Chapter Six

She acts like summer and talks like rain

Reminds me that there's a time to change

-Train "Drops of Jupiter"

Mouse and Astral sat in the mess hall of the Nebuchadnezzer. They sat side by side, nervously, staring at the Neb's captain across from them.

Astral's hair was growing back, long enough that she could wear it shorn into a shaggy, flippant fringe that fell into her eyes. Mouse thought it made her look dangerous and hot on so many levels. He winced and reminded himself that he really had to stop thinking about how Astral looked.

"Well?" Morpheus prompted after a long enough wait. "Why did you ask me here? Why did you send everyone else away?"

"Uh." Mouse started, without really getting anywhere.

"I just want you to know that, even though what we're about to tell you will be a shock, it's not Mouse's fault," Astral started off. "And whatever happens to Mouse should happen to me too."

"Astral," Mouse whispered.

"It's really more my fault," Astral continued. "'Cause you know, in the Matrix there's this big concern about.you know.and you think I would know better."

"That's the thing," Mouse added. "Neither of us was thinking."

"Thinking of what, Mouse?" "Um.well, we.that is."

"I'm pregnant," Astral said. "And I thought it was pretty obvious, the way we were hinting at it and all."

There was a stunned silence. Astral leaned back, crossing her arms and flicking her hair back in the stance that Mouse had come to know as her 'eat me' pose.

Mouse hazarded a look into Morpheus' silent, guarded face. Oh, this is bad, he thought, fingering his black toque nervously.

There was a good five minutes where nothing happened. Eventually, Morpheus' surprisingly calm voice breached the silence.

"I'm going to assume you're the father?"

"Yes! Jesus Christ!" Mouse's patience had reached its limits. He pulled his toque down over frost-bitten ears and moaned. Morpheus' only response was to raise a warning eyebrow, ever-so-calmly.

"Does Jolix know?" He asked Astral.

"Not yet," Astral's voice was quiet. "But I think he knows something's wrong. I haven't exactly.been myself. Varley, our doctor, she knows. She knew before I knew."

There was another stretch of silence.

"Astral, if I may be alone with Mouse for a moment.?"

Astral shot a quick, confused glanced at Mouse, before she left the room.

Morpheus and Mouse remained in a taut silence, while Mouse nervously pulled the bottoms of his sweater sleeves over his hands, wrapping his skinny arms around his equally skinny frame.

"I'm sorry," he said after a moment, his voice breaking childishly in the cold silence.

Morpheus didn't respond, his face emanating not anger, nor disapproval, but a deep kind of sadness.

"I'm beginning to remember things." Mouse went on, rubbing subconsciously at the phantom pains that were throbbing unbidden in his right hand.

Morpheus leaned back, regarding his charge intently.

"I.I can sort of remember how, when I first came here, you would wrap me up in blankets and carry me around. And.and you were always trying to get me to talk."

Morpheus smiled slightly at this. "We gave you the language, but you just wouldn't speak. I was afraid I had already lost you."

"But then I wouldn't shut up, hey?" Mouse grinned feebly, attempting to break the tension, somewhat. "Hey," he started. "I know I haven't been the best.student or whatever, and I'm sorry I got us into this, but I.I really want to be a good father. I just.I don't know what to do. I." He paused. "I need your help. I'm scared."

Morpheus' façade broke and he crossed the table to sit by his charge. He put a huge arm around the frail child and, for the first time in months, Mouse didn't shrug it away.

"I'm not angry, Mouse." The big captain began. "And I'm just as scared as you are. I was scared of you, too, for the first little while. But I'm here for you. I'll help you any way I can."

"I.I don't ever want the baby to know it was a mistake. I don't ever want it to find out the truth."

Morpheus glanced down at the boy by his side and remembered when he thought the same thing, when he would coax a trembling young Mouse back to sleep after a nightmare. "But one day the baby will find out." He said. Mouse didn't answer. "I'll still be here for you, Mouse. No matter what."

All he could do was hold Mouse closer when the boy began to cry.

--

"I love this country where I am, this land is where I make my stand," Trinity sang beneath her breath, murmuring really, while she helped Switch with her hydroponics garden in the lab. "No other heart is truer than the one they call Canadian."

"What is that?" Switch spoke up from where she was working.

"Oh, Neo was sort of singing it earlier. I thought it was cute."

"You never copy anything I do," Cypher spoke up petulantly from his spot in the lab.

"That's 'cause you never do anything cute," Trinity flung back.

"Ouch! Trinity, I am hurt, I really am." Cypher put his hands on his heart. "That you would say such a thing of me!"

Apoc walked to where Switch was, discreetly putting an arm around her waist. "Shut up, Cypher, you're about as cute as a bulldog's ass."

Cypher's only response was to glare in Apoc's general direction, his dark steely eyes narrowing in his odious face. "You know, Trin, if you ever get tired of waiting around for Neo, I'm here. I mean, it only makes sense- with the only other woman on the ship already taken," He was still glaring at Apoc.

Trinity didn't answer, concentrating on her work and pointedly ignoring him. Cypher strode over to her, slowly, obnoxiously. He reached out to touch her. "Hell, even Mouse has a fuck buddy-"

Trinity spun around with all the grace of a fighter of her experience, and punched him soundly in the left eye.

"Mother fucker!" He yelled.

"Leave me alone, Cypher," Trinity said calmly as he stumbled backwards, cradling his face.

"Fine! Bitch." Other obscenities were heard as Cypher left the lab, grumbling to himself.

"Forget him," Switch advised, dismissing Cypher the way she usually did.

Trinity didn't answer, her face unreadable as she worked, her thoughts on someone not there.

--

Morpheus sat in the depression in his bunk, still too stunned to really think clearly. After their talk, Mouse had gone to figure things out with Astral. Morpheus had sat in the mess hall for longer than he cared to remember, thinking things he couldn't now remember. Eventually he made his way here.

He looked down at what he held in his hands, a little startled. A small metal statuette of a human figure, running. Mouse had made it when he was younger; too young to do anything useful aboard the Nebuchadnezzer, when Dozer and Switch let him hang around in the shop and the lab. Dozer taught him to weld metal together, and given him all the small scraps he wanted.

Morpheus wondered absently if Mouse would even remember making it, or know he still had it.

Jesus Christ, a baby.

Morpheus wasn't lying when he said he wasn't angry. But he was frustrated. And guilty, for some inadequately explained reason, like he felt it was his fault. That he had put off speaking to Mouse of such things, left it up for whoever else felt like taking the burden. Morpheus turned the figure in his hands and remembered how he thought he was doing the right thing, being a provider, a teacher, a disciplinarian when needed.

Never a father.

He wouldn't let the same thing happen to Mouse's child. He wouldn't let Mouse make the same mistakes he did. Astral would have to come aboard the Nebuchadnezzer- they would be together, and Morpheus wasn't ready to let Mouse leave the ship. Astral would understand- she didn't have the relationship with Jolix that Morpheus would have liked to think Mouse had with him.

Absently he put off practical things like bunk space and work shifts- obviously, in a few months Astral would be in no condition to do much of anything, and Mouse would have to take care of her. Morpheus put the statuette back in it's place hidden in the shadows cast by his books of Before and settled down on his bunk, not ready for sleep, not up for anything else. He sighed and for not the first time, wondered if the fight against the Matrix, his search for the One, was really worth it.

--

Green code scrolled down a multitude of black monitors, mesmerizing, and Astral stared at it, lost in its obscene beauty.

Mouse sat beside her, silent. They held hands in a simply childish gesture of support and affection and sat in the comfortable silence together. Sharing a blanket. Shivering every now and then.

They had spent the last hour talking, the way they would on that train platform in the Denmark of the Matrix, about nothing and everything, cabbages and Kings, and mostly the future. Their promises to each other, that it would always be a team effort, that they would always put their child before themselves. Before that kind of talk became too serious and heavy for two family-less teenagers to handle and they lapsed into a silence.

"If it's a boy." Astral said, suddenly breaking from her reverie. "I think we should name him Ashley."

"Ashley?" Mouse asked outright. "For a boy?"

"And your name is Mouse? And what about Neo?" Astral shot back with the flippant tone that Mouse had become so entranced with inside the Matrix. When Mouse begrudgingly backed down she went on. "And if it's a girl.I think we should call her Hope."

Mouse fell silent, staring at the falling green code that held so much beauty and pain for so many people. "Hope." He said, simply. "I like it."

Astral smiled at him in the relative darkness of the construct and he was reminded again of why he fell in love with her in the first place.