This is kind of what I imagine happens after the end of the third movie, so needless to say, massive spoilers ahead. It's not smart or subversive or anything, and I'm not sure my writing style really suits sci-fi, but I hope you enjoy it anyway. This fic is for the romantics who want everything to have turned out okay.
I also can't believe I used the phrase 'maharajah's tomb' as a simile in the first draft of this. There's got to be a rule against that.
Trinity
Trinity felt like an intruder on the Logos. Although she was competent, she knew she wasn't the best pilot around. That was Niobe. And Niobe wasn't here.
But Neo loved her, and she was going with him, and nothing else was an option.
They were in this together, for life.
She was scared, of course she was. She just wasn't going to show it.
And then the sentinels hit and she didn't have time to worry in detail, instead driving the ship the best she could with what she had: skills, adrenaline, love and fear.
There was no hope, but she had to try anyway. She had to believe in spite of what she knew would happen.
.-.-.-.
On her lover's command, she flew to the skies, praying that he was right, knowing that he was. What she saw there changed what little time she had left to her life.
"Beautiful," she whispered as she gazed at the land of white clouds before her. Floating on air, bright daylight and the blue jewel of the sky lay all around: a perfect dome of lapis lazuli. It was something she'd never seen before in her life, in or out of the Matrix. Something she'd only dreamed of.
Trinity had never seen anything so beautiful in her life. She was overcome by its reality. This was no fake. This was real. She wanted to touch it, taste the air.
In that brief lull, her hands loosened their tight grip on the controls and Trinity was restored. No matter her injuries, no matter the terror that lay before them. This was what they were fighting for. Peace and beauty and truth.
She remembered the first time she had been confronted with these ideas, as a young child, inside the Matrix. She'd dreamed of leaving her own town one day. And then a woman had found her, and told her of what she'd wanted all her short, short life. She'd taken the right pill (she'd always been convinced it was the right one), and then she was sucked out of her comfort zone into a world she had to grow to love.
She had grown to love it, passionately. She would fight for it, after all. She would bring others to its reality.
But still, every time she blinked after that, every time she woke up, it had confronted her again.
Never in such a way had she seen peace and beauty as she saw it now.
Trinity steeled herself. It was time to go down again. Time to end this. She still didn't know what Neo was going to do. But she trusted him.
She wished that Neo could see this. But his eyes were mutilated, molten metal smeared all over his face.
Maybe he could; maybe he couldn't. She wondered.
"It's like light," he had said.
.-.-.-.
Down, down, through a brief misty haze and then—darkness and lightning and robots. The air felt thicker, greasier, the ship sliding through it with a little more resistance than the ease of the sky. The plunge through the clouds had felt like a return to her body, to the real world, to the lack of hope—only Trinity wasn't afraid anymore. There was a small part of her that hoped she would make it out alive, but most of her knew that she was going to die sometime very, very soon.
And now she wasn't scared about it, not one bit. She wasn't hoping for herself anymore, her hope was for Zion and all its people, and all the people in the Matrix. She was just one part of a gigantic, crazy attempt, and it was going to work because she believed it would and she believed in Neo.
.-.-.-.
Hit. Death was painful, but she'd fought and she'd done her best, and nobody could have done more than what she did. Not even Niobe.
He didn't know she was dying at first. She couldn't let him see her suffer, not after seeing through the swirls that gathered on her eyes that her own death was killing him. She knew more than she saw; she couldn't see much.
And he had to go on.
She'd gotten him this far, and she'd kept her promise: she hadn't let go. She told him how much she loved him, and then they had what they both desperately needed: one last kiss, for all time.
For one precious moment, she was lost to his lips.
They were the last thing she felt, and then she was lost forever.
But Trinity wasn't afraid. She knew the war was going to end, that Neo would end this. Because anything was possible now. She'd seen the sky.
.-.-.-.
Neo
Neo was alone.
Grief overpowered him, swallowing him up in hungry gulps that refused to died down slowly. He was blind, and he had lost Trinity. Neo was afraid.
And finally, he had to get up. He didn't want to. But he did.
He had loved Trinity, and he loved Zion.
And he had to make sure that at least one of them survived.
.-.-.-.
He stands at the edge, blind but not blind in totally new ways. Scared, but not scared. He feels distanced from it all, although he is standing right there.
He offers to face his enemy, his opposite. He brokers a deal.
And then he enters the Matrix.
One—
Last—
Time.
He doesn't leave alive. He doesn't leave at all.
But Zion stands, saved.
Free.
.-.-.-.
Morpheus
In Zion, the sentinels stop moving and the war is over. Amid the shouts of joy, Morpheus and Niobe embrace. Finally. Everything inside Morpheus is screaming in exultation as he holds her close.
Cleaning up after the war is messy. Morpheus learns more than he ever wanted to know about corpses and machinery and fire and grief.
It's a bittersweet victory. If Neo and Trinity stopped this by themselves, why did anybody else have to die? He asks Niobe this, and she reminds him that if they hadn't held the machines off at first, none of them would be alive to enjoy this peace.
It's been two days now, and Neo and Trinity have not returned.
.-.-.-.
He goes to Niobe. Since that embrace as the war ended, they've been a little uncertain as to how they're meant to act with each other. They see each other, and they smile and nod and talk, but neither seem to know how to begin where they left off.
But Niobe's smart. Not only has she lost friends, but also her ship. She will want it back, and she will say out loud the idea Morpheus is beginning to take seriously.
"We're going to find them," is what she says, and it's what they tell the council.
The council thinks its suicide. But the war has taken so much out of these two intrepids; they barely seem alive anymore. What more can happen?
"Let the dead bury their dead."
.-.-.-.
The first night after all the cleaning up is finished, Morpheus can't sleep. For the first time since he left the Matrix, there is no undercurrent, no apprehension. Everything is on the surface. It's too strange, too unknown. It almost feels dangerous, as though he's again unaware of a real world beyond this one. Another Matrix.
He goes to Niobe.
She says, "We're leaving."
After three days, at the heart of the machine city, they find Neo and Trinity together, reunited in death. The machines tell them that they did not die together.
So their placement here was a mark of respect. But what happens now?
Niobe being too outspoken, the council not here to disagree, Morpheus has unwittingly become the bargainer for humankind. Finishing the job that The One began, so many incarnations ago.
It is time for the war to end.
.-.-.-.
The machines are already developing new sources to get what they need: Morpheus finds that they kept their promise, for some reason nobody understands. Perhaps you'd have to go back into the Matrix, talk long and hard with the Architect, before you even came close to understanding it all.
Or perhaps it's simpler. Perhaps the machines, like computer programmes, can feel; and perhaps, even after what they did to the human race, they have their honour.
Perhaps someday, when everybody has chosen the right pill, the Matrix will be but a dream. Morpheus dreams of the day when everyone can see the real sky.
.-.-.-.
The Oracle
The Oracle does not know what she, or any of the other programmes that want out, will do when the Matrix is finally no longer needed.
The machines plan to break through these iron-heavy clouds to the sky, where they'll build solar panels, and capture solar energy. They'll suck these clouds away from the sky, to reveal a blue expanse sprinkled liberally with pale floating clouds and soaked in bright, bright yellow sunshine... and a wasteland underneath.
Rebuilding will be an enormous undertaking, not work for the faint-hearted. And the Matrix is going, going, gone... It won't be a sanctuary forever, although it was meant for eternity. Programmes don't have a time to die. But the Oracle does not want to last forever. Without a Matrix, her time will be at an end.
But many other programmes don't follow her. They choose to become machines. She bears them no ill will. Maybe they can make a difference here, help to bring some beauty back to this wasteland of scrap metal and dark gloom.
One thing is for certain: many of them pity humanity. They know the confines of the matrix, and the threat they lived under while in the system. They won't harm the humans.
.-.-.-.
Sky
Breaking through the clouds has not worked. They merely fold back over the gaps, destroying the short-lived shafts of light again and again. Disheartened, both sides fall back on an alliance. Man and machine, working together as originally intended, work to heal the heavens.
The first diplomat to come to the machine cities is nervous. A tenuous stalemate is reached.
They research, experiment, look for countless ways to undo the damage they have already wreaked. And as the work takes longer, more and more humans begin to dwell in the cities, among machines. Zion rebuilds.
Settlements above surface are established. Machines give help, and in return, the humans think in ways.
And gradually, the sinister side of life in this dystopia dies down.
They realise that all their attempts to take away a scorched sky will not work. Only time will lessen anything.
It takes three hundred years before, on one historic day, one man sees a gap between the lessening clouds. The earth watches with baited breath. Then three days later, the clouds blow apart in a swirl of nearly pure white, and the world, man and machine alike, sees the sky.