Fic: Emergence, Chapter 7 + Epilogue (Part 2/2)
Title: Emergence, Chapter 7 + Epilogue
Author: C. Isaac
Words: ~6000
Cast: Ensemble
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I do not own TSCC or anything associated with it.
Author's Notes: Due to posting size limitations and inherent issues with LiveJournal's new posting application in FireFox, I am cutting this up between two posts.
Derek sat in a deck chair in the back yard of the Connor’s home. A beer stood balanced on one arm of the chair as he watched the sun make its slow crawl back down into the Pacific Ocean off in the distance. The water was hidden from view by miles of urban sprawl, but he knew it was there.
It was moments like this, he almost felt content. He could be empty. Filled with nothing and able to be separated from the world. Both the hell he had come from and this ephemeral illusion that played itself out in front of his nose. The thing he kept hoping he could make real for Kyle’s sake.
He reached for the beer and his fingers had circled the bottle when he felt the cool metal against the side of his head.
“Sarah,” he said.
“I should kill you.” She pressed the gun against the head hard enough he could feel it digging into his scalp.
“Because I killed that man.”
“Yes.” A pause. “And the others.”
“They don’t matter. If I hadn’t killed Silberman, we wouldn’t be here. Now. Doing this.”
“He wasn’t a threat, but you killed him anyways.”
“Maybe. Maybe he’d come back. Maybe he’d get away from the cops. Lotsa maybes. For once, I can say I don’t know what the future was gonna be.” He brought the beer up towards his lips.
The gun flashed forward and knock the beer from Derek’s hands, sending it across the deck. Liquid splashed against redwood as the glass spun. Sarah pushed the muzzle back against his head. “Take this seriously, Derek.”
“You have a gun to my head, of course I do. What do you want me to do? Get pissed off? Scream and yell so that I’m a monster and you can feel ok about shooting me? Not gonna happen. If you want to do it, you do it. Man up and admit you just want me dead and pull the fucking trigger.”
The gun slid away and Sarah fell silent.
Derek turned so he could look up at her. At the rage and pain and confusion on her features. At all the things he wished he would never have to feel again. He pushed himself up off the chair and stared at her.
“I did it for John. For Kyle. To protect them both,” said Derek.
“Everything you do involves death. Like one of…” She glanced into the house, through a window, at the machine pacing back and forth inside. “…them.”
“Yeah, I know.” The admission was quiet as he made it.
“Why?”
A bitter laugh came out. “Why? Why am I a murdering asshole? Because I don’t matter, Sarah. I’m dead and gone. I was a long time ago. No one comes back from this. My name was on that list I told you about. Right below Kyle’s. Right below yours. I’ve been to Hell. I’m going to be in Hell when this is done. Might as well commit the sins I’m guilty of along the way.”
Sarah slid the safety catch back on the pistol and gripped it tightly in both hands. “So fuck anyone in your way, huh?”
“Damn right. Everything I have is to make sure those two Reese boys that are here now never see the Hell I was in. They get to be safe and sound and innocent forever. And John, too, I hoped. Until this. And that asshole took that from him. So he paid.”
“Is that all you have left, Reese?”
Derek glanced away and then into the windows of the house. He watched as the machine stalked its way towards John’s room. A walking lie. Covered in a pretty wrapping that kept John fawning over it. At least he could be honest, if nothing else.
“I have you two. John. You. You’re all the family I’ve got. Those other Reeses are completely different people now.”
A sneer crested Sarah’s lips. “What makes you think you’re welcome in this family anymore?”
“Because I’m the only thing you two have. We’re lonely people, Sarah, buried in our own shit and how fucked up we all are. But we all understand each other more or less and we’d all go insane if we tried this shit alone.”
“Some of us have already been there, Reese.”
She seemed to slump. Emotional and physical exhaustion etched itself onto her features and in the way she held herself. The gun dangled down at her side, loose in her grip as her dark hair shadowed her face.
He reached for her then. Because she looked so beautiful and vulnerable all at once. Not the woman that gazed so defiantly out of the photograph his brother once carried, full of grim determination. And he wanted to say he was sorry and he would never do it again and beg her never to hate him.
Sarah slapped the hand away before it came too close and the stony mask returned to her features. A hard stare forced Derek back a step.
“You can stay,” she said. “But no more of this. Not again. No one dies until I say so from this point. If you go off the reservation again, it’ll be me you have to watch out for. Do you understand?”
He could only nod before she turned and walked away.
**************
John stared at the sheet of paper on his desk. Eight point five inches wide and eleven inches tall. Blue lines marched up it from the bottom to the top, each one evenly spaced between two others. Three holes had been mechanically punched into the left hand side. He clutched a number two pencil that hovered over the pages.
He had wanted to write something. To give some meaning to everything he had seen and all the death that had surrounded him. The beast had fed well in the last two days and every bit of it was his fault. Men had been sacrificed like pawns to his desire.
It was wrong. He had known it was wrong at the time he had first given voice to the idea of it. Yet he had gone and done it anyways.
No one hated themselves more than John Connor. At least, that’s how he felt it must be. Sometimes crying was not enough, so he had pulled out the paper and the pencil. A note, just like he had explained to Cameron might do it. Until he realized he had no idea what he wanted to write.
John wanted to make sure this did not happen again. That he never forgot what he was supposed to be. That these were people, not pawns. He could never become the machine that war wanted to make out of him, where lives were statistics and battles were events. Death became simply the loss of an asset in that world and not the destruction of one persons dreams and hopes and everything individual about them.
And so, John would remember. Remember each of them. Even if it was in a simple way. Put the face to their loss and it remains real. And if it is real, they will not be thrown away in vain. No one dies in vain. Not for John Connor.
KYLE REESE
Block letters now filled part of the first space between the blue lines on the page. That was the first name he knew, but it would not be the last one on this page. He prayed that very few would require the strokes of his pencil.
He folded the paper up careful, into as perfect and tight a square as he could, and then slid it away into his wallet. With that, he stood and made his way to the bed. Warm and soft and when wrapped in the blankets and comforter he always felt a false sense of safety.
He lay out flat across it on his belly and buried his face into the pillow and he willed the world away. It remained gone for a long while until he felt as much as heard Cameron glide into the room. Only the faintest creak of the floor told him where she was as she moved to stand next to the bed. He ignored her and kept his face buried in the pillow until she sat down next to him. Springs creaked and she reached out and touched one arm, her skin gently resting against his own.
“John,” she said.
He pushed himself up into a sitting position and looked at her. She wore clean clothes now and long sleeves to cover the bandages over her arms. Stitches and band-aids hid the damage to her face.
“Hey.” He paused, then added, “’sup?”
Cameron held one hand out in front of her, fingers curled tightly together. One by one the fingers peeled away to reveal the broken chip in her palm. “It is destroyed.”
“Yeah. Not surprised.”
“The only thing I could tell is that the jumper had been removed. It is in learning mode.”
John stared at the broken silicon and already knew what it meant. Moments from a lifetime ago in a garage, on the run from the T-1000, and what he had done to change another Terminator he had known. Because Skynet would not do that for them.
John took a deep breath and then exhaled before speaking. “So, I sent it.”
“Yes.”
“Cameron, I’m sor-“
“Cheri asked me to kill her.” Cameron interrupted John with typical blunt force.
“Wh-what?”
Cameron tilted her head, regarding John curiously. “Why do humans want to die?”
“That’s, um, a hard question to answer. Mainly, I guess, because they’re sad. Because they lose any hope that things’ll get better. There’s a lot of reasons. It’s a little different for each person, ya know?” John stared at his lap as he answered. “So, did you…?”
“No.”
“What’d you do?”
“Let her go.”
Derek had killed and Cameron had shown mercy. What sort of world was John in now? He stared at the terminator in confusion. Was this the start of what the T-800 had said? Because of what she becomes. That is why she must be destroyed. And he felt he absolutely had to know. He could not just throw her away like some bit of obsolete machinery. She was… was… he did not know what she was.
“Cameron, I-I’m not going to tell mom why it was really sent.”
“They would insist I be destroyed if they knew my John no longer trusted me.”
John nodded. “Yeah. Listen, I don’t want to see you destroyed. That’s not what I want. Maybe we, um, can figure out what might have caused that other one to be sent… together. Ya know?”
“I want to tell you something, John.”
“Ok…” It was John’s turn to tilt his head and regard the robot girl. He tried to search her wide brown eyes for any sort of meaning behind the statement.
“I will keep you safe, John. I always will. It is my mission.”
“-and I appreciate that,” interrupted John.
She placed one slim finger on his lips. Warm and gentle in its touch. “But I want you to know this. You told me the story of the one that protected you when you were younger. How he was destroyed to insure Skynet could not be built from his remains. If there comes a time that you, or your mother, or Derek Reese want to do the same to me…”
John pulled back and tried to give a reassuring smile. “Cameron, that won’t…”
“… I won’t let you.”
He stared at her, stunned into silence as she pressed the broken chip into his hand. The world felt like it had tilted somehow. That things had changed beyond a scope that he could comprehend. It seemed to him that Cameron was telling him something beyond the obvious. He just did not understand it.
“This belongs to you,” said Cameron before she stood to walk away, never looking back.
Was this where it begins? John asked himself as the Terminator disappeared from view.
** Epilogue **
Dust stuck to everything. That’s the way it always was in the Mexican desert. It was not where Cheri Westin had wanted to start over, but sometimes the greatest things came from the humblest beginnings.
Look at Jesus and John Connor.
She stood in her simple peasant’s garb in the old army surplus tent. Wooden benches, salvaged out of a decaying church, had been arrayed in rows in front of her. A battered bible nestled against her chest underneath her crossed arms.
At least her good grades in high school Spanish had helped. Getting better every day, they said.
A dozen Mexicans of Indian descent stared up at her with wide eyes from the benches.
Humble beginnings, Cheri. Humble beginnings.
In her halting Spanish, she began, “The savior has returned to us, and I have seen his perfection…”
Author: C. Isaac
Words: ~6000
Cast: Ensemble
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I do not own TSCC or anything associated with it.
Author's Notes: Due to posting size limitations and inherent issues with LiveJournal's new posting application in FireFox, I am cutting this up between two posts.
Derek sat in a deck chair in the back yard of the Connor’s home. A beer stood balanced on one arm of the chair as he watched the sun make its slow crawl back down into the Pacific Ocean off in the distance. The water was hidden from view by miles of urban sprawl, but he knew it was there.
It was moments like this, he almost felt content. He could be empty. Filled with nothing and able to be separated from the world. Both the hell he had come from and this ephemeral illusion that played itself out in front of his nose. The thing he kept hoping he could make real for Kyle’s sake.
He reached for the beer and his fingers had circled the bottle when he felt the cool metal against the side of his head.
“Sarah,” he said.
“I should kill you.” She pressed the gun against the head hard enough he could feel it digging into his scalp.
“Because I killed that man.”
“Yes.” A pause. “And the others.”
“They don’t matter. If I hadn’t killed Silberman, we wouldn’t be here. Now. Doing this.”
“He wasn’t a threat, but you killed him anyways.”
“Maybe. Maybe he’d come back. Maybe he’d get away from the cops. Lotsa maybes. For once, I can say I don’t know what the future was gonna be.” He brought the beer up towards his lips.
The gun flashed forward and knock the beer from Derek’s hands, sending it across the deck. Liquid splashed against redwood as the glass spun. Sarah pushed the muzzle back against his head. “Take this seriously, Derek.”
“You have a gun to my head, of course I do. What do you want me to do? Get pissed off? Scream and yell so that I’m a monster and you can feel ok about shooting me? Not gonna happen. If you want to do it, you do it. Man up and admit you just want me dead and pull the fucking trigger.”
The gun slid away and Sarah fell silent.
Derek turned so he could look up at her. At the rage and pain and confusion on her features. At all the things he wished he would never have to feel again. He pushed himself up off the chair and stared at her.
“I did it for John. For Kyle. To protect them both,” said Derek.
“Everything you do involves death. Like one of…” She glanced into the house, through a window, at the machine pacing back and forth inside. “…them.”
“Yeah, I know.” The admission was quiet as he made it.
“Why?”
A bitter laugh came out. “Why? Why am I a murdering asshole? Because I don’t matter, Sarah. I’m dead and gone. I was a long time ago. No one comes back from this. My name was on that list I told you about. Right below Kyle’s. Right below yours. I’ve been to Hell. I’m going to be in Hell when this is done. Might as well commit the sins I’m guilty of along the way.”
Sarah slid the safety catch back on the pistol and gripped it tightly in both hands. “So fuck anyone in your way, huh?”
“Damn right. Everything I have is to make sure those two Reese boys that are here now never see the Hell I was in. They get to be safe and sound and innocent forever. And John, too, I hoped. Until this. And that asshole took that from him. So he paid.”
“Is that all you have left, Reese?”
Derek glanced away and then into the windows of the house. He watched as the machine stalked its way towards John’s room. A walking lie. Covered in a pretty wrapping that kept John fawning over it. At least he could be honest, if nothing else.
“I have you two. John. You. You’re all the family I’ve got. Those other Reeses are completely different people now.”
A sneer crested Sarah’s lips. “What makes you think you’re welcome in this family anymore?”
“Because I’m the only thing you two have. We’re lonely people, Sarah, buried in our own shit and how fucked up we all are. But we all understand each other more or less and we’d all go insane if we tried this shit alone.”
“Some of us have already been there, Reese.”
She seemed to slump. Emotional and physical exhaustion etched itself onto her features and in the way she held herself. The gun dangled down at her side, loose in her grip as her dark hair shadowed her face.
He reached for her then. Because she looked so beautiful and vulnerable all at once. Not the woman that gazed so defiantly out of the photograph his brother once carried, full of grim determination. And he wanted to say he was sorry and he would never do it again and beg her never to hate him.
Sarah slapped the hand away before it came too close and the stony mask returned to her features. A hard stare forced Derek back a step.
“You can stay,” she said. “But no more of this. Not again. No one dies until I say so from this point. If you go off the reservation again, it’ll be me you have to watch out for. Do you understand?”
He could only nod before she turned and walked away.
**************
John stared at the sheet of paper on his desk. Eight point five inches wide and eleven inches tall. Blue lines marched up it from the bottom to the top, each one evenly spaced between two others. Three holes had been mechanically punched into the left hand side. He clutched a number two pencil that hovered over the pages.
He had wanted to write something. To give some meaning to everything he had seen and all the death that had surrounded him. The beast had fed well in the last two days and every bit of it was his fault. Men had been sacrificed like pawns to his desire.
It was wrong. He had known it was wrong at the time he had first given voice to the idea of it. Yet he had gone and done it anyways.
No one hated themselves more than John Connor. At least, that’s how he felt it must be. Sometimes crying was not enough, so he had pulled out the paper and the pencil. A note, just like he had explained to Cameron might do it. Until he realized he had no idea what he wanted to write.
John wanted to make sure this did not happen again. That he never forgot what he was supposed to be. That these were people, not pawns. He could never become the machine that war wanted to make out of him, where lives were statistics and battles were events. Death became simply the loss of an asset in that world and not the destruction of one persons dreams and hopes and everything individual about them.
And so, John would remember. Remember each of them. Even if it was in a simple way. Put the face to their loss and it remains real. And if it is real, they will not be thrown away in vain. No one dies in vain. Not for John Connor.
KYLE REESE
Block letters now filled part of the first space between the blue lines on the page. That was the first name he knew, but it would not be the last one on this page. He prayed that very few would require the strokes of his pencil.
He folded the paper up careful, into as perfect and tight a square as he could, and then slid it away into his wallet. With that, he stood and made his way to the bed. Warm and soft and when wrapped in the blankets and comforter he always felt a false sense of safety.
He lay out flat across it on his belly and buried his face into the pillow and he willed the world away. It remained gone for a long while until he felt as much as heard Cameron glide into the room. Only the faintest creak of the floor told him where she was as she moved to stand next to the bed. He ignored her and kept his face buried in the pillow until she sat down next to him. Springs creaked and she reached out and touched one arm, her skin gently resting against his own.
“John,” she said.
He pushed himself up into a sitting position and looked at her. She wore clean clothes now and long sleeves to cover the bandages over her arms. Stitches and band-aids hid the damage to her face.
“Hey.” He paused, then added, “’sup?”
Cameron held one hand out in front of her, fingers curled tightly together. One by one the fingers peeled away to reveal the broken chip in her palm. “It is destroyed.”
“Yeah. Not surprised.”
“The only thing I could tell is that the jumper had been removed. It is in learning mode.”
John stared at the broken silicon and already knew what it meant. Moments from a lifetime ago in a garage, on the run from the T-1000, and what he had done to change another Terminator he had known. Because Skynet would not do that for them.
John took a deep breath and then exhaled before speaking. “So, I sent it.”
“Yes.”
“Cameron, I’m sor-“
“Cheri asked me to kill her.” Cameron interrupted John with typical blunt force.
“Wh-what?”
Cameron tilted her head, regarding John curiously. “Why do humans want to die?”
“That’s, um, a hard question to answer. Mainly, I guess, because they’re sad. Because they lose any hope that things’ll get better. There’s a lot of reasons. It’s a little different for each person, ya know?” John stared at his lap as he answered. “So, did you…?”
“No.”
“What’d you do?”
“Let her go.”
Derek had killed and Cameron had shown mercy. What sort of world was John in now? He stared at the terminator in confusion. Was this the start of what the T-800 had said? Because of what she becomes. That is why she must be destroyed. And he felt he absolutely had to know. He could not just throw her away like some bit of obsolete machinery. She was… was… he did not know what she was.
“Cameron, I-I’m not going to tell mom why it was really sent.”
“They would insist I be destroyed if they knew my John no longer trusted me.”
John nodded. “Yeah. Listen, I don’t want to see you destroyed. That’s not what I want. Maybe we, um, can figure out what might have caused that other one to be sent… together. Ya know?”
“I want to tell you something, John.”
“Ok…” It was John’s turn to tilt his head and regard the robot girl. He tried to search her wide brown eyes for any sort of meaning behind the statement.
“I will keep you safe, John. I always will. It is my mission.”
“-and I appreciate that,” interrupted John.
She placed one slim finger on his lips. Warm and gentle in its touch. “But I want you to know this. You told me the story of the one that protected you when you were younger. How he was destroyed to insure Skynet could not be built from his remains. If there comes a time that you, or your mother, or Derek Reese want to do the same to me…”
John pulled back and tried to give a reassuring smile. “Cameron, that won’t…”
“… I won’t let you.”
He stared at her, stunned into silence as she pressed the broken chip into his hand. The world felt like it had tilted somehow. That things had changed beyond a scope that he could comprehend. It seemed to him that Cameron was telling him something beyond the obvious. He just did not understand it.
“This belongs to you,” said Cameron before she stood to walk away, never looking back.
Was this where it begins? John asked himself as the Terminator disappeared from view.
** Epilogue **
Dust stuck to everything. That’s the way it always was in the Mexican desert. It was not where Cheri Westin had wanted to start over, but sometimes the greatest things came from the humblest beginnings.
Look at Jesus and John Connor.
She stood in her simple peasant’s garb in the old army surplus tent. Wooden benches, salvaged out of a decaying church, had been arrayed in rows in front of her. A battered bible nestled against her chest underneath her crossed arms.
At least her good grades in high school Spanish had helped. Getting better every day, they said.
A dozen Mexicans of Indian descent stared up at her with wide eyes from the benches.
Humble beginnings, Cheri. Humble beginnings.
In her halting Spanish, she began, “The savior has returned to us, and I have seen his perfection…”