AN: Um…hiya! Anyone who's still reading this little mess of a story, I'm sorry it's taking me so long to post chapters. I really don't like editing--- I always wind up adding more to the story than taking away from it ---so I always do it with my feet dragging behind me. Have no fear, though, there are only two (I think anyway) parts to this story. Then I might wander back into the main storyline. After all, Pixie has other misadventures to have. Then again, I do have a one-shot about Pixie's mother (since everyone has to have one) that I may post first. I'm not entirely sure, though. Anyway, to anyone still out there reading this story, thank you very much for taking the time out of your day to read it. To anyone who's put me on alert or made me a favorite, you rock like a box of socks. Remember, I'm open to any reviews…good, bad, or indifferent! Just let me know what you're thinking!
Disclaimer: I own nothing except the characters I made up and their Real World alter egos. I don't own The Matrix, The Animatrix, or any of that cool stuff. I'm broke and I just finished graduate school for my Master's Degree. All I own are my Pointe shoes.
"The
remedy is the experience.
This is a dangerous liaison
I say
the comedy is that it's serious." (From "The Remedy" by Jason
Mraz)
Pixie's eyes pushed themselves open, her lids feeling a little heavy like she'd been asleep for a short time and was being forced to wake up before she was ready. She didn't need to even bother to look to know that she was probably covered in bruises despite the extra padding her suit had. That was half the reason she wore the skin covering suit. It acted as a sort of body armor for the young woman since she was of a thin build. Still, there were times when she still bruised despite the padding in her black suit.
As her body started to wake itself up, Pixie realized that the gouge in her skin was starting to smart in the cold air of the ship. Then there were her wrists to contend with. Those were a whole other injury unto themselves. She was still fervently hoping they were just sprained and sore from being cold rather than broken.
Under normal, everyday circumstances, Pixie was one of the more flexible members of her crew, the young woman's entire body felt stiff. Her muscles felt completely uncooperative because of the ship's ambient temperature and the fact she'd been lying prone for some time. A normal reaction, Pixie knew, made worse because she'd put her body through its paces in the program she and Neo had made their way through.
"Don't pull on my hands," Pixie, sleepily, mumbled, as her mind made its way back into her cold body. "I think something's wrong with them."
The medic-in-training was fairly shivering--- Completely normal given the fact Pixie was almost always cold so she knew she wasn't going into shock ---but Pixie still managed the ghost of a smile as Mouse helped her to her get to her feet. Though she did feel awful, Pixie's scale for feeling awful was different from the scale used by her friends on other ships. No matter how much she didn't want to, no matter how she tried to force the idea out of her head and create a new scale for things, Pixie always compared her feeling ill now to how ill she'd been during her days in the Matrix.
On that scale, a pair of possibly sprained wrists, bruises, and a gouged out bit of her arm, though annoying when added together, were nothing too major. Compared to the fact she was supposed to have died before her sixteenth birthday, Pixie figured her injuries were on the low side of the awful scale. Her collected injuries ranked somewhere near tolerably annoying though Pixie knew she was going to have to get treated anyway. If only to figure out what was really wrong with her wrists…
"What happened to your hands, Pix?" Mouse wanted to know, as he acted as Pixie's escort down to the medical bay in order to get treated for her injuries.
Though getting down the ladders that connected the ship's decks was a pain in the rear end, Pixie was able to walk on her own letting the medic-in-training know she had no head injuries. Once she got moving which took some of the chill out of her muscles and bones, Pixie found that she could move normally once again. Still, Mouse was walking with her just in case she decided to make a complete idiot of herself and fall down a ladder or something just as foolish. Besides, though he was annoyingly talkative sometimes, Pixie didn't mind Mouse for company anyway. She rather enjoyed listening to his banter rather than Hawk's.
"The boss in that game happened. I'm not sure who programmed him but he was definitely one of the hardest bosses I've had to face even with a partner," Pixie answered, trying to grip the ladder and finding that it wasn't exactly easy given the situation with her hands.
"The boss was hard?" Mouse questioned, looking somewhat stunned at Pixie's remark. "I didn't think he was that bad. Tough yeah but nothing you wouldn't have been able to handle on your own. We built that program so you could fight on your own in there so he shouldn't have been impossible to beat."
"Take a look at the recording of the program, Mouse," Pixie countered, with a joking smile. "That old guy was one of the worst bosses I've ever faced in any of your games."
A thoughtful--- or as thoughtful as it could get considering that it was Mouse and his thoughtful looks often frightened Pixie ---look crossed Mouse's face. He seemed to be trying to remember just how he'd programmed the boss in that particular program. If he'd been the one to create the boss in that particular program anyway. Many of the ship's new training programs existed thanks to Mouse and deft hands on the keyboards. Programming had never been Pixie's strongest skill so watching Mouse create his virtual games, then allowing her to train in them, amazed the medic-in-training.
"I did the general programming for that game but I think that Hawk might have worked with me on the boss because Morpheus asked him to work with me," Mouse admitted, after a time. "Maybe he tweaked the boss when I wasn't paying attention or when I was training or something."
"I knew it wasn't you who created that boss. Your bosses aren't the crafty, role play game style. You're more of a big weapons sort of guy, sorry to say Mouse," Pixie pointed out, glad to see that the medical bay was within eyeshot.
The fact they were close enough to see the medical bay made Pixie smile. Where the rest of her body was waking back up, her hands and wrists had yet to do the same. The cold was doing them little good. It was only serving to make her wrists feel stiffer if that was at all possible. They'd been pretty darn stiff and sore when she came out of the program she and Neo had been in.
"So you've noticed," Mouse commented, fairly beaming with an extreme amount of pride.
"I've also noticed," Pixie added, with a small, girly giggle and a very bright red blush on her cheeks. "That you like to throw in those crazy ninja girls in the little miniskirts. That also part of your modus operandi?"
Without even the slightest blush on his face--- Though his ears were red, so that might have been a blush or as close to a blush as one was going to get from the young programmer ---Mouse stated, "So you know my fine work when you see it? Nice to be noticed for something so small. Come on, Pix, you've seen my woman in the red dress. If I say so myself that is one fine piece of programming right there."
Pixie could only shake her head. There were no words to describe what she was feeling at the moment and that was saying quite a bit. Her friends from Zion, especially Aisling, were always joking that Pixie knew more words to describe people, situations, and just about anything else than humanly necessary.
That wasn't including the normal swear words that were commonly used in the fleet that she'd picked up on--- As a rule, Pixie never used any swear worse since she felt them to be a sign of ignorance. However, working in the fleet, Pixie had picked up an extensive vocabulary of interesting swear words. ---but words that sounded like something only found in a Matrix dictionary.
Whether or not she actually used any of the words everyone knew she knew was very much up for debate. Pixie wasn't a big talker to start off with so it was hard to say what she knew and what she didn't. The young woman was known more as a listener than a speaker but when she did speak; her friends had decided it was better to listen to her than to ignore whatever she happened to be saying at the time.
"Remember, I can always make you a guy in a red suit or whatever makes you happy. Maybe a nice digital version of that boy you've been going out with," Mouse offered wearing a grin that was more than a little lecherous. "Since you're not a fan of my lovely lady in red. Maybe you need something to occupy your time other than your puzzles."
It took a moment before Pixie was able to process what Mouse had just offered her and, once she did, she stated, "As much as I appreciate the offer, Mouse, no thank you. I'm happy with the way things are. I don't need a virtual Wheeler to make me smile. I'd rather talk to the real thing."
"Talk?" Mouse questioned, raising his eyebrows at the medic-in-training. "I wasn't talking about talking, Pix. I was talking about other things. No matter what your friends in Zion say, my friends and I believe that, even in a program, it's always real."
Her face staining red like someone had dumped an entire bottle of red wine on it, Pixie sputtered, "No...No...Really absolutely no and...and...all Wheeler and I do is talk. We never do anything else."
She didn't feel like going into detail about the fact that she and Wheeler didn't always just talk whenever they were together. Lately, since neither of them had been back in Zion at the same time together, they just talked because that was all they could do. When they were together, however, they didn't just spent their time swapping stories about
There was some rather awkward kissing mixed into their conversations now but Pixie didn't feel like mentioning that fact to Mouse. She didn't want that getting back to the others on the ship, especially Hawk. It was bad enough that Hawk was giving her a very hard time about her seeing Wheeler. The medic-in-training didn't want to give him anymore ammunition to use against her by throwing in that fact.
Just the fact Hawk knew about her and Wheeler drove Pixie out of her mind. She wasn't entirely sure how he'd even found out--- She knew that she'd told Trinity and Switch on her birthday. She was almost sure that Apoc had found out because of Switch. ---but she knew Hawk knew. Not only did he know but Hawk made it a point to bring it up every chance he got and it was never brought up in a nice, friendly, sort of way. He took a great deal of pleasure, the perverse kind, from running Wheeler down.
Thanking Mouse for walking her to the medical bay and promising to watch the recording of the boss fight she and Neo had taken part in with him later on, Pixie slipped into the wide, cold room. From her earliest days in the Real World, the young woman disliked playing patient in any sort of medical related area. Her good health in the Real World--- Aside from some small physical issues that didn't bother Pixie most days of the week. ---was a blessing that Pixie was glad for.
Now though, anytime she was sick--- which was rarely ---or hurt, which happened many times since Pixie was a bit clumsy when not working in her own element, she was more than a little upset with herself. It was like a reminder of a time she would have much rather have forgotten.
The only time she actually liked being in the medical climate of her ship's medical bay or the medical center in Zion was when she was working. That was why she'd become a medic. She wanted to help people as she'd been helped once upon a time. She might have still been learning--- uploads aside; Morpheus believed in making sure she her training was practical approach to things as well as a theoretical approach. ---but Pixie figured she'd get there eventually. Medical school in the Matrix, if she remembered what her doctors had said to her, was supposed to take many years so it only seemed logical for her training to take some time as well.
Her being nearly a doctor at the age of nineteen, Pixie figured that was a good thing. In the Matrix, most doctors were in school until they were in their twenties. She was not yet twenty and already an intern, so to speak.
"What happened to you, Pix?" Dozer asked, noticing that his half-sized apprentice had slipped into the room and hopped up onto one of the metallic exam tables with a muted clang.
Rubbing her sore wrists, springing up onto the exam tables as she normally did apparently wasn't the brightest of ideas given her situation, Pixie, sheepishly, answered, "I did something funny to my wrists during the boss fight. I think they might be sprained but not broken. Either way, they hurt a lot when I put pressure on them."
"Let me look at Neo first, then I'll get to you, Pix. You'll be alright for a while, right?" he asked, as he busied himself checking the many bumps and bruises that adorned the Real World form of Neo.
"I'll be fine. There's nothing seriously wrong with me, I think. Nothing's broken and nothing's bleeding, anyway. That's a good sign, I suppose," Pixie laughed, swinging her legs back and forth before tucking them underneath her.
The young woman knew that her statement wasn't entirely truthful; making her glad that Dozer's attention was elsewhere. True there was nothing broken--- Nothing felt obviously broken anyway ---but her arm had been bleeding earlier. The gouge wound from the laser she'd run into had started to ooze as she'd made her way down to the medical bay. It wasn't bleeding again but it wasn't closed up either. It was just barely trickling a thin stream of blood as the wound tried to close itself again.
Poking at it, trying not to wince as she realized that the wound was still more than a little tender, Pixie knew that it was most likely going to need to be stitched shut. In order to be stitched, though, it would have to be cleaned and checked to make sure it didn't contain any bits of her sweater since leaving that in the wound might cause infection.
Making sure the wound in her arm was clean was something Pixie figured she could do on her own. Stitching, well, she could hypothetically do that on her own too but the young woman figured that there was a good chance she wouldn't do it well. It was harder to stitch up one's own body than someone else's after all. It was a lot harder to give one's own self stitches was harder than anyone thought, not that Pixie had ever tried, of course. She'd only heard that from her friends back in Zion.
Still, cleaning the wound on her own wasn't out of the questions. Hopping off of the table, landing with a thud on the metal floor--- The clunky boots they all wore didn't exactly allow for any sort of grace when it came to climbing on and jumping off things. If Pixie had her way and if the floors weren't always so darn cold, she knew she'd be walking around in just socks in an effort to get away from the boots. When she was home, she always wore just her socks. ---Pixie started to head off to dig through one of the many drawers with medical equipment in it.
"What exactly are you doing back there, Pixie?" Dozer asked, not even bothering to turn around to face the now blushing medic.
"Nothing, Dozer, sir," Pixie bluffed, trying not to giggle as she spoke. "Just had to stretch my legs for a bit. I'm still feeling a little restless after the adventure Neo and I had."
The medic-in-training was exceedingly glad that Dozer hadn't bothered to turn around and check out just what she was doing. If he'd bothered to look behind him, he would have seen a red faced, slightly giggly young woman who claimed to be nineteen years of age but looked just a little younger than that.
Pixie had never been any good at bluffing or lying, much to her own embarrassment. Though the medic-in-training found she had few occasions to outright lie to anyone, there were a few times she wished she could pull of a half descent bluff. Even those, though, appeared to be a physical impossibility for her. Something about not telling the truth always caused her to laugh or giggle or even, simply, grin and that would give the whole game away. The blushing, well, that was a story unto itself.
"Then what are you looking for in that drawer over there Pixie?" Dozer wanted to know, with an almost laugh in his voice. "Like I tell my kids back home, I have eyes in the back of my head."
With a sigh of defeat--- She'd been foiled again when it came to trying to pull something over on someone. ---Pixie admitted, "I was just going to get something to clean out this thing in my arm. I'm not sure if it needs stitches or anything but I do know it could use a good cleaning. After all, it has most of my sweater stuck in it now and I have to get that out."
There was a thoughtful moment of silence as Dozer seemed to consider what exactly he wanted to tell his young apprentice. When Morpheus had first suggested the idea of his taking on an apprentice, Dozer hadn't been all that keen on having someone to train in the ins and outs of being a shipboard medic especially when he'd been told the young woman Morpheus had chosen was someone no one else in the fleet had chosen for an apprenticeship in the medical field.
Pixie, whom he helped rebuild after her unplugging, being the apprentice Morpheus had chosen changed his mind. Though she was a bit older now, she was still the same quick minded, bright little girl he remembered from her first few weeks in the Real World. Sure she was more than a little tentative about things at times than he would have liked her to be but, other than that small flaw, Pixie was making a very good apprentice.
"Go clean out your arm but don't try to stitch it yourself," Dozer informed the young woman.
Pixie nodded, though that was unnecessary because Dozer couldn't really see her, and pointed out, "I may be slightly nuts, sir, but I'm not crazy enough to stitch up my own arm with or without something to numb that part of my arm."
Pixie had entertained the thought of stitching her own arm closed for a fleeting moment but the idea alone was enough to disgust her. As far as she could tell, there were only two options to her and her attempt to close the wound in her arm. The first was that she did what would be considered normal, numbing the area first and then stitching the wound shut. Of course, because the area was numb, there was more than a good chance she could foul up the simple, mundane job of stitching in some way. Her stitches would, most likely, not be neat and organized, leaving her with a terrible scar instead of a neat one.
On the other side of the preverbal coin, there was the option of doing the procedure without numbing the area. That way she could, at least, feel what she was doing, if she was doing anything wrong. That idea, however, freaked her out in more ways than one. Just the idea of repeatedly sticking a needle through her arm as she closed said wound gave Pixie what her friend Wheeler might call the "creeping willies." Pixie wasn't entirely sure what the "creeping willies" were but she figured they weren't a good thing from the way Wheeler said it.
Truth be told, Pixie was deathly afraid of needles despite the fact she'd been stuck by more than her fair share of needles during her days in the Matrix. Contrary to what most people thought, though, it wasn't the blood associated with an injection that frightened Pixie to tears. To the contrary and oddly enough, it was the needle itself. The silvery instrument with its pointed tip gave Pixie the worst frights ever during her Matrix days.
The fact injections--- on the rare occasion she needed one ---now locked into the jacks in her arms had thrilled Pixie beyond compare. No more needles being shoved into her body. Sure the jacks she had weren't exactly pretty to look at but they had their uses and that was all that concerned Pixie, especially when it came to needles.
Taking over the necessary items to clean out her still oozing wound, Pixie hopped back onto the table and got to work. Sure it wasn't exactly easy or fun given the state of her wrists but it had to get done. Just as long as she limited how much she twisted her wrists, things seemed to work out alright. Besides, if she cleaned out her arm, that was one less thing Dozer had to do and the faster he could check out her now aching wrists.
