Only This and Nothing More

Summary: Eh. Just read it?
Disclaimer: The Wachowskis own the movies: all I need to say.
Warnings: Not many. Uh, sex? But it's very brief and very tasteful, and very... important... to the narrative. I gave it an R rating anyway, just... to be safe.
Spoilers: Revolutions, to some extent. I honestly didn't mean for that to happen: but this story, I swear, just wrote itself. All at once. I really couldn't help it. But even the spoilers are kind of cryptic... and it does make sense anyway.
Credits: Lyrics at the beginning are Leonard Cohen's: "Hallelujah". The poem at the end is by Jeffrey McDaniel: it's called "Exile".
A/N: Note from A#6SB: 'This is mine. I don't know if it really happened this way or not: but if it didn't... where did this come from?' I cried a lot, writing this.

I did my best; it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch.
I told the truth -- I didn't come to fool ya.
And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of song--
With nothing on my tongue... but Hallelujah.

She's warm: that's my last real coherent thought that isn't about how soft the skin of her neck is, about filling my lungs with the smell of her hair like it's the last breath I'll ever take.

The room is cold, the ship is cold, there's barely enough room in the bunk for the two of us and we hardly ever risk having time like this to ourselves while the rest of them are up and about: but she is warm against me as she nestles into my hips, her back against my chest: warm and human and alive. Nothing could ever compare to this, or her, and without her everything in my body would simply cease to function. I know this: she knows I know this.

I slip my hand between her arm and her side(she's too skinny, even now, but none of that matters right now), tracing my fingers over her collarbone before palming one small perfect breast, the weight of it heavy in my hand, and rubbing over the tiny nipple with my fingers: she parts her lips, like I knew she would, her head coming back against my shoulder, her dark hair damp and matted with sweat and somehow all the more beautiful for that.

She half-turns in my arms, lifting her leg to slip it behind her, over mine, and somehow pull me closer. We started out slow, as always, but after a few minutes all care and caution had been lost in the flex and play of her muscles, the way her hips fit against mine so perfectly, the soft muffled whispers and gasps that I can feel more than hear. My body trembles, our hearts racing in time, and the world could not get any more perfect than this

(there is no dark or dying)

as I rock with her, pushing forward as she pushes back, like a dance that is older than time and yet somehow only ours. And then I lean into her and hold and I clutch at her and bury my face in her neck, and she whispers in that soft sweet breathless voice "Yes, Neo, yes," and I realize why stars go supernova: they have to.

Maybe they're in love like I am.

Maybe it's that same feeling: like you have to turn yourself inside out somehow, like you have to reach inside and pull out your heart because if you don't show it somehow, there will be nothing left of you.

And my eyes are wet, and my lips are against her shoulder, and

--and---

...and I knew, somehow, that the salt taste was wrong, somehow, too strong and not enough. Not the sweat on her skin: I must have bit my lip at some point, and now all I can taste is blood.

I'm awake now: but being awake is a lot like being dead.

And it is not the soft perfect bud of a nipple beneath my fingers, after all, but one of the plugs on my chest

(nothing ever changes, world without end)

and I rub my thumb over it, lying there on my back, and then run my fingertips around its edge. Metal and skin: cool metal, cold skin.

It's not that I almost can't tell the difference between one and the other anymore that scares me.

It's that I almost don't care anymore.

They say things like "healing well", and "done the best they can"; they talk about how the "scarring won't be so bad". Words like "patience", and "trust", and "only a matter of time"; they talk about heroics, about Kid and a lone ship(at least I think it's Kid: his is the name I seem to keep hearing in my head), about how I must have walked and not remembered; they talk about how he avoided a court-martial with affection in their voices like they find the whole thing somehow endearing. They talk about "miracles" and "fate": but all I know is that they've left me here in the void, the blackness, without so much as the false gift of light that the first loss brought me

(I wish you could see what I see)

and it occurs to me somewhere in the back of my mind that they never even asked me if I wanted it back.

I can only lie here, hearing their murmurs and feeling their touch on my arm: so much meaningless sound and sensation and noise, and I can't even open my eyes to escape the images behind them because there's nothing there when I do.

None of their voices are familiar.

And they say "savior", and I turn my face away.

They say I won't remember any of this.

And yet there is that voice somewhere in me with no place or name, the one that says 'Come back, come back. It isn't over.' The voice that says that half of this is just an illusion, that the war isn't over, that it never was, that nothing was ever that simple: that I have a much bigger job to do in the end. That it is a cycle, a cycle, a cycle. And the whisper in the dark: she isn't gone. Neither of you are. All you have to do is look. And you can save the both of you...

The whisper says, 'It's still your time.'

They say I won't remember any of this.

They say I won't remember any of this.

They say I won't remember any of this.

They say I won't remember any of this....

Mathematicians still don't understand
the ball our hands made, or how
your electrocuted grandparents made it possible
for you to light my cigarettes with your eyes.

It isn't as simple as me climbing in your window
to leave six ounces of orange juice
and a donut by the bed, or me becoming the sand you dug
your toes in, on the beach when you wished
to hide them from the sun and the fixed eyes
of strangers, and your breaths broke in waves over my earlobe,
tingling, splashing through my head, spilling
out over the opposite lobe, and my first poems
under your door in the unshaven light of dawn.

Your eyes remind me of a brickwall
about to be hammered by a drunk
driver. I'm that driver. All night
I've thought about you in the bar.

Once I kissed the scar, stretching
its sealed eyelid along your inner arm, dried
the raining strands of hair, full of pheromone,
and discovered all your idiosyncratic passageways
so I'd know where to run if the cops came.
Your body is a home I'll never return to.

The man in charge of what crosses my mind
is gonna lose his fingernails
for not turning you away at the border,
but at this moment when sweat pours from me and
blame is as meaningless as shooting-up a cow with milk,
I realize: my kisses filled the hall of your body
with smoke, and the lies came
like a season, and most drunks don't die in accidents
they orchestrate, and I swallowed
a hand grenade that never stops exploding.