Author: Meridian
Rating: R for sex, drugs, and violence, though not necessarily in that order. Oh, and swearing, though I've been meaning to cut back.
Summary: In the beginning, there was The Matrix. Before that, this.
Spoilers: The Matrix?
Author's Notes: I think I threw in every cliche but the kitchen sink, from Trinity's love life to how
Morpheus got his groove back. But, to make it new and exciting again, I'm telling it out of order like all those classy directors do nowadays. It has to be good if it makes no chronological sense, right? *crickets chirping*
(2003-?)
04-27-97
They weren't safe in the open. Times were getting dangerous enough that most crews didn't feel safe operating in daylight. Too easy to be seen, too likely for the more famous among the resistance to be spotted by some pencil-pusher who could recognize a face from a mug shot. They had always operated in secret, rats in the walls of the world, emerging only when no one noticed so that their holes-their exits-were never compromised. They worked in the crevices naturally, so little matter that they took to working at night, wearing black, trying harder to blend in and fade when inside. Paradoxically, every invisible run into the Matrix was meant to reveal the illusion, to peel back the invisibility. It was why they had to be careful. Why they didn't work during the day if they could help it. And never, never out in the open. Streets were the enemy, best left to memories or forgotten altogether.
Every fiber of Trinity's being was screaming these warnings to her even as she sank gracefully, if a bit formally, into a cheap metal chair outside an anonymous bistro. Morpheus, reclining casually, appraised her stiff back and refusal to relax with one of his most enigmatic-and, she secretly thought, annoying-smiles. Like the clothes he wore, the smile did not belong to him; it trespassed on the usually serious face with a humor that betrayed no irony. Atypical.
"I don't like this." She didn't need to say it. He knew her well enough to know just how little she liked anything about sitting with two coffees-not real, not real, she berated her traitorous yen for the substance-in the middle of a public space.
"I understand your objection. Relax. If you don't, you will cause trouble. As is, we are fine." The great leader did something that would have destroyed his reputation as a staunch anti-Matrix revolutionary: he raised the disposable cup to his mouth and took a long sip of the bitter fluid. Worse, he sighed with tangible satisfaction, shaking his head. "I do miss coffee."
"You should watch what you say," she paused, appraising him with a critical-jealous, her thoughts nagged-eye. "That might get back to the wrong people."
"Not from you."
"No." That much was understood between them, no matter what they kept from each other. Trinity knew he was aware of only the most admirable reasons for her loyalty. As she was truly devoted to their cause and to Morpheus as a wise, fearless, and inspirational leader, the most selfish reasons for her fidelity remained her intellectual property alone; Morpheus did not need to know what personal stake she had in his quest. He assumed her zeal matched his own for whatever reasons he did, expected and received her support, and pressed no farther. Still, they could poke at one another, prod at the lapses of judgment, suggest means to change, invite personal discussions, no matter if they already knew the answers.
"Why are we doing this here?"
"Relax," Morpheus repeated, lowering his head so that a sliver of his eyes could be seen over his rather ordinary sunglasses. Along with his full-length leather coat and expensive, eccentric purple suit, he had shucked his exotic clipped-on pair of sunglasses. All in all, he resembled the real Morpheus now more than the infamous terrorist residual self image he usually wore on their runs into the Matrix. An ordinary white windbreaker, a salmon polo shirt beneath, and gray slacks. The only piece of his attire that had shocked her more than the entire blase ensemble were his shoes. These were as outrageous as the rest of his clothes were subdued; they resembled bowling shoes more closely than anything else, save that the red and orange leather panels all said "Tide" on them.
He hadn't explained any of his choices, but he had taken her incredulity in stride before turning on her outfit. Before she could protest, Morpheus had Tank remodeling her typical patent leather second skin into what she could only consider an abomination. Tank called it "pretty." Linen baby-doll style shirt with lightly laced cuffs, a satin skirt with black lace trim, and a matching pair of high heels. All of it, save the skirt's trim and her pink-pink!-toenails, was white. Instead of accentuating her pale complexion, the white cloth offset it. She felt almost tan.
Actually, first she had felt homicidal. She wanted to split Morpheus' bemused grin with a well-placed machete before demanding Tank pull her out of the construct so she could kill him, too. Instead, she had allowed him to talk her into going into the Matrix like this. No leather because it didn't match Morpheus' outfit, and he refused to budge on the issue of his attire. No weapons-well, none save the M11 snuck in the woven handbag accompanying her outfit, complete with a flower print that matched her pedicure. No sunglasses-she sulked mightily at him when he took a pair, even if they weren't his usual ones.
"We're incognito today." He brought her wandering, grumpy mind back to the present without using her name. That, at least, was a taboo he was not eager to violate, not in such a vulnerable spot with the pair of them relatively unarmed. He took another sip of his coffee. "That's the way disguises work. No one looks for either of us at coffee shops dressed like-"
"Like rejects from a boat show?" She snapped, fingernails digging into the soft flesh of her clenched fist.
"-like normal people," he finished evenly, unperturbed by her manner. "What is extraordinary for us is nothing to them," he waved a hand absently. "This way we may observe unobserved, as it were." Nothing in his words would have drawn so much as a raised eyebrow, and yet she understood perfectly that, despite his lethargic comfort, his mind was on their mission: reconnaissance.
"We could have just watched from the outside." Paranoia seized her, and she glanced to either side at the other patrons who'd opted to enjoy the sunshine at the outdoor section of the cafe. No agents, not yet, just normal people, as Morpheus had said-drinking coffee, reading the paper, swapping stories with friends, arguing on mobile phones. In her mind, she imagined reading their code in the cold core of the Neb.
As if he had read her thoughts, Morpheus interjected, "Do we ever truly learn just by watching?"
"We can't talk to him. It's too dangerous. He'd remember us if we came back later." This was no less true for all of their attempts to mask their identities. It would not have prevented this latest potential recruit from recognizing them later, not even if she had worn the blonde wig Tank originally programmed for her. Moreover, she would die before she let anyone she might have to work with-besides Morpheus-see her in this getup.
"We can't interact, that's true." Morpheus paused, as he was wont to do before a patronizing delivery of some insight that he believed was the heart of the current charade. "We can observe only, but our eyes deceive us. There are things we must trust to the other senses," he inclined his head again to pin her over the top of his lenses with a significant stare. "Read between the lines."
Lines of code, she nodded grimly, collapsing back against the faux-wooden back to her chair, letting, for the first time since jacking in, some tension run from her shoulders in defeat. He was right. The maddening thing about Morpheus was that he tended to be right so often. She could comprehend why the more literal, more practical members of the resistance often sneered at his methods and then bristled when he succeeded time and again.
"Why now?" What did he need to talk about that he had to have these protective barriers, this willful loss of self?
"I needed to re-evaluate myself and my methods."
"This is not going to become standard procedure." This was not a question. She'd seriously consider jumping ship if he tried to enforce this dress code. Only when he did not rise to the taunt did she frown and wait. He seemed pensive, disturbed, no longer in the mood to joke, not even at her expense. "What is it?"
"I've failed them."
Trinity bit down on a friendly, emphatic denial. It wasn't what he wanted to hear. All Morpheus had ever wanted of her was her honest opinion; he prized her tenacity in this respect, his dreamier and trusting nature required her solid and grounded counter-balance. He believed, she questioned, and together they planned to find the compromise between faith and fact.
"You gave them hope. Made them believe it was possible to be more than they were."
"False hope," he interjected but gestured for her to continue.
Trinity shook her head. "No, you told them what you thought, how it was possible. You gave them hope." She leaned in closer. "But they chose to believe."
"I've been told I can be very persuasive." A ghost of a melancholic smile flitted over his lips, one she had seen far too many times in the real world.
"You didn't convince her." He took her meaning: Niobe. It was sick, she realized, dismissing one failure by using the example of another. However, it was true, and Morpheus nodded. "Free will, remember? Choice."
"I thought..." he paused, a sigh escaping him, "I thought I could just convince them into being the One." He ignored the hiss she made at hearing the title-it seemed risky to her to use even that ubiquitous a word, given its significance and meaning. "If they just believed, I could make them into what we've been looking for."
"Maybe they didn't come with the right qualifications." Trinity reclined, draping one arm over the back of her chair, leisurely crossing her legs. How absurd to discuss something as important as the savior of their fledgling cause like this! They sounded like recruiters, pouring over resumes for the candidate who not only went to the right school, had the right grades, right recommendations, but who could also dice, slice, and make julienne fries.
"They all seemed special. All a little more quick than most, more than us at times. Different." In oh-so-many ways, she shook her head to clear the creeping edge of despair to that thought. As per his usual, Morpheus was right: they all had been special, more so than normal recruits, an extraordinary feat. But maybe...
"But maybe different doesn't mean special," he finished her thought.
"What then? Should we only look at norms?"
"There has to be something else. A feeling. A gut reaction if nothing else. I've been focusing my search here, using this," he tapped his temple lightly with his index finger. "I need to look with my instinct more than my intellect." His hand dropped to rest, fisted, in his lap.
His words sunk into her, stirring that mire of apprehension, that nagging voice that shouted: he's right! he's right and you know it! It demanded she confess to Morpheus those secrets she deemed outside of his realm of concern. Tell him you can find the One, you'll know if he's right. It got uglier the more she repressed it. Tell him what you never told him-tell him that you've known none of them were the One all along! Confess! Trinity gritted her teeth; conscience was a bitch.
No, the Oracle was a bitch. She told everyone to use senses or methods they had least adapted and perfected to guide them along their path. Morpheus was not practical; he was ill-suited to the trial-and-error search pattern they followed trying to locate the One. Trinity was not romantic, and the Oracle had doomed her to thinking with precisely that organ she so mistrusted: her heart.
"So we're here to see if your gut can pick up anything on this guy?" Trinity had to bite her tongue to keep the name from sliding off it. Neo. Just another guy, another copper-top, not quite at the level-and certainly not at the age-they usually recruited. Nothing about him stood out from the typical profile: loner, mildly discontent, none-too-concerned with the trifling matter of the legality of some of his activities.
"Essentially and not quite." She did not dignify this response with anything more than an irritated raised eyebrow. "I am here to see if I can perceive any peculiarities about this one."
"But?"
"I must be honest. I just wanted to remind myself what normal people were like." After a pause, he added, "Normal like us."
"He's hardly up to our caliber." Trinity knew her attitude turned off recruits, as well as intimidating others. Yet that was what was different about the crew of the Neb-her severe prejudices with regards to talent did not deter them, specifically because she judged them all competent-equals.
"True," Morpheus smiled wistfully, "and that's why I wanted to come in for this one."
"Explain."
"I'm trying." He was, she had to admit. This was one of few times she times she could recall him struggling. "He's not good. He's average. He could get better, he could just 'grow up' like so many others," he spat the words with disgust. "He's nothing like what I've looked for up to now. Too old, too new at what little he does manage to get away with. It's a cusp we don't usually examine closely."
"It's better to make sure they're committed."
"Is it?"
This stopped her short, her tongue freezing in mid-delivery of all the reasons it was safer, why it was standard procedure to wait, to see who would make it. Rather than freeing a person, risking already freed people for someone who might freak out or suicide upon confrontation with reality. She decided to wait for him to speak to offer any opinion.
"We're good at what we do. We do the research to make sure the people we take are ones who think like us. Why don't we look for people who aren't sure and see what tips them over the edge? Half the battle of maintaining our numbers is recruitment. Isn't it funny that we do no market research to see what little things separate us from the rest?"
She snorted at the analogy. The pseudo-language of their veiled battle-speak was getting to be as inane as their surroundings.
"Our history, in this or any other time, has shown that while fortune does favor the brave, there is no discounting the sheer power of luck. Generals may come from commoners while kings abscond from thrones. The right person is the one who is in the right place at the right time, and who has whatever it is that makes them fittest to emerge from the encounter the superior combatant."
A humorless, cynical smile played over Trinity's lips."You don't mean to apply Darwin to this hunt? Aren't you the Creationist in this science?"
"Ah," his smirk returned, "the two can be reconciled."
"This is why we're here."
"Yes."
"So you can mesh two unrelated philosophies of yours."
"So that I may test my hypothesis."
"Which is?"
"The One has not come along yet. It's not his time. But it is our time. We can see some element of his future in him. Whether he is this person or someone you and I have yet to discover." No names, she noted, not even Neo's birth name. And a fire in his words. This was Morpheus at his finest. Respectful silence ensued, Trinity caving and running a finger over the chocolate surface of her lukewarm coffee, licking it clean again with an inward shudder.
An imperceptible shift in Morpheus' posture put her instantly on alert, banishing without difficulty the urge to indulge in this fantasy Morpheus had orchestrated. His eyes flashed over the top of his sunglasses, lazily but purposefully glancing towards the street-side counter. Nonchalantly, Trinity uncrossed her legs and dropped her arm before recrossing her legs in the opposite direction. She tossed her head as if to shake a loose lock of hair from her eyes and settled into a comfortable position with a clear view of the queue forming at the counter.
A balding man was ordering a grande latte between bouts of a heated argument on his cell phone that he ought not to have been having in public. Were she watching him from the ship, she wouldn't have heard any of the specifics, which went a long way to explaining Morpheus' new-found need to be digitally present for his observations on this mission.
"No! I don't care if the bitch does have pictures..."
"Sir, it's four-fifty, not four-fifteen," a beleaguered teenager was trying to get his attention in a strained but polite manner, gesturing between the readout on the register and the insufficient change in her hand. Gruffly, the man switched the phone to his other ear while he fished between pockets in his dark gray suit for change.
"Here, damn it!" He shoved a crumpled dollar bill into her hand and went on screaming, adding gestures to accentuate his vulgarity. "I'll fucking bury her on infidelity charges! There's no way she can pin anything on me! That bitch just wants handouts! What am I, a fucking ATM? I got this sign on me that says 'Please bleed me dry, you heartless cunt'?" This last invective train was punctuated with a sweeping gesture, his hand vaguely tracing the words across his chest before being flung wildly outward.
Right smack into the face of the man standing behind him. Their man. Compared to the five-and-a-half-feet of hair-challenged fury in front of him, Thomas Anderson-Neo-appeared, despite having been roughly shaken from his reverie by a backhanded slap, positively tranquil. Or exhausted, Trinity narrowed her eyebrows at the bags under Neo's eyes, biting down empathic frustration on Neo's behalf as he stared down at the shorter man who barely turned to mutter a quick, unapologetic "sorry" before resuming his tirade.
"Sir, could you step aside please, sir, your coffee will be ready shortly. Sir?"
The teenager behind the counter was definitely not being paid enough for this kind of treatment. Prior to her liberation, Trinity could recall the horrors of working a shit retail job; a programmed memory might not be real, but the misery of it lingered long enough. Instead of responding, he just shouted over her into his phone, cupping his hand over his free ear to smother outside noise.
"Can I...can I help you?" The girl darted her head around the offending patron to try to get to Neo. Obligingly, he stepped to the side, opening his mouth in a wide yawn instead of answering straight away.
In that short space of time, Trinity found her heart in her throat, straining for oxygen from the dead air in her gaping mouth. Where Neo had yawned, she expected speech and had, unknowingly, stopped breathing. As subtly as she could, she took an slow breath, praying Morpheus was too distracted to notice. She clenched the hand not draped around the back of her chair in the smooth fabric of her skirt. There is nothing to be excited about, she reasoned against the timpani of her heartbeat. It was a lie-a lot rode on how Morpheus reacted to this little experiment. Neo's decision to order a cappuccino versus a soda might very well determine where they went from here and how they did it.
"Double espresso," Neo mumbled. She shouldn't have heard him from this distance; he mumbled, swallowing his words. Still, she absorbed every detail, as she'd learned to, as part of her survival instinct. Her first impressions of Neo were less than charitable. Too old, too inexperienced, too naive. Not ready. No one ever was, she had to concede, but there was a difference between those who could anticipate the worst and those who were constantly surprised by just how low their fortunes could sink. Neo, she surmised, was among this latter group.
"What do you see?" Morpheus' voice was no more than a faint rumble; he spoke quietly that his words might have more gravity, and it always worked.
"Too old."
He did not reply, and a sideways glance at him discovered nothing of his opinion. Part of her bristled at his determination-why push what was not meant to be? Some of this frustration was leftover from their previous failures with other potentials, some of it generically associated with her mentor. As he refused to oblige her with any clues, Trinity turned once more to dissect their target visually.
Neo, no matter his admirable flexibility for being able to convert at his age, was a suit. He dressed the part. Lived the part, too, according to his background file. Nothing more outstanding than the cyber-equivalent of jay-walking so far, and no part of her, quite in contrast to Morpheus, believed him capable of anything else. In no way, shape, or form could she imagine him sitting with them, loosed from his dowdy work clothes and clad in the black armor of the resistance. Morpheus wanted to remember what normal was like? Neo was about as normal as they came.
"LOOK, DAMN YOU!!!" Baldy screeched-a feat she wasn't sure men with testicles were capable of-at his phone and to the rest of the patrons, startling both Neo and the girl at the register. Trinity raised an eyebrow. In about two more seconds of this, she might pull her gun just to do the world a favor; humans weren't all equal, not by a longshot, and some truly were too annoying to tolerate.
"Hey."
Trinity froze. A cross look settled onto Neo's previously blank facade. The other man ignored him, though he had lowered his tone since his outburst; as impossible as it seemed, he might just have realized that out-and-out screaming in public wasn't socially acceptable.
"Hey," Neo repeated, his voice shaded with irritation and a notch louder. The man on the phone whirled to glare at him.
"Yeah, yeah, hang on," Baldy closed his hand over the phone, "get lost, will you? This is important!"
"Tone it down."
Off to her side, Trinity heard Morpheus chuckle. Few people had the balls to tell perfect strangers to do anything, not as a request and certainly not in the commanding, no-nonsense tone Neo had just used.
"Fuck off," was the man's reply before he returned to screaming at someone on the other end of the line. Neo's eyes narrowed, but he shrugged and looked away.
That was it. No explosion of raw anger, definitely no show of any ability that might mark him as special in the way Morpheus had been using to search for his candidates. Neo assessed the situation and retired from it nonplussed yet unaffected.
"Normal people," Morpheus mused, drawing her attention back to him, "normal people." He shook his head.
"What about them?"
"They don't stand up. They back away from confrontation. Look at him," Morpheus nodded at Neo, who'd resumed standing aloof from the situation, a half-dazed, half-asleep lethargy about his posture. "He's not one of us, you know. He's just a normal person."
"One of us," Trinity agreed, "would have told him where to stick that phone."
"He could have," Morpheus grimaced, seeming defeated, "he might have yelled back, might have kept on in that tone he used first."
"But he didn't."
"That was one of our moments. That cusp, that place and time where one can choose to challenge polite constraint for what's right or sink into obscurity because of a bully. It may seem an insignificant detail, a confrontation at a coffee shop..." he trailed off, waving his hand in the direction of the counter.
"But it's always the little things," she supplied. They watched quietly as the bald man ranted, letting his anger fill the despondent silence between them. Morpheus might look on in wonder, but she could only see the whole thing as pathetic. A slap in the face and more annoyance that is worth it, but still, Neo and the customers queued behind him waited with strained patience for the moment they could escape this unwanted chance acquaintance.
"Sir?" Another flustered minimum-wage employee tried to distract the customer long enough to indicate that his coffee was ready for him to pick up so he could-much to their relief, she imagined-leave.
"One second!" He shouted and, as a final demonstration of his indignance, turned his back on the counter while swiping at his coffee. "Listen! LISTEN TO ME, GODDAMNIT..." he swore, oblivious to everything save his one-sided conversation.
It happened in one of those split seconds that somehow played out in slow motion-just that moment, just as the miserable man was spinning to grab his coffee and stalk off. A gasp caught in her throat as her eyes trailed along the length of Neo's arm. His long, delicate fingers curled into a steady, perfect fist, an action unnoticed by Neo himself. Not one breath later, the coffee lid exploded off the paper cup, dousing the irritable customer in near-boiling, bitter liquid. Some people on line clapped while the employees struggled to appear concerned. The man blinked stupidly as if he could not comprehend why he was suddenly drenched in the coffee that was meant to be safely contained within his cup, now crushed in his hand.
"I take comfort in knowing, no matter my own disappointment with cosmic forces, that there is some justice in the world." Morpheus' dry commentary reached her from some intangible distance, sounding miles away, accompanied by noises she recognized as him making ready to leave. A dutiful voice tried to command her legs to stand to follow him, to play good soldier to his general.
It didn't matter. What Trinity saw in that short interval was enough. No sooner had the offensive little man sucked in a breath to begin a new tantrum then she had lost her own ability to breathe. The very second Neo recovered from his own shock at seeing what happened...he smiled. A touch mischievous, a bit triumphant, a smirk crept up one side of his face the merest fraction. And then disappeared as though it had never been.
"Ready?"
Was that Morpheus speaking? Trinity shook her head once, tossing short hair as the careless move morphed into an irrepressible shudder that wracked her from shoulder to sternum. A careless moment, a series of possibly coincidental gestures that, given the outcome, appeared highly circumstantial but nonetheless damning. Had Morpheus seen it? Did he know? Did he assume coincidence?
"Did you..." Trinity licked her lips, her throat suddenly dry, paining her to swallow, "did you see that?"
Morpheus was shaking his head. "I need you to see reason where I don't, you know that. Don't jump at shadows."
"I just..." She couldn't finish a coherent sentence; her mind kept replaying the memory in reverse, reliving that transient smile on Neo's lips, before that, the concrete but absent display of his anger. And what appeared to be the consequence of his displeasure, it just...Just what, Trinity? What could she tell Morpheus? He was right-she wasn't the type to see meaning in the mundane.
"I think we've learned all we can from this encounter. It's best we put it to better use on a more likely candidate." So used to having his judgments and orders followed, Morpheus turned immediately, not waiting to see her rising to leave with him.
Trinity could not obey, could not force her body into the motions to follow him. There was only the looped track in her brain-Neo clenching his fist, the cup exploding, and the ephemeral grin lending him a thousand and one improvements to his overall physical appeal. While her body's reaction-or, rather, the Matrix's approximation of her own attraction-stunned her, a nagging suspicion spoke louder still.
What was that!?
It's nothing, she squeezed her eyes shut, standing abruptly, hands balling into fists at her side. Ah, but it's not nothing, is it? the voice taunted, it feels like something, doesn't it? Throwing her instincts amiss, Trinity spun uneasily, teetering on her heels and strode away from her seat on a direct line for Morpheus' retreating back. He was rounding the corner as she caught up to him.
Trinity could not do the same. Surreptitiously, she feigned an unfocused gaze over the temporary base of operations that she and Morpheus were abandoning; her eyes flew over the faceless folk in the chairs who had been her immediate neighbors for the better part of an hour and flicked up to where she'd last seen Neo. He was accepting his own coffee around the protests of a very irate, very drenched, very unsatisfied customer.
At the precise moment that she dared to seek his face and he turned from the counter, a fleeting moment of connection sparked between them. A fractioned microsecond of blue on brown and then nothing as he continued on his path in the opposite direction and a wall of limestone invaded her line of sight. But even a fraction was long enough to give her chills and excite her paranoia. Had he seen her? Would he, months down the road, if he weren't permanently crossed off Morpheus' list, meet her in the real world and wonder? Say, "I know you"?
Despite her silent protestations that it would never be so, the traitorous voice that seemed always to know better, laughed maniacally at her. You see the future in that man. She reasoned that this could be the case. Whatever goal Morpheus set for himself in this observation had been satisfied-maybe now they could determine who would go that extra mile Neo had not. He's not the future. We learn the future by observing the failures of today. He's a lab rat we use to learn more about ourselves.
Ah, the voice murmured poisonously, is he?
It said no more, preferring to lurk as a cloud of doubt that survived the transition through the phone line back to her real body. In some respects, the Matrix was all too real. That niggling voice of doubt remained and persisted, proving that paranoia was not an exclusive property of her real life. Though she attempted to drown it out with sleep, Trinity could not ignore her lingering suspicion that it was the voice of truth.