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anythingbutgreyTitle: Looking for a Ghost (2/?)
Ships (Fandom): John/Cameron, John/Allison (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles)
Timeline/Spoilers: Post-Born to Run; full series spoilers
A/N: Basically, this is what happened when I watched the s2 finale last August. It's very long and will be published as one chapter a week until its conclusion. Many thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ava_leigh_fitz and noblealice for their ever-present betaing and cheerleading.
Summary: John’s mouth tastes of mud and specks of gravel, like an old dirt road. He has told this story too many times.
Chapters
One
It takes John three days to finish, and he barely sleeps. He measures out time in Allison’s meals, and he is secretly starting to hope she brings him food because she wants to know about him as much as he wants to know about her. But he’s probably projecting. Maybe he wants it to be Cameron inside. He doesn’t think about how often he has wished Cameron could be human. That they could have something normal, a propensity toward normal, that he could kiss her one day, maybe, and not think about how he will die some day and she will remain the same. He never says these things out loud, is careful to think them only in his most desperate moments, when he can afford to. When those thoughts are the least dangerous thing in the room.
One night at dinnertime Allison comes in with another one of her processed peanut butter sandwiches and says, “I’ve been thinking about timelines.”
John looks up. He has been trying not to look at her when she brings him meals, and knows it seems rude. Survival tactics don’t always match up with expected human etiquette. In fact, they rarely do.
“Oh?” Looking at her for too long makes his mouth dry up. Looking her in the eyes is worst, but everything about her is a little too heavy. The lips are almost as bad as her eyes. Cheekbones are very risky. Her neck could do damage. He wants to say that he’s just trying to understand. He wants to talk about how years ago that feel like months ago a robot told him she loved him and he loved her and how he already somehow knew that. At least the second part.
“If you get back to yours,” Allison says, her hands behind her back like the soldier she is, “do we vanish?”
John puts down the pen and tries to swallow. “I don’t know. I don’t read a lot of theoretical physics, and even if I did I don’t know how Einstein would explain this. Time traveling the way I’ve seen is a direct violation of the grandfather paradox – you know, going back in time to change something so that some later event will never happen. If you make it so it never happens then you would never have gone back to change it. Paradox. As it turns out, it doesn’t work that way.”
Allison nods. Her hair falls across her face and it’s easier to look at her that way, even though he still wants to touch her. He sits on his hands.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” she says, very quietly. The movement of John’s neck to look at her is so sharp it stings. “About this time travel stuff. If in your original future you sent a soldier back to protect your mother, it was so that you could be raised as a soldier to send that man back to protect your mother. And the world goes round and round. It’s enough to kill a person, thinking about it too much.”
John is silent for a moment, and then picks up the pen again, doodling chip schematics in the corner. “Don’t think about it too much.”
“I can’t help it,” Allison says with a delirious sort of laugh in her voice. “I still can’t place you and it’s starting to drive me nuts. This place is driving me nuts.”
Her voice cracks on the last sentence, and John breaks his diligent pattern of staring at anything but her. She looks away for a moment, coughs to clear her throat.
“Derek tells me you’re from pre-Judgment Day,” Allison says with the voice people use when they’re trying to change the subject. She said too much. That was an accident. “You’re lucky. I don’t remember what that was like.”
Allison drapes one arm is across her stomach, grasping the other elbow. Riley used to do that. It looked like she was freezing.
“You believe me a lot easier than Derek does,” John observes with narrow eyes. “Why?”
Allison shrugs. “You have a way about you. I can’t explain it; I just believe you. Maybe because I have to. I have to believe someone’s trying to stop this before it even starts.”
“I don’t know if we can,” John whispers and doesn’t look her in the eye. They’ve been trying and trying to get it to stop and it won’t stop; it’ll never stop. Sometimes he thinks this is where humanity is always heading. Right here, atomic wastelands and not enough of bodies remaining to bury them. Before he can look back up at Allison, she is kneeling in front of him, taking his hands in hers. It’s the most terrifying thing he has ever seen. He can handle Terminators and bombs and running and running and running – they are nothing compared to Cameron begging for salvation. He has seen it once before; he never wants to see it again.
“You have to try, John Connor,” she says, and his name in her mouth is the first thing he has heard her say that sounds like Cameron. He just now realizes that Cameron always says his name as though it is an old, sad song. “You have to try.”
He takes her hands and stands, tossing a glance to the window to see if anyone is currently passing by. There’s no one there, but there might be in a minute. Anyone looking in wouldn’t know quite what to do, a prisoner with his hands lightly grasping onto the fingers of Allison Young, looking her evenly in the eye.
“Allison,” he says, his voice low and quiet. He doesn’t know what he was going to say next. John is normally so good at finding the right things to say, but he keeps messing up in this place, a boy useless without his mother to guide him.
She shakes her head with eyes closed, a tear catching in the edge of her eye. He wants it to fall, wants the full sight of it, wants to bottle it and show it to Cameron one day, say, This is what humanity is. What we do. But it seems to stop and evaporate right there in the corner of her eyelid. Allison is a soldier. First and foremost, soldiers do not cry. All the same, and without thinking about it, because thinking would make him stop, he leans in and kisses the corner of her eye where the tear was a moment before. The brush of his lips against her skin is so light he thinks he imagined it. He has barely pulled away before he knows that was a bad idea. He has also barely pulled away when Allison’s hand catches the back of his neck and pulls him back toward her. She does not kiss him. Instead, he stops half an inch from her mouth, so that he can feel the light breeze of her breath that emerges in short spurts. He looks up from her lips and sees her eyes are still closed, the edges crinkling just slightly in the remnants of a small smile.
That is when he kisses her, with his eyes still open and thinking in echoes of wrong and Cameron and not her. But Allison sounds and looks of her, and John, he is not as strong as people think he is. Allison is soft edges where Cameron might just be impermeable metallic plates. Allison is warm while Cameron is cold, and John knows Cameron is cold because he has felt the inside of her, where the machine lives. He lets his eyes shut after a moment, Allison somehow pressed against the wall and her arms strong around his back, under his shirt. He is careful to keep his hands on clothes and not bare skin, but sometimes her shirt slips and his hand makes contact with the flesh just above her hips. After a moment, Allison pulls away, shakes her head, says, “It’s okay,” because she thinks the unevenness of their desperation is because of his fear. It is, but not in the way she thinks; he’s afraid he’ll start touching her and never stop and when he finds Cameron he won’t be able to stop touching her either. But Allison keeps repeating reassurances along the side of his neck and he decides, just for now, just now, to forget about pasts and futures and be here with a woman who has the wrong face. He wraps his hands around her waist, under the cloth of her ratty t-shirt, kisses her from jaw to clavicle, gets so lost he’s not sure who is the one whispering names and moans, and her fingers are undoing the fastens of his pants when she stops and gasps, “Someone’s coming.”
John pushes away from her as fast as he can, stumbling back into his chair just as Kyle Reese walks with slow steps into the room. John’s mouth falls, his lips parting into a quiet oh.
“Allison,” Kyle says. Allison runs a hand across her hair, and if John is honest it doesn’t look much messier than when she walked in the room. Kyle doesn’t look at her for more than an instant, anyway. “Could you give us a moment?”
She nods and quickly tiptoes across the floor, keeping her eyes on John until the door shuts behind her. He stares until he cannot see her anymore, runs his tongue along the inside of his mouth to taste what’s left of her, tries not to wonder if Cameron would taste the same. Kyle Reese sits at the table across from John and John begins to think this is some cruel joke, people who should not exist bearing the faces of those he loves, paraded into his metal box room to see if he’ll twitch. John finds it stunning just how much he looks like his father. He has never even seen a picture. His mother and uncle said they looked the same but the resemblance is almost frightening. John wants to run his fingers across his father’s face like a blind child, touch the structure, imprint his father on his fingertips so he can never lose this. It seems that this world just makes him want to touch anything he can, and he doesn’t know why. It’s the one sense he has been trained not to use.
“My brother—Derek is out on a mission and asked me to look in on you,” Kyle begins. His voice is not soft or kind or sympathetic, but it isn’t harsh either. He smiles a little, a fractional twitch of the lips hampered by war. “But I get the feeling you’re doing just fine.”
John does not smile back because he can’t. His jaw hangs open and he forgets every rule on the impropriety of staring. Kyle looks back, the small smirk fading away.
“Did you finish your debrief?” Kyle asks, reaching his hand across the table to pick up John’s scurried notes.
“Not yet,” John says. His voice doesn’t sound like it should, but softer and further away, like an echo. “There’s a lot to tell.”
Kyle flips up a page of John’s scribbling and the paper obscures his father’s face. It’s easier for John to breathe that way, when he can pretend the person across from him doesn’t share his face. He flexes his previously frozen fingers, inhales deeply. It’s like the world goes on pause for a moment so he can breathe.
“I can tell,” Kyle says. He looks up at him with an eyebrow raised. “1984?”
John nods. None of this story makes sense. He should have kept his mouth shut.
“And you still won’t tell us what you’re looking for here?”
“I don’t know either,” John lies. Half-lies. “I’m just hoping to know it when I see it.”
Kyle puts the paper down on the table and leans back in the chair, arms crossed. John feels under a microscope and squirms to re-adjust in his seat. He looks down at the table, only glancing up out of the corner of his eyes, like a punished school child. A part of him wants to laugh and talk about his life and find out about this man, Kyle Reese, what he does and thinks and feels. But most of him doesn’t know what to do. After a moment of frozen staring, Kyle stands to go, the screeching of his chair against the ground as sharp and shrill as a child’s cry of pain.
“Try and get that stuff done as soon as you can,” Kyle says, and though his voice is firm it is also kind. “We have to do all this intake stuff, can’t just have strangers walking around the camp. Especially not with a story like yours.”
At this last sentence Kyle’s eyes fall to the tabletop. He shakes his head. “I believe you, kid; I really do, and I don’t know why. But we need more proof than your word.” He looks back up at John and hands him a new pen. A good idea, since John’s had been dying. There are too many words inside of him. “So finish your work so we can at least start to get a grip on you.”
John swallows and nods, his tongue sticking in his mouth. “Kyle,” he says, slow and uncertain before his father who looks his age can go. “Judgment Day. When was it?”
Kyle’s head tilts to the left, his eyes narrowing. “January 25, 2010. It snowed.”
Over one year earlier than it used to be. Things are getting worse. His mother doesn’t stop it. Him leaving makes it worse. It was worse before he left. There are too many options; they bounce off the inside of his skull with the sound of clanging gongs. Before he can think of something to say, the door shuts again and his father is gone. He stares at the metal entranceway for too many minutes after Kyle walks away, and then, with a heavy exhale and eyes that implore he sleep, he continues to write.
When Allison brings him breakfast the next morning, he’s already awake again after a brief night of sleep, listing all the things he knows about chip reprogramming, which he’s starting to learn isn’t much. She gives a little half-smile when she enters the room, sets down the porridge, and then turns to go. John stands so quickly he knocks over his chair, grabs her wrist when her back is already turned to stop her from leaving. She stays with her back toward him while he feels the pressure of her pulse against his thumb, strong and fast.
“John,” she whispers, twisting her wrist out of his grip, pushing against the thumb, the way fighters are trained to break free. She does not turn around. “I’m not sure that what happened—I don’t think it was a good idea.”
He swallows, his hand still in the air, reaching. “Why not?” He has his reasons, beginning with Cameron and ending with how he thinks Allison is going to die someday, someday soon. But that night he had dreamed of her and known it was Allison, not Cameron, and that’s enough. Everything he cares about tumbles to the ground; if he spends his life avoiding life then he will turn to ash as well. He deserves that, doesn’t he, he deserves to be loved or something close to it, he deserves something beyond this constant blood and bullets, even if it will not last. He can’t be here on his own forever. He can’t.
She turns around with a quiet sigh. “Because you’re a stranger here. Because you’re from a world I don’t understand. Because if you finish whatever it is you came here for and go back to your time, I might just disappear.” Allison shuts her eyes and breathes in, a deep, raggedy sound. “Because I’m not sure if I’d rather just disappear.”
“Allison,” he whispers, stepping around the table, standing in front of her. His hands linger in the air in front of her face before he settles the tips of his fingers on her cheeks. “You’re not going to disappear. If I can finish what I’m doing, if I can stop SkyNet, you’re going to live.”
She reaches up with fingers that might be shaking and gently takes John’s hands from her face. Still clasping one, she keeps her eyes low and whispers, “Come with me.” She drops the hand and opens the door into the hallway, where the lights flicker and the floor is smudged with blood and dirt. John takes an even look in both directions, trying to gain his bearings. To the left is the infirmary. That is not the way out. To the right the path splits. Go twenty meters to the right, make another right, continue for one hundred paces, make a left, slip under the gate, and escape. Allison moves to the right, nodding her head for John to follow. They do not make another right. They continue to go straight, and then make a left, then a right, toward the sound of hammers and saws. They stop in a tiny room cramped with desk lamps and people. Each person is hunched over their work at three rows of long tables.
“We study chips,” Allison says. “We’re trying to figure out how they work. Find a virus or something we can introduce into the system and do some damage. Figure out ways to confuse the Metal we encounter. Anything we can think of, some things we haven’t thought of yet.” She gestures around the room. “This is the brain of the operation.”
John surveys the room. With the tiny lamps the only specks of light in the space, it looks more like a druggie’s basement than anyone’s intelligence stronghold. When he moves to the nearest empty station and turns on a light, it doesn’t feel like he controls his own body. It feels like the air is pushing him along. Allison feels miles away, and in his head he hears Cameron whispering, You’re ahead of schedule for the things you need to know.
“I notice things,” Allison says. John jumps at the sound. “I see the way you draw those chip schematics, and I heard Derek telling Kyle you think you can reprogram Metal to help us.”
When he turns to look at her, her hands are deep inside her pockets and he realizes just how young she is. How young he is too, but he was never young, he was never meant to be a child. Allison from Palmdale was supposed to be young. She probably was, once.
“I don’t like the idea of working with Metal,” she continues, looking him evenly in the eye with a familiar determination. “But if it’ll help us win this, if it’ll help you find what you need to set things right, I think you best get started.”
Behind him, someone says, “What are you doing here?”
John jumps and turns around to find that Derek is back from his mission, a sling holding his arm in place.
“It’ll heal,” Derek says off his stare. “What are you doing here?”
Allison steps between them. “I was showing John the work stations. I think he could help us.”
Derek doesn’t take his eyes off John and John doesn’t blink. He knows how his uncle works; he knows to never look away. That’s what strength is, as far as Derek Reese is concerned. Stare anything that comes at you straight in the face, even death. That is how you win.
“Fine,” Derek says. He points the index finger of his good hand at Allison. “He screws up, this is on you.”
She puts two fingers up in a tired salute, smiling. “Yes, sir.”
Derek tries not to smile and turns away before his grim expression breaks completely. Allison turns back to John. “I should let you get to work,” she says. “In the back left you can find Phipps, he’ll show you how these chips work. Maybe you can do some good here.”
She kisses him before she leaves, soft and slow. Before he can open his eyes again, she’s gone.
And John Connor gets to work.
Ships (Fandom): John/Cameron, John/Allison (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles)
Timeline/Spoilers: Post-Born to Run; full series spoilers
A/N: Basically, this is what happened when I watched the s2 finale last August. It's very long and will be published as one chapter a week until its conclusion. Many thanks to
ava_leigh_fitz and noblealice for their ever-present betaing and cheerleading.Summary: John’s mouth tastes of mud and specks of gravel, like an old dirt road. He has told this story too many times.
Chapters
One
It takes John three days to finish, and he barely sleeps. He measures out time in Allison’s meals, and he is secretly starting to hope she brings him food because she wants to know about him as much as he wants to know about her. But he’s probably projecting. Maybe he wants it to be Cameron inside. He doesn’t think about how often he has wished Cameron could be human. That they could have something normal, a propensity toward normal, that he could kiss her one day, maybe, and not think about how he will die some day and she will remain the same. He never says these things out loud, is careful to think them only in his most desperate moments, when he can afford to. When those thoughts are the least dangerous thing in the room.
One night at dinnertime Allison comes in with another one of her processed peanut butter sandwiches and says, “I’ve been thinking about timelines.”
John looks up. He has been trying not to look at her when she brings him meals, and knows it seems rude. Survival tactics don’t always match up with expected human etiquette. In fact, they rarely do.
“Oh?” Looking at her for too long makes his mouth dry up. Looking her in the eyes is worst, but everything about her is a little too heavy. The lips are almost as bad as her eyes. Cheekbones are very risky. Her neck could do damage. He wants to say that he’s just trying to understand. He wants to talk about how years ago that feel like months ago a robot told him she loved him and he loved her and how he already somehow knew that. At least the second part.
“If you get back to yours,” Allison says, her hands behind her back like the soldier she is, “do we vanish?”
John puts down the pen and tries to swallow. “I don’t know. I don’t read a lot of theoretical physics, and even if I did I don’t know how Einstein would explain this. Time traveling the way I’ve seen is a direct violation of the grandfather paradox – you know, going back in time to change something so that some later event will never happen. If you make it so it never happens then you would never have gone back to change it. Paradox. As it turns out, it doesn’t work that way.”
Allison nods. Her hair falls across her face and it’s easier to look at her that way, even though he still wants to touch her. He sits on his hands.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” she says, very quietly. The movement of John’s neck to look at her is so sharp it stings. “About this time travel stuff. If in your original future you sent a soldier back to protect your mother, it was so that you could be raised as a soldier to send that man back to protect your mother. And the world goes round and round. It’s enough to kill a person, thinking about it too much.”
John is silent for a moment, and then picks up the pen again, doodling chip schematics in the corner. “Don’t think about it too much.”
“I can’t help it,” Allison says with a delirious sort of laugh in her voice. “I still can’t place you and it’s starting to drive me nuts. This place is driving me nuts.”
Her voice cracks on the last sentence, and John breaks his diligent pattern of staring at anything but her. She looks away for a moment, coughs to clear her throat.
“Derek tells me you’re from pre-Judgment Day,” Allison says with the voice people use when they’re trying to change the subject. She said too much. That was an accident. “You’re lucky. I don’t remember what that was like.”
Allison drapes one arm is across her stomach, grasping the other elbow. Riley used to do that. It looked like she was freezing.
“You believe me a lot easier than Derek does,” John observes with narrow eyes. “Why?”
Allison shrugs. “You have a way about you. I can’t explain it; I just believe you. Maybe because I have to. I have to believe someone’s trying to stop this before it even starts.”
“I don’t know if we can,” John whispers and doesn’t look her in the eye. They’ve been trying and trying to get it to stop and it won’t stop; it’ll never stop. Sometimes he thinks this is where humanity is always heading. Right here, atomic wastelands and not enough of bodies remaining to bury them. Before he can look back up at Allison, she is kneeling in front of him, taking his hands in hers. It’s the most terrifying thing he has ever seen. He can handle Terminators and bombs and running and running and running – they are nothing compared to Cameron begging for salvation. He has seen it once before; he never wants to see it again.
“You have to try, John Connor,” she says, and his name in her mouth is the first thing he has heard her say that sounds like Cameron. He just now realizes that Cameron always says his name as though it is an old, sad song. “You have to try.”
He takes her hands and stands, tossing a glance to the window to see if anyone is currently passing by. There’s no one there, but there might be in a minute. Anyone looking in wouldn’t know quite what to do, a prisoner with his hands lightly grasping onto the fingers of Allison Young, looking her evenly in the eye.
“Allison,” he says, his voice low and quiet. He doesn’t know what he was going to say next. John is normally so good at finding the right things to say, but he keeps messing up in this place, a boy useless without his mother to guide him.
She shakes her head with eyes closed, a tear catching in the edge of her eye. He wants it to fall, wants the full sight of it, wants to bottle it and show it to Cameron one day, say, This is what humanity is. What we do. But it seems to stop and evaporate right there in the corner of her eyelid. Allison is a soldier. First and foremost, soldiers do not cry. All the same, and without thinking about it, because thinking would make him stop, he leans in and kisses the corner of her eye where the tear was a moment before. The brush of his lips against her skin is so light he thinks he imagined it. He has barely pulled away before he knows that was a bad idea. He has also barely pulled away when Allison’s hand catches the back of his neck and pulls him back toward her. She does not kiss him. Instead, he stops half an inch from her mouth, so that he can feel the light breeze of her breath that emerges in short spurts. He looks up from her lips and sees her eyes are still closed, the edges crinkling just slightly in the remnants of a small smile.
That is when he kisses her, with his eyes still open and thinking in echoes of wrong and Cameron and not her. But Allison sounds and looks of her, and John, he is not as strong as people think he is. Allison is soft edges where Cameron might just be impermeable metallic plates. Allison is warm while Cameron is cold, and John knows Cameron is cold because he has felt the inside of her, where the machine lives. He lets his eyes shut after a moment, Allison somehow pressed against the wall and her arms strong around his back, under his shirt. He is careful to keep his hands on clothes and not bare skin, but sometimes her shirt slips and his hand makes contact with the flesh just above her hips. After a moment, Allison pulls away, shakes her head, says, “It’s okay,” because she thinks the unevenness of their desperation is because of his fear. It is, but not in the way she thinks; he’s afraid he’ll start touching her and never stop and when he finds Cameron he won’t be able to stop touching her either. But Allison keeps repeating reassurances along the side of his neck and he decides, just for now, just now, to forget about pasts and futures and be here with a woman who has the wrong face. He wraps his hands around her waist, under the cloth of her ratty t-shirt, kisses her from jaw to clavicle, gets so lost he’s not sure who is the one whispering names and moans, and her fingers are undoing the fastens of his pants when she stops and gasps, “Someone’s coming.”
John pushes away from her as fast as he can, stumbling back into his chair just as Kyle Reese walks with slow steps into the room. John’s mouth falls, his lips parting into a quiet oh.
“Allison,” Kyle says. Allison runs a hand across her hair, and if John is honest it doesn’t look much messier than when she walked in the room. Kyle doesn’t look at her for more than an instant, anyway. “Could you give us a moment?”
She nods and quickly tiptoes across the floor, keeping her eyes on John until the door shuts behind her. He stares until he cannot see her anymore, runs his tongue along the inside of his mouth to taste what’s left of her, tries not to wonder if Cameron would taste the same. Kyle Reese sits at the table across from John and John begins to think this is some cruel joke, people who should not exist bearing the faces of those he loves, paraded into his metal box room to see if he’ll twitch. John finds it stunning just how much he looks like his father. He has never even seen a picture. His mother and uncle said they looked the same but the resemblance is almost frightening. John wants to run his fingers across his father’s face like a blind child, touch the structure, imprint his father on his fingertips so he can never lose this. It seems that this world just makes him want to touch anything he can, and he doesn’t know why. It’s the one sense he has been trained not to use.
“My brother—Derek is out on a mission and asked me to look in on you,” Kyle begins. His voice is not soft or kind or sympathetic, but it isn’t harsh either. He smiles a little, a fractional twitch of the lips hampered by war. “But I get the feeling you’re doing just fine.”
John does not smile back because he can’t. His jaw hangs open and he forgets every rule on the impropriety of staring. Kyle looks back, the small smirk fading away.
“Did you finish your debrief?” Kyle asks, reaching his hand across the table to pick up John’s scurried notes.
“Not yet,” John says. His voice doesn’t sound like it should, but softer and further away, like an echo. “There’s a lot to tell.”
Kyle flips up a page of John’s scribbling and the paper obscures his father’s face. It’s easier for John to breathe that way, when he can pretend the person across from him doesn’t share his face. He flexes his previously frozen fingers, inhales deeply. It’s like the world goes on pause for a moment so he can breathe.
“I can tell,” Kyle says. He looks up at him with an eyebrow raised. “1984?”
John nods. None of this story makes sense. He should have kept his mouth shut.
“And you still won’t tell us what you’re looking for here?”
“I don’t know either,” John lies. Half-lies. “I’m just hoping to know it when I see it.”
Kyle puts the paper down on the table and leans back in the chair, arms crossed. John feels under a microscope and squirms to re-adjust in his seat. He looks down at the table, only glancing up out of the corner of his eyes, like a punished school child. A part of him wants to laugh and talk about his life and find out about this man, Kyle Reese, what he does and thinks and feels. But most of him doesn’t know what to do. After a moment of frozen staring, Kyle stands to go, the screeching of his chair against the ground as sharp and shrill as a child’s cry of pain.
“Try and get that stuff done as soon as you can,” Kyle says, and though his voice is firm it is also kind. “We have to do all this intake stuff, can’t just have strangers walking around the camp. Especially not with a story like yours.”
At this last sentence Kyle’s eyes fall to the tabletop. He shakes his head. “I believe you, kid; I really do, and I don’t know why. But we need more proof than your word.” He looks back up at John and hands him a new pen. A good idea, since John’s had been dying. There are too many words inside of him. “So finish your work so we can at least start to get a grip on you.”
John swallows and nods, his tongue sticking in his mouth. “Kyle,” he says, slow and uncertain before his father who looks his age can go. “Judgment Day. When was it?”
Kyle’s head tilts to the left, his eyes narrowing. “January 25, 2010. It snowed.”
Over one year earlier than it used to be. Things are getting worse. His mother doesn’t stop it. Him leaving makes it worse. It was worse before he left. There are too many options; they bounce off the inside of his skull with the sound of clanging gongs. Before he can think of something to say, the door shuts again and his father is gone. He stares at the metal entranceway for too many minutes after Kyle walks away, and then, with a heavy exhale and eyes that implore he sleep, he continues to write.
When Allison brings him breakfast the next morning, he’s already awake again after a brief night of sleep, listing all the things he knows about chip reprogramming, which he’s starting to learn isn’t much. She gives a little half-smile when she enters the room, sets down the porridge, and then turns to go. John stands so quickly he knocks over his chair, grabs her wrist when her back is already turned to stop her from leaving. She stays with her back toward him while he feels the pressure of her pulse against his thumb, strong and fast.
“John,” she whispers, twisting her wrist out of his grip, pushing against the thumb, the way fighters are trained to break free. She does not turn around. “I’m not sure that what happened—I don’t think it was a good idea.”
He swallows, his hand still in the air, reaching. “Why not?” He has his reasons, beginning with Cameron and ending with how he thinks Allison is going to die someday, someday soon. But that night he had dreamed of her and known it was Allison, not Cameron, and that’s enough. Everything he cares about tumbles to the ground; if he spends his life avoiding life then he will turn to ash as well. He deserves that, doesn’t he, he deserves to be loved or something close to it, he deserves something beyond this constant blood and bullets, even if it will not last. He can’t be here on his own forever. He can’t.
She turns around with a quiet sigh. “Because you’re a stranger here. Because you’re from a world I don’t understand. Because if you finish whatever it is you came here for and go back to your time, I might just disappear.” Allison shuts her eyes and breathes in, a deep, raggedy sound. “Because I’m not sure if I’d rather just disappear.”
“Allison,” he whispers, stepping around the table, standing in front of her. His hands linger in the air in front of her face before he settles the tips of his fingers on her cheeks. “You’re not going to disappear. If I can finish what I’m doing, if I can stop SkyNet, you’re going to live.”
She reaches up with fingers that might be shaking and gently takes John’s hands from her face. Still clasping one, she keeps her eyes low and whispers, “Come with me.” She drops the hand and opens the door into the hallway, where the lights flicker and the floor is smudged with blood and dirt. John takes an even look in both directions, trying to gain his bearings. To the left is the infirmary. That is not the way out. To the right the path splits. Go twenty meters to the right, make another right, continue for one hundred paces, make a left, slip under the gate, and escape. Allison moves to the right, nodding her head for John to follow. They do not make another right. They continue to go straight, and then make a left, then a right, toward the sound of hammers and saws. They stop in a tiny room cramped with desk lamps and people. Each person is hunched over their work at three rows of long tables.
“We study chips,” Allison says. “We’re trying to figure out how they work. Find a virus or something we can introduce into the system and do some damage. Figure out ways to confuse the Metal we encounter. Anything we can think of, some things we haven’t thought of yet.” She gestures around the room. “This is the brain of the operation.”
John surveys the room. With the tiny lamps the only specks of light in the space, it looks more like a druggie’s basement than anyone’s intelligence stronghold. When he moves to the nearest empty station and turns on a light, it doesn’t feel like he controls his own body. It feels like the air is pushing him along. Allison feels miles away, and in his head he hears Cameron whispering, You’re ahead of schedule for the things you need to know.
“I notice things,” Allison says. John jumps at the sound. “I see the way you draw those chip schematics, and I heard Derek telling Kyle you think you can reprogram Metal to help us.”
When he turns to look at her, her hands are deep inside her pockets and he realizes just how young she is. How young he is too, but he was never young, he was never meant to be a child. Allison from Palmdale was supposed to be young. She probably was, once.
“I don’t like the idea of working with Metal,” she continues, looking him evenly in the eye with a familiar determination. “But if it’ll help us win this, if it’ll help you find what you need to set things right, I think you best get started.”
Behind him, someone says, “What are you doing here?”
John jumps and turns around to find that Derek is back from his mission, a sling holding his arm in place.
“It’ll heal,” Derek says off his stare. “What are you doing here?”
Allison steps between them. “I was showing John the work stations. I think he could help us.”
Derek doesn’t take his eyes off John and John doesn’t blink. He knows how his uncle works; he knows to never look away. That’s what strength is, as far as Derek Reese is concerned. Stare anything that comes at you straight in the face, even death. That is how you win.
“Fine,” Derek says. He points the index finger of his good hand at Allison. “He screws up, this is on you.”
She puts two fingers up in a tired salute, smiling. “Yes, sir.”
Derek tries not to smile and turns away before his grim expression breaks completely. Allison turns back to John. “I should let you get to work,” she says. “In the back left you can find Phipps, he’ll show you how these chips work. Maybe you can do some good here.”
She kisses him before she leaves, soft and slow. Before he can open his eyes again, she’s gone.
And John Connor gets to work.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-11-02 06:12 am (UTC)Also, was this:
His jaw hangs open and he forgets every rule on the impropriety of staring.
because he's shocked that Kyle seemed to know what John and Allison were doing? The dropped jaw thing wasn't completely clear to me.
Looking forward to more!
no subject
Date: 2010-11-02 06:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-02 06:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-02 06:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-02 09:16 am (UTC)Can't wait to see where you'll take all the characters :). I love John's internal monologue on the differences between Cameron and Allison.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-02 09:55 pm (UTC)I liked the show but when it ended I practically forgot about it. Then I decided to follow you because I love your posts on Cordelia, and you re-ignited my interest to "Sarah Connor Chronicles".
I wonder if the writers had some interesting plan for season 3...
no subject
Date: 2010-11-02 09:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-06 06:34 pm (UTC)Is there any way you can link me to info on s3? I'd love to read anything you've found because I just know it was going to be amazing and I can't believe we'll never see it.
Fantastic.
Date: 2011-02-13 06:58 pm (UTC)I love it so much, I just have to hope you will bring some more soon.