Body
“Thus the Other’s body is meaningful.” –Jean-Paul Sartre
Thumb, curled between palm and fingers. Her fingernails make half-moon gouges in the flesh of her own hand. It makes the shaking stop. There is pain tonight. The free hand holds a compress to her eye, but it will still be swollen shut in the morning. She expects this. Already, she can trace the fresh bruises across her forearms, feel the burn in her stomach from where she was kicked and the sting of the scratches along her back from where her body was sent skidding across the ground.
Not her body. Not her body. Her RSI.
Makes all the difference. All the difference. Her body bears the bruises, but her RSI takes the fall. Two forms transcended – but still two forms. And it is not herself that she worries for now.
Her eyes watch the scrolling green stream but her mind sees through it – through to the wires, the metal, the grate of the ship’s floor on the other side. Doesn’t see the code or the picture or the Matrix – sees nothing at all save for the rattling in the back of her own mind; she feels hollow.
Just an hour, Trinity. Just an hour. She glances at the timepiece embedded in one of the monitors. Seven minutes left.
She knows there is nobody who could have taken this watch. Morpheus has been shot – not critically, but a severe wound nonetheless -- and Tank has to take care of him. The new crew are too young, not familiar enough with the code to be trusted with the responsibility of watch on a night like this.
And Neo –
She bites her lip. God. Neo? She prays he is asleep. Wishes her hands would stop shaking.
Today had been a bloodbath, a massacre. Her mouth tastes foul at the images. Four Agents; an army of unwitting coppertops. In one room: the database that needed to be drained. In the next: a hive, hundreds of cubicles where office workers feed the Agents’ need for new bodies. For a time the fight is contained as Morpheus and Trinity manage to destroy host bodies while Neo destroys the programs. Two are deleted. The remaining two are desperate, and they draw the fight out into the main office room where the access to fresh hosts is more immediate. More Agents join them there, and suddenly there are five – five – and three resistance fighters. The room is sealed; havoc ensues – people run for doors, dive for cover, many are screaming and some are sobbing over the sounds of gunfire. They recoil from her – recoil from Neo and Morpheus too, trusting business suits over long leather coats.
She looses sight of Neo among the rising piles of corpses. A massacre. Her hands, chest, face, covered in the blood of innocents, and when she spots him, she sees he is, too. Her sunglasses are long lost. His are intact on his face – she can’t see his eyes. His speed – her eyes can’t catch it, can’t follow; sometimes he seems to be four places at the same time, but then as fast as they split they are rejoined, and she’s not sure if the multiplication ever really happened.
She has never seen him move so fast.
But when he comes out he is haunted. Morpheus has been shot in the shoulder; in the real world, the blood soaks his shirt, dripping off his body onto the floor. Neo stares at Trinity with frightened eyes but she has to help Tank bring Morpheus to the med bay. Before Tank puts him under the anaesthetic, Morpheus catches her arm and says “You have to keep the watch, Trinity. For an hour.”
It is protocol. After especially bad encounters on the inside, close watch must be kept for at least an hour for the safety of the ship and for any other crews who may be jacked in – an abnormality watch. The rest of the crew can’t take it – Neo, too, would be qualified, but she saw his face when he awoke in the core, and knows that tonight, he can’t. Tonight, there are too many lives on his mind and his hands.
She finds a compress for her eye and returns to the Core. Neo is not there.
She prays he is asleep.
Thumb, curled between palm and fingers. Her fingernails make half-moon gouges in the flesh of her own hand. It makes the shaking stop.
She looks at the clock, and immediately leaps out of her seat. Watch shift is over.
In the dark, her hands find the wheel of their cabin door and turn it slowly. In spite of her efforts, it creaks, and she winces.
The lights are out, but there is no complete darkness on the Neb. His boots are on the floor and he is sitting on the end of the bed, forearms resting on bent knees, head bent down in front of his chest.
The air in the room is ice. Trinity’s compress isn’t cold anymore; she tosses it onto the chair in the corner and then crouches to take off her boots. Neo doesn’t move as she climbs onto their bunk with him, sitting at the opposite end, a mirror of him. She wants to hold him but is unsure of what’s appropriate – his body is like stone. She begins to wonder if maybe he has fallen asleep like that, sitting up, and whether she should disturb him to bring him under the blankets with her.
Such a narrow cot – barely wide enough for one, and shared here by two.
“I threw up,” he says, suddenly. “Twice.” He doesn’t look up, makes no move toward her, so she keeps still, though she is not surprised that he has been sick.
“Neo. . .” her voice trails off. She doesn’t know what to say.
“There’s not a scratch on me,” he says. “So much blood on my hands. . . I lost track of the kill count.” Finally, finally, he looks up at her; his eyes are dry, hard, and desperate. “What was the kill count?”
The soft inside of her lip is pressed between her teeth. “I don’t know.” They don’t keep track of the number of dead – they never do. Neo knows this – she knows he knows this. She also knows that there were dozens who died today – maybe seventy, eighty people. Too many for anyone’s peace of mind.
“How’s Morpheus?” he asks suddenly, face intent.
“He’s going to be fine. The wound wasn’t critical.”
“Good. . .” he says, “good. He was bleeding so much. . . .” Pause. “You know, that was the first time I’ve seen him shot.”
“Oh, Neo—”
“I’m serious.”
She knows. But she also knows that Morpheus has taken his share of bullets in his fighting years, and that one more won’t break him.
Suddenly, Neo’s hand shoots forward and grabs her wrist from where it rests on her knee. He jerks it towards him and her body follows, her neck whip-lashing just a little as it is momentarily left behind her shoulders.
“Two-thirds – three-quarters of those deaths in there were mine, Trinity. I fucking killed them. And look at me! Where is the blood on my hands?”
“Neo—” her wrist is caught in his vice-grip; her free hand moves to touch him. She doesn’t know what to tell him. She doesn’t have the skill to kill like he does. But before she reaches, he says, “I was shot twice today, you know.”
She freezes. “What?”
His eyes meet hers in a glare that seems to beg for defiance simply so that he can tear it down. Something in her chest feels torn, her lungs limp as a dirty rag.
“Yeah,” he says. “One bullet passed here.” He pulls down the neck of his shirt and makes bare a space just beneath his right collarbone, where he points to a clean patch of uncut skin. “The other,” he says, “passed here,” and he pulls up the hem of his shirt to reveal the side of his pale and unbruised abdomen. “They passed right through me, Trinity, like I was water, and I barely felt them go. The bullets just hit me and. . . kept going, until they buried themselves in something else. A wall. Or another body.” His hand still clutches her wrist and she is staring at him.
He was shot – and the bullets passed straight through him. Suddenly she doesn’t know where to put her eyes, where to place her gaze.
His hand tugs a little on her wrist; she slides obligingly closer to him. With gentle, gentle fingers he reaches up and touches the darkening skin around her eye.
“Does it hurt?” he asks softly.
“No.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not.”
He is staring at her eye, fixated; she doesn’t know what to tell him, how to touch him. One of her hands rests on his shoulder and the other remains at her side.
“I kill but I can’t be killed,” he mutters. “There’s no justice in that. It’s not fair for me to fight, Trinity. I’m judge, jury, and executioner and they can’t touch me. I sentence them and they don’t even know who I am.” A half-laugh, breathy. “I’m a ghost, Trinity. Sometimes I think I’m nothing but air.”
The subtle desperation in his voice makes her want to cry. She doesn’t know what to tell him; her mouth opens, closes, and opens again, but no sound will come out. She hates this feeling of insufficiency.
His hand slides down her neck and follows the curve of her muscle out to her shoulder; he watches the point of contact between their skin, transfixed. He pushes the wide collar of her shirt over the curve of her shoulder and down her arm a little, as far as it will go; another darkening bruise is revealed there, and he traces it softly with the tip of a callused index finger.
“Why do you bruise when I can’t?” He pauses. “It’s like I don’t even have a real body.”
His eyes meet hers again and they are soft and despairing and filled with such love and need for her and they say touch me, Trinity. Please.
And she does, because she doesn’t know what to say to him. She rises to her knees and presses closer to him, her cold hands (not shaking anymore) cupping his face, pushing his hair back off of his brow; then they slide down over his neck, shoulders, and down the lengths of his arms, overtop of his wool sweater. His body slides down under hers and her fingers weave instinctively through his for a moment. Her mouth falls to his, gentle and seeking. But he returns the kiss with a less gentle, persistent desperation; his head rises from the pillow and she holds it in her strong hands, holding him up, her knees on either side of his waist and her torso curled down to him. His elbow is braced against the mattress and the other hand marvels at how soft the skin of her cheek, the hardness of her jawbone over the smooth fall of her neck. When her mouth pulls away from his it is only far enough to see his eyes – his eyes, which are slow to open and then behold her in a kind of adoring wonder, eyebrows coming together just a little – just a little. He says nothing.
Tender fingertips brush down his front to the hem of his shirt where she lifts the layers off at once, exposing the unbroken, unbruised skin of his stomach, chest, shoulders, arms. Fingers from each hand move to the places where the bullets passed through him – her left hand to his right collarbone, her right hand to the lower left side of his abdomen. On the backs of her own fingers she can see healing scars and blue-black marks carried over from the other side. His eyes are watching her with a faithful kind of trust buried beneath desperate, passionate need – a need for more than just sex, but for some kind of reassurance, a physical reminder of his own being as something solid, to touch and be touched. Her fingers touch the two plugs in his chest, then move down to the four in his stomach, and she thinks, these are your war wounds, Neo – the mark of the machine in the man.
Give him back his body, Trinity.
She slides her body down his just a little and then lays forward, her weight settling over his. Her mouth finds the invisible bullet wound below his collarbone and kisses it, open-mouthed, drawing warmth to the surface of his skin and leaving a mark behind. She slides lower, finds the spot on his side and leaves her mark there, too. Bruises – bullet-wounds – for him to see the next time he looks in the mirror. He can feel what she has done and he gasps, hard, through his teeth.
Her fingers find the clasp of his pants and loosen it, pulling the waistband down past his hips. She can’t tell if his eyes are closed or watching her but when she puts her mouth on him a cry escapes his throat and his body makes a violent start. His eyes are closed, now, she’s certain; one of her hands is holding his hip and he grabs it in his, lacing his fingers through hers and rubbing her palm with his thumb. Briefly she considers having him come like this, but decides against it, wanting to be closer to him, her body against his. So she releases him, moves her mouth back up to his mouth and his eyes that meet hers are glassy and a little wet.
The realisation strikes him suddenly that she, hovering over his naked form, is still fully clothed. He sits up under her and works his hands beneath the layers of her shirts, lifting them all off at once. On her torso, he is met with the marks of battle: a surface knife-wound between two ribs on her side, but mostly bruises – spread like a caress across her stomach, breasts, chest. Darker at the tender skin around the plugs set between her abdominal muscles. When he touches the plugs, their metal is warm from the warmth of her body, but he does so gently, because he knows that any pressure will hurt the more severely bruised flesh beneath them. She watches him stare at her, his glistening eyes taking in the wreckage that is her body tonight. When his fingers brush down her back, she flinches – he sees dried blood on his hands, as she hasn’t had time to wash her cuts.
“Oh God, Trinity, I’m sorry—”
“Hush,” she says softly, silencing him as gently as she can. She guides his hands to the clasp of her waistband and he opens it carefully, easing it down over her hips and thighs, but with each new exposed inch of skin she sees his eyes narrow, following the marks of battle that cover her body like spilled ink.
“It’s not fair,” he says, tracing the outline of a bruise on her thigh. “I wish I could be hurt for you. . . I wish you didn’t have to know pain.” His voice trails off. For a moment she worries he might cry.
Instantly she is off him just long enough to pull her pants down off her ankles and then she joins her body with his, immediately, even though hers isn’t ready and that makes it hurt a little. But he notices – sees her eyes wince just the tiniest bit. Desperately, he rolls them over, settling himself over her – but she locks her ankles behind him and won’t let him pull away.
In sudden urgency – urgency for her, not for himself – he brings his mouth down to her, to her eyes, cheeks, mouth, kissing her with a wanting kind of passion. He moves to her neck with lips and tongue, finding the soft places where he knows she’s sensitive, and is relieved to hear her moan softly when he suckles there. Fingertips rough with callus dance gently-so-gently across her chest, a thumb brushing the places that she most wants touched until her body rises to press into his hand. One hand beneath her holds her up like that until his mouth can follow the places his touch had been, and her lip is pressed between her teeth. She barely notices his other hand as it slides down between their bodies until the violent rush of feeling causes her to cry out softly, muffled into the back of her own hand.
And suddenly their bodies are moving, their mouths are together and she’s holding him against her with a strength she didn’t know her real-world body possessed, her arm hooked beneath his shoulder and his lips at her neck now and oh – oh – her breath, catching halfway out of her lungs, and the sound of his gasps in her ears. Somehow, somewhere between the slow friction of their bodies and the begging call of her own heartbeat she hears him mutter “You are the only truth I know” and then she can’t stop it – her fingernails make marks in his back as her world stops turning, her body pressing up into his and the soft wash of her climax pulls them both over the edge into the gaping nothingness.
They say nothing. Their bodies separate, and they both rise for just long enough to pull the blankets back and slide under them. Speech is somehow excessive. When they lie back down, Neo presses the torn skin of Trinity’s back against his stomach and chest and he curls around her; she lets him, tangling her fingers through his. In the morning, he will crouch behind her in one of the Neb’s bathing stalls and clean the wounds on her back with a sponge and warm water. Later, when she spots him touching the dark spot beneath his collarbone, she will smile quietly to herself -- but grant him his privacy and pretend she doesn’t notice.
END