Kyle Reese was born twice. He only remembers the second time, but he imagines the first wasn't so different. Pain. Light. Cold. Confusion. Time travel was like being born, full-grown.

Born. Babies. There weren't many babies at home, in the future. No time to make them, really. Or food to feed them. Or even, for long, mothers to mother them. Kyle didn't really think the future had mothers. Soldiers were soldiers, and everyone in the future was a soldier. After the War, maybe there could be mothers.

The second time he was born, Kyle Reese had no mother (though he'd had a picture of one once), but crawled up and out of the dark, wet womb of an L.A. alley and stole a homeless man's pants.

-

Sarah sat in the hotel room waiting for him to come back. She sat thinking about not thinking. She sat Zen. She sat with a finger stuck in a hole in her jeans, and thought, though trying not to think, about the holes in her life. In reality. In her best friend.

So. Mother of the savior of mankind. That's been done before. But this messianic embryo would grow human. And would be hunted his whole life. She'd be reading him the Army field manual instead of "Where the Wild Things Are." How can you be a mother and raise the type of soldier Reese had described?

And Reese. This thin, dirty, intense guy who had seemed crazy but ended up being the only sane person in Los Angeles. Had seemed every inch the soldier but had soft eyes. She wanted to know about him. Wanted to know why he was sent back, why he was the one. She wanted to know about the future, where those things sat like silver kings on thrones of human bones, routing out men and women like rats from under the remains of civilization. She'd ask him when he got back with the supplies. She'd ask him, and she'd force herself to listen. She'd memorize every detail of what he said, the scars, the look in his eyes, and she'd start there. She'd start preparing herself for the kind of mother, an unmother, she'd have to be.

-

She wasn't always.

She didn't know it then, but later, much later, when her son asked about his father, she would never forget to talk about his eyes and that intensity, and she'd always smile and mention his pants. Those awful, paint-smattered, too-short pants.

Always a hero. Always dead. Always with John's eyes and homeless guy pants.