At the Crossing

Written by Anakin McFly

There's a telephone in the room. It's a perfectly normal appliance for a motel room to have – a standard requirement, even – but Neo can't quite get over how it looks like the ones they use to get out of the Matrix, and when he walks away from the window, it's the first thing his eyes land on.

He half expects it to ring: the way so many phones used to do whenever he entered a room and saw them, calling him home from another level of reality. He doesn't know what would happen if this phone were to ring. Take him home, perhaps. Only that he has the ITDT in his pocket and he can go home any time he wants.

Maybe it'll bring him to a different kind of home, he thinks, and something about that idea tugs at his heart. He doesn't know what kind of home that would be, or where, but sometimes he still has that yearning in him that no place he knows has ever been able to fill. There were times when he thought he’d found it: the first time he’d stepped into the actor's house, and the few other times they’d spent in that same house gazing out at the infinity pool, just enjoying the silence of each other’s company. But there was always awkwardness, too, and it was hard to feel at home with that much awkwardness in the air.

Maybe there is no home. Like the spoon. Maybe there’s no home, and the closest he can ever get to that is the sight of a telephone in a foreign motel room, eternally ringing – or not ringing – suggestions of escape.

He can still hear the noise from below. For a moment he thinks wryly of Choi inviting him to parties he never fit into, leaving Neo standing there by himself against the wall, waiting to be noticed, waiting to have questions answered, waiting to be told his destiny. And then it had happened; and he was still lost.

He wondered what Choi would have thought of the others. That they were more fun, perhaps. They would have fit in at parties. Shane Falco wouldn’t stand by himself at the wall.

Neo sits down on the bed, rubbing the sides of his head with his fingers. The others are down there, and he’s up here. Sometimes he doesn’t know how they put up with him, or why they even keep inviting him. They don’t invite everyone, after all. Tom Ludlow never gets invited.

Neo reaches for the remote on the end table and turns on the TV, hoping it'll cover the noise. But the volume is on low – too low to be audible – and he doesn't wish it any louder. He falls backwards on the bed and stares at the ceiling. The television plays on in the background. The party goes on in the more distant background.

He’s suddenly lonely.

The ITDT is in his pocket. He can go home any time he wants. There are people there. Trinity. Morpheus. The rest of the crew. They care about him, and he cares about them. But somehow thinking about that just leaves him feeling oddly hollow, and misplaced.

He pulls himself back up, turns off the television and gets off the bed; then hesitates, not really knowing where to go, or what he's doing here.

He leaves the room. The outside air might help to clear his head...

There’s someone out there on the main balcony. Neo hesitates by the door, staring.

It’s not one of them. His back is to Neo, but Neo has since grown able to tell; most of them have, probably. The stranger is staring fitfully into the night, arms resting on the balcony fence. The car park is empty now. The world would be silent if not for the others down there creating their tiny racket in this isolated little bit of space.

Neo glances down the row at the other motel rooms. The doors are all shut, and the whole upper floor seems quiet. He doesn't think there's anyone else there, but he hadn’t thought there was anyone else at all here, either.

Neo closes his door. The stranger gives a start at the noise, and jerks his head around. No, he’s not one of them, Neo confirms. But there's something about him that suggests they're not that different, after all. And he’s staring at Neo, mouth falling open partway as though he’s in shock.

Neo gives him a nod of acknowledgement. “Sorry, I... I didn't know anyone else was staying here."

He doesn’t even know what he’s apologising for. He approaches the other man, noting how his gaze nervously follows him all the way. Neo rests his hands on the balcony fence, next to him.

The stranger eventually manages to speak. “Yeah... I, uh...” He peters off, then takes a breath and tries again. “How long have you been here?” he asks.

“I just came up,” Neo says. He gestures towards the stairs, then in a vague downwards direction. “I was... I was with them. I left.”

The stranger raises an eyebrow, a hint of incredulity on his face. "They’re really noisy, aren’t they.” He leans forward against the balcony fence, trying to look casual. But Neo can see his hands are trembling. He’s younger than Neo. There’s a thin scar running across the right side of his face. Neo wonders how he got here, and where he came from. He doesn’t seem like a local.

“Yeah, they are,” Neo agrees.

"Do you know how long they're staying?” the other asks. “Because I came here for the quiet, and... it's not quiet." He sounds annoyed, beneath the nervousness.

"I think they booked the place until morning."

"Great," comes the muttered sarcasm. There’s something almost forced about it, or at any rate deeply uncomfortable.

And then, looking as though he’d finally made a difficult decision in his head, he turns and holds out a hand to Neo. "Adam Kaufman."

Neo shakes it. "Thomas Anderson."

A barely perceptible flicker of excitement crosses Adam’s face and vanishes.

“...Neo,” he says.

It’s Neo’s turn to stare. “How do you know that name?”

Adam releases his hand and averts his eyes. “We’re both from other worlds.” He pauses. “The Matrix,” he adds, almost inaudibly, almost a croak. “I love that movie.”

“...Oh.”

Adam chances another glance at Neo. “You know about it?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

Silence. They stare out into the night.

“I like computers,” Adam says suddenly, trying not to sound embarrassed, and then realising that Neo is not telepathic and cannot hear the litany of “omg it’s neo” that’s racing around repeatedly in his head.

Neo looks at him.

Adam tries to look as though he hadn’t said anything, mad at himself in his head for screwing this up.

More silence.

“How did you get here?” Adam asks, changing the subject upon taking the silence as confirmation that Neo doesn’t really seem to care about him liking computers. Or maybe he does, but just isn’t saying.

Neo reaches into his pocket and takes out his ITDT. “It’s an interdimensional travelling device,” he says. “It lets me move between worlds.”

Adam blinks at it. “I had one of those,” he said. “It broke. It just died. I couldn’t get it working again.”

He had one of those, Neo thought. Which means he was there, too. At that place. That... hotel. “How did you get here, then?”

“There’s, uh... there’s an apartment.” Adam gestures vaguely with a hand. “Not in this world... not in any world, but somewhere else. And the door is some kind of... portal. I found this place in the preset destination options and I thought I’d check it out. Booked a room for a couple of nights. And then those guys started making all the noise.”

Silence.

Adam is starting to think that perhaps Neo isn’t really as exciting as he’d always imagined he would be, dodging bullets, saving the world and all that. Right now he’s just standing on a balcony and not saying much.

“You like computers?” Neo finally asks.

Adam’s eyes light up for a split second, and then he stops them from doing that. The last thing he wants is to look like an over-enthusiastic fanboy around Neo. “Yeah,” he said, trying to sound disinterested, and not quite getting there. “I’m a-“ He pauses, correcting himself with a grimace: “...used to be a tech analyst. I just left the job a while back. Personal reasons. I’ve been working on some of my own programs since then. You know, the things I never had the time to do with a job, because I didn’t... have the, uh, time...”

Shut up, Kaufman, he chides himself, giving himself a mental kick in the head. He’s just rambling incoherently now.

“Cool,” Neo says. There’s not much inflection in it, or excitement, and that makes it sound oddly sincere.

Adam forcefully keeps the smile off his face. “What about you?” he asks, perfunctorily. He knows what Neo is up to. Saving the world. There’s always a world in need of saving, real or otherwise.

Neo fixes him with a slightly raised eyebrow that’s nowhere as impressive as the kind of eyebrows that Adam is used to being around. “I thought you watched the movies.”

Adam’s face reddens slightly. “Well yeah, but...”

Adam can’t figure out what goes after the ‘but’, and they lapse into an uncomfortably meta silence punctuated with the occasional awkward glance at each other. With time, they forget that Adam never finished that sentence.

And eventually, the noise below seems to die down a little. “They’re getting quiet,” Neo says.

Adam nods. “Yeah.”

“Maybe some of them passed out,” Neo says.

Adam lets out a small laugh. He doesn’t usually laugh, despite Sasan’s best efforts to get him to lighten up before he killed himself from stress. But this... this is different. Neo just has that effect on him. He makes him nervous. Because he’s Neo, even if this particular encounter isn’t the most stimulating and seems to consist more of empty silences than anything else. But that too is good. It’s something, just hanging out with Neo. Neo isn’t chasing him away, and that has to be a good sign.

But with the growing quiet, Adam also realises that he has little excuse now to stay out here. He did come here to work, after all. And it’s getting late – it must be past midnight by now.

“I should go,” he says. He steps back from the balcony. “Uh... thanks.”

Neo contemplates him for a moment, not saying anything, making Adam even more uncomfortable. “For what?” Neo finally asks.

“For... for talking to me,” Adam says, looking embarrassed and much more human than most people ever get to see him. “For being you. You know.” He mentally kicks himself again. Shut up, Kaufman. Shut up, shut up, shut up. If anyone he knew ever saw him like this...

Neo doesn’t know, but he can see that Adam is getting increasingly flustered, and he drops the matter. “It was nice meeting you,” he says instead.

This time the smile slips through. Adam shoves it off in short time, but just for a moment, it was there. “You too,” he says, a bit more tersely than warranted in an attempt to counter that moment of weakness. And then, after a protracted pause, he turns and heads quickly back to his room before he can embarrass himself any further. His heart is singing. He just talked to Neo.

Neo watches him go, and sees the motel room door close. He looks back out into the darkness. It’s a lot more quieter now. He moves away from the balcony, hands in pockets, and makes his way down to where the others are.

He pauses by the door; takes a couple steps forward to the window, and peers in, trying to stay out of sight.

A very drunk Conor is conversing animatedly with the standing lamp. Jjaks is watching him, bleary-eyed, sometimes nodding in fervent agreement.

A few others are passed out on the floor, or the couch. There’s occasional movement, but minimal. Neo wonders what not-Tim would make of this aftermath.

Alex is trying to straighten up the place, regardless, navigating around his less-sober peers where necessary. Junk litters the floor: empty paper plates, cans of beer, plastic bottles, someone’s shirt. Neo contemplates for a moment going in to help Alex out, but then he sees Alex give up on the cleanup, say something to Conor, and then trudge up the stairs to the bedroom above.

Neo leaves them be. The car park is still empty; he waits a while longer, although for what or whom he does not know. It does not arrive. There’s nothing but the whispering breeze. And it’s getting late. The light in the motel’s front office has long gone off.

So he goes back up the stairs. He passes by the door to Adam’s room and hesitates for a moment, wondering if he should say good night. But Adam might be working, he thinks, or asleep, and he shouldn’t disturb him.

Neo walks by, on to his own room, and lets himself in. The bed seems a little more inviting now. There’s still that odd void inside him, yearning for its unknown home, but he feels less alone. There are others around in this place. There are others asleep.

He climbs into the bed, turns off the lights, and falls asleep as well.

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