Title: Either Side of the Divide
Author: SilverAshes
Rating: T
Category: Drama/Angst
Summary: The aftermath. In two parts. Flipside
Disclaimer: Don't own them. Don't claim to. Don't have any money. Go figure.
A/N: The complete version of a fic written for a special word challenge on The Looking Glass.
He runs. And runs. And never stops running until the door is chained and locked and bolted behind him. Pressing his back to the cold wood, he sinks to the floor, curling his knees to his chin and listening to his racing heart. He wants to believe it, to believe it all, but he's terrified.
Really, truly terrified.
For the first time ever, someone's found him. And not just him, but the other him.
He's careful, he's methodical, he's logical, he's fucking invisible, and he knows it. So where the hell did this all go so wrong?
He wants to know, but he doesn't.
He wants to know the truth, but he doesn't.
He wants to know her, but… she terrifies him.
None of this fits with the solitary existence he's become inured to.
This wasn't the way it was supposed to be.
He started small – practicing on the firewall of the local police station. Easy. Clean. Spoof the IP address. Run a probe. Find an open port. Send a decoy to establish the DoS attack. Leave a mess while the processors were occupied with other things. Get out, change the IP address, clear the DNS cache. Simplistic, yet beautiful.
He figured if he breached enough systems, he'd stumble upon the clues to lead him to an answer. An answer to the hacker's question.
But everything was unravelling in the other direction. Suddenly things were out of control. The answer was finding him.
He keeps hearing her voice in his head; words so powerful and heavy with intoxicating truth. And he drank it all in, a cormorant for any fragments of the answer.
It's easy to see why he's so much more obsessed now than he ever has been before. The unreachable key is now suddenly within his grasp, communiqué delivered by an enigma prinked in black leather.
He sees her in shadows, flickering on the walls of the darkened room; can still feel that ineluctable attraction that set his senses on fire.
Rising from the cold floor, he pads silently to the bathroom, almost afraid that any noise he makes will incriminate him. Maybe a warm shower will smooth the knots from his neck muscles, settle the thoughts racing in his mind. An ablution of his empty life in preparation for the truth.
A cleansing of all in him that is unholy.
But not of her.
--flipside--
By the time she closes her cabin door behind her, the memory of strobing lights and thumping bass has long since faded.
She leans her forehead against the cool steel, pressing her open palms against the metal.
There had been an unspoken fascination well before this evening – but she'd never expected it to be so acute.
She went too far, and she knows she did.
This wasn't the way it was supposed to be.
She hoped that Cypher wasn't watching this private drama on the extension feed. He'd dared to publicly make comment about her taking his shifts and she'd turned, eyes spitting fire and brimstone – a harridan chastising an unruly subordinate. And now you've gone and contradicted yourself.
They were supposed to be the owners of the keys to freedom – important yet invisible in the ludic lives of those still blissfully ignorant. The lone soldiers fighting the artificially soporific effect of a dreamworld out of control.
In that context, they stayed one step removed – offering choices and pills, but never anything more. Her life was an exercise in hyperreal technological lexicography with no room for the language of emotion.
She'd always understood where the boundaries lay, where she was allowed to go, and where she'd allow herself to go.
But for the first time, something was different.
Neo was just another foundling inside the digital nightmare, thrust aside by a society too blinded to see what was in front of their eyes.
He should be just another name on Morpheus' long list of potential prodigies.
Maybe she's getting too tired of making memoirs out of lies. She wants to erase the traces of distrust that lurk on the edge of her conscious.
Rid her veins of the doubt that runs through her.
But not of him.