Purity of Essence - Chapter 4 - Fingernails
Purity of Essence
By Wrin Chikaya

Chapter 4- Fingernails

"You can keep my things, they've come to take me home."

Matrix picked leaves out of the treads of his boots; it had been AndrAIa's idea to come to Floating Point anyway. He rolled a leaf up between his fingers and stared at it. What was the point of it, anyway? Weren't they just wasting time? He ground his teeth, determined to stick it out for her.

AndrAIa stood a few metres away from where Matrix was sitting, looking desolate, running his hand along the grass. Even Frisket seemed confused as to his reaction; he didn't usually pull into himself like that. He was, so AndrAIa thought, always a rather ... outspoken kind of guy.

He glanced around quietly. Somehow word must have gotten out about Megabyte. People hadn't panicked openly, but Matrix could sense that the truth had been twisted enough for people to think that he either left Megabyte alive on purpose, or that they had been right about how pitiful his Guardian skills were. Binomes walked by, staring. Occasionally they would try to shuffle a few paces away from him, trying to stay unnoticed. Matrix shook his head.

AndrAIa remained quiet on these matters. She couldn't much do to help him, and had always made it a point to not try to change things that would change of their own accord; though this bothered her. It bothered her to see Matrix back at where he started, back to ridicule and back to hatred. She thought he had mellowed out a bit since the Games; it seemed now to her more like he'd just been hiding his personality better.

Matrix's mind was boiling fairly rapidly by now. He was questioning his own Guardian abilities much like the citizens of Mainframe began to question the validity of Dot's position as Command.Com after Phong's death. They had begun to revolt quietly, slowly, but surely. It made Matrix sick to think how fickle their society was, especially after spending so much of his life thinking about it as a veritable Utopia.

AndrAIa hadn't known much about what had happened to Dot earlier. All she had known was that Dot had had a series of crimes and crimes of circumstance pinned on her head by the naysayers and fear-mongerers of the city. She paused, considering whether or not this Megabyte situation Matrix had been speaking about would have had anything to do with it. If so, Matrix must not have known about it for a very long time.

Matrix pulled Gun from its holster and fiddled with it for a little while. He shifted his weight to the other side in order to hold it with both hands. Why hadn't Dot summoned him until the last minute? He clenched his jaw. For somebody who planned a whole lot, his sister sure wasn't the greatest person at planning ambushes in advance. He scratched his head. She hadn't told anybody, likely. And the more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him like she had planned it well after all.

"AndrAIa?" Matrix mumbled from where he was sitting.

AndrAIa padded over to the tree he was shading himself under and knelt next to him. "Yeah?"

"What's wrong with me?"

She frowned slowly. He'd always been one to blame things on himself -- surprisingly like his sister in that sense. "There's nothing wrong with you, lover... you did what you could."

"Sometimes I wonder." She snorted some air out her nose, a habit of thought, trying to figure out where Matrix's emotional pendulum was swinging this time. He was a difficult person to be there for, easy to nestle next to, and to love, and to talk to, but his mannerisms were sometimes everything short of secretive. Getting him to speak was often an ordeal. But she was patient; and this often proved to be her biggest asset. "What do you think is wrong with you that you're asking me? It sounds like you're just trying to get me to tell you something you think you already know."

"I should have thought to ask Dot about what to do with Megabyte. I was selfishly quiet. I was--"

"Uninformed," AndrAIa cut in, though the amount of information she had on the situation was negligible.

"You know little less than I do about what actually happened. I'm not entirely certain she really wants us to know."

AndrAIa wondered silently why this particular detail would matter, but said anyway; "Dot is a rather private lady sometimes. A lot like her brother, in that sense." AndrAIa frowned. "She has a right to her own privacy; just as some of the things that happened in the Web you choose to keep private."

"It's exactly that, though. She won't tell me anything. Maybe I would have known better how to deal with Megabyte --"

"Do you think that unreasonable?" she interjected, thoughts barreling their way through her mind about him not blaming himself anymore, at least.

"Considering the situation, well..." Matrix ran a hand through his hair, another habit of thought. AndrAIa took this to mean that he didn't really know if he felt it unreasonable or not. Half the time, she mused, his body language spoke louder and more often than any of his words did.

"I don't think she's being unreasonable," she stated. This was another card to play, placing a solid opinion. Sometimes knowing her opinion ahead of time made it easier for him to spit his out. She hoped, at least. "Dot wasn't mad at you, you know."

Matrix's ears seemed to perk up. "She wasn't?"

"Nope."

He folded his self-destructive attitude. AndrAIa raised an eyebrow inwardly. He respected his sister a lot, she could see this. And even after the countless time she had spent with him in the Games, she still found it odd that he continued to keep so much to himself that she found it difficult to understand what it was that he was thinking. Fortunately, the time that she had spent with him had made her understand his mannerisms better, and be more understanding of such quirks.

He wrung his hands, his mind reeling. People didn't treat him the same anymore. They were an impressionable lot, the citizens of Mainframe. It nearly made him sick to know that all he had to do was breathe in a way that displeased them and his name would be smeared.

AndrAIa stared off into space. She felt quite shut out, but by far was used to it. The entire atmosphere of Mainframe sometimes made her feel shut out, the small-town way of things making her feel like a stranger. In the Games, she felt more comfortable; constantly being on the move made her feel slightly more at ease; though wherever Matrix was it seemed she didn't need the sensation of 'ease'. She felt as if she belonged, even if the thought of everybody knowing who she was grated on her at times.

Matrix ran his eyes across the horizon. He blinked at a glint in the distance, then squinted to get a better look at it. His cybernetic eye twirled and zoomed in, but by the time it recalibrated itself, whatever had caused the glint was gone.

Matrix felt a chill run up his back, and his game-born instincts crawled their way to his consciousness. It seemed the filth had found a better place to hide.

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