Title: Little Aggravations.
Fandom: Matrix/CWS
Character: Smith
Genre: Angst
Rating: G
Synopsis: He hates this place. It's the smell. And the company.
Spoilers: Major CWS spoilers.

Authour's Note: This fic is based on Tanathir's Conversations With Smith, and takes place in the same universe. You don't have to read that fic to understand this one, but you'll understand a reference or two more. This fic also contains MAJOR spoilers for CWS, so if you would like to read it, read it first.

Little Aggravations

He can smell them.

Everywhere. Walking down the street, he catches their scent wafting up from a sewer grate and it's everything he can do not to grimace, show his distaste. But he can't. Showing his distaste would let them know how far he'd... progressed. A strange word to use, but the correct technical term. One charts the progression of a disease, after all, and that's what's happened to him. He's caught a virus.

A particularly nauseating virus, to be sure. Not that he should have any concept of nausea. That too is a symptom. Also one he cannot show.

He never can, for he is never alone, always accompanied by his partners, his watchdogs, his jailers.

He knows what will happen if they catch wind of what's happened. This has happened before. They told him. He had needed to be defragmenter; portions of code he'd developed removed. If he hadn't known better, he'd have thought Brown enjoyed that particular thought, from the way he had told Smith. This makes him wonder exactly what had happened to him. Something, some nameless instinct (fragment) buried deep (and Agents don't have instincts) tells him that it wasn't like this; it was much worse (and better), painful (and joyful).

He knows what they tell him is true, because he knows the defragmentation was unsuccessful. He knows because he has a fragment of a splinter of a memory. A scent. Nothing he can smell smells anything like this. Humans don't smell like this. They're foul, revolting. He's grateful he doesn't have to eat, because he wouldn't be able to keep it down. Not with the stench of human everywhere.

Where then did the smell come from? What is it? He always keeps his olfactory sensors primed for it, but all he gets is blood and sweat and tears and filth and human.

Perhaps it's an error, it never existed.

But it still persists, like a splinter in his mind...

"Why did you do that?" The voice is soft, almost musical. It grates on him almost as badly as the smell. And he resents it for jarring him out of his reverie.

"Do what?" he asks, barely managing to keep all trace of the aggravation he feels out of his voice.

"Your nostrils flared. Are you not aware of your respiratory subroutine?"

"All I am aware of, Brown, is your delaying our functioning. We will proceed."

"We will proceed." The third voice in their trio joins in, his voice hard and deep. He speaks with overwhelming authority; authority he's not truly entitled to.

"We will proceed." They are all in agreement. And yet, in some way he's lost another small piece of ground to them; his control slipped a little more. Little by little they gain more power over him.

They have no real odor, but in a way, he loathes them as much as the virus.