Title: A Question of Truth

Author: SilverAshes

Rating: T

Category: Drama/Angst

Summary: An unfulfilled promise of a reality worth fighting for.

Disclaimer: Don't own them. Don't claim to. All hail the almighty Wachowskis for their ingenious creations. I'm just taking them for a walk while Warner Brothers is counting the takings. Don't even bother trying to sue, because I'm sure that the court case will cost more than the 50c you'll get from my dwindling bank account at the end of it.

A/N: My first Matrix fic published – written so many, many years ago. Dedicated to my lovely friends and fellow authors at The Looking Glass.

So, this is denial. A strange word. Syllables running together so that, if you say it enough times, somewhere the meaning becomes blurred. Blurred enough so that she can convince herself she doesn't believe in the fucking prophecy. That dreams are dreams and nothing more. Somewhere, there exists a point in time when disbelief lead to denial. Another smothered emotion became a by-product of the mind.

A truly free mind is a redundant being. With loss of awareness comes loss of control. And in a world that is built on rules, control is everything - a step out into a dark lane can be met with searing bullet fire. Yet control is forgotten in the land of the real; the almighty ones preaching to their children that control is not a word in the vocabulary of the free, and far less an emotion that should be experienced. But a loss of control in the real world has consequences more profound than a simple bullet graze. It can mean a slip of the tongue, a lingering glance, a moment lost in time when the façade shatters slightly. And so she survives by avoiding the intricacies of emotion.

In a civilisation that lives in a strange limbo between enslaved and freed, a delicate balance exists to accommodate the needs of both. In the world that classifies itself as free, day in and day out, those who occupy it have become ignorant. Once, freedom was a thing a seasoned warrior achieved. Now, it is pushed aside by all but a few, taken for granted, more a right than a hard-earned privilege. A twisted hypocracy, for freedom to be a privilege rather than a right.

Sometimes they forget why they are here in the first place. It's harder for those who once knew what total subservience felt like. For the freeborns, who've never seen a coded rose petal or felt geometrically calculated beach pebbles beneath their feet, there's a silent yet deep-seated belief that maybe the unreal rarely spoken of could be better than the starkness of a dirty reality. And that strikes deep, inflicts another scar, albeit unseen, on the hidden heart of the true warrior. Knowing that the beauty once believed in is a figment of an ethereal false truth brings the mind to question. Brings the mind into question.

These freeborns live with little objective, following their blinded leaders. The Council preaches, the people pray, but the warrior never steps from her shadows to join the faithless masses.

Raw knowledge forces her into quiet submission; her basic instinct of trust destroyed by the discovery that everything she believed was a digital lie.

The question that once haunted her has changed, morphed, suddenly become something so intangible that even her subconscious cannot grasp it.

What is the Matrix?

Once it meant something, but now she can't quite find the reason behind that question. He spoke it with such conviction, his eyes pleading with her to feed his insatiable need for the truth.

Turning back, she'd caught his eyes one last time. She couldn't afford to give too much, yet she'd needed to bait the hook well enough.

But she'd wanted to leave so much more behind.

The answer is out there. It's looking for you.

So many of us have looked for you for so long. There's so much you don't know. So much you don't understand. So many secrets and so many lies awaiting your innocent eyes. The purity I find there now is waiting to be tainted and terrified by the theatre of a digital war. Waiting to be deceived by the poisoned words of truth. And you have no idea.

I can't let myself do this, to myself or... to you. I can't bear to stand by and watch as you go the same way that all the others did.

But maybe this time, something's different.

Maybe this time, what I'm feeling is the long-lost meaning behind the question.

There's no easy honesty here for you. Only an unfulfilled promise of a reality worth fighting for, spoken between shattered eyes and beautiful eyes.

And it will find you… if you want it to.

I'll find you.