Caveats as usual - anything you recognize I don't own. Some OC are mine. Just here to play.

Indeterminate

Maggie dreamt of a time she had not seen in years. She dreamt of a time before the war… before Judgment Day.

In the dream she is young and beautiful and carefree. She is like the girls on the cover of Teen Vogue and the clusters in the mall; only worried about the boys their age, when they'd get to wear lipstick, and why it was so unfair that the boy band of the moment had broken up.

It is a dream of a moment that never existed.

In the dream her skin is as taut as she remembered, youth and good eating, and she knew the face that looked back from mirrored glass. All of this is the same. Black hair that swept along her shoulders and dark angular eyes under eyebrows that end too soon. If she was more fashionable she would draw them longer, pluck them thinner, wear more mascara on the edges of her short lashes as though they would make her fit in better. In her dream she wanted to belong to the shallow echoes and be one of them.

She had always been too practical for her own good.

"Maggie," said a heavy mechanical voice. "Time waits for no man."

There was no mistaking who it was. How its even possible doesn't occur to her in the dream. Just that it is.

Her father stood there, or what was left of him, clad in a terminator's exoskeleton with the remnants of his skin stretched tight over its metal skull. But it spoke with her father's voice, his face, the disappointment evident in both of them. And there was nothing in Maggie's hand except for a silly handbag, too small to contain a grenadier's bounty, too lightweight to be hiding a proximity mine or RPG. All the silly accoutrements of the girls she desperately wanted to be left her defenseless.

"Maggie." The thing reached out and caught her wrist in its grip and she screamed.

The touch burned when it should have crushed. She's never felt pain like it.

"You should have trained harder. I told you to train harder." The terminator-father pressed in with metallic fingertips and the pain radiated up her arm and lit up the nerves on her left hand. Both are numb with agony as though it is possible to feel nothing and everything at the same time.

Her surprise and the subsequent delay would be the end of her.

She screamed and yanked backwards against his control but he had her tightly. If she'd only run sooner, really run. Run away from his nutty survivalist life and beliefs, all of his faith in a crazy woman who spoke of this future. Her childhood carved from the nightmares of machines instead of the bogeymen and monsters under her bed.

"No!!" The word wasn't effective. Words don't stop them.

The machine rested backward onto its heels and ripped her wrists right off of her arms. Maggie had no more thoughts. There was nothing but pain and anguish and the indefinable want for death.

"Oh please, god." She begged as blood gushed from her arms and the machine with her father's face reached back in to finish her. "Kill me."

2009 – 5 years after Judgment Day

"Hold her down! Jericho! You have to hold her down!"

Maggie's eyes opened. It wasn't her father above her. A woman with wide eyes and deep copper hair was the only thing within eyesight. Blinding white lights are just behind her. Her first thought was angel, but the pain rushed back in and she couldn't cling to anything but the waterslide of hurt and sheer blinding wails from her nervous system. It might as well be her father as weight pressed across her chest and stole the screams away from her. She couldn't inhale or breathe.

She bucked again and the weight slid sideways. Maggie grabbed at the bulk of weight and realized that she fought a man. Her eyes opened onto the meat of her arm pressed against his dark brown skin.

Her scream lost its force.

The flesh was burned away. From her elbows down, there was only blackened and bloody flesh. Nausea exploded up through her belly and she vomited explosively at the sight of her long fingers, two of them burned to the bone. White bone, it must be, at the tips of her fingers. A skeleton exposed just like the terminators.

"Turn her over." The voice ordered but Maggie can't hang onto it.

"Give her the morphine." This one was more familiar.

"Carter…" The redhead protested.

But Maggie's father had no sympathy in his gaze. The morphine wasn't to help his daughter, its to quiet her.

She looked up, someone has her by the shoulders as she continues to heave and there is a moment when she cannot tell the difference between the reality and the dream. His eyes flash red in the MASH unit's lights and the heavy bolus of morphine goes in IV. She only has a moment to hate him and the drugs sweep her back into the nightmare she just left.

Two days later

The dawn was red and dripping. The clouds of dust in the air make the light stream through a ponderous and liquid affair. It made for brilliant mornings and even more vibrant sunsets as the sun forced its rays through the ashes of millions of men, animals and buildings. A Mozart concierto, Van Gogh's painting, a genius, an ordinary man – they were all reflected in the atmosphere – they were all dead and gone.

Maggie saw none of it but she had spent a thousand mornings on patrol since Judgment Day. She didn't need to see the dawn to know its rising. Her internal clock woke her with first light as it does every morning. As a child she lamented the regularity enforced by her father, dawn always came early on the West Coast, as an adult it is so familiar that to wake without it would be a luxury she didn't understand.

Yet, this is the first time she's woken with so much pain and as her eyes opened she realized that she's not in the command bunkers.

They've lived underground for the last five years. Walls, hewn or raw, are part of life and provide security that open skies cannot promise. But now, she's not inside. The realization is hazy and sluggish. Drugs. She vaguely remembered the order for morphine and the detachment in her mind fit with the side effects of the drug. It is a relief that it has also pushed her dreams into some far corner of her mind. But rising consciousness reminded her of what happened in the first place.

She and Chavez on the rim. An HK strafed the squatter's below, one of the small ones, not a full size but the tactical model, just a little smaller than a Chevy Tahoe. They were low on ammo and tired. If they'd faded into the hills the HK would never have seen them. Twenty human civilians dead, but their mission would be safe.

Whether it was a lack of common sense or heroics, perhaps the same thing, they'd decided to go after the HK.

"My arms," in her memory they are burned to a crisp. As she tried to lift them up, they are swathed in heavy, wet bandages and the motion brings the memory of pain back up from the depths of her mind.

"Lie still," a woman's voice ordered.

Low on ammo they'd unlimbered bolas from their packs. Two long ropes tied around steel balls. Spun properly they could twine around an HK's mobile jet engines and ensnarl them. The balls could damage the casing or strike inside of the whirling blades and cause the engine to flame out.

"Chavez?" Maggie asked.

"Just hold still, Maggie, we'll be there soon."

"Be there…" The words didn't mean anything.

Chavez cast his bolas and missed. She would have teased him about it but she'd already cast her own and they struck the HK just as his slid down the back of the machine, twisted around the very end of her own rope and arced down toward them. Fate. Bad luck. A simple mistake. The HK started to go down and the end of the bolas did what it was designed to do. It hit an object and wrapped tight around it, centrifugal force swinging it around and around whatever had gotten in the way.

Maggie's neck wasn't the intended target, but the bolas weren't a machine to decide between termination priorities.

It dragged her up off the ground even as the HK lurched in uneven flight with one engine gone. She was choking. The rope burning against her neck and then the HK plunged downwards unable to keep airborne. It hit the rocky ridge and detonated against the sand, the fire and the explosion blasting against the woman still caught in a horrible embrace.

"Where is he?" She asked again.

"Back at camp," the woman told her. "We're trying to get you to Harper's Point."

Harper's Point. Maggie knew the name. "That's in Texas." The words were hard to speak but with all of the angry signals her body was sending, they were lost in the noise.

She tried again to open her eyes and focus. They were definitely not at Crystal Peak. Nor in the cave systems just outside of Reno. It was the wide cargo bay of an Osprey and she could hear the steady throbbing of the engine around them. They weren't alone, she could see other worried faces around them and it was at that moment that she recognized Kate finally. The look of recognition made relief spread across Kate Connor's face.

"Maggie?"

"Why Texas?"

"It was either that or watch my husband try to kill your father." The wry sense of humor was barely evident meaning that it had been serious. "The base there has a fully functional military hospital. They've managed to defend it against Skynet ever since the Day."

Maggie tried to lift her arms again, they wouldn't budge. "How bad?" She croaked and tried not to see the sadness of the other woman.

"It could be worse."

"Did you have to amputate my hands?"

"Oh no," Kate seemed horrified at the thought. "Nothing that awful."

That wasn't how she remembered it but Kate pressed tightly against her shoulder and Maggie realized that she was tied in place. A strap stretched across her forehead which was why her field of vision was limited.

"You have second degree burns over your hands and arms. The Osprey couldn't fly until we had you stabilized."

"And my head?"

"Don't you remember?" There was a tone in her voice of pity as Maggie shook her head in the negative. "You have first degree burns on your neck. The rope broke when the HK crashed or you'd be dead, but it left a friction burn."

The bolas. The HK. Chavez.

"Am I okay?"

Kate couldn't touch her anywhere but her shoulder and the movement lacked the strength it needed. "Your neck might be broken. I can't get good x-rays with the equipment we have."

She couldn't breathe. It wasn't from the injury, her chest just refused to expand and contract. But the faint memories. She remembered moving on the operating table, she remembered being able to turn her head.

"There was significant swelling around the base of your neck. It started once we had you stabilized, the fluid we gave you to counteract the shock of the burns seemed to trigger it."

All she got were tears, this wasn't something she could rail against, something she could fight. "Kill me," she whispered. It was impossible to survive with the kind of injuries Kate was hinting at, hard enough in the world before Judgment Day, impossible afterwards.

The other woman shook her head in an absolute refusal. The steady belief in Kate Connor was always evident despite everything.

Maggie knew that she'd survived a model of terminator that none of them had ever seen, that wasn't even designed yet. The experience had made her stronger than all of them, John Connor and Jackson Carter included. But it didn't take a highly advanced machine to kill someone – you could take them down with a pair of ill-cast bolas.

Kate spoke, "If we were going to do that, I would have let your father put you down back at camp. John got you on this plane and we're going to go where he sends us. He hasn't given up on you yet, don't you dare do it for him."

That thought gave Maggie little comfort.

But Kate wouldn't let it go. "You're a fighter, so fight."

She didn't have the heart to tell Kate the truth.

July 2004

The two guards entered the cell of 15B, female wing, Reno Detention Center warily. They were both larger than the girl who waited for them in a seated posture on the frame of her bed. It had no sheets only a single mattress and pillow and the girl wore a shapeless orange jumpsuit. She was barefoot, the soft and slippery paper slippers discarded on the floor so that she wouldn't lose the advantage of traction. Maggie was seventeen, but not yet able by the court's definition to have herself emancipated.

The bigger man was named Harvey, a hefty biker in his off-time, gestured for her to rise. "Come on, Maggie. Judge says you have to be present at this hearing."

"I'm not going." There wasn't any sulky youth in her voice, it was a simply flat denial. She wasn't going with them, not to the hearing, not to see her father, not if she could help it. "I'm happy right here."

The shorter man who requested that all of the juvies call him Mr. Thompson as though he was the history teacher at their local high school, stepped toward her. "Don't make this harder for all of us. We're just doing our job."

"You're supposed to want to lock me up. If I get out, I'll just do something to get brought back in."

Harvey shook his head sadly. "Nobody gets to pick their parents, kiddo. You've got to put up with them until you turn eighteen and then you get to pick your own life." He readied himself to pull her up off the cot.

She looked up at him in surprise, as though he'd said something that she'd never imagined, it was tinged with obvious sarcasm and he grimaced in response. They'd all heard the story. A shrink had dragged it out of her in one of the group therapy sessions after her third trip through the center. A father who was a true right-wing nut job. He not only believed in the approach of Armageddon but in the teachings of an equally insane woman, a wanted felon who had died several years earlier. Maggie's life was driven by preparation for the end of the world. Combat training, wilderness survival, living off the land. Jackson Carter sent her to school but only after she'd spent her morning training and every evening doing the same thing. At sixteen she could kill and gut a deer with nothing but a stone but had never been to a high school dance or a movie theater. She hated him with all of her guts and then some.

"I won't go back with him."

"He's complied with all of social services requirements."

"He lied."

Harvey feinted and Mr. Thompson tried to grab her. Neither movement caught her attention. She head-butted the big guard and as he staggered backwards she leapt up onto his body and hit him again. The second strike smashed into his cheekbone and stunned her for a second as Mr. Thompson yanked her to the floor and tasered her. There was nothing she could do against that and she twitched helplessly on the ground as they handcuffed her hands and feet to a waist chain and lugged her up to her feet. Drool dripped from the side of her mouth and she tried but couldn't form any words.

Despite the attack and the bruises forming on his face, Harvey looked embarrassed to have her chained up like Hannibal Lector and he tucked his hands under her armpits to give her a little extra support.

"You know she's been a model inmate every time she's been here." He chided Thompson, unhappy at the use of the taser.

"Except for the end," Thompson amended.

"Yeah, the end." There was no way of getting around it. "When we make her go home."

2009 - Harper's Point – USS Sanctuary AH-17

The bandages were different and the strap across her forehead was gone. In its place was a high-necked collar that held her stiffly in the bed. Maggie had been awake for a long time as she tried to evaluate her condition. There were three separate IVs in her body, she could feel one taped to skin of her neck, a jugular catheter then, the collar might be to hold it in place, or it could be evidence of Kate's prognosis – swelling around the spinal cord. She was in a medical bay, obvious from the smell of astringent and betadine, more obvious by the groans of those around her. Hidden from sight by regulation blue curtains she counted at least twelve different voices in pain and three doctors or nurses, she couldn't tell which, who moved among them.

No one knew she was awake yet, which was good. The collar held her tightly and her arms were too heavy to move as though they'd been plated in gold. The pain was gone though, a sign that gave her pause, it might mean a nerve block, or it might mean that she was crippled. Maggie imagined death or the camps, maybe even starvation ten years in the future when the food ran out, she hadn't ever thought about this, crippled and unable to protect herself, unable to help. If all she was was a drain on their resources, her father might back off for a little while but her existence was anathema to him. Eventually he'd put her down like an ailing puppy, too weak to make the decision for itself.

Putting herself through her paces she discovered that there was nothing, no sensation, anywhere belong her collarbone. Tears started unwanted and trickled down her cheekbones.

"Are you feeling any pain?" The nurse, heavyset with gorgeous features, pushed aside the curtains. "You didn't make any noise or I would have realized you were awake."

"Cry out and you give away your position." Maggie whispered back and the tears came harder. Everything she was came from her father's way of life and she hated that even in moments like this, she couldn't be anyone else but who he made her.

"You're safe now." The nurse said and when she turned Maggie could see that her uniform identified her as Rodriguez. "The doctors gave you a spinal block so that you wouldn't jostle the skin growth. You'll be in bed for another two maybe three days before they let you move and probably another week or two wearing that collar but at least we'll be able to get you on your feet."

"Skin regrowth?" The words seemed foreign. Skin didn't just regrow, not the way the nurse made it sound. "Don't you mean scar tissue?"

"Well, I won't lie to you." Rodriguez said as she lifted the sheet away from Maggie's body. "Gonna check your catheter placement real quick." Whatever she did was beyond Maggie's range of vision and there was no sense of touch associated with it

Rodriguez straightened back up. "You're going to have some loss of sensation at least in that left hand, but other than color mismatch, your skin shouldn't have a lot of residual scarring."

Maggie stared at the other woman uncomprehendingly.

A man cried out from across the bay and the nurse swiveled like a dog on point. It didn't die out, only got louder, and the nurse pushed through the curtains and disappeared.

The conversation slipped into the back of her mind. She couldn't attach anything she knew to what the woman had said. She lay in the medical bay alone for a long time before there was a cough at the curtains and they were pushed open slowly. John looked through and there was something indefinable in his gaze as his eyes locked on hers. He was not a traditionally handsome man, his features sharp and unforgiving, especially when they were charging up the front of a ridge to rescue someone. There was never any hesitation in his step, just that profile turning to look at those coming behind him, disappointed that they were following instead of pressing ahead.

"How are you feeling?" He asked softly, gruffly, as he stepped inside the tiny partition. "They said you'd be pretty numb for the next few days."

"Why are we here?"

"You want the truth or what I told the General?"

Her frown pulled at the muscles in her neck and jostled the catheter enough that she winced with the needle's pressure.

"The truth then." John sat at the end of her bed. He wore his gold wedding ring unconsciously, and unlike many married men, never twisted it on his fingers or even seemed to notice it was there. His marriage to Kate, like so many other things, had been foreordained.

He'd always taken that with a calm acceptance as a child and even a few years of childhood rebellion had changed the truth of the matter. He'd seen terminators with his own eyes, first the T-800 and then the T-1000 and then the T-X. Predetermined or not, he'd never railed against what was to come. Not like Maggie who'd refused to believe until the nuclear clouds filled the horizon like a long chain of thunderstorms that blossomed from the ground up.

"The truth," Maggie said. "Only the truth."

"I'll never lie to you unless you ask me too." His words were an echo of another time, when youth and naivete still protected them. He'd been twelve when he'd told her that and she was a gangly nine. Sarah had brought them there needing a place to law low for a time. And while Jackson Carter had raised Maggie on stories of a woman stronger than any other in the world, it was the first time she'd met the mother and the son. At the time she'd been greatly impressed, a feeling that would change and evolve over the years until it left her back where she'd started.

"No lies." He promised. The rasp in his voice was the result of damage from his last encounter with a terminator before the Day. Damage to the larynx and vocal cords that made him sound harsh and emotionless, but Maggie knew that wasn't the case, he could suffer and feel pain. He did every time they lost another man or woman or child to the machines. "Chavez carried you six miles back to camp. But the sand had gotten into your burns and Kate had to… Kate had to scrub at them to get the particles out. It was bad. Neither Jericho nor Barnes could hold you down while she worked and it killed them to try. By the time she was done there wasn't anyone in camp who didn't know what was happening." His eyes closed. "You know what he wanted to do."

"Euthanasia." There was more than one moment when she would have welcomed it.

"Not under my roof. You can call it what you want, but its still death, and I wasn't ready to give up on you. We've been getting radio transmissions from these guys for two years. They're the military, or what's left of it. They've been doing okay staying out at sea for most of the time, even the new HKs don't carry enough fuel to chase them across open water. So I gave them what they wanted in exchange for help and medical care. Jackson disagreed with me."

An alliance, Maggie remembered the fervid arguments with both men on opposite sides of the table. Her father wanted to stay fluid and guerilla-like, while John thought that their strength lay not only with tactics but in numbers. The establishment will draw fire. Their goals are not our goals. They never believed the truth when it was laid before them. Why would we trust them now? Her father's words were as present in the room as if he were standing there.

"You allied yourself with them because of me?" She didn't know how to take that. "Why?"

"Not just you. We need more medically trained doctors. We need ammunition and more birds. Hell, we need more pilots and some way to train them. All of that is here with the military." John smiled at her. "And you needed their facilities. The Sanctuary did humanitarian missions before the Day, and a lot of field response techniques were perfected here before getting back to clinical trials. They've got this blue shit glued to your arms that has dermal cells inside of it that they can reattach to your arm."

"Blue shit?" Her question made him smile. "Is that the technical definition?"

"You don't trust me? I'm John Connor."

"I've seen you in compromising positions." She countered and they both glanced up as the curtain opened again and Kate peered through.

"Oh, you're awake. John, you'd better be making her feel better and not planning some kind of raid." But there was nothing but affection in Kate's voice. The redhead's hair was pinned back and she was wearing a pair of navy blue scrubs with a captain's insignia on them. "They were the only ones that fit." She said by way of explanation.

"Good will and company. I promise." He rose to his feet and kissed Kate gently on the lips. "Maybe you can tell her about the blue shit. My definitions are notably vague."

"Blue shit?" It took Kate a second. "Oh my god. You mean no one's explained the growth matrix yet? How long have you been awake?"

A man shrieked across the bay and it quieted them.

"You forget who she was trained by." John's voice brought them both into the past and Maggie tensed. "They focus on the ones making the noise."

There was a moment and when Kate turned back to Maggie her eyes were shining with tears. "That was the only time you screamed," she whispered. "When I had to debride your arms. Up until then, you could have been dead except for the fact that you kept breathing. But when I started and you screamed… that was worse than anything I've ever seen."

"Like we'd finally managed to break you."

"My father accomplished that long before you did." Maggie meant the words to soothe the both of them but somehow they just made everything worse.

If you made it to the end....reviews are always welcome.