Gray Blood
by noiseforyoureyes

disclaimer: It all goes back to James Cameron.

summary: Inspired by episode 2.09, Complications. "There was a raid on our bunker. Metal was everywhere. They took out our command, killed everyone over thirty, killed the children. They took the prisoners to this... place."

When the raid happened, it was chaos only for the people, not for the machines. Some dark corner of Jesse's mind always marveled at this. They moved slowly, carrying out each execution with calm precision, while all around them bodies ran in every direction – grabbing guns, grabbing children, screaming orders. It was a thankless truth that when metal wanted you dead, they didn't let you wait for it. When they raised a gun at you, they targeted your vitals, not your gut like a spiteful human might; in a fraction of a second, they decided upon the quickest way to snuff out your life. Cruelty was not in their nature. Death was.

But something about this harvest was off. Jesse took in the unfolding pattern with dread; it distracted her from an otherwise instinctual rhythm of action. This was too specific, too careful. The machines were registering people as corpses by age: all the young ones, all the old ones, were shot down like so much wasted space. Meanwhile, they turned with real interest to everyone inbetween. The twenty-something unit soldiers; the strongest among them. These were struck down carefully into unconsciousness, as if the machines were taking pains not to inflict any damage. It made no sense. Metal was never so particular about the condition of prisoners, much less their age.

Others in her unit picked up the pattern, growing more reckless with their gunfire as they did, some of them even throwing all defense to the wind and advancing on the metal squadron, as if daring them to take a shot. And on occasion, the metal obliged – but never with killshots. Always, they went for the least fatal places: a shoulder, a leg, an arm. Jesse's stomach turned watching it. She guessed all too well what must be coming for them.

For her.

Derek snatched up some nameless kid that was still standing and bolted for the south tunnel. Jesse followed, clutching her rifle so tightly she couldn't feel it anymore. Every time they rounded a corner, she covered, and every time she made another mad dash without the world turning black, her heart skipped right on cue. It was a familiar battle; crazy as it was, this was her life, and everything from her muscle memory to the grip on her gun was tailored to fit it.

But some new madness crowded the edges of her mind as she glanced behind her – something ugly in the way the metal stepped so precisely over the sleeping bodies. It wasn't right. It wasn't the way of things.

She fought while her thoughts escaped to higher ground, where she could watch what was happening to her like it was happening to someone else, and wonder what it meant.

Jesse woke in the dark. Her arms and feet were not bound; she was dressed in what felt like a simple hospital gown, but she couldn't see a thing to confirm it. Bringing her hand up to her nose, she stared at it long and hard, but no outline emerged. The blackness was complete.

Hesitant, she got on her knees, moving forward inch by inch until her outstretched hand touched cold concrete. It didn't take long. Her hand passed over four walls and returned to its starting place. It was a cell, and a small one. No windows, no discernible door. So unlike the camp houses, where everyone was tied to the same floor in the same room and could at least draw strength from each other. It seemed the machines were trying a new way of breaking people that was really an old one: people had perfected it long ago.

Jesse had wanted to believe the Grays were rumors, but now that luxury was gone. The nightmare stories of camp torture growing worse, of strong, high-ranking soldiers leaking information under the machines' new methods, seemed suddenly all too real. People were creative, and to impart the sickest inventions of human torment to the mind of Skynet – a mind which retained everything and lost nothing… Jesse shuddered. Cruelty was not in their nature, but oh, they were capable of it.

When the light first spilled into her empty quarters, she thought she'd gone blind. A figure stood in the doorway, looking like a savior, but she knew he wasn't anything of the sort. Metal surrounded him, watching. They didn't need to hold a gun to his head; their very presence told him a wrong move would not be tolerated.

Even when she was pulled bodily up to face him – her Gray, she came to call him in her mind – she couldn't focus on his eyes, and she wondered if it was the light deprivation or just the fact that she wouldn't allow herself to believe she was looking into the face of a human being. Words came out of her mouth: she asked him if he liked being responsible for the deaths of twenty children and twenty more old men and women. She told him she wanted to see his insides, to make sure they really were flesh and not metal.

He said nothing, and they took her away.

When her eyes finally adjusted to the harsh light of the testing room, she didn't look into his face anymore; there was something behind it she couldn't stare at too long. Instead, she turned her own face away, closing her eyes. She wished he was a machine, because it felt wrong to hate a human being this much – someone she was technically fighting for with every slug she put into a metal skull.

Jesse fought while picturing Gray blood on her hands, losing track of time as days turned into weeks and weeks turned into long stretches of delirious semi-consciousness. She thought of Derek, because her family was all dead, and their memory afforded her no strength now – it was all tied up with memories of another world long gone, one she had trouble believing had ever existed.

But Derek was a constant. Jesse didn't like the idea of relying on someone, but if she was being honest with herself, she liked the feeling. She took pride in her independence, but sometimes – many times, here in the post-J-Day world – it got old, going back to her bunk every night with nothing but survivor's guilt and stagnant fear to keep her company. Jesse wasn't sure she'd ever admit this out loud, but then, she generally made a habit of never admitting anything out loud. She was a walled person and that was how she liked it.

Once, she'd worried that Derek would weaken those walls, or insist on getting past them – but instead he'd become something of a defender of them. He didn't ask questions; he didn't need to have Jesse spelled out for his benefit, and her gratitude for this was what made her finally open up to him, slowly and quietly. Derek was a broken idealist, she'd come to realize. He fought for things even when he wasn't sure they existed anymore.

Jesse was still picturing Gray blood on her hands when he came up to the door of her cell: not Derek, as she'd foolishly wished so many nights, but her Gray – the one with the eyes she couldn't look at too long. He was standing in the doorway and it took her awhile to realize that no metal was with him. He was standing alone, silhouetted by the light, and this time he was a savior, beckoning her.

Jesse's fingers itched for a gun and she wondered how they would feel around his neck. But she couldn't attack, not with him standing there so clearly unarmed, and her gut told her it wasn't a trap. What purpose would that serve? She was trapped already. There was nothing they could do to her they hadn't already done, aside from killing her. Unless it was more mental torture, more to break a mind already fraying at the edges, by giving it a ray of hope.

But it turned out that attacking a person was as foreign to her senses as attacking metal was natural. Jesse approached the man as if there'd never been any choice in the matter, and as she neared him she finally realized what had made his eyes so unbearable: they'd still been human. Something in them hadn't died, had in fact been killing him every time he stuck a needle into a soldier. His face now was a twisted, pitiful thing that begged her forgiveness, but she wasn't sure she was capable of giving it.

The Gray had already kick-started the escape in more ways than one, but Jesse was his first rescuee. Her mind sharpened as she ran, her fingers less fumbling each time she helped break a lock, freeing soul after soul from their isolated chambers. Each time she came to a door her heart caught in her throat and she found herself almost praying it was Derek. It was such an odd feeling – this panic at the thought of not finding him, a need to see his face above all the others' – but she couldn't distance herself from it, and decided she no longer wanted to.

The Gray kept pushing weapons into people's hands, showing them to the stash he'd nicked from somewhere deep in the facility, and soon the Resistance looked like the Resistance again, storming the gates and shooting anything that stood in the way.

Like a ghost, Derek finally appeared in the current of people. The heady relief that filled Jesse at the sight of him turned to ice when she realized he was moving against the mass, not with them. He was chasing someone, and murder was in his eyes.

Jesse scanned the sea of people for his target, and found a man several yards away also running against the current – making like hell for an open door in the back. Derek yelled something, and rifle shots rang out in response. One of them hit the man in the arm, and he stumbled, but it was too late; he'd already reached the door. Jesse would remember the next moment with perfect clarity, as the man – Derek's Gray, Charles Fischer – turned for one frightened instant, and she saw his face, full of ugly fear and cowardice.

Then he disappeared through the door.

Derek slammed against it in fury, but the door had been locked from the inside. He began pounding it with his fists, the tendons in his arms skeletal – but the drive that had carried him this far seemed to be leaking out by the second, and his knees bent with an unseen weight. Jesse grabbed him by the shoulders.

"Derek," she said. "Derek, there's no time." The man – the coward – he'd bring an army of metal down on them any moment. She pulled Derek bodily away from the door; he was heavy and warm with fever. "C'mon, love. We need to go."

But his body was shutting down. She swore under her breath, the panic setting in fresh. The sonuvabitch weighed a ton under normal circumstances, and she was already weak herself. She called upon every bit of adrenaline she had left, trying to ignore how much her muscles shook, and somehow they moved forward. She kept her mouth by Derek's ear, spilling whispers into it, nonsense strung together by nerves and will. He responded with one step after another, breath coming short.

A soldier saw their plight and skidded to a halt beside them, helping Jesse brace Derek's steps. Something hot stung her eyes and she squinted against it. The traitor's ugly face kept appearing in her mind's eye, his balding head slick with sweat as he glanced back at his former prisoner, and she felt comfortable hating him for all he was worth. What he'd done to Derek – it was not what had been done to her. She watched his eyelids fluttering closed and smelled the metallic stench of blood on him, little red pinpricks on his neck standing out in the dim light.

Her fingers itched for a gun again.

For the first few hours after they arrived at the safety bunker, Jesse simply sat with him, ignoring all the medics that tried to fuss over her. She clutched his wrist – just to feel his pulse, just to know he wasn't going anywhere. "Blood test," someone muttered above her, and she saw a needle go into his arm. He flinched like he'd been burned, mumbling pitiful nonsense with his eyes squeezed shut. She thought of Fischer with a needle, smugly selling the soul of a soldier for his own condemned half-life, and the anger grew in her until she almost forgot there were such things as killer machines hell-bent on world domination; all she could think of was Fischer, and how much he needed to die.

Her own Gray had died during the escape, and she realized he'd never once uttered his name to her, or anyone else. She supposed it was for the best: no matter how many soldiers he'd saved, the Resistance would never let him through their proverbial doors, and alone, he was a dead man walking.

Looking at Derek, she wondered just how easy her Gray had let her off, how long it'd been since he'd decided he wasn't going to be the machines' teacher – that he would hide, on his end, what people were truly capable of. All that was left in her veins was a drug meant to keep her awake during the sessions; she couldn't remember the last time she'd truly slept, but she felt almost grateful for the chemical-induced insomnia now. She needed to be here, to make sure he pulled through. Jesse wasn't sure why she thought her presence would make any difference, but she was tired of second-guessing herself. It was what it was.

Three days passed before Derek was conscious and coherent, sitting up with dried food in front of him that he refused to touch. It was yet another day before he spoke to her at all, during a night shift he shouldn't have taken – one she was trying to take from him, to no avail. His eyes were a stony gray that wouldn't quite meet hers, and he sat next to a pile of weapons and ammunition, cleaning and loading them with methodical grace. He was still pale, still more the ghost she'd seen appear in the crowd than the Derek she remembered. But he was here, alive, and healing. Jesse found it difficult to believe.

The truth was, she didn't feel quite comfortable in her own skin, either. Mornings were disorienting, too much like the simple dreams she'd had back in her cell: of a bunk and a rolled-up jacket to support her head, of people around her, and dim light to see by. But each day, the reality of her surroundings sunk in a little bit more, shoving the nightmare back where it belonged. It was amazing, she thought, how readily the human mind could compartmentalize trauma. It didn't make it go away – Jesse knew this would be back to kick in her in the ass someday soon – but it meant she'd made it her own. And that was enough.

She picked up an automatic and began cleaning it while they stared out at the empty landscape together, watching the moonlight bathe it blue. Derek said nothing for a long time after she arrived, but she could hear him thinking, formulating what to say. He chewed the inside of his lip, something he did when he was trying to focus. She stayed quiet, afraid a word from her would cause him to retreat again.

"I don't care what he did to me," he finally said, and she was taken aback by the clarity of his voice. "It's what he's done to others. God knows how many." Derek's eyes were suddenly transparent as he stared at the gun he held. Jesse saw how cold and how deep his fury ran. "He talked about them like they were old friends, and he talked about me like I was becoming one." He paused, then did the thing she least expected: he locked eyes with her. "He's the worst of them, Jesse. He knew it, the metal knew it. I need to kill him." He swallowed, now looking through her. "I need to beat the hell out of him."

Jesse took this in with a nod, as if it were the most logical response in the world. And in a way, it was. She set down the loaded automatic carefully, trying not to reveal just how much she'd seen in him, and how much it shook her. She picked up another rifle, choosing her response, and delivering it with all the nonchalance she could muster. "Radar crew's been trying to hack the signal going in and out of the Gray base, but the metal cleaned up quick. They're going to keep trying – pass the names we got onto other units."

Derek shook his head. "Not good enough. It needs to be now."

She stopped cleaning the rifle and studied him. A question was poised at the edge of her tongue, one she knew she shouldn't ask. How did you get out, Derek? You weren't in your cell. It was something that'd been bothering her since she first saw him appear in the escape crowd: he'd clearly been fresh from a session, with Fischer in such close vicinity, and no weapon pressed in his hand by a guiding escapee. But how in the hell had he done it? Alone, with no one giving him the opportunity?

She burned to ask him, but instead the silence stretched on, and she knew it was for the best. The things he didn't tell her, he didn't tell her for a reason. And she, of all people, recognized the need for certain battles to be private ones, fought on the turf of the individual.

So instead, she simply handed him the rifle, and waited until he met her eyes again. "Have a little faith, love. His days are numbered." She shrugged. "He's got a Reese on his ass."