Title: Ballerina
Characters: John Connor, Cameron Phillips
Summary: He thinks he loves the façade during those moments – the ballerina.
Spoilers: The Demond Hand, 1x07
He looks up to the sound of Chopin wafting in from a room she barely uses (at night), to the kitchen where he's still doing his homework. She does this often – leaves him there to go into her assigned room once her homework is done (not that she should find any of this difficult so she's always first to finish).
He knows that she methodically changes from the clothes she wore during the day to the ones that are neatly folded on the bed, and available whenever the mood strikes her.
She dances barefoot on the wooden boards, a graceful beauty shadowed by the afternoon light pouring in through the white curtains. Putting all of her weight on one foot, then the other, over and over again.
It happens sometimes that he drops the pen, and forgets about equations and answering questions. He gets up and climbs the stairs and peers through the half open door as she dances, seemingly oblivious to him when, truth be told, she's aware of his every move.
It strikes him that she doesn't repeat the movements from earlier sessions but goes for something new, as if she could actually feel the emotion in the music and recreate it through herself, through her choice of going for one foot instead of the other, of bending this way instead of that way.
Sometimes, he thinks he loves the façade during those moments – the ballerina. He tells himself he could never be in love with this (and he really wants to believe it) – after all, she's all metal endoskeleton and Skynet's computer chip.
How someone made from metal and wires could be so graceful in those moments, when she decides it's ballet time? Does she want to fool them – or is she only fooling herself?
She's been built to kill him as he's born to destroy her kind. Her sole goal in life was to terminate him so she could live (and he finds it ironic) and by some kind of twisted fate, she's become his protector.
She's become much more but he's not ready to admit it out loud, let alone to himself. She shouldn't be more.
He doesn't realize that she has stopped dancing until she's staring at him with blank brown eyes (how he would like to see something there when her eyes meet his). "You are watching me."
So much for stating the obvious. "This is different from last time," he states lamely - she has caught him off guard.
"I like doing something new." She sounds genuine and he doesn't tell her that if she can't have feelings, she can't like either. "You wouldn't understand."
"Why?"
She wants to tell him, you're not him. Not yet. He's not the John who kisses the corner of her mouth when in the safety of his bunker, the one who tells her he loves her and really means it. He's not her John yet, so she knows she won't be able to make him understand that, when it comes down to her, there's more than meets the eye.
As quickly as she has stopped, she resumes her position, her arms forming an ellipse while she raises and bends her left leg, her left foot resting against the side of her right knee.
He backs away, knowing this is his cue to leave.
There are times she is as much a mystery to him as he is for her. There are other times when she plays ballerina and looks more and more like one of them, those normally blank eyes getting close to something not so blank anymore. These are the times when it gets harder and harder every day to pretend she's just his weird sister.
She dances to the grateful notes of a piano and he goes back downstairs and tries not to think of beautiful machines pretending to be one of his kind. It's too dangerous to forget that there could be a glitch and she could kill him.
He swears he won't watch her dance anymore.
But tomorrow, he'll climb those stairs and stand by the half open door, and it'll begin all over again.
End.