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TITLE: Insides Out
AUTHOR: Dylan
RATING: R.
SUMMARY: As usual, the Oracle is the bearer of ill news. Agent Smith waits in the wings, and Trinity, in the middle of this desperate war, deals with her fear and doubt. And fucks Neo a lot.
CATEGORY: Romance, Agent, Adult.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: This fic squeezes, in my mind, somewhere in between "Matrix" and "Matrix: Reloaded." Apparently, Neo knew Smith was back before he met him again in that latter film, mm'kay. And Morpheus' crew visit the Oracle semi-regularly?
Insides Out
Near the end, there was a time when Neo and I learned to love fucking in the Matrix.
We loved the way our bodies were so supple, so tight – unrecognizable to us in comparison with the ways we were Outside. And we loved how warm the air was, so different than the perpetual metal cold of the ship.
Neo had discovered – for entirely war-related purposes, of course – that he could mask our code, that we could go nearly invisible within the Matrix’s larger programming, and we used this to our advantage. Neo and I, we shuddered to think that one of our Operators might catch us at this strange, unexplainable game in the heart of enemy territory.
I see now when it started, our fascination with the other’s and our own residual self-image: skins cream-white, uninterrupted by the metal holes and openings that served as such jarring and hated reminders of past blindness. It all began after a visit to Her.
“This is not something you want to know, honey. Believe me. I know.” The Oracle regarded me over her grandmother glasses, eyes hard and warning. I should have paid attention then.
“Tell me,” I demanded instead, voice surprising me with its forcefulness.
She sighed, a deep, bitter sound, and got up to pace over to the kitchen counter. “Coffee?”
“Tell me, ” I repeated, and then paused and looked away. “Please.”
I remember She put her hand on the countertop then, leaning all her weight against it – a gesture of defeat. The other hand was at her aproned hip, bracing, and She turned her back to me. “There’s no two ways about it. He’s going to die.”
I stood up as though slapped, and I remember knocking over her vase of flowers, and I remember the ceramic clash and clatter of it against the linoleum. I flinched at the unexpected sound, but She hadn’t moved.
Her back to me still, “I see some things very clearly. And if we win, I don’t see him. And if we lose, I don’t see him.”
I started to shake, and absurdly reached down to gather the broken shards of that stupid, stupid vase. There were water and bright green flower stems all over the floor.
Later, when I had beaten and battered myself into some semblance of composure, I went out into the waiting room, and I wrapped my arms around him. And I remember being grateful for his sunglasses and that I couldn’t see his eyes or he, mine. Then he’d gone in for his ‘checkup,’ and I was left standing alone with Morpheus.
He studied my face sidelong. “Bad news?”
I nodded, swallowing.
And when Neo came out, he didn’t have his glasses on. He always talked to Her without them. And this time his eyes were haunted. Bad news for him too, then. I rested my head against his chest and breathed in.
Morpheus was called off on other business, and Neo and I, on the way back to our Exit, we found the nearest empty tenement building and fucked roughly against the back wall, not speaking. It would take me weeks – many times I looked up from whatever I was doing to catch those brown eyes tracing my face, full of some great fear he could not hide – weeks to realize what the Oracle’s words to him must have been, and then finally, the whole thing clicked into place. Like anything Fate did, it had its own kind of horrible poetry. She’d told him I wasn’t going to make it either, hadn’t She.
It didn’t and doesn’t surprise me. I have always known that when he goes, so will I.
We couldn’t seem to fuck enough to stay warm, to bleed away the unshakeable cold of the Real, to banish, if only for that moment, its dirty desperations and harsh truths. The leather of his clothes felt so good under my hands, so much slicker than the handspun cloth he actually wore. We couldn’t seem to fuck enough to bleed away the energy we had, Matrix-side. The energy so at odds with the undernourished, sleep-deprived bodies we normally inhabited. Here, if we believed it hard enough – and that was his strength, wasn’t it? believing himself into flying? – we could believe that we had just eaten a five-course dinner, and slept well in beds made of down and warm flannel.
We couldn’t get enough of each other’s digital skin, lips and teeth and shoulderblades. Hips and collarbones. Without telling him, I was captivated by that particular place at the back of his skull where his hairline met bare, white skin, where the fuzz made a V into the groove shaped by the two strong tendons at the back of his neck, where it was unmarred here, in this place, by the ugly, naked hole of his brain plug.
And I counted the smooth bumps of his spine with my tongue, free of their metal protrusions.
We were fucking. I wrapped my legs around Neo’s hips as he thrust into me, my back against the wall. “Harder,” I whispered through clenched teeth, and he grabbed my ass in one hand and pushed into me.
I hooked my chin over his right shoulder, and we moved together. I looked out the window and over to the roof of the building next door, several feet above our floor. And froze.
“Jesus.”
Smith was standing stock-still on the roof there, looking down at us.
Neo’s head jerked up and followed my gaze out the window. I felt the exact moment when their eyes met; Neo tensed his body against mine, arms tightening as if to protect me, and we half-stumbled, still together, sans our usual Matrix-granted grace, away from that damn window.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Neo was murmuring in shock.
Smith had been smiling.
“Neo,” I breathed into his mouth and came, clenching around him. And then his face went open, and he was coming too, and we were jerking away from each other, and Neo was throwing himself out the window, glass shattering, his hands still working at the zipper of his pants.
We didn’t catch Smith, of course. By the time we got there, the son of a bitch was gone. I had hoped, when Neo killed him all those months ago, that it would stick.
We stopped stealing extra minutes inside the Matrix after that – and so we also stopped fucking. Even Outside we avoided doing it near windows.
I know Neo feared he could follow us there too.
END
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