Revisions: Sarah
SERIES: Revisions
AUTHOR:missnyah
CHARACTERS: Derek Reese, Sarah Connor
RATING: PG-13 for series
WORD COUNT: ~2000
WARNINGS: Spoilers for all of season 2.
NOTES: AU from "Able Raised a Cain" on, some pieces of "born to Run" thrown in
SUMMARY: Fate, God or John Connor offers the chance for some lives to be lived again. Part 3: In which Sarah's visit with a priest is revised.
Additional: Late to the Game? No worries, there's plenty of action in the cheap seats: (Part 1, Part 2)
Her body told her it’s just after noon when the door opened again. She hadn’t seen sunlight in a few days but her internal clock had consolidated its ticks against cinderblock walls and psychotropic drugs in Pescadero. A few fluorescent light bulbs couldn’t fool it. “You’ve got a visitor Ms. Connor,” Auldridge’s voice rang out from the amorphous shadow in the doorway.
She folded her hands neatly on the table and rehearsed her plea to Fr. Bonilla. A shadow separated itself from the dark patch that was Auldridge and resolved into a shape Sarah knew. She watched the image grow larger and wondered if Judgment had already happened and if this silhouette had been burned into her retina by the light of a dying planet, a grotesque nuclear photograph. She watched the shape so intently, waiting to see if it would be followed by Charley Dixon and Riley Dawson, Andy Goode and Miles Dyson. And with his brother at the vanguard, would Kyle Reese bring up the rear? She watched him with such intensity that the sound of his voice caught her unawares. “Thank you, Agent Auldridge.”
Sarah should have been surprised like she should have known not to trust James Ellison, like she should have known how to keep her boy safe. But all the surprise she had been allotted was used up. Calm was all she had left. Calm, a feeling she’d faked so often that the reality of it was like an unexpected taste in her mouth, wine when you’re expecting water. “Fraternizing with my demons Agent Auldridge?” She called. “That’s a bit unprofessional, don’t you think?”
She threw her head back, letting the metal back of the chair dig into her neck. She didn’t remember falling asleep but that didn’t mean much. “Sodium Pentothal or did I lose a lot more blood than I remember?”
Derek approached her slowly, wide-eyed, cautious. Why was she imagining him this way? Maybe it was because he didn’t have a gun in his hand.
“Sarah Connor? My name is Fr. Peter Tilden-“
“Where’s your brother? This is his M.O.”
“I was told you requested the sacraments.” Derek’s face had been scraped clean of its ever-present shadow of stubble and a priest’s cassock nearly covered all evidence of his tattoos.
“What is this?” Sarah felt a laugh bark its way from her throat, shoring up the dam against impending sobs. “Do you win if I go mad?”
“I was also told that you’re sick.” Derek looked uncertain. She laughed again. She laughed at Derek’s hairless chin. She laughed at his priest’s collar. She laughed at the fact that she was being haunted by the Reese boys because two were dead and she’d failed the only one left.
“I want to see the priest. Fr, Bonilla.” Sarah turned and directed her request at the camera in the corner because she didn’t trust the apparition to deliver her message. “I want to see Fr. Bonilla!”
“Ms. Connor… Sarah, I am a priest. I’m the one they sent.” The shade of Derek Reese was staring at her hard. He’d shed some of the furtiveness he’d worn in the door. “I’m the one he sent.”
Derek took her hands across the table as if to offer comfort. But when his fingers closed around hers she careened away from the table, backing away as far as the cuffs on her ankles allowed. Her skin was crawling. “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull you metal bastard. Derek Reese is dead. Go on and kill me. I won’t tell you anything.” Priestly vestments were one thing but Derek wouldn’t have touched her, not even a Derek who lived only in her sleep-deprived mind. The apparition before her had not been crafted by hallucinogens and hysteria. It was the Devil stitched into flesh.
The thing with Derek’s face tried to find an appropriate expression. She wondered when it would start trying to find a gun. “I’m not sure what….” Sarah stared coldly into its eyes. They were logical things weren’t they? Let it see the illogic of lying to her, of trying to use her for its purposes.
The machine’s eyes narrowed. Then its whole demeanor seemed to change, seemed to twist itself into a shape she almost recognized. There was death in his eyes but not because he lacked a soul, only because his soul had been eaten around the edges, dissolved in the acid of a lifelong war. “I’m not metal,” he said coldly and at the same time Sarah said, “Reese?”
The timidity had left his posture. The piety had gone out of his gestures. His fingers wrapped around the handle of a small black case and she half expected it to become a gun under the force of his will. But there was still something of the confusion in his lowered brows.
“Fr. Peter Tilden,” he maintained but the pieces of the priest he’d so carefully assembled had fled from his joints and tendons, only the soldier was left.
“The last time I was shot you came to get me. There was a woman. A doctor. She held a gun on you. What was her name?”
“Sit down and try not to look so hostile,” Derek replied sharply. “You’re Confessing.”
“I’m crazy. Remember?” Sarah stayed where she was. “What was her name?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Derek said flatly. Strike one.
“There’s a scar on your chest. Bullet wound. Near your heart. How’d you get it?”
The muscles in his jaw clenched so that the contours on his face became sharp. The expression was so like her son’s. “I don’t know who you think I am but I was sent here by John Connor-“
“How. Did. You. Get. It?” Whoever he was, he wasn’t metal. He was fighting confusion. He was fighting to keep his temper in check.
“Look Connor, I’ve got a lot of holes in me but none near my heart made by bullets. Where I’m from- you dig yourself a hole like that, you don’t step out again.” His tone was measured and even. It stood in a bizarre contrast to his words. He crossed himself for the boys on the other side of the camera lens.
“Show me,” she challenged.
Derek was silent a moment, nodding as if she’d said something he needed to ponder, something that weighed on his soul. “I’m the priest,” he said quietly. “You are confessing. So sit your ass down because I’ve got the impression that if my cover gets blown I’m not walking out of here.”
This time Sarah did as she was told. She sat and looked him in the eye. “Derek Reese died five days ago. People tend not to see things they don’t expect to see. As long as you’re wearing that face, no one’s looking for you.” The ponderous expression returned but Sarah thought it might be genuine this time. “Who is my son’s father?”
“Only Connor knows that,” he replied distractedly then tilted his head to allow that she herself might have some idea.
It wasn’t quite strike three. She thought the Derek Reese she’d known knew the answer but she’d never seen sure, that was one confession he’d refused to hear. “Yes. John Connor. My son. He sent you.”
Derek nodded, though it hadn’t been a question.
“From when?”
“2027.”
“When specifically? Where was your brother?”
“My brother? Kyle?” Derek glanced to the side and Sarah knew he could see his reflection in the double-walled glass of the observation window that pretended to be a mirror on this side. She wondered if he might be seeing himself as she saw him- as an imperfect copy of himself, counterfeit, a fake given away by smudged ink, by a missing water mark. “He’s with my unit. He’ll assume command unless Connor pulls him for another black bagger.”
“Your team- they didn’t come back with you… Sayles…?” It had been two years and Sarah had never paid much attention to the names of the dead men from the safe house.
“No. We had just pulled out of a remote bunker that was under fire. Patchy retreat. My team didn’t have time to regroup before Connor sent for me.”
Sarah swallowed. There might be a few days, a brother’s death, or a whole lifetime between them but this version of Derek Reese was alive and that, she supposed, was the difference that counted. “He gave you a mission. So what’s next?”
“We pray.”
“Pray?”
This time Sarah let him take her hands. He bowed his head and she followed suit thinking he wanted to shield the sight of their conversation from eyes more concerned with punishing her crimes than upholding their laws. But then he did the last things she expected: he began to pray. “Everlasting King, Thy will for our salvation is full of power. Thy right arm controls the whole course of human life. We give Thee thanks for all Thy mercies, seen and unseen. For eternal life, for the heavenly joys of the Kingdom which is to be….”
The prayer went on for some time and it was some time before Sarah realized that the rhythmic twitchings of his fingertips against her palms were something more than a tick of this new Derek. John is north. Where, they tapped in precise Morse Code.
Canada, she replied in kind.
“…Waters like boundless mirrors, reflecting the sun's golden rays and the scudding clouds. All nature murmurs mysteriously….”
Where.
“No one can put together what has crumbled into dust, but Thou canst restore a conscience turned to ashes. Thou canst restore to its former beauty a soul lost and without hope.”
Sarah hesitated for the space of a missed dash. Derek had lived under her roof for over a year and she never brought herself to trust him…. Peace Arch Park.
“Across the cold chains of the centuries, I feel the warmth of Thy breath, I feel Thy blood pulsing in my veins. Part of time has already gone, but now Thou art the present. Amen.”
“Amen.”
“Do you have any prayer requests to be offered up at Mass?”
She was ready to play the part now. “Yes. Please pray for my son who is dead,” she said. “If John were alive, nothing would stop him from coming to me. He’d try to take down the prison himself. FBI, SWAT, it wouldn’t matter how dangerous it would be for him. He would come. I’m all he’s got….”
As she looked at Derek across the unadorned steel table he seemed to change again. His monochromatic clothes took on a new shade. Stubble darkened his features. They changed places at the table. As the memory surfaced her stomach clenched exactly like it had the moment she realized who the man before her was and who he was to her. She looked at her hands, remembering how she’d held him up as the blood pumped rhythmically from the wound in his chest.
Back then she’d hoped so much that he was someone else. Not Kyle. She’d never let herself think he might be much like his brother. But she’d still wanted something more than he had to give. She’d wanted someone to trust, someone who was family. But Derek Reese had been a junkyard dog, half-mad with rage, who snapped at any hand that tried to pet him and tore the throat from anyone who looked at his master askance. But she never quite knew who that master was. John? Derek himself? Humanity?
She looked at him now, their roles reversed, and thought maybe she’d been just as disappointing. Maybe if she’d given him a place in their lives to fill he would have filled it. Maybe if she hadn’t distrusted him all the time he wouldn’t have given her a reason to do so. She gritted her teeth for a moment around the decision at hand and had to take a breath before parting her jaw so the secret could slip through.
But when she spoke, it wasn’t the secret she’d intended, it wasn’t that they were family. “And it would all be a waste because I can’t stay with him. I’m sick. Or, I will be soon. Cancer.” Sarah nodded to herself, confirming that this was the secret that could help him even if it wasn’t the one that cleared her conscience. “So pray for my son because he was always braver than was good for him.”
Derek nodded. He opened the case he’d brought with him.
“This has to be a sin.”
Derek raised an eyebrow. “Catholic?” He said, meaning, “Do you care?”
“Retired.”
“Good. You can correct me if I mess it up.”
“First Communion, Father?”
He nodded but offered, “Done a few baptisms.”
Derek mouthed some words that resembled the sentiment of the sacrament in question (as far as Sarah remembered anyway) while Fr. Tilden went through the motions for the boys outside with a similar amount of accuracy. When he finished he placed a round of pale white host in Sarah’s cupped palms. “The Body of Christ.”
“Amen.” The wafer stuck to the roof of Sarah’s mouth and she wondered if her own son would someday be remembered in something that tasted like pressed cardboard.
Before he left, Derek took her hands once more. “I’ll pray for you Sarah Connor,” he said but she didn’t know him well enough to know who was speaking just then.
To his retreating back she said. “You know that’s not very priestly of you, Father.”
“What’s that?” He said, turning half around.
“To be thinking that I’m prettier than my picture.”
His hint of a smile wasn’t quite priestly either. “Well then maybe you should pray for me too.”
End part 3