Pairing: Neo/Morpheus

Rating: R

Summary: The lines between man, machine, and god.

Morpheus never really knew what he was looking for until he found him. Pale and dark and incomplete, he called out to him. Light brown eyes that looked at him unseeing and begged for freedom. Morpheus couldn’t deny him. Couldn’t say no, despite the rules. It might have been blind belief, and it might have been pure selfishness.

So he reached in and dragged him out of his prison forcefully. Was coldly satisfied when Neo failed to accept his destiny from the start. It had given him satisfaction to know that all of the teaching would be left to him. And he remembered running a hand over Neo’s limp and pale form at the very beginning, and feeling his weakness. He was only human, after all.

“I saved you,” he said to the quite room and unconscious man. “Now it’s your turn.”

He didn’t really expect this from Neo. Or if he did, it wasn’t in a violent, demanding way. He expected Neo to live, and that was all. Just that would be enough. Already, he could feel the strangeness coming from this man. This One.

Now it was a year later, and the man had found himself and grown into something stronger and greater than he’d ever imagined. But he was still only human. Nights sometimes Morpheus still heard him crying for something remembered and lost. A family member, perhaps. A childhood home.

Morpheus never cried.

***

Morpheus sits and reviews the contours of his One’s face. Skin and bone and flesh and real. Neo closes his eyes and grits his teeth. Doesn’t necessarily want this, not from Morpheus. Not from his teacher.

But his body will not be denied, and Trinity isn’t here to satisfy him with her supple-soft breasts and short-cropped hair.

He strokes down the smooth column of his throat to his bared chest.

“Have you ever tried,” Neo says, eyes still closed, “to save yourselves?”

Morpheus does not reply, only brushes a kiss against the palm of his hand. The questions are all rhetorical at this point. There can be no other way, just like there can be no other One. But the simple comforts of them are not to be abandoned. There is a reason the machines can keep so many trapped with the easy comfort of lies.

Hands trail down his chest and his legs part slowly to allow Morpheus access. “Have you ever wanted to go back?”

A soft sigh escapes from lightly parted lips. “Of course not.” He says, lying and giving the required answer. Morpheus gives a cursory smile and his hands fall lower...

As Morpheus worships him with his hands and mouth and body, Neo always says, “I’m not a god, you know.”

“Of course you aren’t. You’re only human.”