Title: Inner Child
Fandom: The Matrix
Genre(s): Angst, General
Rating: K
Character(s): Jue, Thadeus, OC
Pairing(s): N/A
Spoilers: Animatrix
Summary: You live because you have to. (challenge prompts "fear", "why?")

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"It's the question that drives us," she'd said, the quiet intensity in her dark eyes holding the younger woman's attention and keeping it. But she remembered-- oh, how she remembered-- that in a way she was lying, and it hadn't always been the question that had done the driving on her part.

What had it been for her? She could have said fear. As a child, a kid of just twelve, she'd been searching for something, but she hadn't known that the answer to that question was her goal. She could truthfully say that at that point in time she'd known nothing of the dreamworld in which she'd lived; she'd been three years older and wiser when the team of the Icarus had unplugged her from the Matrix.

You lead your life and stay standing just because you have to. You don't know why, don't know if there really is a reason to keep on living every day, and maybe there isn't. That's what scares you most; the possibility that there is nothing beyond this, that you're trying to find the means to an end that doesn't exist.

She threw herself into every task she undertook: training in Zion to return to the Matrix as a free 'pluggie', sparring with Thadeus in the construct on-board the Osiris, the ship on which she'd eventually applied to be a crew member, fighting the sentinels and the other machines that held most of the human race prisoner in that dreamworld they didn't know about... There were times that she thought she did it for the others, the people trapped inside the Matrix, and the thought made her search inside herself for whatever motivation guided her life.

Somewhere beneath the cool, calm facade she presented to the world, Jue was still the utterly afraid little girl she'd been before she'd lost her illusions, but she'd locked that child down so hard she barely knew the feelings there anymore. Even Thadeus never saw that side of her.

You keep doing this because you have to. You don't know why, but when you're doing it, you really don't care.

fin