a/n: For elemental. Just... take it. Leave poor Zinck alone.
Chapter 18, pt 2
HE WON'T REMEMBER the crash. Nothing of the violent jolt and inertia that throws him to the ground, and nothing of Tank's brief cry of shock and agony as thorny vines and jagged teeth pin him to the chair he would die in. Seconds later. Too long. And Morpheus, rising unsteadily from his place at the controls, taking in the carnage and destruction all around, as if not quite aware of where and who he is. He bends over Tank, and covers the younger man's eyes. Tells him it will be alright. Says it again and again, until nobody is listening. But Neo won't remember.
The first thing that stimulates any cognition is her voice. He rises to his feet, and he hears her susurration in the howling wind, a murmur that leads him to her, where she half-sits, half-slumps against the nautical doorjamb. " Neo? Are you there? I don't think I can move…"
"No. No, Morpheus… someone. We need help!"
"I'm alright. Just... help me up." But she can't see all the blood. She doesn't know. He falls to his knees, into the claret pool that spatters like a trail of dried rose petals. And he is afraid to touch her. He begins to panic.
"Trinity. Trinity… no. God, no." Neo cups her jaw in one hand, and tentatively presses onto her wound with the other, recoiling when she winces. He looks up for Morpheus, devastated when he can't find him. "Trin…" She is clinging to his shirt. " Sweetie. I'm sorry. I don't know what to do…"
He can see it in her eyes. For starters, don't ever call me that again. But she doesn't realize how serious it is. And as the color drains from her cheeks, the warmth from her tenor, he'll call her whatever the hell he wants. My angel. My everything. My only. The terms of endearment flow like tears.
"Stop. Neo. You're scaring me."
And then Morpheus is there, lifting her as if she weighed nothing, his expression like stone. He isn't calm. But there is such focus, such determination in his eyes, Neo nearly trips over himself to get out of the way. The captain marches with her to the med bay, and Neo has to jog to keep up with his stride. He watches, paralyzed, as Morpheus tears Trinity's sweater down the center, a quick, violent jerk that strikes him as too harsh a motion to expose so delicate a figure. And yet his superior officer is relentless with her body. His large, sinewy hand presses hard under her left breast, over the smooth, crimson tear, and she yells out, hisses.
"Morpheus…" She begs his name, and for the first time, Neo hears Trinity's fear. It's foreign and unnatural in his ears, so unlike her habitual tone he wouldn't have recognized it as her voice. She clings to his arm, writhing now, panting. She gasps, and her eyes squeeze shut. " Morpheus…knock me out. Give me something…"
"No. Look at me," he says it like an order, holding the back of her head and looking into her eyes. Trinity obeys, lids snapping open to stare back, as if anchoring herself to him. "You need to stay awake or you'll freeze. Do you understand?"
Her breath escapes in condensed puffs. "Mm."
"Trinity. What did I tell you?"
"I need to stay awake."
"Good."
She trembles, and her hand reaches out blindly, snatching Neo's from the air. She squeezes, digs her nails into his skin, as Morpheus sterilizes the wound, and begins to stitch the tear in quick, crude sutures.
"Tell me how you made it back."
"What?"
"From the tropics," Neo says, glancing at the half-closed laceration, hoping to distract them both from the gruesome task. "You never finished telling me."
Morpheus tugs the nylon string through her skin. In a shrill, aberrant shriek, she laughs and sobs simultaneously. "Oh, that. Damndest thing. One day, the engines just… zap, you know?" Her teeth chatter, punctuating the syllables. "Fucking miracle. Nobody back in the city believed me except for John the Baptist here. Who offered me a job, thought I showed great promise. And now… here I am."
The captain gives her a wry glance, which she returns as best she can. "Everyone else thought it must've… must've been a mechanical glitch," she gasps. " Bullshit. I spent two months dissecting that engine. It was dead."
Neo caresses her hair back from her forehead, her face, wiping away cold sweat. She is fighting hard to stay focused on the conversation, he can tell. "Everyone had given up on me," she says, almost proudly. "When I got back to Zion, my name was engraved on the Memorial of Lost Souls. It's still there, in the temple."
"You'll take me to see it?"
She nods, giving him a whisper of a smile. "The bastards had given away my apartment, too," she adds as an afterthought. "And gave all my stuff to the orphans. Can you believe that?"
"I'm sorry."
"It never fails. I get nothing but shit from Zion."
And Morpheus actually chuckles.
THE TEMPERATURE DIPS below freezing, and Trinity doesn't get any better. She shakes constantly, and no amount of blankets will give her relief from the cold. Still, Neo tries, determined to keep her alive, cocooning her, huddling in a corner, as far as he can get from the breeches in the hull. The air is toxic, and the filthy ice and snow that blizzards into the ship is worse. Perhaps the sentinels know where they are, Neo thinks. Maybe, they left them up here to die slowly.
He has stripped all the beds, and in a cruelly dehumanizing act he will always regret, he uncovered the crew that lay in the core. But it does no good. She is quickly slipping away, her anemic pallor tuning a scarlet-speckled sliver, as pin-tipped capillaries break around her cheeks, nose and eyes. He holds her on his lap, as one would cradle a child, disobeying Morpheus' edict that she should sit up on her own.
"Neo, please take one of the covers," Trinity whispers, not for the first time. "You're not used to it. You must be so cold..." She grins and tugs at him. "Sweetie."
"I'm fine," he lies, tucking his hands under the frozen, threadbare cotton that covers her. He weaves their fingers together. They squeeze, separate, and entwine again. "Can you feel that?"
"No. But… do it anyway."
He smiles, and then he thinks he'll cry. "I can't feel it either."
"God."
"It'll be better once Morpheus gets the fire going." Trinity seems to find this amusing. "What?"
"Morpheus. Tell him… I have some manuscripts on fleet protocols he can burn. As my gift to him."
The tips of her eyelashes are white. Tiny crystals in her hair, in the corners of her eyes, sparkle on translucent skin. It is as if she is being transformed into something other than human, something ethereal and supernatural, beautiful and deathly. And that unearthly blue has gotten more intense, as if her life, drained from blood, phlegm and bile, were concentrated entirely in her irides.
"You know, I haven't told you yet," he whispers. "That I love you. That… I've fallen in love with you."
Again, her expression flickers with her wry flavor of mild amusement. "No," she replies hoarsely. "I suppose you haven't. And we mustn't… we shouldn't leave these things to the last minute."
He brushes her cheek, kisses her brow and eyes. "Trinity, I love you."
"I know."
Their lips are icy, tingling without sensation when they begin, but Neo is intent: they will feel this. He'll make them feel it. He has been numb for thirty years, not just the past thirty minutes, and he senses that Trinity knows his pain all too well. People like them can always see it in others. Loneliness, abstinence, self-imposed isolation. He doesn't pretend to know her reasons. Details- of very little consequence now that they've found each other. He kisses her until it's warm enough to feel, hot enough to burn, and deep enough to bring back that faint hum of hers, tickling his tongue again. He loses himself in that sound, in that nearly inaudible expression of femininity and passion. Perhaps he is the first one to hear it. But there is no time for details. All they have is now.
So it is now, in a stolen moment in the frigid abyss, that he murmurs into her ear. He tells her she's beautiful. No. Not just beautiful, Trin. You're devastating. He tells her that when she moves, he can't take his eyes off her. He tells her that ever since he got here, and for sometime before that, not a night has gone by when he hasn't wondered about her, and thought about them, together. Could she tell? Did it show, that every time he looked at her, he stopped breathing and said a prayer?
Hm-hum.
He waits for her to elaborate, which she doesn't, except to curl her lip. And he has never felt more adored, more loved by anyone, as he does right then. It's in her eyes, and her voice, when she tells him,
But when you came into a room… I'd turn and leave. I'd shy away. 'M sorry, Neo. I wasted our time together... I waited too long.
There aren't many combustible items on the ship. Morpheus has barely an armful of books, clothes, and emergency heatstones when he returns, piling them close to Trinity, gazing at her with something like regret. "You got the regs?" she asks.
"Yes."
They share a grin. "Morpheus."
"Hm."
"Where's Tank?" - she rephrases- "What... what happened to Tank?"
Of course she doesn't know. How could she know? That Morpheus had been unable to separate flesh from steel, and their cheerfully-disposed operator still lies in the cockpit, his body exposed to the frigid, unforgiving elements. Tank was the last of her crewmates, the sixth one. Neo runs his fingers through her frozen hair.
"No," she whispers, still looking to Morpheus, who hasn't answered her question. "What… where is he?"
"He was a good officer. He did his duty, Trinity."
Neo's heart breaks as he looks down at her face. It is as if something snaps, and she just falls apart in his arms. The tears come unbidden- he can tell she tries desperately to suppress them. Physically, it must be agony for her to sob, and worse to hold it in. "No," she repeats. "Not Tank. Not… Switch…"
Morpheus looks away, and Neo suspects the captain cannot bear to see her cry, and the truth is neither can he. She looks so utterly demolished, so completely unlike the Trinity he is used to. There is naught but her muffled exclamations of sorrow, as she turns her face into his sweater, clawing her fingers into the mesh. She's weeping, silently, but Neo can feel it, as he holds her head, and rocks. Under any other circumstance, he knows she'd never let him see her like this, but it doesn't seem to matter anymore.
Her friends deserve to be mourned. And so, lying in his arms, Trinity gives them a funeral, their final ablution streaming down two perfect, porcelain cheeks.