τρωγλοδύτης – troglodytes, the Greek root of the word "troglodyte," or "cave-dweller." for, like, obvious reasons.
for what it's worth, this is something of a love letter to "The Length and Breadth of Fury Road" by sacrificethemtothesquid. not in the sense that this story overtly attempts to draw on that one or pretends to be its equal, but in the way that a toddler's crayon drawing of a tree is a love letter to the world. L&B works with a different fandom and a different set of character types, but the underlying themes are undeniably similar.
...
The machines bring Neo back alive, but only barely.
Hours after the machine forces withdraw, a deep hum starts to shake the already crumbled foundations of their salvaged city. Dread is his first reaction, and he can feel it echoed a thousand-fold around him as everyone who can filters out from the Temple and return to Dock, dread and despair, but it is not an army of sentinels that slowly descends through the tunnels they'd drilled. It is a single mechanical arm, long and winding, and he knows what it is an instant before their newly minted herald gives a shout.
"It's Neo!" Kid yells. "They brought him back!"
Morpheus is already moving, Niobe at his side and Link and Kid peeling off from the masses to follow, scrambling over ruins of metal and stone as quickly as he can, wishing to be faster, faster, as the cry is taken up. "Neo! Neo! Neo!" A hundred voices echo it back, urging him on, none so ignorant as to be jubilant. If Neo could have returned under his own power, he would have.
At last he reaches the arm, sees it to be not a single element but a thickly twisted rope of thinner tendrils, and watches as they unwrap with a whir and an oddly graceful spin to reveal a narrow metal platform set gently on the broken ground before them.
On the platform is, of course, Neo.
Morpheus drops to his knees, the air suddenly too thin and too silent.
"No," breathes Niobe. "Is he–"
Pale and still, with a rough bandage tied over his eyes and vicious burns streaking up across his forehead and down his cheeks. If he's breathing, it's too shallow to see, and he should just reach out and check, feel for a pulse, a breath, anything, but for the first time he can remember he is frozen with indecision. The One cannot be dead, but if his purpose has been fulfilled then Neo is no longer The One, and can die as easily and as senselessly as any other. Morpheus had believed in the Prophecy so fully that in its wake, he has no guide for his convictions.
"Oh shit," says Link, staggering to a halt, Zee trailing behind by a clasped hand. "Is he dead?" Behind them both, Kid seems to have been stunned into silence.
"Where's Trinity?" Niobe asks softly.
As if in answer to her question, another long mechanical arm comes twisting down from the sentinels' drill shaft, and they watch in silence as it lays Trinity down next to Neo with the same grace and care. Her body has been pierced in many places and her torn clothing is soaked with blood, but her face is calm and serene, and so perhaps she had been spared the pain that should have come with such a gruesome death.
The two arms hover, claws extended in what Morpheus cannot help but liken to the manner in which a human seeking truce might hold up their hands, and cables undulating faintly in some current he cannot sense. The machines have never spoken, never communicated in a way that humans can understand, yet they seem almost to be waiting for something. Kneeling on the broken ground, surrounded by a carnage of meat and metal, looking upon an act of kindness by the centuries-long enemy of his people, Morpheus feels much the same.
"Thank you," he finally says. He doesn't know if they understand, if they can even parse the sound waves in the air, but he will say it nonetheless. "Thank you for bringing them back."
The machines whir softly, a quiet whine of pneumatics as the claws that had delivered Neo pulse open, close, and then open again. Then, with a spin, the claw twists shut and the tendrils wrap back into a single heavy cord. The one hovering above Trinity does the same, and they withdraw together, claws hanging heavy and oddly lifeless as the cords go taut above them and lift them silently through the cavern and back out through the shaft.
The silence remains even in their absence.
Even next to Trinity's corpse, Neo looks very dead himself, but Morpheus steels himself and reaches out to lay a hand against his throat. The skin is cool, but not cold, and after long seconds a faint pulse stirs against his fingertips.
"He's alive," he says, and the noise returns.
Much of the city is in ruins, but Zion is more than just her foundations. The necessary life-support systems are still largely functional, and there is room in the Temple and the cloisters to gather the wounded who cannot fit into what is left of their medical facilities or the medical bays on the remaining ships. Rebuilding will be the work of many years, if not a lifetime, but it is not yet time to think of that. First there must be grieving, and celebration, and the struggle to balance the two.
First, there must be healing.
By the time Neo and Trinity were returned to them, the first rounds of triage had already been completed. The wounded separated from the dead, the shaken from the injured, the hale from the exhausted. The machines were brutal, and the conditions unfavorable: most of those injured in direct attacks had died, whether immediately or in the minutes after, and many more were marked by shrapnel or flame. Most of the civilians had escaped relatively unharmed, and so there are plenty of able bodies to tend to the damaged, however mangled they may be.
All functional ships small enough to fit have been lowered through the maintenance shafts to the cloister level, piloted down one after the other by Niobe and Morpheus in a slower and more cautious re-enactment of their earlier desperate flight, so that their medical bays and supplies may be added to the sprawling field hospital spilling between the cloisters and the Temple.
Dwellings closer to ground level have been given over for use as infirmary space, but those with critical injuries need the specialization of outfitted operating rooms and regenerative equipment: the padded seats used for jacking in have been affixed with restraints and are now used for surgeries; the electropuncture kits for building up atrophied muscle in the newly freed are used in tandem with amputations and skin grafts; jacks and ports now induce comas and deliver nerve blocks along with saline and blood; several nutritional synthesizers have been reprogrammed with cultures from the biological labs to produce antibiotics, collagen films, and protein-based suture threads.
Morpheus knows, because he has been there.
More specifically, he has been on one ship, sitting next to one bunk, watching and waiting for something to happen.
So far, it hasn't.
"Any change?"
Morpheus looks up at the deep voice and sees Manx leaning around the doorway, looking slightly odd without her dark ceremonial robes. She's been patient, but time is pressing. "No," he sighs, turning back to Neo. "No change."
They'd been hoping he would wake up in time to see Trinity off, to join in bringing her to the fire, but it had always been a thin hope. Whatever he'd done in the Machine City had cost him greatly, and although it doesn't appear that his consciousness is trapped in the liminal spaces of the Matrix as it had been before, he hasn't so much as twitched in the four days he'd been back. He breathes, though, and his heart beats, and his body struggles to heal. He is not gone, but neither is he entirely present.
"We could take her up to a colder level and wait another day," Manx offers, but Morpheus shakes his head.
"One more day won't make a difference. Even if he did wake up, he'd be too weak." The burns on his face are infected, and he's been running a fever for two days. Trap's kept him propped up to let the fluid drain more easily, but the skin is still swollen and shiny, the blisters still weeping and crusted with pus.
Manx's solemn face, pale skin framed by straight black hair, doesn't change. "All right," she says simply. "We'll do it tonight, then." The dead from the siege have been burned in batches each night, brought to great fires in the caverns behind the Temple and sent off to the surface in smoke, carried on drum beats and cheers and the primal voices of grief.
Trinity will be among the last. Her body has already been washed of blood and soot and grease, her thumbs pressed into casting plaster and onto the pages of the Books of Record, her clothes mended and set aside for someone, probably Neo, to take. She's waited long enough.
"Tonight," Morpheus echoes. "I'll bring the crew."
"All right," Manx says again. "We'll be ready."
She leaves as silently as she'd arrived, and Morpheus returns his hand to Neo's where it lies inert on the thin mattress. The skin is too warm, and there is no reaction to the touch. No change. The words are heavy in his head, leaden in his heart. No change. For so long, change has been the essence and the herald of hope, and has rested perhaps too weightily on Neo. Now it seems that change has used him up and left him behind. "I'm sorry, Neo," he says softly. "We'll take care of her as best we can. We'll give her a ceremony befitting her end, and all will know who witnessed her at the last. Her memory will be a blessing to you, now and always. I can't promise you much, but I can promise you that."
He lets out a long breath, then stands and heads out of the infirmary, nodding to Trap as he passes her at another bed and catches her eye. She nods in return. It's all the assurance anyone can give, right now, and in this moment it's enough.
Everyone has duties. Everyone is worked to the bone in the effort to salvage and rebuild, and everyone falls into bed at night or the end of their shift exhausted in more ways than one. But everyone who wishes to may attend the ceremonies each night, and anyone who is called upon to do so is given leave to help prepare the bodies. It takes little time to find Link and Niobe, and less for Kid to find him. Zee and Ghost are invited, but decline. Understandable – they'll mark the burning, but didn't know Trinity well enough to need more time than that. Many will come to the ceremony to honor her, but few were truly close with her. Few will truly mourn her, but those that do will mourn deeply.
"Neo should be here," Link says as they begin the descent to the caverns. "I know we can't wait forever, but..."
"We've already waited long enough," Morpheus replies. "Trinity didn't want to rot underground, and Neo likely won't be awake anytime soon."
"Besides," Niobe points out, "this is about her, not him."
"No, I know," Link says. "It just feels like there's a piece missing, is all."
Kid says nothing, just trudges along beside them. He hasn't said much in the past few days; perhaps it had all finally hit him, and his youthful exuberance proven unequal to the task of shielding him from the weight of all that's happened. Not a one of them had ever witnessed this level of destruction, this intensity of catastrophe, but most had at least prepared for it, had known it was possible. The young ones among them would have heard only stories, seen only aftermaths, if that. A sentinel attack or two, an engineering accident, maybe a death in the Matrix, if they'd been trained to go back in – every human in the waking world has seen the kind of violence wrought by the machines, but none yet living had ever seen such a slaughter.
Perhaps the generations of Zion's previous incarnations had seen it, but from what little Neo had said, none who reached the Architect had chosen to fight back.
There is enough to reckon with already, in the present, without worrying about the hundreds of years that have apparently been lost from their records. As they enter the Temple, Morpheus sets those thoughts aside. Niobe had said it rightly: the hours to come are for remembering the dead, not worrying for the living. They have so little time in which this balance is acceptable, and he will not waste it.
The fires are laid behind the Temple, shielded by ranks of stalagmites and folds in the rock walls. The glow of the flames will be visible from the gathering space, but the smoke is conducted away through a combination of natural chimneys and chiseled shafts. Whether the smoke truly reaches the surface is largely a matter of faith, but it isn't impossible. Merely improbable, as everything achieved in his lifetime had been. The chambers, though, where the bodies are held and prepared, are a level below and reached by a winding staircase hewn into the rock. Here the priests of the flame do their work, aided by friends and family of the dead, and here the dead await their final journey.
Manx is sitting in meditation when they arrive – that, or she's simply taking a moment to rest – but stands once they've circled around the stone table on which Trinity has been laid out in a simple robe, posed as though she's merely asleep. "Thank you for coming," Manx says softly. Morpheus has always found her voice soothing; deep and smooth and gentle, kindness without adornment. "As you know, Trinity will be taken to the fire at tonight's ceremony. Her memory will be with you always, but her body will soon be beyond your reach. Take this time to see her face, her form, and recall together what made them precious to you."
He has heard these words many times – even now, there are others in the chambers, led by other priests in the final rites and rememberings around the bodies of their loved ones – but time does not erase their sting.
The next hour passes oddly, painfully, slowly, quickly. He weeps, unashamed, accepts and offers comfort without hesitation, laughs and grieves and breathes and, through it all, remembers.
He had known Trinity the longest, had been the one to meet her when she left the pod and had accepted her place at his side ever since. Had been impressed by her ability and hopeful about what it might mean, had trained her and sparred with her and taken her to the Oracle and waited amidst the scent of fresh-baked cookies to find out whether she could be The One. He'd seen the momentary flicker of disappointment in her face when she'd returned and said no, she wasn't, then watched as she tucked it away and returned to their work with peerless focus.
He knows that she had seemed cold, to many. That she remained reserved and hard-edged with all but a few and felt no guilt about it. She had little patience for grand gestures or noble words, preferring directness and expedience, and appeared to have no interest in anything permanent. She was a nomad, a constant in his crew when others came and went, and avoided building ties to anything or anyone she knew she couldn't keep.
In the end, she had decided to keep very little. Neo and hope had been her only baggage when she left with him, aside from the certainty of her own skill, and even those hadn't followed her through to the other side, whatever and wherever it may be. They hadn't died with her, and for that he is grateful, but how he wishes that she hadn't died either. How he wishes that she could be here to watch this new world unfurl before them – not even to guide it, but simply to watch it happen, to see what she had made possible and rest a while in the relief of a job well done. She had been so tired, lately. Always so tired. Tense and taut, like a string about to break, the fibers worn down from too much touch, too much care.
"You can rest now," he tells her, and strokes her hair. It will be cut, once they leave, the fibers too valuable to burn, but it has been washed and combed and is as smooth as it ever was. "There's nothing to fight, anymore, nothing to fear. You saved us all. No one could have done more." The others have finished paying their respects, and left him alone to say his final goodbyes. "I'll wear your amulet until my dying day, and I'll give one to Neo. He may never see again, but he'll know your touch, and I know he won't forget your face. You will be remembered, Trinity. You will not be forgotten." He presses his forehead to hers and lingers there a long moment. As Manx had said, this will be the last chance he ever has. "Goodbye, Trinity," he says at last. "I believe we'll meet again someday, and hope it will be in a kinder world."
When he straightens and steps back, Manx steps forward. She'd kept her distance, giving them privacy, but never lost sight of the body in her care. "I'll have the amulets for you at the ceremony," she says. Morpheus nods and tries to be subtle about wiping away a few wayward tears, though he really needn't even try, not in front of Manx. Sorrow is as much a part of her role in this world as violence is a part of his, and the two aren't really that far apart.
He has to laugh, a little, at himself. So much violence, so much death, and it still hurts so goddamn much to say goodbye to a friend. "It never gets easier, does it?" he asks.
"It gets different," Manx allows, "but no. It doesn't get easier. You get better at it, sometimes, but it stays about the same."
"Isn't that the truth," Morpheus sighs, then sniffs and clears his throat. "Thank you, Manx. I'll see you at the ceremony, then."
Her normally serious face quirks into a suppressed smile. "One day I'll get you to say it," she promises.
"One day," he agrees. "But not today."
"Fair enough." Her usual expression settles back into place. "Try to get some rest, yeah? For her sake, if not your own. To get as much from the ceremony as you can."
"I'll try."
He takes his leave of her, nods respectfully to the bodies and the mourners he passes on his way out of the chambers, and doesn't look back. This is the break point, the threshold he crosses in letting go. It has to be. He won't see her again, won't touch her again. She will be taken to the fire naked and hairless as she had awoken in the pod, carried not by machines but neither in the arms of those who loved her. It may have been easier in the distant past, when death was more often marked by burial than burning, but enough have broken before the flames, unwilling to cast something so precious into a force that seems so cruel, that it was deemed a greater kindness for impartial bearers to do the deed.
She is gone. She is dead. Her memory remains.
These things are all true. They are all painful.
By the end of the night she will be smoke and ash, a final defiance of the machine world that overtook their own. Metal lingers; life does not.
He goes back up the steps to the Temple level and returns to the world of the living.
...
me: you know what's a great idea? starting another multi-chapter shitshow when I so far have a 100% failure rate on finishing multi-chapter shitshows. and you know what's an even better idea? posting it in a tiny fandom that's functionally dead. that'll definitely make me feel great about this.
anyway, no promises about where this will go or how long it'll take to get there, but I just rewatched the trilogy and was bodyslammed by feelings that had apparently been lying dormant for years, waiting for a chance to pounce.