It all seemed so simple, and insignificant. Breaking through the walls of the world was not the difficult part, it was piecing one's self back together after being split into a million different pieces. The night he died all that he was scattered across the entire world, in the seen and the unseen, his mind separated from his body, and he had become nothing. But over time, slowly, the pieces had come together again, and the One would rise from the nothingness, and become himself once more.

A calmness had spread over him, and he knew that he would never know panic or pain ever again. In the nothingness where consciousness is separated, he was nothing, and part of nothing. He was not a man or a machine, he was not part of a species or a plan or an equation. He was blackness, the absence of something. How he came from nothing into the world again, he can only assume it's because he chose to.

When he returned he found the world more or less how he remembered it. The only difference was that he could see more of it, all of it in fact, all at the same time. He soon realized this is how God saw, if he ever existed. And with God's eyes he observed the world he had died to save. He reached into the very plugs that connected humanity together. There in the Matrix they seemed so distant from one another, strange that they were in fact all connected into one machine, and were in effect, one being with each other. It was through this single machine that he reached out into everyone, and saw everything. It was through God's eyes he saw the world.

It was four months before he ate, he didn't need to eat, and the food wasn't really there, and he wasn't really there. But it took him four months to remember that he once ate food. It took him four months to recall how to chew and swallow. Because before that moment, eating just didn't seem important to him.

He could hear outside the walls of the world, outside the Matrix itself he heard the whispering conversations of the Machines who maintained it. And it was through the Earth that he felt the shockwaves of Zion, rebuilding herself just as he had. He heard man and machine, discuss the future, the future of both their species. He heard the Machine, who was more human than anyone would know, afraid of the future. For the first time something was not going according to a plan, and it scared them. And Man, deep underground, was distrustful and as hurt as ever.

He was breaking through the back doors, watching the armies of the Frenchman come for him. But the first thing he had ever learn was how to disrupt the code of the Matrix, and it was simple for him to merely rewrite the very code the programs were made of. He didn't just kill them, he annihilated them. Piece by piece, he tore them from existence. For this he didn't have to lift a finger, he didn't have to punch anyone, or shoot anyone, or use kung-fu. He just made it happen. By their very code he ripped them apart. This is how he dealt with the Lycans and the Vampires of the Merovingian.

The bullets were useless, they were useless.

He walked quietly through the Frenchman's chateau, confronting the man himself in his entrance hall. The Frenchman stood above him on the stairs, and beside him was Persephone, who looked upon him with great fear, she did not recognize him.

"It can't be." She whispered.

"It is me." Neo said.

The Frenchman raised his head, and put his hands on the railing of his marble stairs. He stared down at Neo, total blackness against that white floor. Neo himself stood tall and strong, with a look of complete apathy directed at everything around him. He hardly seemed like a man anymore.

"My God, what has happened to you, Boy?" The Frenchman asked.

"I died." He said plainly.

"Your tricks do not impress me. I did the same long, long ago."

For the first time in years The Frenchman takes his wife's hand, she's shocked by the action. He doesn't look at her, but he grips her hand tightly, afraid.

"I am aware of that now, Merovingian. I saw in the nothingness who you are."

"Did you?"

"You are me."

Persephone's lip part and a small gasp escapes her lungs. She looks to her husband, and for the first time in years, she can see him.

"The first me, in fact. I am the sixth. But you are the first, the first Chosen One, the first Messiah of the people of Zion. You were their experiment, you were their results. Long ago you were human, and long ago you went to the Architect and chose a door."

"Obviously, not the same door as you."

"You did not save her."

He looks to Persephone, but the Frenchman pushes her away and slams his fist into the railing.

"I could not save them, but I saved us! Here we are! Alive, after all these years, we are still alive!" The Frenchman cries.

Just then from the ceiling One and Two pop their heads into the room. Like an embodied storm cloud their bodies blow chaotically, their code hardly being able to hold together. They were beautiful creatures, two beautiful sons written by a former Messiah.

"One, look." Two said.

"It is Neo." One said.

"Indeed, it is."

"Father, do not be alarmed…"

"…We shall protect you."

"It is noble of you to wish to protect him, but it is useless." Neo warned them.

They smiled down at Neo, for what did they to fear? Nothing had ever killed them. Their father had made sure that they above all would be immortal. Their father had made sure they would never know pain or death or anything that so plagued mortal man. They knew not how to fear. So all they did was look down at Neo and smile. All their lives they'd been made to fight. So all they enjoyed was fighting.

They flew down towards the One, who did not move. They landed beside him and punched him, but to their shock, their fists flew right through him, like he himself was a ghost. Neo looked up at the Merovingian.

"I told you." Neo said.

Neo grabbed One by the neck, One instinctively and immediately turned to his ghost form where he raged and squirmed, but he could not break from Neo's hand.

"Useless."

Neo was stopping it at the code's level, preventing him from phasing through his hand. The ghost screamed an unholy scream, his transluscent form seemingly screaming with him.

"Brother." Two said.

Two ran into Neo, grabbing him by the waist, together the trio fell through the floor. The three of them had the unique and common ability to distort the Matrix around them. For One and Two, the talent was a gift from their father. For Neo it was a skill that he had earned. One and Two naturally had more ease with it, but Neo had a greater amount of control over the Matrix around him. They fought each other, falling through the walls and floors of the endless labrynth that was the Frenchman's home and trap. Punches and kicks went through one another. One took out his knife but Neo grabbed it right out of his hand and then scraped One's cheek.

The trio stopped, it was the first time they had ever bled. One hunched over and held his cheek. Two went to his side, holding him slightly there. The Twins looked up at Neo.

"I didn't know…"

"My blood would be so red."

"What are you?"

"What do you want?" They said.

"I want my other half."

The Twins tilted their head at the thought. It was something that they could easily understand.

"You are a One in Two?" They asked.

"Yes."

"Your Other is trapped here, then?"

"Yes."

"We cannot allow you…"

"We can't…"

"Thought we understand you."

Neo nodded.

The Twins bowed their heads. Neo bowed his own.

The Merovingian was pulling Persephone down the endless hallways, she was struggling against him, but he was determined.

"You must hide." He told her. "You must."

"I don't understand! What are you keeping from me?"

"There's no time."

She pulls him back to face her.

"Make time, explain this to me. This is the first time you've even paid more than ten minutes to me. What's going on? What's wrong?"

"You saw for yourself! We are under attack."

"But why! Why do you suddenly care about me?"

"Because he loves you." Neo said.

The couple jumped as they saw Neo's lean figure down the hall from them, appearing without a scratch on him. The figure leaned ever so slightly to the right, the head tilted down like some inhuman and sinister thing.

"He's lost you twice now, he just needed reminding why he loved you in the first place. If nothing else, the end of the world showed him what it was like without you."

Neo looks up and walks towards them. The Frenchman tugs at his wife, but she remains still.

"I see her in you now." Neo looks to Persephone.

And suddenly, only Persephone sees for a mere moment, Neo frowns.

"Do you miss her?" Persephone asks.

She takes a step forward towards him, but the Frenchman holds her back, trying desperately to protect her.

"Yes." Neo replies simply. "I thought briefly about recreating her."

"Could you do that?"

"Yes."

"Then why don't you?"

"Because it wouldn't really be her."

Then after a silence his hand raises and he reaches up toward her. The Frenchman pulls her closer, but she looks at him and nods. She gently pushes him away and takes a step towards Neo who still stands on the air. She meets his fingertips frozen in place, she grabs his hand for him and puts it to her cheek. She searches his eyes for some sort of reaction, for some sort of emotion. But she cannot see it, she is however certain that it was there.

His hand lingers there on her cheek, feeling the softness of the fake skin, and even then he can see the code that makes her up, and even then he knows there is no body that this mind can go to. He sees every piece of her, all at once, and he knows even then, she is not Trinity. It is she who breaks away, his hand still lingers where her cheek was. It is she who turns to her husband and cries into his chest, and he holds her, for the first time in years he holds her.

"Mon amour," he tells her, "Ne pleurez pas. Je suis désolé. Ne pleurez pas." He gently pushes her away, until she stands on her own.

The Frenchman looks to Neo.

He punches Neo in the face. He goes for another punch, Neo blocks, an elbow, Neo blocks. A kick to the knee that Neo dodges. In some awful ballet, two men fighting similar styles, one attacking and the other simply defending. The years had gone by and the Frenchman was no longer anyone's Messiah. But long ago he had fought for a people, a people who believed in him. He had fought for a woman who loved him. Long ago he was a man. Long ago he fought like this. But Neo nearly ends it all when he punches the Frenchman in the chest.

"You are a failed Messiah." Neo tells the Frenchman. "You and my predecessors. However, you succeeded where they did not. You survived the purge, the creation of a whole new Matrix. Why then, I wonder, did you never seek out the Resistance, the next One, to aid them?"

The Frenchman shakes his head.

"I could not stop the machine already in progress." He says.

"I did."

"I did what I could."

Neo stares at him, stares into him, and reads the traces that reveal his human origins.

"You know what I am here for." Neo says.

"I don't have any idea."

"Do not lie to me, I can feel him."

"No. You cannot have him."

Neo kicks his knee in.

"You will give him to me."

"He's dying."

"I can save him."

"No. I will not give that monster to another monster."

Neo grabs the man by the throat, squeezing it slowly, slowly.

"Stop!" Persephone screams.

Neo looks at her, and lets him go. The Merovingian falls, and she falls with him, grabbing him, holding his head up. Neo looks down at them, almost not understanding it. Long ago the Frenchman and his wife were human, but they had been forgetting what it was like ever since they had left their bodies. Neo would admit that he was experiencing a similar sensation at the loss of his life and his body. He was a mind of a human free from humanity, he was forgetting slowly what it was like to be alive. He feared this digression, this apathy that the eyes of God had given him. He looked on a little longer at the Frenchman and his wife, she held him with her tears drying. He could not speak but his fingers trailed her tears on her face. He must have really loved her once more.

When they looked up Neo was gone.

He walked on the air deeper into the chateau that was so well written and crafted that anyone without his eyes would get hopelessly lost. But he saw the way the walls curved and twisted together, he saw the very coding try to trick him. But after a while he no longer needed his eyes, for he felt he was being somehow tugged towards what he sought. He had found even in death and even with God's eyes he was still a creation of an equation, and was still bound to that equation. Four months after he returned he was eating noodles in a restaurant where no one recognized him anymore, and he remembered the face of an enemy that he was forever tied to. And it fell on him suddenly, where this enemy was, this opposite that defined who he was.

It grew more and more silent the deeper into the chateau. It seemed colder, but temperature was not a concern of his. The lights faded, and he knew he was going to a place where few ever went. His footsteps echoed along the walls and at the end of a dark hallway he saw a light shining from the side. He could suddenly hear the deep and painful breaths and the machines doing their work. Despite the fact that none of this was here, that Neo himself was a formless mind, and that the entire Matrix didn't really exist, it had rules, and with the exception of Neo, all things were bound to these rules. Neo's particular coding which was made to initiate the restart of the Matrix, had with it the quality of disrupting the Matrix around him. And with that ability he rewrote the rules around him, he could fly, he could live forever.

But there were others, like his opposite, that were still bound to the rules of this fake world.

Smith could hear the footsteps from the hallway over the monotonous sound of the machines around him. There had been many days when he had felt that he knew it was his salvation coming for him, there were days when he felt he knew that it was Neo down that hall coming for him. And he had felt this so many times and met with so much disappointment that he had been beaten down. He no longer assumed Neo was coming, and felt that perhaps the One was still dead, and he alone was left alive to suffer on his own. And so when he heard the footsteps, he assumed nothing. He thought it was the Frenchman come to torture him again.

And when Neo came in through the door, Smith didn't even move.

"Has it happened yet? Am I dead?" He asked Neo.

Smith laid there in a simple bed, a machine program now connected to machines to live. He had grown emanciated over the years, lying helplessly in that bed. When he was found by the Frenchman he could hardly move, and over the years he had not gotten better, but only worse. The Frenchman had decided to keep him, believing he would be the only one fitted for containing a monster like Smith. On the occasions that the Frenchman would come to him all he would say is how happy he is that it was he who found Smith, how happy and how safe he feels knowing Smith is down here where he can't hurt anyone anymore.

He seemed suddenly so very small to Neo. Lying there in that bed, his head lying by its own weight. Smith was very evidently dying slowly. He laid there in a daze, and Neo knew that there were only rare moments where Smith was full conscious and aware. This moment was not one of them.

He could remember the rain and the lightning and the feeling of his ribs breaking under Smith's punches. He could remember all the hate he felt in the moments where Smith seemed triumphant. He remembered being afraid and angry and cold and now there Smith was, a body that wasn't real, dying in a world that wasn't real. He sat down in a chair beside Smith, who was laying on his side. Neo now faced Smith and Smith looked up slightly to see Neo's face.

"No, you're not dead yet." Neo told him.

"Is it raining outside? I hear rain."

"No, it's not."

"Oh."

Smith laid his head back down and closed his eyes. Neo, wanting Smith's attention, grabbed his limp hand.

"Smith. It is me." Neo said.

"Hm."

"I have come for you. I have returned from nothing for you."

"What do you make of the world?"

"What?"

"The world we made, it's as bad as the last one."

Smith shook his hands away from Neo and curled up even more, closing his eyes.

"I can still smell them." Smith said. "Even in here, I can smell them. This is the world we made when we died, I hate it too."

"Smith, we are bound by a connection we cannot severe. I have returned for you so that we can be together."

"I'm dying."

"Your code is corrupted, this happened because of what I did to you, I can fix it."

"I miss the rain."

"I will make it rain."

"I miss the real world."

"We can go there."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why do you care about what happens to me?"

"Because…if you die, I will be alone. Remember, Smith? When we were in the white room, you told me to come find you and so I have."

"The white room?"

"We spoke for what seemed like ages."

"I couldn't keep myself from slipping apart all over again."

"We still have work, Smith."

The machines hook into Smith and they read out his heartbeats and his breaths. They make sure he keeps going. But then Neo takes his hand once again, and he's too tired to turn back over and see it happen.

"I am sorry."

"Do what you must."

Neo grips his weak hand and knows it is cold and withered. He forgives Smith, forgives him for everything, and apologizes for never being able to give him peace. Smith's life was a violent and cruel life, and that is all he'd ever know, all he'd ever feel, all he'd be able to comprehend. But for a brief moment when Neo took his hand, there was relief.

The Merovingian held the hand of the woman he loved, running down the corridors. When they turned a corner into Smith's room they found no one there.