each hand around the extended forearms, pulling them backwards, then forwards, cracking the bodies like whips. He felt the bones crack in the arms, the ribs compress against each other, the spinal cords shift and snap.
Two. Three.
The bodies fell. They die so easily. Why is everyone so afraid of them?
He ran towards the last agent, flinging his leg out in a long, sweeping kick. The agent dodged, both hands coming out to grab Neo's leg, and swung him towards the wall.
Neo's body crashed into the bricks.
Don't get cocky, he heard Morpheus' voice in his mind.
Focus, Neo. That was Trinity.
His hand darted out and grabbed the approaching agent's hair, holding the program in place as he swung a tightly clenched fist into his face. He watched dispassionately as the skull fragments shattered into the brain.
It's over.
That was four. There were five.
Fuck.
He ran after Trinity. She was cornered in an alleyway, two streets and three stories away from the exit. The agent attacked, his fists flying toward her face. Neo would have laughed if it hadn't been Trinity in the situation - they were moving so slowly, it looked as if they were fighting in water.
He strode up behind the moving agent, gripping his chin in one hand, the back of his hair in the other. The twist was slow...seemed slow. He could see the vertebrae dislocate, though the skin on the outside remained as deceptively blank as ever. The body slid away, to reveal Trinity's scared eyes, her palms still raised defensively. Stop looking like that.
She didn't speak, but turned and began walking toward the exit. He followed a few steps behind her, sensing her anger, seeing it in the code. He knew better than to try and talk to her in here. She refused to utter anything but the most necessary of information while plugged in, keeping herself focussed on the task at hand.
Trinity lifted the phone first, keeping her back to Neo even as she was pulled back to reality. Neo watched impassively as her lines of code stripped themselves away one by one, her body disintegrating before his eyes. He reached out and caught the receiver before it dropped, carefully setting it back on the hook.
He wondered what she would say to him once they were alone. She was angry, there was no doubt about that. Not necessarily at him, but at herself, at her inability to fight her own battles. Usually, Trinity accepted his assistance in fights, not disagreeing with the fact that he was the better warrior, now. But... perhaps she felt he'd been doing it too often lately? She'd been training more and more each day, sometimes alone, sometimes with him. Even if her head could accept the fact that there was a new, more powerful force than her in her life now, her body wasn't ready to give up being the alpha of their little pack.
Neo had no desire to enter into a contest with Trinity. He loved her, she loved him - and it should have been that simple. But Trinity - fighting, hacking, wilful Trinity, couldn't comprehend that. He was afraid she'd begin to pull away from him more if this pattern of behaviour persisted.
The ring of the phone broke Neo out of his thoughts. He sighed, letting his fingers slide over the greasy plastic again - green to black to green - before lifting it to his ear.
~
She wasn't there when he arrived on the ship. It was Morpheus standing over him, sliding the jack out of his skull, unlocking his arm and foot restraints. Neo stood, subtly resting a palm on the arm of Trinity's chair, feeling it radiating a slight warmth. Her warmth.
"Where did she go?" He murmured as Morpheus moved to stand behind Tank, eyes fixed on the screens.
"Lower level." Morpheus replied distractedly, examining the coded record of their latest trip into the Matrix. If he hadn't been piloting when they needed to jack in, he'd have been in there too. He was becoming worried about Neo and Trinity - specifically Trinity's reactions to Neo's strength in the Matrix. Morpheus wanted to be there at the tensest of moments, to ensure that he could insulate the raw emotions between the both of them.
Neo moved towards the ladder and climbed down, listening for any slight sound Trinity might be making. He checked the mess - she wasn't sitting there with a half-drunk mug of water as she was prone to doing. As they both were. Nor was she lying on the bunk in their room, eyes closed, softly breathing, her palm curled up beside her face in a sweetly childlike gesture...
It was far too easy to see her when she wasn't there. She'd been branded onto his brain, burnt into his psyche.
He knew if he couldn't find her in the mess, or in their cabin, he'd take the best course of action by not trying to find her. He recalled a cat his parents had bought when he was a kid. After fights, it had retreated to places unknown to lick its wounds in private. It was only when it was healthy and happy that it would allow itself to be seen.
Trinity was like that cat. She'd only let him be around her when she was fine, together, all shields up. After that day... that pivotal day when his new life had begun, she'd closed herself off from him after their kiss. She'd kept ducking and dodging him - an easy feat, as she knew the ship much better than he did - kept blocking herself off from him emotionally, too. He remembered how he'd latch onto her whenever he saw her, following her, asking her things.
He wondered what would have happened in their relationship had he not made her endure his endless presence in those first few weeks. Had it weakened what they might have become? Or had it strengthened their bond, allowing her to know that now there was somebody there for her, that she didn't have to keep relying solely on herself anymore? It had been like a struggle, then, both of them pushing as hard as they could against each other. Trinity, to keep Neo from invading her life further than she allowed, and Neo, to break through her barriers, to try and undo the stoicism that the years of endless fighting and death had inflicted upon her.
He'd gotten angry with her for it once, when she wasn't around. Silently cursed her - but never spoken a word out of turn to her face. Neo knew that the respect he had for her bordered on fear. She held so much power in those perfect, strong hands of hers, so much influence over his life. At her command, he'd defeated death itself. If she'd ever gotten angry at him, flown into a true rage, he doubted he'd ever be able to recover.
Fortunate for him that rage was not her way. She always stayed so placid, so balanced, despite whatever emotions she might be feeling at the time. Their struggle against each other had ended abruptly on their first night together. He'd been closer to her then than he'd ever been with another human being. Not just physically, it had been more than that. For those few minutes, he'd been bonded to her soul, understanding what she was going through. But that had hurt.
It had hurt him to realise that she'd only agreed to being with him to get him to believe that she'd given all of herself to him. She'd tried to salvage herself emotionally by sacrificing her physical body. The whole process had happened subconsciously, he knew - she hadn't planned out a manipulative scheme, it had just...happened. He could feel how desperate she was, how scared that being with him was going to make her lose a part of herself. Become weaker.
Looking at her, he watched her face as she registered the pain in his eyes. She'd felt so guilty for putting him through that - and he'd felt guilty for making her feel guilty. He'd realised that if they weren't careful, they could easily fall into this self-destructive cycle. So he broke it. He smiled.
"I love you." He stated it as if he just realised the fact, and wanted to share it with her. He realised that it was the first time he'd actually said it. That revelation stunned him - how could he have gone this long without telling her that he loved her? He'd stated it over and over in his head a thousand times a day - every time he saw her, every time he thought of her, every time he touched her. Trinity equals love. Love equals Trinity. Trinity love. Love Trinity. Love Trinity. Love Trinity.
Her eyes had shut tightly as they kissed, and the hand that was cradling her face registered wet heat. He recalled the feel of each individual tear as they rolled down over the backs of his fingers.
"Trinity," /he'd murmured, /"Trinity..."
He'd been lost from that point on, pressing her down harder over and over again, devouring her mouth when she gasped. He still remembered the little cut-off exclamation she gave as she came, her body tensed and frozen. He remembered her breathing returning to normal and her muscles twitching against him. He'd been so close to losing it when his hand slid down and brushed against the plug in her upper arm and he'd realised how real she was, how totally and utterly and completely real, and he'd cried out to her as his body stiffened, then slumped.
Trinity's fingers were brushing the short fuzz of his hair when he finally returned to his senses. Shifting along her shoulder, he tried to move closer to her, burying his face in her neck.
"Can you breathe down there?" She'd asked, a hint of humour in her voice. Nodding against her skin, he'd silently tightened his arms around her. They'd laid like that forever, Trinity's fingers moving down and circling each plug in his back.
It was only when he woke up that he realised that he'd been sleepy. Still cushioned on Trinity's chest, he'd grinned as he rubbed her abdomen. I'm in love. And she's in love with me. And not just any 'she'. Trinity.
The 'she' in question had sighed quietly as she slept, turning her head towards his the slightest bit. Moving slowly so as not to wake her, Neo had shifted himself up the bed, settling his head on the pillow beside her and pulling her back into him. Yes, I'm greedy. I'm greedy and I love you, Trin. He'd grinned again.
After that, things had been relaxed. Easy. They could talk together, they could share a joke. His idolisation of her lessened enough for him to treat her like a normal human being, and that made it easier. Her apprehensiveness towards a relationship almost completely disappeared. And that was when they'd become not just Neo, and not just Trinity, but Neo and Trinity. Ass-kicking lovers, defenders of Zion. And Neo was glad of the title.
The silence in his cabin pressed in on his ears, harsher than sound. His fingertips circled the bolts on the side of the bunk as he stared up at the patches of rust on the ceiling.
"Trin," he whispered quietly, "I want to talk to you."
A few minutes later, the door creaked open. He kept his gaze fixed on the ceiling as she shut the door behind her. Then, she stepped over to the bunk and lay on her front beside him, studying his face. Gingerly, her fingers crept out and touched his arm. "Neo?"
He turned to look at her, his hand coming up to cover hers. "Trinity."
She shut her eyes and sighed. "Yes, I'm being idiotic." He smiled softly.
"It's not idiotic, Trin. I just wish you'd tell me what's going on."
She turned over on her back, mirroring him. "You know what's going on. I don't like... I don't like you coming and rescuing me every time I get into trouble."
"It was an agent, you couldn't have-"
"No, Neo." She squeezed his arm gently to make him stop. "I'm not angry at you. Not now, anyway." She took in a long breath. "Before you came I never seemed to get into these situations. Or at least, I got out of them quick."
"We're doing more difficult things now - now that I'm here."
"It's not just that. Neo, I want us to be - to be partners. Equals."
"We are-"
"No. That's just it. It's not you, but..." She let go of his arm and put her hand over her eyes. "I find myself letting you take the lead, just putting you ahead of me all the time, and then I get angry when you do take the lead, when you do go ahead of me and it's not your fault. So I can't even get angry at you." She turned to look at him. He looked confused. "And you're just the innocent bystander."
He turned on to his stomach, resting his head on his fist and touching her cheek with the fingertips of his other hand. "So what do you want to do about it?"
"I don't know."
Neo slid an arm around her waist, pulling himself closer to her and pressing his lips to her forehead. "Maybe," he whispered against her skin, "we should go through a sim. Fight Club style. Last one to fall, pass out or give up wins."
"Wins what?"
"Dominance."
She smiled, but pushed away from him so she could look him in the eye. "That's not going to help."
"I know. But at least you could have the pleasure of kicking the crap out of me." Their normal spars in the sims were relatively low-contact, not enough to seriously injure either of them.
She raised an eyebrow, silently asking him if he really wanted to challenge her.
"I'll do it, Trin."
She gave a slight nod of the head. "Okay then."
~
"You're not going to be doing anything freaky in there, are you? Cause I really don't want to see that stuff from you, Trinity."
She sighed. They got this speech from Tank, in one form or another, every time they wanted to run through a sim together. Though he had no reason to assume that they'd do anything while they were jacked in, making jokes about their relationships had become par for the course with him - it was his way of coping.
"No, Tank, we will not be molesting each other in the program." She replied. When Tank wasn't looking, Neo gave her a tragic look. She raised an eyebrow and smiled at him slyly. What the hell. This time, you may just get lucky.
He grinned at her. He knew that there was no way he'd get the opportunity to do anything intimate with her in a sim, or even on the ship. Privacy was nil, and the idea of having Tank watch them going at it in a digital environment was hardly arousing. He'd only realised the fact that they had to limit their encounters to when they were in Zion a few days ago - it had been cause for a quiet moment of contemplation followed by quite a loud expletive.
It wasn't that he /needed /that from her - Trinity was so much more than just that side of their relationship - but the connection they'd felt while they were making love... he didn't want to go without that for the months when they weren't in Zion. There was no way around it though. It was just... just another thing that this duty denied him.
He laid back and let the jack-in plug drive the thoughts from his mind.
As soon as he entered the sim, she smacked him in the face. His head snapped back with the force of her blow, and his eyes rolled back in his head.
"Ah! Christ..." his hands covered his face defensively as he got his bearings. He started to look at the code through his palms, working out where she was.
"No cheating." She said warningly. Damn, she's good. "I mean it, Neo, I don't want you using your abilities now." He loved how she called them 'abilities'. Tank and Morpheus were in the habit of calling them 'powers', but he recognised her unconscious objection to labelling him in such a deific way. Nevertheless, she usually still encouraged him to use his skills whenever possible so that he could extend them even further. She usually wasn't intimidated by the impossible odds facing her when she fought him like that - but now she wanted at least the chance to even the score.
He let his hands down from his face. She was standing before him, her arms crossed under her breasts...breasts made /very /obvious from the outfit she'd chosen.
"You said Fight Club." She said in response to his raised eyebrows. She was wearing a pair of jeans - a shock to the mental image he'd built of her; he'd never imagined her wearing something so average as jeans - and her chest was bare apart from a modest black bra.
He cocked his head to the side. "Weren't you unplugged before the movie came out?"
"Constant streaming in the core." She replied. "Once you get good at reading the codes, you can watch anything showing in the theatres."
"Handy."
"Certainly better than downloading at two ks a second." She remarked, and once again he had that feeling that she knew far more about him than she let on.
"Well I guess-" He swept his leg out in the middle of his sentence, catching her off guard. She began to fall to the ground, but managed to turn it into a none-too-graceful back flip at the last second.
"As I recall..." she began to speak, a little more breathlessly now, "the men in Fight Club didn't wear shirts." She smirked at him. He shrugged, and his shirt was gone.
"Happy?" He walked towards her.
"Deliriously." She mirrored him, pacing forward and clenching one fist. She swung at the same time as he did, resulting in them both dodging the other's blow. She was faster than him to recover, thrusting her other hand into his unprotected stomach. The air left his lungs in a soft grunt, but there wasn't really enough force behind her blow to injure him.
He caught her arm as she began to pull away, holding it in his left hand as his right slammed into her cheek. Her leg drove into his shin, and he let go of her, hissing in pain. Stoic./ Blank. Emotionless./ It was an unspoken agreement between them that neither would show any more evidence of pain than was unavoidable. Neither of them wanted to know that they were really hurting the one thing they loved over anything else in the world. They were sparring, playing. It wasn't real.
They continued to fight. It wasn't as graceful or delicate as their fights usually were; it was comparatively slow, and every blow had real power behind it. Within a few minutes, she was bleeding from her mouth and her eyebrow, he from the jaw and cheek. Both of them were limping, and Trinity was having trouble lifting her arm.
"You wanna stop?" Neo breathed heavily, a knot of worry forming in the pit of his stomach. She shook her head defiantly.
"No." She bit her lip and straightened up, like a rod of steel had been shot up her spine. He nodded. She ran towards him and knocked him down to the ground in one hit. Sitting on his hips, she grabbed a hold of his hair and slammed his head into the mat floor.
"I...I give up..." he managed to sputter out between blows. She paused, staring at him. Her expression was part anger, part confusion, and didn't look wholly human. She leaned down, coming nose-to-nose with him.
"Are you just doing this to let me win?" Her eyes were wide, questioning.
"No! Christ...I'm done, Trin, I give up. You win. /I lose./" She narrowed her eyes for a moment, examining him, then sat back and nodded.
"Okay." She looked up to the ceiling. "Tank!" She called. As soon as she spoke, they were pulled out of the program.
~
They did feel more balanced after that. Healthier. Something clicked where it hadn't before. They began to work in tandem. On missions, they were like mirror images of each other, moving with a shared purpose. When they were requested as back up for another crew a few weeks later, they single-handedly obliterated the three SWAT teams they confronted.
On the ship, neither of them spoke of it. It was just... there. The closest they got to mentioning it was late one night, when they were playfully wrestling with each other in their bunk. Trinity got the upper hand, pinning Neo down to the mattress with her hands on his shoulders. He laughed softly, raising his palms to cover hers. Then he quietened, still staring at her.
"What?" She asked, smiling.
"Your eyes." He murmured. She waited for him to continue. "They're... in this light, they're aqua."
She smiled, and lowered her face down to his. Didn't kiss him, though. Just whispered.
"I know."
And she did.
~ End
AN: If the ending seemed brief, there's a very good reason for it. I don't really think this is one of my best, and I knew if I left it any longer it'd just fester on my harddrive. However, I do feel that it deserves to be uploaded, and as a trix fangirl myself, I know how desperate we all are for new fic. If you enjoyed it, tell me! I hate review whoring, but hearing from you guys really does make my heart smile. :)
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