"You never said you could do that!" Roland burst out, almost accusingly, the second Trinity removed the jack.
Neo blinked, disoriented. "I didn't know I could until I did," he said.
"But you goddamn flew!"
"Yeah, he did it to cause you personal offense," Trinity muttered, and Morpheus' quietly terse reproof made her mouth tighten. Then her face softened, as Neo looked up at her. Her hand still rested on his shoulder.
"Are you alright?"
He nodded, his eyes locked on her face, and she exhaled with evident relief, her shoulders relaxing. "Okay then," she said. "Good."
The Hammer was a nightmare for Neo. Roland treated him with extreme brusqueness, bordering on contempt, seemingly terrified of being implicated by mere association. Or perhaps his reflex irritation with Morpheus spilled over onto his startling new protégé. It was hard to tell, and didn't much matter.
The rest of the crew was unnerved.
They were unnerved by what they had seen on their feeds when Morpheus was rescued. They were unnerved by the day Neo went in to help Colt, and then flew away. And they were unnerved by Trinity's grimly protective devotion to this man, who performed casual miracles with such unassuming ease.
None of it aligned with their views on the possible, never mind the likely.
Trinity had quietly arranged with Morpheus that she and Neo should work on emergency repairs on the Neb. Everyone knew that Neo was ill equipped to do any such thing, but nobody mentioned it. The deaths had left Trinity raw, and there was a new glint in her eyes that made them wary.
One day the crew roughly teased a bemused Neo on his newbie inability to help in any useful manner with the general maintenance chores. The attempt at banter had been heavy-handed, but not unusually so, not by the brutal standards of the Fleet. Yet Trinity's response had been swift, protective and icily effective. It was devastatingly apparent that where Neo was concerned, her iron self discipline no longer held.
That night in the mess, Mauser announced, "There's something going on between those two."
Colt abruptly put down his spork, shook his head slowly as he looked over at Mauser. "You dumbass," he said.
"I'm telling you..."
"Of course there's something going on. How the fuck d'you ever make it out at all? There's shit where your brains should be - Maggie, scan the bastard."
Maggie bit her lip to suppress a smile.
AK had been watching her, and he began to laugh. "You've been holding out on us, girl," he said accusingly.
"She hasn't said anything to me," Maggie said. "She didn't need to. You're just slow. Or blind. Your call."
Trinity was the one constant Neo had, in a flood of change that he was struggling to survive. Nothing else made any sort of sense, and only the knowledge that he didn't have to do this alone made it bearable. He found himself increasingly unable to believe that he had ever been without her, even as he needed constantly to prove to himself that she truly did exist. That pale face framed by dark hair, the watchful blue eyes, the remote, distant manner with everyone else - that stopped, the moment they were alone, and she turned to him with the vibrant warmth that could suffuse her face in seconds. He found reassurance in being the only person able to comfort her in her grief for Switch, Apoc and Dozer; in the fact that his near desperate need for her was so plainly reciprocated. When they were alone, they were able to simply be happy, in a way neither had ever really known before. Yet they were alone so rarely. The ship held a full crew, and privacy was a near impossibility.
Morpheus and Neo had been assigned the cabin used for the newly freed, and Trinity had been put in to share with Maggie. To her surprise it was far less difficult than she had anticipated. Maggie's tact was immense, her ability to disappear at opportune moments uncanny. Trinity was also disconcerted to find that the younger woman was clearly a quietly authoritative presence aboard the Hammer; not merely well liked, but well respected. Her Captain paid her the greatest of all compliments - he ignored her unless he wanted anything. There was no need to supervise.
"You've changed," she said abruptly one night as they prepared for bed.
Maggie had not been thrown in the slightest.
"People do," she said calmly, neatly folding her sweater and stowing it away. "Or at least, they should. What point is there, otherwise?"
Zion. The great Dock, domed, lying beyond the serried defenses of the main gates. Neo had been amazed by the sheer scale of it, the ranked rows of docking bays, the tracks for the mechanized transport systems, the milling of the uniformed personnel. He followed her to the elevators, and on the way, saw from the railed balconies the endless fall of levels, the great bridges and walkways intersecting.
"It's huge," he said, staring over the barrier edge in shock, as the great cylindrical city stretched away beneath him, neat red door succeeding neat red door.
"Quarter of a million people."
"Really?"
"Yeah. So not that big, really, given. But it's ours. It survives. And it's free, we're free."
She put a hand out to his arm, as he looked about him, assessing this new world.
"It's human," she said, "It belongs to us," and her face warmed into a smile.
The elevators were crammed, but mostly with civilians, and neither of the other two military personnel were Fleet. Trinity received curious glances, but the interest, Neo realized, was aimed at her uniform. They didn't recognize her. The anonymity made him happy. He was pleased to think that they would be able to rely upon it, on leaves to come.
They arrived at a small red door, identical to all the rest, on a mid level in the tubular city. She unlocked and opened it and stepped inside, and he followed her. A room, almost unnaturally tidy. Functional. A chair, a desk, and a large bed in a carved stone recess. Shelves and areas for storage, mostly bare, her possessions presumably stored out of sight. The inevitable computer. Neo was fascinated by Trinity's home, the first space he had seen that was wholly personal, wholly her own. The very impersonality of the space he saw moved him. She had, he realized, treated it simply as an extension of the Neb. There was nothing individual at all.
She remained by the door, leaning against the wall, observing him. His obviously controlled curiosity prompted her to say gently, "You are allowed to, Neo. I mean, unless you've changed your mind..."
"I'm not going to change my mind," he said at once.
She smiled. "Then it's your home, and you need to explore it."
Neo was silent, and she waited, until he looked up at her, shrugged slightly. "I don't feel like it's my home, yet. Zion, I mean."
"It will. I promise." Trinity quickly closed the space between them, hugged him fiercely. "It'll be our home."
He bent his head to kiss her, and suddenly they realized that they were free - from duty, other people, the ship. They were civilians now, private individuals, alone in their own home. For an instant, they froze. Neo took her face in his hands, looked at her silently. She matched his gaze, and neither moved or spoke for a long moment. Then she covered his hands with her own, took them from her face, and joined them behind her back, reaching her arms around him as they began to kiss.
They were tense at first, unable to ignore the enormity, the irrevocability of the step they were taking. But after an endless, draining week of enforced restraint the need was overwhelming, and soon neither cared about anything other than the feel of the other's mouth and hands on their body, about skin meeting skin, about the chance, finally, just to love one another. It bore only the most ghostly likeness to the awkward, muted, gray exchanges of Neo's virtual history, and he was shocked by how natural, compulsive, instinctive, loving her was; how shiningly right. With every gasp and every shiver, every turn of her head and movement of her body he was losing himself more in her, drowning more completely in the visceral intensity of the real. He became less and less sure where he ended and she began until, eyes dazed with need, she pulled him within her, and they moved to a rhythm as ancient as humanity itself. He cradled her close, one hand entwined in her hair, the other under her waist, as she locked her body around his, pulling him ever closer, deeper into her. Finally she arched and cried out, her eyes wide with love and amazement, which defeated him in turn as completely as it was always to do.
After, neither wanted him to withdraw, both unwilling for this moment to be over, already a memory. Already a part of their past. It had been new to them both in its intensity, in how much it mattered, and yet, somehow, it had also felt utterly familiar, as if they'd been making love to one another for years. It was more tender, more joyous than anything they'd ever imagined.
"I wish I could tell you," he said eventually, his face still buried in her neck. He felt her cheekbones move against his skin; knew that she smiled.
"You've shown me," she said. "It's enough."
