fractures. (sarah connor chronicles)
pastpresentfuture; flux; john
maybe he's making things worse
written for denz who likes time travel, but doesn't like to think about it. no copyright infringement intended.
--
It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you'd be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
Carl Dennis, The God Who Loves You
--
The contemporaneity frustrates him. Time doesn't work like this - whatever fix he sends back, it never touches him. It shouldn't touch him. And yet he looks in the mirror, and his face has changed, is always changing. Scars appear and disappear. Maybe he's making things worse.
Some mornings he wakes and Kate is still there. Some mornings he wakes to an empty bed, and he searches his memory - is she patrolling? Exercising? Dead? Sometimes he gets the answer wrong and the men look at him, wary and cautious. He hears Kyle once - he's having a rough one - and he knows that the others talk about him behind his back, that they are always talking, always tense. I used to be a better liar, he thinks.
--
And then there's Cameron. Sometimes she's the girl that he remembers, vacant expression and unintentionally pursed lips. Sometimes she's the enemy, and more than once he's nearly died for that mistake. After the fourth time that he captures, reprograms and sends her back - and curious, curious that no-one else should recognise her, or should realise that this has happened before, over and over and over, tiles shifting beneath their feet without their knowing - after the fourth time, he begins to scratch a tally into the bedpost.
Until he wakes, and there is no bed, and the scratches are gone, and there is no Cameron this time around.
--
Other methods of maintaining records: paper in his trouser pockets (different trousers the next morning); cuts on his hand (only bruises when he wakes); tattoos on his shoulder (one day there, the next, a hieroglyph).
He begins to think he's making things worse. That maybe the answer to the war is to stay in the here, to be in the now. He doesn't understand it. His life should remain the same; he shouldn't be shifting between the outcomes. If he dies here, he should live somewhere else. But the he that he is, and the he that he could be, or that he was - these three should never meet, should never intersect. Time doesn't work like that, he thinks, it shouldn't. He has no answers.
--
He wakes: empty bed, but there's an old shirt in the corner of the room, tossed beside the city's blueprints, so Kate is here today, though dead only hours before. He touches his face - a beard, great. Just what he needs, to waste another razor. Maybe he should just leave it as it is.
He looks around, frowns; has to work out where he is. East tunnels, he realises, and, Jesus, remembering the cave-in from only two days before. Or maybe not. His mind is always unclear when he first wakes.
His tongue finds cuts in his mouth and on his lips. His shoulders crack as he stretches, gets out of bed. What next? What now? Every day he learns the world anew. Every day he's born again, playing catch up, trying to stay focused. Who knew survival would be such a pain in the ass? He takes that back. He always knew. His mother told him so.
--
This Cameron has red hair, and it throws him momentarily, until she tilts her head the way she's wont to, and he shakes it off, feels the 'new' memories slide into place, shuddering uncomfortably against the old. It's like having double-vision, familiar and unfamiliar. His life has always been a patchwork, and he supposes it's a gift, being able to see everything that is happening. When he was younger, he had a working concept of the future. Now that he is old, he has a broken concept of the past. There's irony in there somewhere, and bitterness, too.
"John."
Cameron's voice breaks him from his fractured consciousness and he re-focuses. "I'm coming."
--
He sends her through; he stops counting. The numbers change, anyway, as though even his constancy is wavering, uncertain. The future is always in flux, yes; the past is, too, by his own hand. That the present meanders before his eyes is too perverse to contemplate. There are consequences for playing with time.
--
Go back to come forward; come forward to go back - at least, that's how Kate puts it. Sometimes when he pictures himself, he thinks of his life as a straight line with other lives knotted around him, twisting and circling and spiralling about him. He is the only one who goes forward to go forward. He should be the constant. He should be the fixed loci.
He thinks of his mother, too, and a thread that stops abruptly whilst his seems endless.
--
He almost doesn't send her this time. Kyle is gone. Derek is gone. Kate is gone. If everyone goes back and he's the only one going forward, eventually there's going to be a moment where everyone is gone and all those faces - all those names and eyes and hands and feet and bodies - leave him behind. He wavers and Cameron looks at him, a picture-perfect image of the girl he met so many years ago. A real memory, he's sure, he thinks, not an imprint, or an echo, or an artifice. Artifice. Nothing in his life is real, it's all created by his own hands, by others. By machinations beyond his scope. Time should be linear, not concentric and yet there it is, whirling around him. He almost doesn't send her. Almost.
end.