Nanaseven > Two Minutes
- AUTHOR: Nanaseven
- TITLE: Two Minutes
- CATEGORY: Drama, Post-Movie.
- RATING: PG
- SUMMARY: Two minutes inside One’s mind.
- AUTHOR'S NOTES: What...? I... don’t know. Angela Coggeshall. 9 December 2001. The Matrix belongs to someone else.
Two Minutes
sleeping doesn’t work anymore.
he can close his eyes but when he does there is no dark. there is water-beaded glass. there are shards of glass. a mirror of glass, his naked hands touching it, and her. her naked hands press against the other side of the mirror. her fingertips rest on his exactly. she is real. not glass.
but not dark.
he opens his eyes.
“there are no mirrors on the neb.” as if she can see into his mind. not surprising; he can feel her there right now, a splinter drawing sharp sweet blood that he thinks about for hours and wants to taste. his eyes find her, skin and bones and the color gray bundled together in the corner of the bunk. her thin fingers are caught in her hair. she drags them through, and again. clean hair. he knows that it smells like soap. “i almost miss the mirrors inside the matrix.”
they’ve installed a light above the bed. beneath it, her face is bleak nectar, eyebrows cocked as she pulls her hair up in two fistfuls. she is beautiful, but it doesn’t matter if she doesn’t know it.
“you don’t need a mirror,” he says to her.
he is satisfied without her smile. anything more than a slightly curbed statement would be more pretense than purity, more bustling streets than silent cabin. she is restrained, maybe always has been and always will be; strength has never required a tangible ebullience. and she is tired with the late hour. he drags a fingertip light like breath along the shadows below her eyes, wishing her not lively, but content to live.
she looks at him directly. “don’t you want to sleep?”
“you should.”
“i’m not tired. you seem it, though.”
“i am.”
she smiles at him, now, but the smile falls into place alongside the shabby walls, a humming ventilation unit, frost in the air, the thin blanket shared between them. as she unfurls across the mattress, her eyes lowered modestly, and furls into him, her head slack against his stomach, she passes a hand over the lampswitch. her face becomes gray in the banal hues of the dim cabin, all he can see of the swell of one cheek. he fixes his gaze upon her hair, sprawling limply across his torso.
and it is dark.
sleeping doesn’t work anymore. but trinity does. she is his peace.
there is no reason to close his eyes again tonight.
