#its overwriting the part of my brain focused on getting things done. help me!!!

[maraschinotopped]

hey guys i think i have a new fixation developing

[wackygoofball]

Moodboard: Jaime x Brienne - The Matrix AU

Jaime Lannister is a man fed up with the monotony of life. Day in, day out, he follows through the same routines as a programmer in one of the biggest companies in Westeros. The only distraction from this aching sameness of the world is his second life as a hacker, causing a bit of havoc in the online world under the pseudonym Kingslayer.

All the while, he enjoys his little contests against fellow hacker running under the pseudonym Oathkeeper, a person who seems oddly honorable for someone regularly cracking codes and stealing data from national security.

However, something deep inside him keeps telling him Jaime something is off about his life, he just can’t put his finger on it, until a message pops up on his screen without Jaime having a chance to retrace who sent it or how someone managed to get past his firewalls.

THIS REALITY IS A LIE.

But how would reality be a lie? Jaime can’t make sense of that, reckoning that someone is just making fun at his expenses, but all of that changes when he is suddenly taken into custody by grey-wearing agents who want to know about his activity and his connection to the hacker known as Oathkeeper. They keep pushing him by saying that Oathkeeper is a terrorist and that he would go to jail for a long time by not cooperating. That this would be conspiracy against the country. Jaime does not budge, however, not finding it right to snitch on his frenemy, even when the agents get physical.

What happens thereafter seems to be out of a bad action movie as suddenly a tall, blonde, mannish woman bursts through the door of the investigation room, holding the agents at gunpoint.

“We are getting out of here,” she tells Jaime, who is more than perplex. “Get moving, Kingslayer.”

“Who are you?” he asks.

“Oathkeeper,” she answers. “You either come with me now or they will be your end.”

Jaime decides to come with the strange woman with brilliant blue eyes, still trying to catch on to what just happened, what he just saw, and the fact that Oathkeeper is this woman, a woman in general, because he thought he was talking to a guy.

Maybe he shouldn’t have made as many dick jokes, then.

Oathkeeper gets him into a car and they chase down the streets.

“Where are you taking me?” Jaime wants to know.

“A hideout.”

“And where do I go from there?”

She shrugs. “That is up to you.”

“How so?”

“You will see,” is the only reply Jaime receives, though it’s not in the least satisfactory for him.

They eventually arrive at a run-down factory, exit the car and get inside.

“So? What will I see now?” Jaime demands to know at last, because he starts to think that this is getting ridiculous. For all the hate he felt for his old life, the boring life without any change, he starts to think that it may still be more favorable than this mess right now. He didn’t want to get involved with terrorism, federal government and ominous women taking him away with rifle in hand. He wanted to have a bit of fun by messing with the system. That was all.

“That depends on the choice you are about to make,” the woman tells him. “There are two paths going from here. You kept telling me that you had the feeling that something is off about this world, and there is.”

“And what is it?”

“You will only learn that if you take that path. If you don’t want that, you can simply return to your old life,” she says.

“But the agents…,” he means to say, but Oathkeeper only ever shakes her head.

“Are being taken care of.”

“How?”

“We have our ways,” she lets him know.

“We?”

The woman shakes her head. “I can’t answer that without you having to walk that path.”

She takes out two pills, a blue and a red one. “Swallow the red one and you will learn the truth about reality itself. Swallow the blue one and you will return to your former life, having forgotten all about this here, about the agents, about me. Those are the two options. There is no middle ground.”

“But how do I make that choice without any prep-up? Without any time to consider?” he questions.

How do you make such a decision at all?

“There is no way to prepare for the truth. You just swallow it or you don’t.”

THIS REALITY IS A LIE, Jaime reminds himself and takes the red pill – only to wake up in a nightmarish landscape, naked, alone, monstrous machines looming above him and around him. Jaime doesn’t know what is going on, feeling nothing but fear and terror. The last thing he sees is a bright light, and then the lights go out again.

He awakes with Oathkeeper sitting by his bedside.

“What… is this?” he asks, still feeling weak, as though he spent years in a coma.

“Reality,” she tells him.

“Why can’t I move properly?” he asks.

“Because you haven’t ever done that.”

“I walked. I worked out, I rode my bicycle to work, I…,” Jaime insists, but she just shakes her head. “That is what they had you believe. In fact, you were always in that cocoon that you woke up in before we took you away. You never walked, never spoke, never ate, never drank, never rode a bicycle, never operated a computer. That was all a lie.”

THIS REALITY IS A LIE.

“You sent that message to me, didn’t you?”

She nods her head. “I send it out for those who start to have doubt. And you had doubt, so I gave you the chance of a choice. Because that is what they have taken from us.”

“Why do you do that?” Jaime asks.

“Because everyone should be entitled to the choice of the truth.”

“Then I think it’s time you tell me because I made my choice.”

And the truth is about as chilling as the entire landscape now supposed to be Jaime’s new reality: The machines took over years ago, humans having driven inventions too far to the point that the machines started to have a life of their own, sought power, and won it. And the humans? They became what they once sought to create, a resource. Just that for the machines, humans are no more than batteries, feeding off of their bioelectricity.

“And why that… other reality?” he asks, frowning.

“The Matrix. A program they wrote to keep the human mind going, because we are apparently not of much use when we are all brain-dead. They need us to live that much. And so… they used what they had, all of that data that they gathered about the human race over the years to replicate something real enough to fool us all into believing that what we see is real, that the ice cream we have tastes like chocolate, that the world in all of its monotony is… the one reality there is. They created the Matrix because it was easiest for them. No resistance. Where would it come from when you grow up believing that this world is real? You just fade away and you will never know how it happens.”

“But you are here,” Jaime argues, still trying to wrap his hand around all this.

She snorts at that. “And they don’t like that at all.”

“Then what is your plan?”

“We overwrite the program, start over new.”

“Reboot,” Jaime says. That was something they kept going back to over and over throughout their online conversations, but Jaime always failed to make sense of what Oathkeeper meant by that. Though now, it starts to make sense, regardless of the fact that everything makes no sense at all for Jaime right now.

“Yes,” she confirms.

“I never asked for your real name.”

“Brienne… welcome to reality, Jaime.”

While Jaime has a hard time coming to grips with all of that new input, especially once he goes into training, it doesn’t take him long to notice that the supposed leader of the revolution, this stubborn, mannish woman whom he once knew as a fellow hacker in the programmed reality tries to keep her distance from him, just like she seems to spend most of her time alone, and that even though she is the leader of the revolution.

Brienne’s one focus is to achieve their shared goal of bringing down the machines, of achieving the Reboot, no matter the costs, no matter the suffering. She is ready to give her life for all those hundreds and thousands of people still not awake, still sleeping, not knowing that they are on a death march without moving their feet.

Jaime, for his part, soon finds himself right in the middle of this revolution. While not everyone likes him, he has a way with people that helps him captivate them and have them ever the more motivated to work for the revolution.

As the revolutionists re-enter the Matrix again and again to find a way to overturn the system the machines created, all the while dodging the danger of the agents, clever, adaptive tools of the machines set into the program to kill them, coming after tem whenever they enter. In the course of which Jaime and Brienne start to uncover more and more of a kind of truth they didn’t know they were blind to.

Because, as it turns out, Brienne was the first to awaken, which seems to be an error the machines made and could no longer undo, setting forth a chain of events in their otherwise perfect system that may well bring it to the point of collapse.

However, the revelations don’t just stop there as the two find themselves more and more closely targeted and the machines trying anything within their powers to see them separated, which makes it ever the harder for the two as their growing attraction starts to get in the way of staying focused on nothing but the mission.

Particularly Brienne finds herself struggling with her feelings. After all, she believes that she was forever meant to stay alone, a voice having whispered that to her long, long time ago.

However, the two have to put most of that aside in the face of the machines rising, which means that it’s now or never that they launch their revolution, trying to achieve the fallout, the death of the program, the Reboot. Nevertheless, the questions keep nagging at them both as they dive deeper and deeper into the world of the codes that made up their lives back in the Matrix.

Is it perhaps that they have been re-programmed before?

Is this indeed their first awakening?

Or was there another life, another reality other than the one they are in right now?

And were they together in this life?

And what will become of their revolution?

Will it be destroyed or will it overwrite an entire system?

Reality itself?

Additional Image Sources: The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), The Matrix Revolutions (2003).