Strawberries
For him, it was when he was imprisoned on Io. Part of him had been expecting it from the moment he saw the crew waiting as the Mnemosyne docked. He'd played his part, looked surprised and impressed as they gave him the tour. But fundamentally, Io felt exactly the same to him as Zion always had, a place built to subordinate all else to survival.
Yet when they'd turned the wheel and opened the door to his room, he was blindsided. It looked exactly like the room he and Trinity had had in Zion. And right then, in a place and time he never thought he'd see, he felt her absence hollow him out all over again.
When he tells the story to the crew of the Mnemosyne later, he makes it sound like the door had hardly closed behind him when Morpheus appeared and the ship swooped into view, speeding him off to save the day. In reality, he knew he'd been there had been at least four hours.
For a long time he was frozen in place, the door against his back, unwilling to move a step closer to the semicircular nook that held the bed.
Then he found himself sitting on the bed, where at least he didn't have to look at it.
When he buried his head in his hands, he saw Trinity again. Coming to him in Zion, floating through the crowd in that dress. Her heartbeat against his chest.
Some time later, he came to. Something was gnawing at him. A dull ache, almost like an itch, in his right arm. He looked down and saw that he'd gouged a bloody crescent around his plug with his fingernails.
The red shock of it sent him reeling back to the look in her eyes when she'd first seen him do it. Before Tank started his training, when he still felt like a stranger knocking about in his own body, the metal heavy in his arms and the back of his neck.
"Stop that," she'd said sharply. She grabbed his arm. Wiped the blood off the rim, rubbed her fingers together. The startling pain as she'd firmly wrapped a bandage around the wound, pressing the plug in deeper.
When they'd sat for a moment, she'd asked, "Why did you do it?"
Stumbling over his words, he'd said, "They're so heavy. I almost felt that the world would... would vanish if I didn't have concrete proof that it was still there."
She'd shaken her head. A soft sigh. Elbows on the table, she'd rested her chin on the back of her hand, losing her gaze elsewhere. Her sleeve slipped down, revealing a wide crescent of shiny scar tissue coiled tightly around her plug.
Sitting with his knees up to his chest in Io, he tried to remember if he'd seen that scar on her arm, if that had really been her in the pod opposite his. It had to have been her. But his vision had been blurry, and he'd been lifted away before he could be sure.
And here he was, on the other side of sixty years, in a city that hadn't existed in the world he'd known, not knowing if he'd ever see her again.
"That was when I couldn't stop crying," he tells her now, in their temporary quarters on the Mnemosyne. The ship hums, slowing as it approaches Io. In the day or so it's taken for them to make the journey back, they haven't left each other's side. "When was it for you?"
For her, it was after she'd finished Thomas Anderson's Matrix Trilogy. She'd never been one for video games, but from the moment she'd chosen to play as Trinity, she found herself acting completely out of instinct. The jumps, the punches, the kicks – it was like she knew instincetively just where to go a split second before she had to, like a dance she knew so well that she couldn't consciously think of the steps.
She played for an hour or two every time she went to the coffeeshop and didn't see him. It was a good outlet for the inexplicable rage that surged through her, even if an hour or two was all she could fit in before the kids or her husband needed something.
("I remember the time you told me you always wanted to have kids," Neo says quietly, and she lowers her gaze. They both know that part was the Matrix giving her something she'd missed in those sixty years and couldn't have now.)
She made it through to the end. Trinity crashed, and Neo collapsed after his final sacrifice. She sat absolutely still for a moment, gripped by the sudden chill in her arms, the back of neck, and down her spine. She couldn't believe it had ended that way.
The only thing she could think of to do was load the first game and play it through again.
Sparks flying on the deck of Nebuchadnezzar.
The Oracle had told Trinity that she would fall in love, and that the man she loved would be the One. She'd leaned over him and kissed him. And he'd breathed again.
When she'd watched that cutscene the first time, she'd had the feeling that something in her that had died had come back to life. It didn't make any sense. She – Tiffany – had never experienced anything like that. So how did it feel so familiar? How did it feel like a memory?
And the words she knew for it – whose were they?
So this is what love feels like.
Life.
"Then I sat under my desk and cried for the rest of the night," she replies, shaking her head. "You made one hell of a game."
They have so many years to cover. But having talked about their lowest low in their most recent history – having laughed about it, even – an almost giddy lightness fills them as they step out into Io. A freedom they've never known before. The dead resurrected, walking hand in hand.
For all their eagerness, their exhilaration of just being alive again together, she gets tired quickly. Her body was unplugged less than forty-eight hours ago. It's remarkable that she can stand at all.
She waits in their room while he goes and gets them dinner. Without meaning to, she falls asleep on the bed. Wakes up to his eyes.
His expression is awed. "As I was walking back here, I realized something."
She feels a flutter of anxiety. His realizations, it is fair to say, have been life-altering. "What?"
"That you were the one who used to leave a tray in my room."
She laughs, all tension releasing in a rush. "Who did you think it was?"
He shakes his head. "Whoever had drawn the shortest straw."
She smiles. "You had no idea. It was what I looked forward to all day."
He sets down the tray he's carrying on a table, pulls it up to the bed. "Well, now I think I know how you felt."
Dinner is noodles.
From what he's seen, he doesn't think there's wheat here. Their guess is that these are made from potato starch, though of course neither of them really knows what potatoes taste like.
There are small partitioned plates of fresh vegetables, pickles, a warm clear broth with mushrooms. Restorative food, prepared with care, a million times better than what they used to eat, yet nothing that could be considered extravagant.
That is, until she uncovers a last clay dish to reveal a perfect dome of ripe strawberries. It is the first time he's ever heard her gasp, and it melts him a little inside. "I… I can't believe these are real."
"They're real. Niobe showed them to me before she locked me up, last time I was here," he says. "She always scared the shit out of me. She had me try one, but I couldn't tell you how it tasted."
"If they're half as good as they look…" She reaches for the dish.
"Wait," he says suddenly.
Her eyes widen as he gently picks the reddest strawberry and holds it to her lips.
As he slips the strawberry into her mouth, the thought that flashes through her mind that this is an absurdly romantic gesture, something from an archive of scenes like walks on the beach at sunset, balcony serenades, moonlit gondola rides. Something that has no place in this world. But quicker than conscious thought are the tears that rush to her eyes, and his.
"What are you thinking?" she asks finally.
"That if we... if we hadn't died, we wouldn't have had this." His eyes flicker across the room, the view below. "Any of this."
"No, we wouldn't," she says softly. "What do you think that means?"
"I don't know," he says haltingly, and the way he says it, so familiar, so achingly modest, is what undoes her. They hold each other, shaking, releasing the emotions they held all those years ago that they'd buried too deep because they'd had to. There had never been time.
When their tears subside, they can't help but laugh a little at themselves. They drink some water. They take turns feeding each other the rest of the strawberries.
She knew he'd had more on his mind than he'd initially said. Could practically see the thoughts forming, profound, unassuming, entirely him.
"The Oracle told me we can never see past the choices we don't understand," he says slowly. "But we're living in the sum of everyone's choices, not just ours. I never understood before how the One was somehow going to save humanity. But it makes more sense to me when I think of how every person is connected to everyone else through the sum of our free will, our free choices. Like we're all in this weave we make together. I don't think I can explain it or understand it beyond that. Maybe in another sixty years," he adds, chuckling, and she smiles.
He holds her hand again.
"I've been thinking... Maybe we can't even really see past the choices we do understand. Except afterwards, looking back. That's what we're experiencing now. Maybe that's what this now means." He looks into her eyes. "Another chance to see how being chosen by you changed everything. Everything."
The desire in his eyes sends her heart soaring. She reaches for him, pulls him onto the bed with her as they rediscover all they are together. Everything and more.
Whatever happens next, there will be more unexpected possibilities she knows she could never foresee at this moment. She knows that now, believes it completely. In love, there will always be the conditions for something new to grow.
The arc extending beyond everything she could have hoped for.
The taste of strawberries on his lips as he kisses her again and again.