a/n: So, we are continuing directly form last chapter, part 1. There will actually be three parts, butI am posting parts 2 and 3 together, because they really should be read torgther for the sake of continuity. Thank you all for your support, and Enjoy!

Chapter 15, Part 2

They slept in the same bed that night, spooned together under a heavy duvet as the freezing rain wailed its unforgiving song across the city. For Neo, to hold Trinity again, to press his lips to the back of her neck, to lose his fingers in her hair was like finally coming home, though the comfort was fleeting. The trouble was, they weren't home. The plugs in her head and back were gone, as were many of the scars and birthmarks to which he'd become accustomed. The map of her body had changed, his map to reality wiped clean, flawless, rendered inhuman.

And though he slept next to Trinity, whispered the name Trinity as he shifted with her in his sleep, Neo couldn't completely separate her identity from Jordan's. Only yesterday, had she slept like this with someone else, he wondered, resenting himself almost instantly for such petty, irrational musings. Jordan's affairs were irrelevant. The truth was he hated himself. He hated himself for what he'd done to bring her back. And if she knew, she'd probably hate him, too. If it had been Trinity's choice, Neo knew she would have died, along with their child, with dignity and closure.

Neo awoke at half past ten to gentle pressure on his arm and tiny hairs tickling his cheek. "Trin?" he grunted drowsily, reaching up to touch her, turning his face to welcome a kiss. But when his eyes cracked open, he realized that the morning embrace was from a rather unexpected source. Not that the cat didn't bear an uncanny resemblance; it was lithe and slender, completely black with exotic blue eyes.

He pushed the covers aside, gathering the purring, long-haired pet in his arms, rising to the scent of coffee and croissant. Trinity's apartment looked different in the daylight, her large bedroom warmly decorated in deep red fabrics, full-length mirrors and mahogany furniture. Her side of the bed was empty, a navy nightgown tossed on the mattress.

"Trinity?" Neo walked into the open loft, glancing out the large windows at sleet obscuring the city skyline. Referring to the cat he still held, "Who's this?"

"Oh, that's uhm…" she hesitated. Trinity's hair was cut short and she was already fully dressed, sipping orange juice while surfing the net on a laptop computer. Finally she sighed and said under her breath, "Her name's Déjà-Vu."

"You're kidding."

"I'm afraid not. You want coffee, or is your mind already too free to enjoy it? I know it tasted different to me this morning."

"I'll take a splash."

"It's in the bodem. Strawberry preserves are on the table if you want something with the croissant. I uhm… I made a fruit salad and vanilla yogurt parfait, too."

"How long have you been up?" he asked, pouring himself a mug of the strongest coffee he'd ever taste. The entire kitchen was glass and stainless steel, save the mosaic tile counter which blazed with a million squares of every colour imaginable.

"Since five. I couldn't sleep."

Neo noticed that her keys and purse were on the dining room table, and she'd left her scarf on the radiator to dry. "You went out?"

"Yes." She faltered for a moment. "For milk."

"Well, you have a nice place," he remarked, finding some sliced salmon and cream cheese in the fridge. He popped a sliced bagel in the four-slot toaster. "Don't tell me Texacortem pays their programmers this well."

"No."

"So, then. Cracked open any good IRS D-bases lately?"

She didn't answer him, typing quickly on her keyboard, seemingly deep in concentration. Deciding to leave her to her thoughts, Neo walked around the room with his coffee, taking a quick tour of Jordan Andrews' life. Of a life Trinity had never told him about, though he'd asked more than once.

The apartment was meticulously organized and decorated in a modern, minimalist style, which didn't surprise him, and yet many of the details caught him off guard. Her bookshelf, in particular, was quite a puzzle. Multivariable calculus, The Cambridge Monographs on Particle Physics, The Gibrov Lectures on Quantum Electrodynamics, Noncommutative Geometry… many of them were first-edition printings from the sixties and seventies, the bindings old and torn, with sheets of notes poking from between the pages. But these looked as if they hadn't been touched in years. They were stacked under other books, biographies and publications of David Hume and William James. A copy of Tennyson's poetry. Shakespeare. Milton. The Bible. Knowing Ghost's avid interest in philosophy, literature and religion, Neo guessed that this was Alan Lee's influence. And possibly his all his books, as well. Neo turned his attention to her desk, surprised to see a few pages of hand-written sheet music.

"I didn't know you played the piano."

"I don't. She did. Jordan's mother forced her to take lessons."

Although referring to one's past identity in the third person was not uncommon among pod-borns, Neo had to wonder if it was appropriate in the present circumstance. Jordan had dated her work, December 24th, 2000. Yesterday.

"Can you play it for me?" Neo asked, dusting eraser shavings off the music and stacking the papers in his hands. She had a beautiful grand piano off the dining room, and more than anything else, he wanted to get Trinity away from that computer; watching her was depressing him.

"I'd rather not."

"Nobody's out there, Trin. I tried."

She sighed. "Well, it's been ten weeks. The question is, how long would it take a devastated city to build a broadcast-capable hovercraft."

"Beats me."

"From scratch, I could probably do it in three weeks. But that's with all the raw materials and manpower at my disposal. And if there was serious damage to Zion's infrastructure, their first priority would be life support. So, with Morpheus pressuring the Council, three months? Maybe four."

"I hope you're right," Neo said, thinking less about her proposed timeline than weather or not Morpheus was still alive. The last time he'd seen him, their captain was leaving with Niobe and the others on a suicide mission through a support line.

"Your bagel's done."

Neo only vaguely heard her, his attention captured by a black and white photograph on her desk. A young man only barely recognizable as Ghost was wearing thickly-framed rectangular glasses and a professor's jacket and tie, collar covered in chalk. He was laughing, his arm around a much older woman who was undoubtedly Trinity's mother. The resemblance was uncanny. She had a cup of coffee in her hand and a pile of manuscripts in another, and it looked as if she was in the process of unloading them onto Ghost, who was playfully refusing the assignment. Neo squinted to make out more details. The chalkboard behind them was covered in some kind of mathematics, though it didn't look like a classroom. Large computers and several pieces of unidentifiable equipment suggested a lab.

Neo flipped through some of the files on her desk, most of which were from work, although there were a few receipts from a storage company in Westmount, and some hospital bills from her bogus coma. That the Matrix was charging her for the fraudulent illness was annoying to him, though he kept his comment to himself, knowing Trinity had probably noticed the cheap irony herself by now.

Under the pile of folders were a few envelopes filled with pictures and old documents. Curious, he unfolded some yellowed papers, which were death certificates for a Sydney and William Andrews, dated 1975 and 1964, respectively. There were letters as well, handwritten scribbles on bits of stationary, napkins, loose leaf. Some were just endless lines of mathematics with random comments written into the caption. Neo noted that many, even the ones which were almost wholly equations, were addressed to The Trinity, and had been signed Love to you as always, The Ghost.

April 13th, 1977: I won't spew any of my philosophic nonsense. I know how you hate that. And you already know how I feel about this, but I can't deny you any longer. For you, we will leave tonight for Kansas…

"What are you doing?"

Neo jumped. Trinity was beside him, her face white as she gathered the letters, folding them back into their envelopes.

"I'm sorry. I didn't realize."

"What? That things on my desk might be private?"

"Technically, this is Jordan's desk."

"And that makes it okay?"

"No, it's just that…" Neo sighed. "Trinity, you know everything about me. You always have. Christ, before we even met you'd pulled out every file on Thomas Anderson that ever existed. You'd watched me in my apartment for months… I couldn't have a secret from you if I wanted to."

"And so you're going to dig up mine?"

"I rather you just tell me something about yourself once in awhile. In almost year of living together, how much have you ever told me about your life before the war? I didn't even know your name."

"You know everything that matters. You know that I love you," she said. "Isn't that enough?"

"Maybe it isn't. Maybe I want both of you. You and Jordan." Neo handed her the letter he'd been reading. "Why can't I know you as he does?"

"Ghost? This is about… Ghost?" She panted, searching around the room as if looking for a way out. Neo could tell she was about to cry, though he didn't completely understand the reason. She couldn't even meet his eyes. "We were friends. Not that it's your business anyway."

"I didn't mean that-"

"God, I can't believe this. I've given everything for you! You'll never know what I have given for you!"

Her explosive response shocked him, and all Neo could mutter was a bitter, "Excuse me, Queen of Sacrifices." He hated himself for speaking to her so, but he could not contain his resentment of her monumental oblivion. If she only knew why she was really here… But how could she? How could she have any idea what he was going through?

Trinity was crying now; they'd never fought like this before. It upset him to know he'd made her cry. And although he continued to believe himself in the right, to begrudge her and Jordan their mysterious past, the instinct to console her was stronger than his indignation. He pulled her against his chest, though she was rigid, and whispered an apology in her ear.

Trinity's tears were warm on his neck; her sobbing on his shoulder was first thing that had felt real in months. And though he realized the timing was twisted, he wanted her. They hadn't made love the night before; his only concern had been her comfort. Trinity was so overwrought that even after a hot shower she hadn't stopped trembling until she fell asleep in his arms. But now, in spite of everything, or perhaps because of it, he wanted her.

Neo lifted Trinity's chin and murmured another 'I'm sorry' before kissing her, pressing her body to his the way he used to, down in the hot caves of Zion. Hackneyed fantasies of having her on the beach of some deserted island paled in comparison; Neo would have given anything to be back home with her, where it was real. Candles everywhere, her nearly transparent clothing clinging to sweaty skin, no bra, usually no undergarments at all, not when she planned on being with him. She was better than a dream, Neo thought, eyes closed as he explored her RSI, imagining that it was the real thing. She was better than anything his, or even her mind could invent.

"No, Neo…" she whispered, breaking their kiss. "I can't."

"What?" That she was rejecting him again was hurtful. And this time, he was insulted. "Why?"

"It's this place…" she said, still tearful and slipping from his arms. "We have to get out of here. Tell me we're not stuck in here…"

"I told you. I don't know, Trin."

She shook her head, as if becoming prisoners in the Matrix had been his proposal for her to reject. "I can't be stuck in here. Not again."

"Well, I don't like the idea any more than you do." He pulled her back to him, wanting to calm her the only way he knew how. "But while we're here…"

"No. Stop it. I just… I can't. It isn't right."

"And if we are trapped here for the rest of our lives?" Neo asked, not wanting to even consider the possibility himself, but needing her to tell him that she'd be there for him. That they'd get through it together. But he wouldn't get the answer he wanted.

"I don't know. I need space. I need to think," she said, grabbing her coat and purse.

"So you're leaving? That's your solution?"

"Yeah, well. Maybe there's a fucking bridge I can jump off."

The flippant proposal of suicide made him angry. "You're right. Killing yourself a much better way to spend an afternoon than making love with me."

"That's not what it would be. Not here."

"Fine. But that didn't stop you from fucking every other guy in the city. I guess I'm just not your type."

Of course, Neo regretted it before he even said it, but he didn't even have a moment to take it back. She was already gone, the final two words of his sentence lost as the door slammed behind her.

The pregnancy test she'd bought that morning had given negative results, and though the news didn't surprise her, Trinity was heartbroken. If the crash hadn't done it, she reasoned, two months of metabolic stasis in a pod certainly would. The worst part was she couldn't be completely sure. Perhaps somehow, in the real world, the baby was still alive. Trinity entertained the possibility in flukes of hope all morning, but ultimately her instincts told her to mourn. She could feel it, that tingle of excitement in the pit of her stomach, that indescribable glow of life was gone. She was empty. And trapped in this prison, where even her pain was dampened by the simulation. Simulated feelings…

After preparing several breakfast dishes, she'd baked all morning until Neo woke up, keeping her hands busy as she imagined how she was going to tell him. One batch of ginger cookies, a maple-crumb cake, twelve double chocolate brownies, and two apple crisps later she'd cried all the tears she had, burning her fingers on the bunt pan and enjoying none of the fruits of her labour. Overwrought, she ran to the bathroom and cut off her long hair as a private expression of grief. And still, none of it seemed enough. In a place such as the Matrix, nothing would ever be enough.

Strangely, fighting with Neo seemed more real than kissing him. This illusion, this shadow of the man she loved. The minute Trinity saw him that morning, hair adorably mussed from sleep, holding her cat against his naked chest, she knew she couldn't tell him. Telling him would only condemn Neo to a suffering similar to her own, and without any real means of comforting each other, they'd probably die here, broken and separated. Their only hope was to cling to what they still had, Trinity had decided, two buoys strapped together in stormy waters, weathering the waves, waiting for rescue.

But when he'd mentioned Ghost… how could he have any idea what that did to her? The memory of her final conversation with her best friend was an open wound that hadn't even begun to heal. In the light of their present circumstance, Trinity saw her confession to Ghost as the ultimate betrayal to Neo. Indeed, torn between resenting her lover for his insensitive attacks on her lack of sacrifice and hating herself for the reason she didn't deserve them, it was all Trinity could do to leave without snatching up her gun and ending it all then and there. Even in her more rational moments, a lover's murder suicide was more attractive than a life in the Matrix. She'd tell Neo about the baby, then kill him and herself. The thought excited and terrified her, and though Neo would never know, over the following twenty one days, as he slept peacefully beside her, she'd seriously considered the action more than once.

But ultimately, she loved him too much to hurt him, by denying him his life, or denying him hers. She suffered in silence, struggling to find some kind of anchor. That night she'd returned home with two containers of Häagen-Dazs strawberry ice cream, sincerely relieved to find Neo still there. Trinity lit a fire for them and spent the evening on the couch, in his arms, telling him Jordan's life story. It was the least she could do to tell him something, to hold onto what little they had left.

Her mother had been a physicist, and one of the truest redpills who never made it out of the Matrix, Trinity began. But she hadn't hacked her way to The Question. She'd discovered it though her meticulous research into the basic properties of elementary particles, through years of trying to process erroneous data that could lead her to no other conclusion other than the matter itself was flawed. The world was flawed. Everything was a mathematical approximation. Over simplified. Synthetic. "Before scientists really started to dig, the programming that made up the most basic components of matter were only exact up to a point. In fact, the machines had really half-assed electrons," Trinity said, smiling faintly though her voice was dark. "Nobody believed her, of course. Mom was discredited in her field, her funding cut off. But she couldn't let it go, and there was nothing that could be done. Even if the rebels had found her at that point, she was too old to unplug. She went crazy, as people like that inevitably do. Killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills. Ironic, don't you think? Sleeping pills."

Neo didn't know what to say. Trinity had been sixteen and a recently-admitted undergraduate in mathematics. And she'd watched her mother go crazy. She'd been the one to find her body. "The thing was, I believed her," Trinity said softly, face eerily void of expression. "I wanted to deny it, but I couldn't. I knew, I had known for a long time that there was something wrong with the world. But I was afraid that I was going crazy like she did. Schizophrenia. That was the diagnosis. The doctors convinced me I had it, just as she did. Wanted me to get help. But I would have killed myself before I'd let them lock me up. And it probably would have come to that, had it not been for Ghost."

A philosophy PhD candidate with an interest in defining the limits of reality, Alan Lee had taken notice of her mother's increasingly obscure publications in the early seventies. They communicated in correspondence at first, but eventually the young man had abandoned his studies at UCLA to fly to McGill to meet the woman in person. "There is a group of guys back in California, and some at MIT who call themselves hackers," he'd said one night after her mother had invited him to dinner. "They're into ARPANET and most of them were on the project when the first node went live. Rumour is, these computer geeks know the answers. But I did some digging, and the truth is all they've got is a question."

Jordan, then only fourteen, had looked at him from across the table. "What question?"

Needless to say, Alan Lee never returned to UCLA, and over the following few years, he and Jordan followed the underground hackers' movement, and Jordan took to the art fluently. They derived their screen names from paintings in the church Ghost used to insist she accompany him to every Sunday, though she could never understand how he could be so religious given all they had uncovered.

"Ghost and I were hacking the internet before people even called it the internet," Trinity said, mixing some peanuts into her ice cream. "That led us to the search for the Matrix, for Morpheus… our contacts eventually led us to Kansas City. After my mother died, that's were we went. The rest, I suppose, is history."

"Yes. But that leaves me with one unanswered question."

"Which is?"

"You still didn't tell me how you can afford such a lavish lifestyle."

"Oh." Trinity's lip curled slightly. "Well, back when Ghost and I were looking for answers, our principle contact at Harvard went to a great deal of trouble to hook us up with the hacking community. He was such a nice guy, I bought fifty dollars worth of stocks in his new company as a thank you gesture. I guess the investment grew a little since I've been unplugged."

"What company?"

"Microsoft."

Neo chuckled, and massaged her shoulders. "Incredible. Okay. Now I know everything."

"Mmm." She consciously tried to relax, to let his fingers sink into her skin, pushing everything below the surface. Feeling uneasy, "Yeah. Now you know everything."

Trinity let Neo do as he wished with her that night; she didn't have the strength or the will to deny him again. It was awkward, frustrated sex, and although they both tried desperately to make it work, nothing felt the same. For Trinity, the experience was more painful than anything else; she was dry and tense, and Neo knew her well enough to stop.

"I'm sorry, Neo," she whispered.

"No, I am," he said. "I forced this on you. I just… I'm sorry. I'll do anything you want, Trinity. Maybe I should just go… if you want me to leave you alone…"

"Can't you just hold me?"

And so he did. He did every night until Morpheus found them three weeks later on a shabby skeleton of a hovercraft, which he appropriately named The Lost Cause. The crew were made of the people who'd built it, Niobe, Ghost, Link and (delighted finally to be serving on a ship) Kid. It was certainly a historic mission. As rumour had it, so excited was Trinity at her imminent freedom that she actually let Neo feed her the red pill – a capsule for dinner, a kiss for desert. But the truth was, by that time she and her celebrated lover were only barely clinging to their sanity, emotionally dead and estranged beyond recognition. Morpheus could see it in their eyes; they'd been plugged in too long.

It took an unusually long time for Trinity and Neo to recover. "I don't know what's wrong," Niobe had said to Morpheus over Trinity's body. She was ghostly white, bald and unconscious on the med-bay table. "Physically, they're fine. But… Morpheus, if I didn't know better, I'd say they've lost the will to live."

"They'll pull through." Morpheus said with absolute certainty. "There are some joys in this world, Captain Niobe, which are worth living for."

"Oh yeah? Which part should they be looking forward to? The religious fanatics who will be asking Neo to turn dirt into water?"

He wrapped his arms around her shoulders from behind and spoke into her neck. "Our baby. They'll be the godparents."

Niobe leaned back against her love's chest and smiled; their rekindled affair was still new then, the baby a shock, conceived on the night the war ended. David was the first child of Peace. "You're right," Niobe whispered back, "a child is worth living for. I'll bet you can't wait to tell them. They'll be thrilled, Morpheus."

Of course, the news affected Neo and Trinity deeply, a bittersweet dagger in the center of two separated hearts, mourning the loss of their own reason to be alive. They couldn't look at Morpheus or Niobe without feeling a pang of envy, a pain for what they would never have. And they couldn't look at each other without wondering what relationship could survive this kind of misery. Indeed, those thirteen weeks in the Matrix nearly killed them, and it was no small secret among those who knew them that the after-effects of that hell came very close to tearing them apart forever.

And then, as the story goes, there was Aurora.