My Name is Lethal

-



Caution. Detour. Signs you choose to ignore. Signs you turn a blind eye to. But they're everywhere you look: they've swamped newspaper articles and have taken over six o'clock Live. The Captain may have planted the bomb, but you held the detonate button beneath your thumb. Not quite a terrorist, yet close enough. For a cause, you reason. For the cause.

Then there are ashes, flaking plaster, crumbling buildings, crying children.

Hi, my name is Lethal.

They call you Trinity.


There's a difference, says Grandma, busying herself with the oven, between hesitation and cynicism. It's a fine line to walk, but choosing sides was never an issue with you.

The girl counts the tiles on the floor. ... eleven, twelve, thirteen....

... and yet, there is the possibility that maybe - just maybe - the choice isn't yours to make. What then, sugar?

I don't do sweets, she mutters, turning down more than just a slice of apple pie in the process. Forever up to the challenge, forever in charge, forever assertive, forever defiant. Grandma blinks, then smiles.

So strong. It's one of the things he'll come to love most about you.

She thinks Grandma means the Captain, who loves the girl as he would a daughter.

She is wrong.



Then the Philosopher comes along. And well, he loves you. Period.

It's as if you want to scream at him with the ear-splitting intensity of white noise, or the intolerable disturbance of drunken caterwauling. You want the Philosopher to understand that for all his meditations, a solution to your problem will not be found simply because One doesn't exist. He can't repair you with those reverent hands; you remain damaged goods, and dangerous. You're as unpredictable as gunfire from an unknown direction, and one day, with you the way you are, he might drop to the ground. Dead.

He has composure. He has focus. And yet you can't help but see him as a smile in the rear-view mirror, nothing more than a mere reflection. Reassurance is powerless against the inevitable. Skid to a halt and drop him off, before cause and effect take over.

Blood stains and blaring sirens.

If you are the crash, he will be the wreck. Don't risk it.

Drive on.



Everything the Oracle told me has come true. Everything but this.

He is watching her now. He will not say a word.

Fractured bones. Broken pieces are all she has to offer. But if she is the skeletal remains salvaged from the ruin of a soldier who could, in the cascading lines of neon green code, read only

r u i n

.
.
.

- be her closet.

Hold her like you would a secret, lest she slide of the curve of your lips, into your mouth like a saline drip. Sweat and tears. Will he find the hint of smoke in her, the tinge of something bitter, sharp as the cracks in his armor, where the skin shows through?

Her hands will wander and she will find those scars, not so unlike her own. Then will she understand that he is broken too?

What could not be mended by the Philosopher's skilled hands are now healed by inexperienced ones. Clumsy and fragile and faltering. Oh, but he's trying. As hard as he can, and that in itself is enough.

She smiles through the haze of free falling and flight and what might even be completion.



You're forever shifting gears - heart beat, accelerate. This fairytale, built on an accident prone area, can't end happily ever after if the brakes don't work. But you buckle up, and ride it out.

Some days, you hide from the guilt in your second skin of leather. Everywhen else, it's all about him.



You're sleeping Safe, tonight.



-

The whole thing's vague, I know. Forgive the obscurity. The Matrix isn't mine. Working on it, though.