All disclaimers apply. Please, do not sue.
Faith
narie_the_waitress
The girl on the street wears the medallion on her chest with pride, but she keeps it hidden underneath her garments, as close to her breast as possible. It is a simple thing, metal brushed and worked only long enough to shine attractively but that has lost its luster and been covered by a patina from years of being worn and never taken off, so that now it is simply a nondescript piece of metal whose meaning is only know to those who wear one like it.
It had all started out simple enough, truth be told. Despite all the cleaning up and rebuilding after the war, people had suddenly found that they no longer had things to do. After the war, long before the girl had been born, all of those who had survived woke up to find that resistance was no longer necessary, and that their life, although not exactly meaningless, certainly felt empty and hollow, because the sweetness of triumph only lasts so long before the numbness of routine waters it down to nothingness.
So they remembered. Some chose to remember life before the war ended, those that could remembered life before they were unplugged, but in general they simply remembered and sat together, talking about things and the novelty and shock of living in a world that could be described as peaceful.
And given that setting, it was bound to happen at some point. Her name was bound to come up sooner or later, and once it did it would only be a matter of time before others starting remembering her and realizing that amid the great convulsions that rocked Zion after the One's sacrifice, she had been more or less forgotten.
When the machines had come to talk for the first time they had only brought back His body, because hers, if there had been one at the time, had probably already been lysed and fed to those still in the pods. There were no images of her, no statues of her to rival those of Him, their savior. Those who remembered her spoke, but never did say much other than she was beautiful and cold and utterly devoted to the cause, and to the One. So after everything returned to normal there were no statues of her, no cold metal dais where her carefully preserved body could be revered by the faithful. Only a simple memorial in the level where she'd lived, where sometimes candles would be lit and offerings would be left. Not that it mattered. She was not the One, after all, but only His consort. Only the woman He'd loved.
She had not been the one who had saved them from the machines, He had. No one exactly knew what had happened to her after the two of them had boarded the Logos, because her body, like the ship itself, had never been found, and He, dead, would never tell them. But once her name was brought up, people started talking about her in hushed whispers, and even now, sixty years later they spoke about His consort who had not truly been forgotten by all of them but simply neglected by most.
And yet some believed in her, her who had all the makings of a true goddess and who couldn't have died within the Matrix because only the two of them were on that ship, and He never would have let her go in alone if He'd had no way to plug Himself in afterwards, not when the Agent had been loose and the whole of that world was tethering on the brink of destruction.
Maybe she had killed herself afterwards, out of despair. Maybe she had died before Him and something in Him had broken then, maybe she'd been forced to give her life for the Peace, maybe that had been one of the terms. The machines were cruel, and no one put it past them, even now, to demand something like that. Or maybe they had taken her and plugged her back in, and after that she had been lost to Zion, one of many in the mindless masses, oblivious that in her case, she had a place to come back to, not a new world to discover.
There were so many theories about her, and no one to prove any of them right. Perhaps that was what added to the mystique, the fact that even in death she proved as elusive as she had in life. Was she not, after all, the one who had always managed to outrun the Agents, the one who had first seen Him for what he was, brought Him back to life before He had even had a chance to begin His task, and even died for Him, at least once, selfless, pure, saving Him with her own sacrifice time and again?
The cult – but it hadn't been a cult back then, simply the sudden realization that this New Zion they were living in, where everything was new if not in shape then in name, because it had been the One's sacrifice that saved them from certain death, and what better way to repay him than to constantly remind all of his existence by naming everything after him? – had slowly sprung up around her. She was, after all, slowly being forgotten, more so as the years passed and victory against the machines grew distant enough to become a memory that not all shared. She was only a footnote in the histories that were being written, because she had not been captain of a ship, like Niobe, whose brave run through the service tunnels had earned her honors she had never cared for, nor had she been like Mifune, whose heroic death was remembered if nothing else as a tribute to the man's stubbornness.
And that wasn't right. She was Trinity, after all, the Trinity, and the One had loved her, and she had brought Him back to life and died for Him and done so much that without her no one would be left to remember Him. It was there where it all began, and it was then when it all began, and over time it had grown from a ridiculed fringe group to a steady current that lurked beneath the surface of the city, that paid lip service to the One because even now it was too early to diminish His valor and bravery, but that still placed all of its faith in her, who believed she'd been the one who truly made it all possible, who supported Him when He needed her to, who'd given so much and gotten nothing in return.
It feels incomplete and so it is, but at the same time it is complete and will not really take to many additions.... I know some of the canon is dodgy and irregular, but such is the nature of historical revisionism.
For the record, let it be noted that the original idea is not even really mine, but has been taken, with mild modifications, from Angus McSpon's Sailor Moon fic, SM 4200 (which is incomplete, can be found at http: // shell.ihug.co.nz/~macspon/fanfic/sm4200/sm4200.html, and should be read by every single BSSM fan out there) Although he uses it in somewhat different circumstances than me, and he certainly fleshes it out and gets something out it, while all I do is laze around...
Commentary of all sorts is welcome.
narie, Chicago, IL, USA
7.11.2003-14.11.2003
(bakanarie@hotmail.com,
http: // www.lemondrops.org/vague)