Chapter Text
Her feet were planted in the air. She didn't know what would happen if they touched the ground. "That window," Neo pointed. It was outlined in light. Unreal. He was weightless code in her hand, three storeys above the Embarcadero. "You're on a ship. That's our way out. We can go straight through it."
Trinity closed her eyes and slammed through the glass into her body.
She was. Inner ear static as the jackline slid out. Her heavy head. Her punctured, interrupted skin tight over her jacks as she breathed his name.
Ship scent like ozone and rust and a bad breath of tunnel air, and something else she didn't recognise. Pod residue, thin and bloody on her skin. She tore her eyes from Neo's face, watched the endless green fall of the monitors, simpler to parse than English - morning in a city far away. She could see all of it. It was beautiful inside. His arm was around her shoulders. His hand was in hers.
She reached her hand to the name etched on the core. Mnemosyne. She did. She did remember this. Like a job or an apartment she'd been gone from for decades. Except this was real. It was her body. Her dead body. A hand reached for hers on the plaque - a stranger with a quiff of dark hair, who didn't feel strange at all. "Welcome aboard. I'm Captain Bugs."
She took it clumsily, still holding tight to Neo. "Trinity." She stared at their joined hands. "I was first mate. Nebuchadnezzar." She felt the ship close grey around her as she spoke, her old home.
Bugs's lip curled. "You are." Tip of the thumb to their temple. "You were in my brain. Trippy. I know who you are." Trinity felt the whole crew watching her. She tried to take in their names and faces as Bugs introduced them. The runners who'd helped them fight their way out. Freeborn crewers. Machines - synthients. A program in oscillating dust. Neo had told her. They'd talked on the rooftop before the exit. Humans and machines and programs all come for her because they remembered who she was. Bugs turned on one heel. "We need to get out of here. There'll be time to talk later. If we make it."
She leaned against Neo as the crew parted, each one of them looking back at her as they ran back to the life of the ship, even the machines. How was she even standing? She could remember her first escape now - her real childhood, in shadows and red flashes of pain - weeks before she'd stood unaided - the poor Neb medic who'd carried her to the bathroom during her second painful menarche. Not this time, at least. One of the humans approached them - a young woman with tight-coiled hair - she must have been freeborn, her arms bare under her shirt. There was warmth and concern in her eyes. "Trinity, welcome. I'm Ellster - I'm the Mnemosyne's medic. Could you come to the infirmary with me?"
Trinity looked back at Neo. Her body was unfamiliar casing. She was used to taking care of things alone, surrounded by people who needed her, but alone. There was a curtain of dread between this body and her thoughts. "Could you come with me?" She clutched Neo's hand, like she'd get lost in herself without it.
"Of course," Neo said. The care in his eyes felt overwhelming.
They followed Ellster down the hallway. The infirmary was in the right place but it didn't smell the same, the chemical mix was all wrong. She sat on a med bunk, her hand still dangling from Neo's.
"Trinity, I'm going to need you to get undressed," Ellster said, and pulled a heavy curtain around the bed. It stopped at their joined hands.
"I'm sorry," Neo murmured, dropping her hand and averting his gaze, like her body might burn his eyes. "I'm right here." He closed the curtain between them. Her hand ached for his warmth. Her mind missed the sky. She felt claustrophobic and alone. She wished Ellster wasn't there because she thought Neo could have looked at her if they'd been alone. She slipped off the soft blue shirt and pants and wondered whose clothes they really were. She looked down at her jacks. She remembered her jacks - they were part of her, a history. But these weren't her jacks. There were so many of them. And she had a plate of extruded metal on her crotch - she touched it. Smooth, slimy with pod amnion. Her fingers traced down to its base. It went into her vagina. She hadn't known how uncomfortable it was until she looked at it. Hadn't felt the intrusion until she saw it. What was it for? Every machine had a purpose. This one occupied her.
"You ready, Trinity?" the young woman called.
"I'm ready." Her voice didn't betray her. Trinity still sat on the edge of the bunk, staring at herself. This hadn't been her body in a long time - it had been the machines'. It was hers. It was her future. Ellster slipped through the curtain. She gestured for Trinity to lie down, and pulled the sheet over the upper half of her body, covering the foreign array of jacks. The doctor reached for a device in a rack overhead that moved like a dentist's light - she pulled it nearer, turned a dial and unfolded a monitor screen, thumbed buttons until a pale violet light shone from its sleek lenses. Trinity didn't recognise this as human tech. The crew had been salvaging, always scavenging. Making new.
Trinity watched Ellster's eyes widen as she studied the monitor. "Neo, could you call Lumin8? I think I need its help."
"Is she alright?" The panic in his light step. Trinity stared at the curtain. Lumin8 was a synthient. A machine.
Ellster laid a gentle hand on her arm. "Should I tell him?" she whispered. Trinity nodded at her - she wanted Neo to know as much as she knew about her body. Ellster straightened. "Trinity's doing fine but she has a pod fitting that needs to be removed and I think Lumin8 could get a better grip on it than me." Pod fitting. Trinity held still, held on to Ellster's eyes. She wanted to rip down the curtain. Pod fitting. But what the hell else was the poor medic meant to call it. She could feel it when she breathed now. If she moved it would move with her. She kept still.
Clattering and footsteps and the door closing again. "Trinity -" Curtain rustling, filigrene clicking up the frame of the bunk. Her hand up without thinking. She felt steel pinpricks on her tongue. Scraping needles in her eyes. Metal limbs holding her underwater. Rise and fall of her diaphragm, skin pulled round jacks, the synthient's tiny hands flat between steel and her skin. She could see it. Dense, golden, fractal thoughts in Lumin8’s core. Codes she could break as easy as breathing. It would be like murder. She felt machines touching inside her brain.
Ellster's fingers depressed her belly at the edge of the plate. There was a needle in her hand, blue liquid floating in the syringe. "What's that?" Trinity asked her.
"Local anaesthetic," Ellster replied. "That thing's fixed to two jacks that plant against your ilioinguinals."
"Shit." She couldn't remember where those went but it sounded bad. Her jacks wired in the territory of her nerves. She wasn't stupid enough to say no, but it hurt to cede her body back to numbness. "Alright."
She tensed as the needle slid into her skin. She watched Lumin8 bring a collection of fine tools out of a drawer - a microsaw, a flex pin shaped for the synthient's hands that could turn screws too small to see. "It's inactive?" Ellster asked the little machine. Its lights flickered. She watched the sawblade thrum in its hands. Pressure on numb flesh, a tear growing by millimetres. Cloud of metal dust precipitating on her naked hip. Why should this even bother her after she'd given birth three times and had god knows what instruments shoved up in there -
That never happened.
This thing all along.
The quiet whine and chitter of Lumin8 sawing the plate of metal.
She flailed her hand at the curtain. Neo grasped it, wrapping his own around her through the cloth. "I'm here, Trinity."
She heard the plate break from one of the jacks. Ellster bent over her as the synthient sprang over her torso. Trinity recognised the tool in the young woman's hand - they used it for smoothing out scratched jacks. She wanted to sit up and grab it and patch up her own self like she'd always done when she was free. Her hands shook. She curled the empty one, and felt Neo hold the other tighter. She watched the synthient with its saw, tenths of millimetres from her skin.
The metal broke free. She felt the object tilt, twist sideways in her vagina. Ellster's fingers caught its stem, her eyes on the monitor. Trinity looked up at the screen and realised part of her was expecting to see a baby and she wanted to scream with laughter. It moved like a probe. Like a fucking ultrasound appointment that never fucking happened and she was staring at a stark mass of metal on the screen. Is it a boy or a girl?
"I think it's fully unhooked," Ellster nodded. "There’s some filaments deeper inside, but they’re free-floating. I can take it out as soon as you're ready - it might feel strange."
"I'm ready."
Trinity felt Ellster pull gently at the object's stem. She could feel her cervix prickle as the wires slid out - it was no effort to her, no labour, but its lumpy centre caught weirdly inside her vagina, like her body didn't know how to let the machine go. Was it really that fucking difficult? Ellster tugged, and it slipped out all at once, sticky metal between her thighs. "There we go. Lumin8, can we get a parts disposal -"
Trinity rose half-upright. "I want to see it."
Ellster's eyes widened, and she put it into Trinity's empty hand. Plump bulb at the end of a flexible stem, surface scored and hinged as if it might unfold into another set of secrets. Three monofilament wires sprouted from its head. The plate dangled heavy from the other end. This object was realer than her children. "I don't remember this. I unplugged a lot of people and I never saw this."
"Me either," said Ellster. Her hand covered Trinity's over the stem, gentle, the way you must be when someone's just woken up and knows so little and feels so much all the time, and there's only so much you can tell them. "You and Neo were different. The same in a lot of ways, but others I don't yet understand." Violated differently. Ellster pulled the sheet down over Trinity's legs. She felt gross underneath it. "Do you need a moment?"
Trinity shook her head, tried to shove it all out of mind. "I want this over with. What else you got for me? Shots?"
Ellster smiled awkwardly. Seemed like she was glad to close up Trinity's different, nasty interior and do something routine. "Yeah." She opened a fridge compartment in the bulkhead, and turned back with a couple of syringes in her hand. "Can't say I get a lot of coppertops who already know the drill."
"Did you just fucking call me a coppertop?"
Ellster looked terrified until Neo exhaled a breathy laugh, and god, to Trinity it felt like hearing music for the first time. She could hear the tears on his lashes. "Sorry," Ellster said. She glanced at their joined hands, and steadied a syringe against Trinity's bare thigh instead. "Guess it's even less fun the second time around."
"Oh, I was fine fresh out of the pod," she murmured. Because she remembered that now, too. "When Morpheus unplugged me I felt like a fucking legend. Woke up in a power plant covered in gel and jacks...I loved it. Always wanted to shave my head but my dad would've beat me." Neo's hand flinched - she'd never told him much about her parents. Her first set of parents. God, her memory was a mess. It made for enough bluster that she barely noticed Ellster sticking her, cool in her veins. "They dumped Ghost on the other side of the med bay six hours later...two of us wrapped up in blankets like newborn babies with a curtain pulled between us and I told him he was my brother now and I was going to take care of everything for us. I was the shit."
"You are the shit," Neo chuckled, stroking the fabric against the palm of her hand. "You're the One," he whispered.
The words made her turn still. They'd always been there. She had believed in him and in herself. It was as natural as seeing for the first time. Or falling in love. She had jumped with his hand in hers and seen how she could not fall. She had always known, and not known what she knew. One.
Ellster looked down at her in awe. "We saw you fly. Were we wrong about you this whole time?"
"No -"
"Yes -" Neo had spoken at the same time. Trinity jerked aside the curtain until their eyes met again. "I never cared what anyone else believed," he said.
"I still don't," she whispered. "But I remember us."
She wanted to touch him, properly, kiss him like it was the first time all over again. "Are you comfortable?" Ellster asked gently.
"I need a shower," Trinity said. She felt grimed. She'd dropped the device on the bed beside her body. She couldn't quite look at it any more.
Ellster nodded. "That should be safe enough - the water in that unit's sterilised. You need help?"
She looked at Neo, silently pleading. "I'll take care of her," he said. She remembered how they'd tended new rescues together. Helping them eat and bathe, stimming dead muscles and rubbing topicals around jack sockets that looked like fresh piercings. Answering their questions as honestly as possible. Some of them had been like she was fresh out the first time, refusing to admit they needed help from anyone until they were falling over on the deck.
"Okay." Ellster put a gentle hand over hers. "I'll be nearby, you can come find me any time. I appreciate this isn't new for you, but you can always talk to me about anything that feels different or not-right, you know? You're going to need some time and care to get comfortable in yourself, just like anyone would." Trinity bit her tongue. She really didn't want to talk about her body with anyone except Neo if she could help it.
She hauled herself upright as soon as Ellster closed the door. The sheet slipped off her. She knew it wasn't that Neo hadn't wanted to look at her; he wanted it too much, and she wanted it too much. His eyes on her felt golden.
She traced her fingers over herself, ridges below her raw skin that stung and sang as she touched them. "I have more jacks." She could feel the warp of her skin on her back. Neo's eyes held her, soft as dawn. Dewdrops on his lashes. "You too?" she asked. He nodded. "Why?"
"To take more from us."
"Oh god." Hooked in her body this whole time. Metal and pus, wires under her ribs. Eyes that hurt, her neck hurt. "How do you sleep?"
"Without you? I haven't much."
"Neo..." she breathed. "Touch me?" He climbed on the bunk beside her, almost holding her, like he was afraid, like his hands would bruise her if he touched her too much. "Neo, what is it?" Silent tears ran from his eyes. His eyes. She could remember him losing his eyes, and she - "I was dead." His arms closed around her, like he'd been waiting for her to say it. To feel it crash through her body. The collision, a stab for every jack, pinned back again to the machines that created her. She'd gone as far as she could go, come back to their grasp like a comet. And here she was free of them again. Here they were - here he was. She remembered in layers and colours. A boyfriend she'd had for six months, long ago. Her lover, her everything. Six brutal months where her heart had never stopped racing except once, twice, stopped in that crush of steel in her ribs and blood filling her lungs. Flash of sun fading forever on his lips. Until she woke to it again, the crash and the sunrise above her, until she saw the rules of the world for what they were.
She saw his eyes fall on the machine attachment beside her; he reached for it, turned over the metal plate to read the web of circuitry underneath, his fingers following the flex up to its bulbous sensor head. "What is this?"
"It was in my vagina." He gasped. She'd hurt him. She wanted to reassure him, tell him how she hadn't really felt it, somehow take back its presence so it wouldn't come between them. She heard him fumble it as he stared at her, felt him decoding some emotion that she didn't even know the name of as it scrolled down her face. He gathered her back into his arms and held her sticky naked body so gently she couldn't breathe.
His embrace let her be. She'd lost that for so long, her body floating alone while she took care of everything in the matrix. She didn't want it to ever end, but her skin was crawling. "Neo," she whispered.
"You want that shower now?" he murmured.
"Yeah." She still felt like pod, too clean, like someone else's.
Neo helped her stand again, and walked her across to the shower cubicle, bearing more of her weight than she was herself. He reached in and unfolded a shower stool that was bolted to the wall, and she lowered herself ungainly onto it. Warm water on her skin. It was overwhelming. The clinging biogel stink receded as she bowed her head into the flow. She ran her hands over her own skin, like she had found half a human under the goo. Water streamed between her parted thighs. She touched her labia, and breathed sharp around her own sensitivity. She wanted the sanitised stink out of every fold.
"You okay?" Neo asked. He was half inside the cubicle, barefoot in his undershirt and pants. He looked good - graceful, solid, competent, while she was stumbling around like a newborn ungulate.
"I'll be okay." Her hands trembled as she lifted them from her lap, and Neo reached to turn the soap valve for her. She gathered it on her palms, rubbing her arms, under her breasts, between her legs. Her skin sockets stung at her touch - she'd forgotten how they got angry when they first touched fresh air. She'd forgotten how intense the sensitivity was. She was probably covering herself in scratches and bruises just trying to make the gel and machine touches go away. Neo took a handful of the soap, ran gentle fingertips from her shoulders down her back, an electric jolt on every jack they passed. "Thanks," she murmured.
"I got you, Trin." Neo's touch flowed back up to her neck, traced the edges of the unknown hardware. "I won't ask if you need me to do your hair."
She looked back at him and laughed. She'd missed him. She was laughing with tears in her eyes, shaking so hard her thigh jacks rattled the stool. God, how had she forgotten that she missed him so much? How could she have ever thought it was too late for this? His arms wrapped around her from the back, and she turned her head against his chest, sodden landscape of his shirt under her stupid sensitive cheek. She was soaking his undershirt and he didn't even mind. He wasn't going to be prissy or judgemental when she wanted his touch. She held him frantically like he might vanish again. Like she might never have this again. Like he might never ever forgive her. "God damn it, I love you," she sobbed. She loved his little jokes, his tenderness, his courage, his purity, the way he listened to her all through. "How did I…? I almost… I could have," she could have walked away from all of this?
Neo kissed the tip of her nose and it felt like touching a star. A comet trail of the softest kisses she'd ever known, up to the crown of her head. He tucked her under his chin. She hated that she was wasting precious hot water. He ran his hand so tenderly up her arm even though her naked breasts were right there and she could see his erection under his sodden pants, and she knew - she just saw - that he would sooner die than disrespect her will. She wanted to tear open his fly and show him how she'd missed him. If she tried she thought she might fall to pieces. She couldn't stop crying. She curled her hand against his back, a fistful of wet undershirt.
"Hey," he murmured, his breath a wildfire warning on her bare scalp. "Let's get you clean and dry." He was almost as wet as she was.
She nodded. He dropped to one knee on the grated metal floor, and slathered soap over her feet. She felt raw and his touch ran electric through her every nerve, up over her knees, up her thighs. She could have almost come just from the way he touched her toes. When had she last been treated like this? What could she possibly do to deserve him?
He turned off the water, patting her dry where she sat. She watched as he pulled his sweater and socks back on and lined the bunk with all the other towels. She wasn't stumbling now; she had control of her joints, like when she learned to play the game; her body was clean and she knew its shape and it was doing what she told it to do.
She awkwardly put her clothes back on and sat down. Her bare head felt so light. She shivered in the sleeveless shirt. Neo pulled off his brown sweater and tugged it over her head before she could protest. "Shhh, you need it more than me," he assured her, and pulled her back into his arms in just his wet undershirt.
She lay still against him, listening. "That doesn't sound like an XHC-3 engine."
Neo rubbed her cheek. "No, it's not. You'll have to ask Hanno and the synthients to show you all the new tech."
"I could see it," she whispered. "It was thinking at me while it sawed that thing off me."
"I can too," he confirmed. "I haven't told Bugs yet, but I think the mach - the synthients know. They seem to trust me."
"I think I could kill it." It was an offhand thought, like how you could live with a man for fifteen years and one day he could put his hand around your throat and try to strangle you to death and that was just the sort of thing you had to forget you could see until it was too late to forget. She met Neo's eyes and neither of them had to say anything about that. "I used to have nightmares about little machines like that. I was being tortured and I was - stuck in place. Limbs held by a machine. My therapist said it was sleep paralysis. Gave me some pills. Fuck me."
"Blue pills, every day."
"I was always reaching for someone...someone near me." She gasped at him, another wave of tears breaking inside her. "I saw you and I didn't remember your name..."
The pain in his eyes warmed her, comforted her, his hands cradling her face. "They made you forget."
"You never forgot."
"I wasn't sure it had been real. I - stopped believing you were real." She pressed her lips to his, swallowing his guilt and praying that he could somehow stomach hers. Slow, soft brush of his lips, his anguish against hers. He pulled back an inch. "Without you..."
"You thought if you believed it was real I would be dead."
He blinked away tears. "Did I let you down because I'd rather have believed I imagined you?" There was an emptiness in his eyes that stretched forever between her and her, the past and the place where they lay together now.
Trinity took his hand in hers. She caressed his face, his scalp, his throat. She cupped the heavy plates on his neck; no more illusions that they were ever natural humans. Anomaly. The One. They were. One. Always. From the moment she believed it, remembered it, knew it, discovered in midair.
She pulled up her two shirts, staring at her abdomen.
She drew a line low on her belly with her finger. Still anaesthetised, unfeeling. "I had a scar here. Donnie - he was breech." She was talking nonsense. There was never a scar. This body was admixed in a lab and seeded in the fields long ago, then locked in a pod until she'd made it her own. She'd flown up to the sun and crashed and it had been taken away from her again, all its little defects and wounds gone like her real life had never happened.
Neo laid his hand flat over her stomach. She felt his thumb in her navel, the numb weight of his trailing fingers. She’d come back to a body with all its familiar touches gone, like she’d been evicted. But if it ever had scars again, they would be her own. "There's a lot I need to tell you." She waited, frozen in the soft amber of his eyes. "They resurrected our bodies and kept us maintained and apart from each other in our pods. It's been longer than I knew - I don't remember it all and what I do remember isn't all straight. Bugs told me they kept us for sixty years."
Trinity allowed the information to contradict everything else she knew. Familiar, incandescent ignorance, the first rebellious instinct to awake, the uncanny one that had shown her that nothing she had ever learned was true. She thought she was fifty-two. She'd always been told her memory was poor, non-linear and half-imagined. They couldn't tell her who she was any more. "Tell me everything," she asked.
She listened for hours. She held most of her questions, believing him, trusting in him to give her the truth back. Some things, she had to ask. Ellster checked in on them sometimes, testing her brainwaves and blood sugar, injecting her with this and that. She listened to Neo, and the feeling came back into her belly.
She was so tired. Part of her wanted to simply lie there and trust Neo, to vanish back into letting someone else decide her life until it was time for her to take care of something, but the rest of her ached to get her hands around the world. She stretched her legs, met the crew again and asked her barely intelligent questions about the engine and their depth position and the pad lifts. She was remembering herself in flashes; that first time she was awake and hammering Morpheus with questions til his ears bled because she needed to know how everything worked. She wanted to see the machines and take them apart. And she didn't even have to do that, looking at Cybebe and Octocles and Lumin8 and sensing them writ in gold. These were her allies, not like the machines and programs that had taken and kept her life from her. Her hands hungered for revenge. She wanted to clip Niobe around the fucking ear and maybe hug her as well for how she'd committed to them in the end. She fought the urge to keep asking Hanno which junction they were at, dislocated by the image of her kids in the back of the car, asking her if they were nearly there every five minutes. They weren't her kids. Prickles and tears of feeling returned as the hours went on. Not her life at all. Alien feelings, programmed commands, things she remembered that Chad assured her had never really happened. Years of her life turned into someone else's energy.
She was flailing out from under a hundred shoulds. She kept finding things buried underneath them. Real memories, Zion memories. Flashes she'd felt while playing the game, hidden and missing things - she'd run the digital Neo around trying to get into the tunnel between the repair yard and the temple, trying to catch the sulphur smell of the washing pool. It wasn't on the game map but she knew where it ought to be. She tried to get into her brother's apartment. Her brother - her real kin. In Zion. They were taking her to IO. Every time the ship rocked she felt further away from those precious memories. It was like swimming through dust. She couldn't see anything ahead of her.
In the matrix, she had people to tell her what to do, what to want, how to be. She felt exhilarated by the blankness ahead. She wanted to move past her strength. She'd not stared into the unknown like this since she was a bald-headed wet podborn child. "How are you so calm?" she asked Neo.
He took her hand in his. "You're home."
It was like she had been living in the dark without his clarity and innocence. No sunlight in decades. His warmth reached a place in her core that she had not known was cold.
"How long til we reach IO?"
"Another couple of hours."
Their eyes met. It was too long and yet maybe just long enough. She held his face in her hands, felt his eyes on her as she came close, noses brushing, heads touching, his lips between hers. It was like coming back to life again. She was alive and he was moving with her, his tongue on hers, holding her close and tenderly cupping her neck and it felt like a deep livewire into her cunt through the strange metal. She was hungry, starving for this connection. She remembered that he had always held her with this much care and respect even when he was railing her. She broke from him and pulled her shirts over her head, tugged at his undershirt as he stared at her as if he were overcome.
He caught her hand. "Wait one minute," he said. She didn’t want to. She clenched her ravenous hands as he eased her back down. She felt small beneath his eyes - she still didn't know how she could deserve him. His hands splayed over her ribs, his fingertips looking gently at all the ways she'd changed - not good ways - he touched her loose skin and phalanx of jacks, slowly, like he was reading that whole archive of stolen time, rewiring memories from plug to plug as he explored her body. His dark honey eyes were so soft it was like he was praying. His hands rose up the sides of her breasts and he bent his head between them, dotting kisses, sparks through jacks, connections in places that never existed before. His lips touched the tip of her nipple where she hadn't had feeling since she'd breastfed and she felt so much that she had to grunt back a scream.
She played her hand over his neck - they'd changed him too - made him so lonely inside there - his eyes met hers again and she felt her head sway under the weight of years they hadn't chosen. And he'd chosen her, always, above everything, and she had chosen him.
He pulled her pants over her hips and slid them to the floor. She felt disjointed as his hands cupped her toneless ass and his lips caressed the skin low on her belly, her nerves stirring as she remembered how she had once felt like his beauty was all hers, meant to belong here, the tip of his nose in her navel. His hand cupped her bare vulva. Her hairless skin rang at the touch. Was he really? Neo glanced up at her, then bent his head to drop precious kisses on her labia.
"You - you don't have to," she told him.
Neo looked up from between her thighs. "You have no idea how much I've missed this."
She gasped at his open lips on her bare flesh. He breathed soft on her, circled the hood of her clit with a fingertip. Barely touching her but like nothing had in years. Her stomach was so tense around her jacks that it hurt. He hadn't even started yet. She was more sensitive than she'd ever been and he was gently, gently, warming her up to where he wanted her.
He kept up the touches and light kisses til her nerves could stand it, teetering on some equilibrium in the intense pleasure. Her hands curled tight in the back of his shirt. Scroll of words in her head men hate that and it's gross and no way, Tiff - blinking into code. Neo's tongue rode gentle up her vulva, ripping all those old commands to pieces. Patterns, remade as he saw fit. She remembered how they'd learned love together - he'd shown her that nothing she'd ever known before was real. He was showing her again, waking her up.
She remembered joking to him that nothing he could do in the matrix could match the miracles he performed with his tongue and fuck, it was still true.
He was feather-light over her hood - if he'd gone any harder she would have screamed. His fingers rested on her belly, stroking, and she felt all the tension in her body letting go to him, letting him carry her. Her hips shivered and she arched toward his touch. His tongue was wet and firm and divine over her clit.
She was floating and didn't know what would happen if she put her feet on the ground. He held her thighs and she melted into the portal of his lips. She couldn't go back. She was outlined in light. She slammed through into her body.
When she could see again, Neo looked so damn pleased with himself she couldn't stand not to have him. She tugged him by the shirt, almost strangling him in her need to have him hold her. His face was a perfect mess. God, she had to make him feel this good. She was warm in his arms. She just had to hold him like this til the energy came back to her. She felt so good and he was so good and she loved him so much.
Siren trill. "What?" She blinked and looked up at Neo. Her eyes were blurry, but it looked like he'd cleaned his face. There was a blanket around them and he had a jacket wrapped over his undershirt.
"That's just the landing alert," Neo told her. "We'll be in IO in five minutes."
"Did I fall asleep?" He smiled at her like she'd said something delightful. "Oh god, Neo, I'm sorry, that wasn't good for you at all."
His hand cupped her chin. "It was the best thing I've done...ever." He was grinning like a fool. He was so wonderful. He was infuriating.
"You've not been out long," she wondered, her fingertips stroking the hair on his scalp.
"Bugs found me the same day we shared that coffee at Simulatte," he told her. "Lost track of when that was."
"Five days. Six now, I guess." His sweet demeanour about her failure to reciprocate had roused her curiosity. "How many times have you come since then?"
"I haven't." Her jaw dropped and her heart jumped. "I've been waiting for you."
"You didn't even have one real orgasm before going in there ready to die?" He kept smiling at her. She felt appalled and astronomically aroused. "Christ, at least let me blow you before we land."
"No," he smiled. "Relax. We've got time."