Tomorrow and Yesterday
By mrasaki
Fandom: Terminator/Terminator Salvation
Pairings: Marcus/Kyle, John/T-800 (implied)
Rated R
Completed 06/24/09
Notes: For mizzykitty, who requested it in exchange for ST fic. *smooch*
One
It is 1995, and the Terminator is watching.
John Connor lies on the flat, lumpy pad on the trailer bunk, which is close enough to the ceiling to bump his head if he sits up too suddenly, and stares back.
The air is still and hot, and John's tank top sticks to his scrawny chest. The Terminator doesn't blink, doesn't move. John isn't sure what it's doing, if the Terminator is recharging in standby mode or whatever, or if it even needs to recharge.
His mother sits nearby, hunched over the flimsy formica table and fingering her knife, eyes hooded. She's tense, but John remembers that from even before the days she was put away and John was stuck with a progression of bozo foster families who only wanted his ass for the benefits check. As if the government has to pay people to take care of him, when John is perfectly capable of taking care of himself. She hasn't changed much. Still the same, lean, intense, all corded muscle.
You can't tell she gives a fuck about John, except that she doesn't like or trust the machine and never leaves it alone with John for a minute.
John knows the Terminator won't hurt him. It's a vibe he gets. Though the Terminator—or, as John calls him, T-Man—high-fived him so hard his hand is still sore and red. Dude is cool, and it's like having his own personal guardian and friend minus the lip about curfew and stealing motorcycles and goddamn clean your goddamn room and even his mom's constant mantra about John being the savior of humanity and all that crap.
He's just always there, listening and patient and undemanding.
Two
It is 2002, and John Connor drifts.
The world didn't end five years ago. Two weeks after that his mother died in Acapulco. Two terminators, endless battles and scars later, and leukemia defeated her in the end.
Was Judgement Day prevented? Delayed? He doesn't know. It isn't as if someone came back in time to tell him.
His mother died in a Mexican hospice, only there because John checked her in after a shouting match involving the first slap she'd ever given him. She'd wasted away quickly after that, sharp bones poking through leathery, sallow skin, but her gaze had been as diamond hard and sharp as ever. Fierce. She told him to remain vigilant, to keep the faith.
John doesn't have it anymore. He can't sleep, can't eat. He spends his days shuffling around Los Angeles, napping under underpasses and hacking bank accounts for quick cash. A year ago he'd tried college and dropped out after a week. Too much theory, not enough practice, and he couldn't sit through 1984. If only Orwell'd known how much worse it could be.
It's hard figuring out what to do with yourself when you've been told ever since birth that you're going to be some sort of messiah and then it doesn't happen. But he'd stayed in college long enough to learn the fancy words for what-didn't-happen: Post-apocalyptic dystopia.
He starts
imagining, dreaming, seeing
people on fire, turned to ash in seconds and blown away in a hot
wind. He sees wrecked cars, bombed-out buildings, grey radioactive
dust that drifts down from the sunless sky and coats every surface
like obscene snow. Then he blinks, and it's a sunny day in Southern
California again. Plump, tanned people with no worries in their
heads, no real
worries about starvation, blindness from ozone layer depeletion,
radiation sickness, scurvy, cholera, or killer machines, just worries
about the cable
bill and taxes and the extra fries they shouldn't
have had for lunch.
He lives the hallucinations, hallucinates reality, his mind stuttering on pause between what should be and what is.
He starts drinking, and from there it's an easy slide into marijuana, ecstasy, Vicodin, Special K, Quaaludes, coke, reds, Valium. Never acid or shrooms.
He drifts, waiting for the world to end.
Three
It is 2004, and the Terminator doesn't remember.
So John sits in the passenger seat of the busted-up truck and tunes out the banging and screaming in the back, and he shivers and sweats and pukes through withdrawal all the way down California through Nevada into Mexico.
He doesn't tell the T-850 about his dreams though he knows it will listen. The future is confirmed, and he'll worry about the hereafter later. He has a purpose again, and that's all that's important.
He doesn't tell the Terminator—or should he call it the Protector instead? he wonders deliriously—about the other one. He doesn't tell it about the nights he wakes up sweating, smelling again the fine, heated grit of New Mexico desert, of seeing flat, emotionless eyes on him and finding tacky come cooling on his belly.
Or maybe he does. Things are blurred, memories jumbled together with sheer physical and mental misery, and he isn't sure if he calls the machine T-Man. Maybe he does.
The machine says nothing and drives.
Four
It is July 24, 2004, and the world ends.
Five
It is 2018, and John Connor meets the first—and last, he realizes later—machine who thinks he's a man.
John can see the dull metal of its chest gleaming, seamlessly fused with living flesh, but the scream of rage and horror it releases is entirely human.
He's not sure when he starts thinking of 'it' as Marcus again.
Perhaps it's when Marcus mentions Kyle Reese, unknowing what it is he gives John. But John is surprised less at actually finding Reese after years of searching but at Marcus' tone. Protective and concerned. The kid was practically alone for who the hell knows how long in that ghost city, and John can guess what happened, the ways of comfort and affirmation of life.
On the way to San Francisco, it occurs to John to wonder if this is the same Marcus his mother mentions in one of her endless tapes. It's one of the rambling ones, more philosophy than practical advice, and she sounds drunk.
The tape broke into a snarled tangle seven years ago and had been carefully stored away.
Six
It is eight hours later, and John Connor can't run.
The machine has the same relentless gait, the same strongly planed face, the same expressionless eyes. It is T-Man, but is not. Is this the one who will kill his father, he wonders. Reese is currently scrambling out of the way and shouting at John to move, damnit, move.
John has Reese's eyes, the same lips. People will think they could be brothers.
The T-800 reaches for him, hulking and naked, and John wills his reluctant body to move. Then Marcus comes crashing along and tackles the machine. Metal rends and sparks fly, and Kyle Reese is looking at Marcus with an expression that John had previously always thought would be aimed at Sarah Connor. On a face so young it could be called puppy love, but in a world like this teenagers and children grow up fast.
Then Marcus is down, and John has to run.
Strange to think of a machine as naked but it is, as tall and perfect as John remembers, down to the length of cock nestled between long, strong thighs.
If Marcus is just the first prototype of a machine masquerading as human, Skynet has succeeded too well. Marcus is flawed, his mission compromised by his humanity. Skynet will probably decide to scrap the programming.
The Terminators of the future sent back to eliminate him at every point of his life were missing something vital to the human element, John will realize later as he's dying on the floor of a helicopter. Human emotions, like loyalty, love, despair, and hate. The frozen, unblinking expressions, the unnaturally smooth gait, the massive mesomorphic bulk in an age of malnutrition, will make them easy to spot.
It's a flaw in Skynet's strategy, and demonstrates just how completely Skynet underestimates the species it seeks to exterminate. Perhaps that will be the turning point of the war.
He moves faster, setting and wiring charges, trying to ignore the metallic clanks and softer thuds and Marcus' harsh breathing.
The machine catches up to him, stripped of its flesh, and that makes it easier for John to fight. No familiar face and memories associated with his first friend remains, just a construct of metal alloy and glaring red eyes.
He screams You son of a bitch as white-hot fingers rake down his face, leaving a trail of pain and a cauterized scar.
Eight
It is 2029, and John Connor is dying.
"You stupid fuck," Kyle whispers, staring at him with hot eyes. "You stupid asshole, what was it all for? Marcus died for you and we still haven't won, and for fucking what?"
John only looks at him and can't summon enough energy to say he's sorry. It wasn't supposed to end this way. Killed by a Terminator in 2032. Killed by cancer in 2029. The future's not set, he thinks, but damn if it doesn't suck no matter what you do. What the fuck, he's dying of cancer of pretty-much-everything, thanks to an entire adulthood spent living in a nuclear hell-hole and being caught at ground-zero in a nuclear blast eleven years ago. There is no such thing as fate, only what we make for ourselves. And Kyle has spent the last ten years staring at him with the eyes he'll pass on to his son, alternately full of hero-worship and blame and guilt and loneliness. More concerned, like John was at his age, with what could have been instead of what is.
Kyle takes the proffered photograph warily, as if John will raise his emaciated arms and slap him, but his gaze slides away to the photo as John just continues to stare.
Cameras that work are rare, and actual film and the paper to print them on are next to nonexistant. Photographs that've survived are treasured, and what Kyle holds is priceless. But his wondering gaze is fixed on the woman in the photograph instead. "She's beautiful," he says, almost involuntarily. Then, his wariness returns. "What's this for?"
John only says wearily, "Keep it," and raises a wasted hand to wave him out.