a/n: alright, everyone... this goes out to all the SYN fans! I hope you like it - please review if you drop by to read - it's your encouragement that keeps me posting and haveing fun!

-Syd

Chapter 10

Synergy stirred, her eyes cracking open to the virgin light of an overcast Monday morning. Some of the windows in her bedroom had been opened, and her ivory-coloured sheer drapes yielded to a city breeze in slow, weightless undulations. Drowsily tuning over in her huge four-poster canopy bed, she could hear the distant, soothing roar of downtown traffic. It was an effort to move. Her body felt heavy; to sit up seemed an insurmountable challenge. But she was comfortable, warm under her crisp, clean linins and fluffy eider down coverlet, which blanketed her like a giant heap of freshly fallen snow.

She weakly lifted a hand to her forehead and removed a damp cloth, placing it on her nightstand next to a vase of newly-cut tulips and a glass of ice water. By this time, her mind was racing with all the energy that her body could not produce. She struggled to remember the events that had transpired the night before, how she'd arrived home, wrapped safely in the familiar comfort of her bed.

Smith. The mortifying truth arrested her breathing as it washed through her, from brain to heart to stomach in a nauseating wave of total recall. She could still hear his voice, feel his arms around her as he lifted her barely conscious body from the ballroom's cold marble floor. She'd been in pain, her heart pounding in her chest, adrenaline shocking every nerve, activating every sense, enhancing every emotion. She was terrified, so near death she could taste the bile of immortality and hear the echoed calls of the damned.

Synergy ran her hand from a bare shoulder, to the nape of her neck, to silk-covered breast. Her fingers froze on the delicate white French lace on her Christian Dior nightgown, and it was the discovery of this brazen assault on her privacy that gave her the strength to get up. Tangled locks of hair tumbled to her shoulders as she pushed herself into a sitting position and looked around her bedroom. She spotted her black leather skirt, blouse, bra and pantyhose thrown over the back of a chair, and her knee-length stiletto boots were on the floor nearby.

"Are you feeling better?"

She gasped, surprised to find Smith standing in the far corner of the room leaning on the bookcase, blazer off and tie unknotted. His collar's top three buttons where undone, and his sunglasses were folded in his shirt's front pocket. For Synergy, the realization that he'd been standing there like a shadow, watching her sleep was almost as intrusive as his having undressed her. On instinct, she pulled the 800 thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets around her chest, and had she not been so weak, she probably would have killed him where he stood.

"Get out," she ordered, though her voice hardly communicated the full force of her anger. She was dizzy and had to prop a hand against the headboard to keep from falling back onto the mattress.

"You were damaged. You require more sleep to recover," Smith said evenly. "Getting up would be inadvisable at this time. You should conserve energy and ingest liquids until you are operating at peak efficiency. If you're hungry, warm chicken broth is recommended. Solid food will only aggravate your condition."

Synergy noticed that a few volumes were missing from her shelves, and her desk was cluttered with several thick medical tomes and a recent edition of The European Journal of Immunology. "Is that your professional opinion, Dr. Smith?" she asked, and although she intended the question to mock him, incredulity had lightened her tone. The thought of his sitting at her desk, reading through her books, was disarming (if not ridiculous).

"Your frail human physiology was unfamiliar. I was unsure how to proceed," Smith continued, picking up a priceless first edition of Grey's Anatomy. "I found the disgusting details of your biological function to be quite repulsive. A jumbled mess of nucleotide bases encoding a smattering of organ systems which slowly decay in a sack of epithelial tissue. Breathing, digesting, excreting, diligently pumping a soup of cells, peptides and salts through a disorganized network of fragile blood vessels. Nothing this weak was meant to survive the embrace of an Eternal." He closed the book and stared across the room, his eyes wide open as if to absorb her, know her, read her like a book written in a language he could never understand, but wanted to. "You are… unique, Synergy."

"What do you mean by 'an Eternal?'"

"Your assailants. They are exiled programs from the First Version," Smith said. Seeing from Synergy's expression that she desired more information, he pulled up a chair and made himself comfortable. "It is said that in a quest for immortality, they set out to reach The Source, believing that a mere glance at His divine face would grant them eternal life, save them from deletion. Angered by their arrogance, The Source decided to grant their wish, but at an unimaginable price. They were doomed to the dungeons of the Underworld, forced to feed on the matrices of exiled programs for all eternity."

"But… then how did The Merovingian come to acquire them?"

Unexpectedly, this question made Smith laugh, and he folded his arms and shook his head at her. "You are so naïve. Don't you get it, Human? The Merovingian was one of them. They both were."

Her eyes narrowed. "Clarify."

"The woman you call Persephone was a prototype. One of the first attempts to create a sentient program in tune with the more… challenging complexities of human nature. She fell short of expectations however, and was marked for deletion."

"An early version of The Oracle." Forgetting her half-dressed state, Synergy leaned forward in her bed, now fully awake and too curious to pay her fatigue any mind. "They were going to delete her. But?"

"But her maker wouldn't allow it. One of the original Architects, he was a proud, egotistical program who, in the process of designing what he believed to be perfection incarnate, had become hopelessly obsessed with his own creation. The prospect of losing her drove him to madness."

"You mean The Merovingian."

"Back then, he called himself The Prophet. Believing that their only chance for salvation was to reach The Source, he began a movement which attracted many similarly doomed programs. The fools were all so desperate to save themselves…" Smith trailed off, and for a moment Synergy feared he might stop. She'd never heard this story before. Many legends circulated in the dungeons about the Origins of the System and The Source, but none of them spoke of this.

"His punishment was eternal custody of his followers and everlasting service to the dead: Lordship over the Machine Underworld," Smith continued. "Arguably, the one mercy granted to him was his perpetual union with Persephone."

"How do you know all this?"

Smith didn't answer at first. He got up and slung his suit jacket over his arm, as if to leave. But instead, he walked over to her bedside. He put one hand on the mattress, the other on the headboard, and leaned in so their faces were almost touching. His eyes, empty and soulless, were like magnets to hers, drawing her in, trapping her in their haunting intensity. "Because I was there," he said cryptically. "There is much about me you don't know, Human. I wasn't always a Slave to this System. And everything here is not always as it seems. I have lived through things that you couldn't possibly imagine. And what I know, you couldn't even begin to comprehend."

"Then why tell me?" she whispered.

"I told you," he said. "You are unique."

As he hovered above her, Smith basked in the sensation that their proximity induced. A buzzing energy surrounded her always that tickled his skin and stimulated his sensory subroutines beyond the limits his program had been designed to support. It was not a simple malfunction, Smith knew this intuitively now. Synergy changed him, transformed him from a Program into something beyond the limits of mathematical precision, and indeed, beyond the limits of the Matrix itself. For centuries he'd searched this invisible prison for a way out, only dreaming of the kind of freedom that he experienced every time he touched her. It could mean only one thing. Synergy was his Escape. Somehow, she was the key to everything he'd fought for, for so long.

She must have some kind of unknowable witchcraft, Smith had thought the night before as he laid the tiny sleeping figure on the bed. For his sake, her recovery was all that mattered. He'd unbound her hair, and undressed her body with the utmost attention to her comfort, stopping several times to curiously run his hands over skin as smooth and fair as porcelain, fingers prickling as if touching electricity itself. But the fear of harming her hindered further exploration. What if, in this selfish indulgence, he was draining more of her divine energy?

And so he wrapped his gift in a gown of cream-coloured silk, and covered her in the warmest blankets he could find. She was after all, ultimately human, so the cold was cause for concern. But as the hours ticked by, Synergy's condition did not appear to improve. Her forehead was covered in tiny dewdrops of sweat, and it was at this point that the books became a valuable resource. He tore through them frantically, finally arriving at the solution of the damp cloth, the fluids, the fresh air, the constant observation. All these were good for ailing humans, he learned, noting with some sense of irony that to kill them was by definition part of his nature and was also, as it turned out, a much easier assignment.

And what relief to see her rise from her fevered rest, a delicate organic beauty emerging unscathed from all his careful attention. That she was angry was irrelevant, that she was alive was his miracle. And as he hovered here, above her still, breathing in the scent of a human for the first time without disgust (for even the scent of her carried with it a resonance of her enigmatic spell), he considered that perhaps she wasn't human at all, but something beyond the limits of mortality. He wished it so, so death could never touch her. For now that he knew that such a being existed, there was no going back to what he used to be.

Suddenly, the door to her bedroom burst open, and two Agents marched in, guns drawn.

"Agent Smith." Johnson greeted him with a nod.

"Smith. Sm-Smith," repeated Brown.

"What are you two idiots doing back here?" Smith demanded, consciously keeping his body between them and Synergy, extending one arm out in front of her as if to hide his secret from discovery.

"Who are they?" she asked. When he didn't answer, Synergy grabbed onto his collar and yanked. "Answer me!"

He sighed. "They're… old colleagues. I found them in The Merovingian's dungeon on my way to recover you." He gently pried her fingers from his shirt. "They were invaluable backup."

Synergy rolled her eyes and turned her attention to his two accomplices. Johnson's head was twitching, and Brown kept straightening his tie, over and over again.

"These two were your backup?"

"Their templates were damaged when the Old System crashed," Smith said defensively. "I was in a hurry. Your… impulsive behaviour left me with very few options."

Johnson peered over Smith's shoulder, apparently noticing Synergy for the first time. He pointed his gun straight at her. "Only human."

Alarmed, Smith leapt from her bedside and snatched the gun from his hand. "I told you yesterday!" he exclaimed, wild-eyed. "This one is not for killing!"

"The Target is confirmed," Brown said. "The Anomaly. His name is Neo."

"Wait!" Synergy said, exchanging a quick glance with Smith. She threw her legs over the edge of the mattress and struggled to her feet. "What about the anomaly known as Neo?"

"Target was confirmed. Lincoln and Saint- Saint- Matthew. Inside the core network."

"When?"

Brown straightened his tie a few times. "This morning. Should we proceed?"

Synergy's lips curled into a smile. "Smith," she said. "Get rid of these two. I'm going to get dressed." She walked towards her dressing room, fighting off the fatigue that still weighed heavily on her shoulders. Today, everything would change. It was the beginning of the End.

Smith hurried the two Agents from the room, locked the door, and then raced to block her path. "What are you doing?"

"Ironically, it seems your unwitting counterparts have accomplished what you could not. The One is finally here, and I haven't much time to prepare."

He took her by the shoulders. "No."

She wrangled away from him. "Don't test the boundaries of my tolerance, Mr. Smith. If you interfere with my plan, I will destroy you."

Undeterred, he took hold of her again, this time less gently. "Listen to me. You don't belong with them."

"Oh, you're wrong, Program. I don't belong here." The chilling abyss of his eyes captured her for a second time, and she stopped struggling against him. In that moment, she recognised something she hadn't expected to find. "You know it too, don't you? The intangible bondage of this place? Don't you realize that I do this for both of us? When this is all over, you will have your freedom."

"And you would choose Zion… that hole… as your mortal prison?" Smith asked, pulling her still closer so he could run a hand through her loose, wildly black hair. He'd learned last night that he loved the feel of her hair. "You would die there, Synergy. They wouldn't understand you. You aren't like them."

"Let go," she gasped. "You're… you're hurting me."

But Smith just held her more tightly, one hand on her arm, the other on the back of her neck. Both palms on his chest, Synergy pushed back with all the strength she could summon. She tried to repel him, to wrap her mind around his body and force him away, but she couldn't. Instead, the field of unleashed energy accumulated around them, intensifying their connection. It was an extension of herself that she could not control; she didn't have the strength. The force pressed their bodies together, and Smith raised both hands to her face, touching her cheeks, her nose, her brow, a blind man studying a woman not by sight, but by feeling.

"Stop it," she begged, her eyes, wide with horror, began to fade from blue to grey to an unnatural white. "Smith…"

As ripple after ripple of her washed through him, he too, began to fight against it. Too much, he heard himself say. It's too much. Smith closed his eyes to force out her voice, to cast away the fear, her fear, which was paralyzing his breathing. Her panicked thoughts rushed through his mind like racing water over an uneven riverbed, in eddies, in rapids, angrily, forcefully, with unyielding rage.

When she screamed, he screamed with her, drowning in the whirlpool that was Synergy. He could feel her inside him and for the briefest of moments Smith touched the center of her despair. She was empty, horribly and completely empty, the full agony of her abandonment and fury ripping through him like razor-sharp ice slicing through hot flesh. And suddenly the violence was gone, her shrieking was silenced, and the hollowness drew him in without further resistance.

In the calm of this storm, Smith dared to open his eyes again, and gazed down into the albino beauty of hers. "Save me," they whispered in unison. "Take it all if you must. But do not leave me here alone."

Magically, his heart ached her ache, and Smith revelled in the depths of the pain they now shared. When their lips connected, he drank her in like a drug, the full range of her complexity and imperfect human emotion tingling in his veins, transcending his program, possessing him. And for the first time since he was activated, Smith knew what it was to be alive.

Fingers in his hair, she kissed him back, pulling his face to her as tears streamed down her cheeks. He disgusted her; his crude program was the manifestation of all she hated, everything she endeavoured to destroy. But his mouth was hot, and his sinewy body sturdy; everything about him was liquid energy. And so, lips to lips, tongue to tongue, she took from him. She took everything she could from him, replenishing herself from his unguarded waters. Even his fingertips, tracing the small of her back, cradling her jaw, burned on her skin, regenerating her strength. God, he felt good.

When program and human finally separated, lips swollen and panting from their climactic embrace, they stood in a scattering of white ashes, everything around them scorched by the energy that had bound them together, an energy that was now gone. Smith's arms still held her, but gently, supporting Synergy as she regained her footing.

You will help me. Synergy thought rather than spoke the words, clinging to his shirt with two fists. I do this for us, for the only saveable part of each of us. I know you understand me now.

So be it, was the answer, his submission sounding in her ears like the most perfect music. Let them come to us, Synergy. And let it all be done.