A/N *kicks the Wachowski bros* Damn you!  Bloody go and AU all my fics why don't you!

Disclaimer:  I don't own the Matrix.  Other assorted people do.  I just write about it, and make no profit from said writing.  Cheers.

His first combat session was humiliating and painful.  He got the crap belted out of him by a grinning Pixel, who then proceeded to sit him down on the floor of the dojan, tell him exactly what he had done wrong, then made him get up and do it again.  He came out of the construct feeling like a solid bruise, and like he'd learned something very important but couldn't quite figure out what.

That night, for the first time in the real world, he dreamed.  He was drowning, choking, strangling.  Everything was pink and he was so weak and trembling and the machines were coming to eat his eyes out…

Allan sat up in bed with a scream.  His entire body was trembling, as if somebody was running a low-level electrical current through him.  He held very, very still for a moment, then slowly relaxed into the bed, taking deep breaths.  He really, really hoped that nobody had heard that, but after a moment, the door opened.

The darkness was split by a shard of fluorescent light, and somebody stepped inside, turning the lights on to their lowest setting.  He expected Shadow, but it was Veil, looking positively ethereal, her fine grey hair flowing over her shoulders, her delicate face highlighted by the soft light.  She came right in and sat down on the edge of his bunk.

"You okay, kid?" she asked softly. 

He nodded, pulling the thin blankets tighter about him.  "Just dreams.  Nightmares."

"Drowning in pink goo while the machines come to get you and you're too weak to move?"

He half-sat up in surprise.  "How did you know that?"

She smiled down at him, looking like somebody's harmless old grandmother.  It's alright, dear, Nana's here to chase the monsters away. "Everyone gets those dreams, kid.  It's a good sign.  It shows your subconscious is beginning to deal with what happened to you."

"Oh."  He slumped back.  She smiled as she got up. 

"Don't worry too much about it, kid.  You're making very good progress.  Shadow was right about you."

He rolled onto his side to look at her.  "What did Shadow say about me?"

Veil shrugged her elegant shoulders as she opened the door to leave.  "She said you had potential."

The door slammed shut.

The nightmares, rather predictably, got worse before they got better.  They came most nights, sometimes twice, and always there would be somebody there, to wake him up, talk away the demons, and leave him to sleep.  Happened like clockwork, just procedure, get the newbie back to sleep so the rest of us can get on with what we have to do.  It rankled a bit, but not as much as the fact that it was never Shadow who came in to comfort him.  Every other crewmember barring the captain had been in, including Queenie and Dante, who had very strange senses of humour, but not Shadow.  She was no longer running his physical training in the real world, not since he started combat training.  There was no time, for either him or her.  They both had other things to do, though she had told him that he still needed to keep his fitness level up.  It was easy to let it slide.

He still got the crap belted out of him in combat training, but was constantly told he was doing well and improving quickly.  He'd even managed to floor Twitch a few times, but Twitch simply laughed and confessed he'd never been much good at combat.

Slowly, Allan found himself becoming more accepted by the crew.  His mornings were taken up with training but his now-free afternoons were spent crawling over the ship, doing odd-jobs and fixing things, discovering just how different, sometimes, the reality of the ship was to his dry, factual training.  If something happened, as it occasionally did, that his training did not cover, he would have to go and search up a crew member who knew what the hell was going on.

He was on one of these expeditions, trying to find out what the hell a particular pipe in the med bay did.  It wasn't connected to anything, but the section it was in had broken down and he didn't want to remove it if it was important.

Jump told him he should talk to Shadow, who was the ship's med officer.  He had been surprised to learn that, but figured that with all this new teaching technology, it could happen fast, and young.

He found her.  She was dangling from a harness almost six feet above him, apparently welding something to the ceiling.  Not wanting to disturb her while she was so perilously situated, he sat down to wait.

She flicked off the blowtorch and released the catch that spooled her down to the floor.  "What's up?" she asked, unclipping herself from the harness.

"Need a hand in the med bay.  Can't figure out what this damned thing does, but it's broken."

She nodded.  "Just let me put the torch away, and I'll be right down."

He nodded and wandered back down to the med bay.  Just as he reached the, door, a horrible scream from the direction he had just taken made his blood run cold.  Before he realized what he was doing, he was already halfway to the storage room.

Shadow was huddled against the door of the storage room, cradling her arm to her chest.  Her hand had gotten caught between the heavy hatch and the frame, and was crushed and broken.  He could see the broken bones poking white and sharp through the skin, blood soaking into her shoulder.  Her face was whiter than ever, her eyes wide and shocky.  Her breathing was coming in fast gasps, whimpering softly on each exhalation.

His shiny new medical training kicked in hard, and he took her gently by the shoulders and pulled her towards the med bay, scrolling quickly through the information.  Hands were tricky, with all the bones.

At the med bay, he sat her down carefully and stuck a syringe full of local anesthetic in her lower arm.  Not in her arm-plug, that would have gone straight to her bloodstream and knocked her out.

Pixel appeared at the door.  "What's going on?" she demanded, and then she saw Shadow's hand.  "Oh, gods."

As the pain dulled, Shadow calmed slightly.  "Fuck… that hurts," she whimpered.

Pixel moved back as Allan approached the injured girl.  "What are you going to do?" she asked softly.

"There's not much I can do," he replied absently.  "And injury like this?  Needs surgery.  I'm not trained for that."  He began to carefully clean the places where the bones had broken the skin.

Munin appeared in the doorway.  "I heard a scream.  What happened?"

"Shadow got her hand mangled in a door," said Allan, not looking up from the task at hand.  "She needs to get back to Zion."

Munin crossed and looked down at the injury.  "Can't you fix it?"

"No, sir," replied Allan patiently.  "She might be qualified for this, being that she's the chief medic and all, but I'm not, and you can't really ask her to do reconstructive surgery on her own hand, can you?"

Munin was silent for a long moment, and Allan wondered if he was going to get into trouble for that.  Then the captain spoke.  "Pixel, we need to get back to Zion as fast as humanly possible."

"It'll be at least eighteen hours, sir.  We're a long way from home."

"Then you'd better get started, hadn't you?"

"Yessir!" Exit Pixel.

Munin turned to Allan, who was examining the mangled hand and considering what would be the best way to splint it.  "Can you take care of her?"

"Yes, sir.  If I can keep her from going into shock, she should be okay.  But for the hand…" He shrugged helplessly.  "I don't know, sir.  With proper treatment, it might be okay, but I really don't know."

Munin nodded.  "Just do what you can."