Being a Good Guy
Marcus lay awake, thinking over the last few weeks. He hadn’t had a bad day since waking up here in the destroyed ruins of the world. He was starting to wonder if he was ever going to have another one. They’d come and gone before, back before he died and came back as a cyborg. He couldn’t remember going this long without one before.
Blair stirred in her sleep, curling more tightly against his body as a draft of cold air blew across them. Their blankets were not entirely up to the task of keeping them warm in the post-nuclear desert night so Blair insisted they sleep together to share body heart. There were other benefits as well, Marcus thought as Blair nestled her head more firmly against his chest. Certainly he didn’t object. He did worry, though. More then one temporary girlfriend had fled after a bad day. He didn’t want to lose Blair that way.
There were bad moments; he particularly recalled the one when Barnes had tried to kill him with an RPG in the Skynet medical lab they’d invaded to get Connor patched up after the battle at Skynet Central. The black rage that filled him on the bad days had come back full force when the smoke from the grenade cleared and he saw Barnes standing there, waiting to see if it had killed him. He’d wanted to turn it loose on Barnes; his mind had gone over all the ways he could hurt the other man, all the ways his new body could tear the other man apart.
He hadn’t done it, though. Connor’s life had been more important then the anger and so he’d simply shoved it to the back of his mind until it passed. Marcus didn’t remember ever being able to do that before. He wondered if maybe at some point after his death someone had taken out the part of his brain that caused the bad days. It could have been Dr. Kogen as easily as it could have been Skynet. Even with all the files he’d stolen from the central database before it was destroyed he still didn’t know everything they’d done to him.
If one of the surgeries or procedures on his dead body had taken away those black rages, or at least put them under his control, maybe he could be the good guy that Blair said he was. Good guys could still have nasty thoughts, he figured, as long as they didn’t have to act on them.
How many of the problems in his old life could he trace back to a bad day gone wrong? His first prison sentence, for sure. Pretty much all of the restraining orders he’d had against him. He didn’t blame a bad day for his death sentence, though. Black rage or no, he knew that he would have killed the cop that gunned down his brother while Tyler tried to surrender. He’d do it again and still not regret it. The first cop he’d killed he did regret, a little bit. The man had opened fire on him and his brother as they fled the scene of a botched car jacking but both brothers had been armed at the time. He could understand the man’s reaction. Marcus tended to provoke strong reactions from people; he didn’t blame the cop for shooting first.
Blair woke up a bit, maybe she sensed his unhappy thoughts. “Marcus, is everything alright?” Her voice was muffled with sleep.
“Yeah, it’s fine. Go back to sleep.” He stroked her hair as she re-arranged herself and drifted back off.
Hell, maybe it was fine. Maybe dying and coming back as a monstrous mix of man and machine in this world full of killer robots and hard-bitten survivors living in the ruins of a nuclear apocalypse was the best thing that had ever happened to him. If it meant that he really could have a second chance to do things right, to be a good guy, he’d take it.
Marcus curled his arms around Blair and rested his chin on her head. He’d take all the killer robots and nuclear winter they had to throw at him if he could be her good guy.