Chapter Three: Your Beautiful Corruption

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"No. Stay there; face them. Look down on them, from on high. See how they are all… oblivious. Watch them."

A whimper, inaudible, felt only in the vibration of aching bones.

The hands, those hands, reaching around to part the cassock at its point of separation, to grasp its edges and pull them back past Neo's hips.

Fingers, at his waist.

He stays.

Looks down. Doesn't move.

Doesn't turn.

Watches.

"Mmm, can you see them, Neo?" His name, a rare occurrence past those lips. Soft, like a silenced pistol. Like the knife that opens your throat in your sleep, as you dream of Heaven. "All of them, they have all come here seeking power. Power attracts power, yes, but it also attracts those without… and some of them are here for you, no? To see what it is that you see." An arm has snaked around his waist, that maddening hand splayed on his taut and trembling black-clad thigh. Moving, not fumbling, with deliberate and excruciating slowness. "They are here to see what the Savior of the human world might have in store for them, now… just imagine" – a purr, now, more than a spoken word; Neo can hear the satisfaction in it, the keen-edged pleasure inherent in the mock, and this is so very much a part of this – "what they would say if they could see you, now. Right now."

Without knowing, without consciously realizing, Neo has been pressed more tightly against the marble railing, his hands – hands that have been extended in battle and in peace, deflected bullets and touched the fallen with tenderness torn out of his own battered heart – helpless with their command not to move, palms-down on the cool stone, his back to the darkness and the man who now hovers over him like a demigod of lust. He swallows as his chest tightens, loosens, and his stomach does a slow, almost nauseating roll; he is trembling, now, and he can't seem to help it. Can't seem to help it, even though he knows damn well that every tremor in his limbs is like a nectar of victory, to him.

To the Merovingian.

Yes.

"And you're so close," the voice goes on, unrelenting… as unrelenting as the hands that are now no longer dancing the dance of deliberate hesitation. "So close to them, up here… we are not entirely concealed. Not entirely in shadow…" Neo's helpless, nearly silent moan of understanding. Of humiliation… but he is not bound, he is not incapacitated, he stands there against the railing on the strength of a single command.

Choice.

Deep down – if not entirely unconscious – and buried, wrenched and perhaps coerced from himself… but even now, the building blocks of his mind could make him aware of his freedom to refuse… if he so chose.

He does not turn.

The hands are at the waistband of his black slacks, moving. Not even exploring, really: they know this territory. They have staked it out, if not extensively, then at least with enough poise and pure nerve to make up for the lack. It does not even take both hands to reach beneath the cassock, to lift up the hem of the black shirt Neo wears beneath it, to slide a pair of long and oh-so-assured fingers between the buttons and slip them open in a whisper like sin on Christmas morning.

"Just think," soft, urgent, but so controlled that it is like a shiver of ice down Neo's neck, that voice in his ear. "We are not entirely in shadow, and there are so many of them… the people you are trying to save, mon cher, all of these people and programs, each one of them influential, each one of them powerful… and I watch you…" A flash of heat on heat: heavy yet shockingly delicate hands leaving the buttons undone and reaching to grasp the opened front, brushing Neo in places that make his nerve endings fire off in spiraling sheets of code that read to his fevered mind like the melting music of the dying. "I watch you watching them, waiting for your… for your chance, I see you drive yourself to insanity with this… love" – the word, dripping, but he will not argue, cannot, the hands have taken an inexorable and irrefusable grip on the waistband of his opened slacks and begun to pull. Neo is too thin, even within the Matrix -- work and worry and the constant motion of struggle have melted what little excess he had from muscle and bone -- and it takes very little force for the slacks and the simple shorts he wears beneath them to begin to slide down and over his hips.

Not far, of course; that would be unnecessary.

And the Merovingian appreciates nothing if not efficiency.

"…this love for them, this passion that you have that I myself barely understand – no, look at them!" For Neo had tried again, almost against his will, to turn; this time, the hand that forces him back is harsher, more insistent. "And yet… here you are." And the smaller man can hear the smirk this time, feel it like an overlay of a final orchestration in the midst of a symphony. A whisper, now. "Here you are. Within mere feet of all of these people who see you simply as their Savior, as the Anomaly; oh, but he's the One." Air, cool and somehow damp, on the back of Neo's legs. The rough caress of cotton, wool, silk. His stomach, rolling over and over, and the painful tightness between his thighs. The hands, stroking. Holding. "And if they were to look up now – right now! – just imagine what they'd see… wouldn't that be a sight, hm? Your hands" – and one of those other roaming hands pauses briefly to caress Neo's, splayed there on the railing, damp with sweat and trembling – "grasping the rail, your head down, your feet spread..." A pleased, self-satisfied, drawn-out sigh of arousal, of contentment with a job well-done.

An expensive shoe squirms its way between Neo's black boots, parting his legs; he lets them be parted with the smallest headshake, the smallest sound of protest. The hand on his back, pressing, leaning him forward ever-so-slightly. The sound of a zipper – a sound that nearly makes him start, makes his eyes widen at how clearly it seems to echo, here in the dark, a brief fleeting thought that that must have been heard, it must have – and a quiet, happy grunting sigh. "They know nothing of this, do they, Neo? On ne sait rien. Not as far as you are concerned, anyway… they don't know you are here in the dark, waiting… but they might well. It only takes a moment. How everything changes in a moment! How the mighty have fallen, and if even one of them were to look up at this very moment, they would see you falling with… such… exquisite… grace."

A pause. In that pause, worlds might have ended and begun again from the ashes. "Without a single protest."

A whisper of fabric, a whisper of skin.

The warmth of cloth is replaced in an instant with the dry, throbbing heat of flesh: Neo grinds his teeth and bites his lip, hard, eyes open and excruciatingly aware of the crowds milling just beneath them. One of them could look up. Any time. He suddenly wants desperately to struggle – not necessarily a struggle to resist – or to move, to sinuously twine his shaking body backwards, to end what feels like an endless breathless moment of torment, of waiting, of anticipation. He wants to speak, to cry, to shout, to do something, anything. To have something to do. To say.

The silent balcony, spinning into eternity.

The music below, pulsing.

The shockthrill of contact, of hands on his bare skin, that feeling of violation before anything has even been done, the moment in which his pride is nothing but a pile of shattered smoking rubble and he is only this, only this, only this.

His muffled whimper.

Please dies unsaid before it even reaches his lips. This is not something by request, it is not something to be pampered and planned and thought-out.

All of this, happening in less than a minute.

"Mmm, Neo," from just beside his ear. "You give this to me so willingly, don't you?"

And for a moment the world explodes into green and white: code negative, an eruption of sensation, pain and pleasure and Neo thinks – not in words, no, he is far beyond words and coherent thought: it comes more like an image, a painting – that in that instant all skin and muscle and bone have been stripped away, that all that is left is a framework of nerves that register every touch and brush and shock like a gunshot. The initial contact sends a burning trail into the pit of his stomach, down the insides of his thighs, to the tight, screaming pain that is white-hot between his legs. Dangerous, dirty, shameful, exhilarating, empowering, wrong, right, shades of gray and when the stretching that is the part of the Merovingian that he is pushing the man beneath him to take into himself ceases to be stretching and slides home so fully that it hits something inside Neo that is pure sensation, agony beyond endurance because it is just too much, reasons and options cease to fucking matter at all.

A gasp, a cry, a groan, bitten back against his lips.

Neo's head rocks back; his eyes squint and like the voice of an omniscient, amused and vengeful god: "Don't. Keep them open. I want you to see them seeing you."

This is not what Neo has ever had with Trinity: not a desperate celebration of humanity, of life and love and promises made and kept and made again. Not something to be joked about, held up to the light, put on a pedestal and turned this way and that to admire its facets… and it is not his hated, feared, and loved brutal trysts with Smith – his opposite, his negative, the one entity extant in all planes of existence that can fully balance who and what he is, offset the power that he carries with him, within him, every waking or sleeping moment… it is not that circuit closing, world-shaking and earth-shattering needing to be, not something that he has loathed and feared for years before slowly coming to grips, to terms, with that, his eternal forever nightmare of But what does that make me It is not finally defeating his own fear, as he desperately preaches to new redpills, confronting Bane and blood on a cold steel deck with Trin screaming below and his own eyes a smoking mess in his face… it is not, either, sex for the sake of sex.

Except when it is.

When you carry the world on your shoulders, you may not notice how heavy it's getting… but after a while, your shoulders start to bow with the weight of it. When you are held up as a figurehead to two races of people, when your very existence was the legend they passed down for generations that was meant to free them from oppression and death, when if you are gone for more than an hour or two past the time you're expected a twelve-ship search party is immediately dispatched to make sure you're intact… your shoulders start to bow, just a little.

Just a little.

When everything is a battle, a struggle for peace, when you are expected to be both yourself and something more than yourself, when you are dancing as fast as you can in combat boots through a grease-slicked minefield… you start, even in the very back of your constantly-turning mind, to chafe at these constraints. No, they're not pure bondage, perhaps – the choice is, after all, yours to make. Or at least it was, before the people you kept telling how nice the water might be if they'd only shed their fear of the pool and wade in decided all at once to take a dive into the deep end… while still unable to swim.

This makes you automatic lifeguard.

You don't resent this role; it is your place, your Purpose, your destiny if you choose to think about it that way. But all the same, the seeds are already sown.

And what you're growing is a desire to take a step down.

Not in truth; not in station; not in duty. But every once in a while, there is someone who knows the way you feel, truly knows it, someone who is just self-serving enough to take advantage of this while being just compassionate enough to do it because you need him to.

When you feel powerless to begin with, being made to feel powerless seems like an insult, an oppressing, a brutal manipulation. But Neo's trouble is not feeling powerless: it is trying to contain within a mostly human shell too much power, like a thin live wire pumped full of sparking, killing juice. Too much juice, and the wire will burn out, or explode; too much juice, and Neo – in his love for them all, his desire and true need for peace, in his newly-awakened mastery of the Matrix and awareness of his own keen connection to the Source – will implode in a shower of pieces.

The Merovingian, is powerful.

Like now, one hand on Neo's back, warm through the coat that still hangs on the smaller man's shoulders. One hand grasping his hip hard enough to hurt, hard enough to bruise, later… not that either of them are even remotely considering those consequences now, while Neo's fingers drag helplessly across the unmarked marble as he is rocked against the railing, his other hip scraping the stone, his black slacks caught between his hips and his knees and his lips pressed together to turn the litany of pleas and moans into an inarticulate, muffled hum.

If asked, neither of them could have told an observer – not that either of them would have, if asked – how it had begun. How their interaction had gone from uneasy truce to business relations laced with a thick undercurrent of tension… a tension that Neo had denied as fervently as he'd ever denied anything, for as long as he could remember. Not the Merovingian, he'd said. More than once. More than a dozen times, actually. No way. I'm not… I wouldn't… no.

But there was no denying that somewhere, deep down, there was both affection and attraction – attraction in both the purest physical sense, and attraction to the power, the essence, that blinding charisma that always seemed to make the hair on Neo's body stand on end whenever the two of them were in close proximity. And, of course, the Merv had known this, sensed it, played on it: a glance here, a word there, a well-placed clever double entendre somewhere else. Was it to test Neo's loyalty? To throw him off guard? To see if he would, when faced by something that so obviously made him uncomfortable, abandon his idea and his quest for peace for the sake of his own comfort?

There was no way of knowing: and Neo never asked. He'd simply smiled, discussed, accepted the gift of weapons with thanks, and soldiered on.

The Sixth Anomaly, fulfilling his Purpose.

There is no gap in the story, only that whirlwind of confusion that so often accompanies a massive paradigm shift. The Merovingian had wanted him. The attraction was there. The Merv, in his infinite wisdom gathered through ages of observation and his own keen cunning, could read Neo like text through a transparent window: the pressure, the need, the edgy ranging restraint like a wild animal tossed into a mile-wide cage: the cage may not always show bars, but the animal knows it's there nevertheless. By instinct.

The two of them were not 'an item'. Neither of them would have allowed it, not at this point… and Smith might have murdered them both. Their joint desire for mutual peace overrode any and all personal needs and compulsions: and something like that would have undermined immediately any credibility the Merovingian's arguments may have held with the human councils. Lousy aspect of human nature("Ah, see, he's only taking his side because he's screwing him") – and one that the Machines knew nothing of, this judging people by their extracurricular pleasures – but an aspect of human nature all the same, and one that had to be taken into account. And at this juncture, the Merovingian had Persephone… and Neo Trinity, and Smith as well.

And neither one of them, right now, craved the 'trappings' of a relationship. That had not been the point of this, when it had begun.

How he came to be here, his head halfway thrown back in pleasure and the delirious thrill of the shame of it, feet above the curious eyes of the Merovingian's guests. By day, they were nothing more than associates, brought together by a world-spanning, endlessly vital cause – sustaining the Matrix, and thus the Merovingian's life, existence, and that of his people, as well; and protecting the human race from itself – who never touched, never interacted socially except with the most polite and considerate of tones. By day Neo was the black-clad emissary of a people, the slightly bewildered and yet unfailingly confident Sixth Anomaly who had once claimed that he'd "handle" a room full of men armed with automatic rifles and ancient weapons of destruction… who had simply stood, when faced with a dozen men with orders to end his life, and beckoned them with a single hand… by day the Merovingian treated him with cool, calculating respect: inviting him to speak, for dinner, for an audience with those of his people he knew might have something to gain from Neo's ultimate intentions.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

But the Merovingian had seen through Neo in an instant, seen through him, and then -- without there seeming to be so much as a changeover reel, in Neo's mind and memory -- there were the nights that he sent one of his underlings with a private invitation to dinner… they would dine, and speak, in public, but when eyes were off them he would close a rough hand around Neo's arm just below the elbow. Cut off all protests before they had even begun… and Neo would allow himself to be taken. To be used. Once or twice, Neo's snark had been cut off with a clipped, well-timed backhand across his clean-shaven cheek… and at the instant of contact, something hot and hard would melt inside his chest, his stomach, something evil and foul-smelling would break open and pour itself out into his veins and then flush out of him in sweat, in tears, in fluids spilled across tight black fabric, silk sheets. Flesh.

Anyone seeing this, or reading it described, might think that there was something wrong with this: that the Merv was somehow taking advantage of the One, abusing him, using him simply as an expendable plaything, to be tossed away like a spent prophylactic at the end of the night.

Those who believe that will never understand.

Using someone who desires nothing more passionately than to be used by you is a demonstration of affection… of love.

And if you're good at it… well.

Both of them were innately pleased by this unseen dynamic: Neo because of its brutal opposition to his everyday existence, the Merovingian because he took delight in Neo's delight in it, and, of course, the opportunity to "despoil" the One is something not to be taken lightly. And so, the Merv's petit chiot: a lapdog that could bite, and bite hard, at any moment. Neo enjoyed the hot, close-up rebellion of it… being summoned by a word, a look, a nod, summoned to a back room or a bedroom or a dining room at the other man's faintest whim. Once or twice he'd slept in one of the luxurious beds hidden upstairs in the chateau, when his work or their encounter had left him drained and only crawling between the sheets when the sky was light with day… once he woke to find his coat pressed and his shoes cleaned, and once, dozing in a bathtub that was almost as big as any apartment Thomas Anderson had ever had in his life, he had been startled by one of the house servants, who came in with a silver bucket, a tray… and a razor. Neo had thought that this had simply been an offer of a razor to shave his face, digital stubble or no. How wrong he had been. Monsieur's orders, the poor lackey had told him. He… eh… thought you might appreciate a little grooming. He told me to tell you that he would appreciate it…

He never woke to find the Merovingian beside him, and when he dressed and left – on the rare occasions that he did so by daylight – Himself was more often than not nowhere to be found.

Neo never looked. If he wanted to be found, it was an easy task to be.

Once, he'd shed the cassock, a little code manipulation, and he'd found himself a sleek, short leather jacket… and driven Merv's car through the midnight streets, with Monsieur himself luxuriating amusedly in the back seat, describing lazy directions… while(unbeknownst to Neo at that time) a great faction of his crew was scrambling in a panic: Where's Neo? Have you seen him? Do you know where he is? He just… vanished!

Once – and only once, both Neo and the former "plugged in" version of himself knew how to learn those lessons pretty damn quick – he'd been frustrated about something, angry at the slow progress of his mission, fuming and seething and generally wired with an inarticulate rage, and he'd whined a little too much, snapped when he shouldn't have, protested something that by their own unspoken pact, he didn't have the right to protest. In a bottom drawer of one of the carved wooden chests in one of the master bedrooms, there was a dark green, wickedly leather riding crop. Neo's Oh hell no, I don't think so wide eyes had vanished into something else entirely after the first four or five welts.

He'd stopped whining real fast… and secretly, was thankful.

Choice.

Freedom.

Weight.

And one of the things Neo loved utterly and secretly about this was the contradiction in terms, so utter and complete that it made his nerves tingle: the One, this symbol of power and freedom, this "legendary" Sixth Anomaly who was known on sight, listed on the rolls of dozens of governments as a dangerous and deadly terrorist, a cult leader who knew no bounds and would stop at nothing to "subvert the System" …this man, this person, this entity… was, by night and whim and command and his own choice, more or less the Merovingian's personal call-boy. When he was under those hands, he was not "the One', he was not this über-ultimate thing… and yet, still… he was. The delirious subjugation of it, the debasing of this, this image, aroused and vindicated him beyond anything he ever might have imagined, before or after the end of the world. It wasn't being loved for being the One, and it wasn't letting go of that place, that responsibility. Instead, it was… what was it, really? There were no words. Only the freedom of it, summed up sometimes in Neo's own imaginings of what the Merv would say to someone: "Oh, yes, Neo. Well. I call him when I like: he's my…" Insert knowing smile here, and whichever graphic word you choose: Neo had one or two that he usually filled in those blanks with.