Windmills

The night was quiet and sullen as the heart that thumped in the chest of the darkly shaded young man. His eyes sparkled with some deep question of the universe and the consistency of changing realities that morph and reinvent in every reaction to action that he does. From the dark cab of his car he stares out at the long branches of trees that rustle in the breeze, their leaves chitterling across the ancient concrete of vine wrapped benches. Here he pondered the odd questions of how many versions of himself have sat here, tonight, and pondered the mirror in his head. Did they ever think of him, these other versions of himself? Did they ever wonder if he thinks of them? How many times, he wonders, has he sat in this exact same spot and pondered these same thoughts?

How many times has she lied to him?

To be the savior of humanity, wanted dead since long before he existed, you'd think heart break wouldn't be a new sensation. But there was a different heartache tonight. Tonight, it was a feeling of being let down, not by one person, but of everyone, of an entire race. Tonight was the kind of night, John Connor wonders why he did it all, why did it even matter?

Why would he even save these people?

He thought on not the girl who was a liar or the months of stress he had allowed her to cause. He questioned himself. He questioned why he would ever save himself, much less humanity? He had put so many lives in danger, people he couldn't ever get back. Arrogant, selfish, rash, it was all he could think of in self-loathing of the foolish rebellion against a thousand faced mirror. They talk about the worst of humanity, and tonight, he felt like he was everything ugly, everything horrible that made living his life, making his destiny, a thankless job.

He was an angry, exposed, nerve that scathed when prodded by the reality of this world, these terrible circumstances which he couldn't change. He felt lost, felt like he never did anything right. Every time he thought he had a handle on it, there was always something to change it. It grew to make him bitter, angry, defensive, like a dog kicked too many times. He snapped and snarled when anyone got too close, a helping hand bit in the rage of a life of disappointment.

He thought he had someone, once. She was perfect. She was everything he had ever wanted, everything he could hope to have. Even after she turned out to be something else, he tried to convince himself that something would turn up eventually, something that would make everything be okay. He was waiting for a fairy godmother, the blue fairy, answering a midnight prayer to the North Star to come to his room and make her a real girl. It was all the impossible dreams of a young man so deeply in love that he could hardly see it himself, rationalized by all the plans he made on a wing and a prayer. He was hardly the first one, and certainly not the last.

There were thousands of teenage boys, staring at magazine covers, streaming movies of that one perfect girl on screen. Led on by an active imagination of how happy they'd be together based on some fabricated, outlandish, first meeting. It was an artificial love, the worship of someone who lived a thousand miles away, who never knew their names, who would never be able to replicate their fly-by-night love.

But what do you say to the boy whose nobility was so sincere, so rare? What do you say to that scorned hero, whose love, whose focal point of this great dedication, was not a magazine cover, DVD, or streaming video … but in the room right next door? What if this angel of the heart and mind was a being that you sat across from every morning, and ate dinner next to every night? A lack of personal knowledge, the distance, the barriers of society, keeps most of these young men away from their goddesses. It made it easier to smoothly transition to another faith, another religion. But to sit in front of the girl that was always the one, lock eyes, and know that it could never be. It was that even inches from her, to know that you might as well have been thousands of miles away. It was impossible for her to replicate that one thing, that one emotion, which is all you know anymore when her scented perfume whiffs through your nostrils on a dark winter's morning.

John Connor had tried so hard to tell himself, convince a brilliant mind, built like clockwork, that he was just like any other guy his age. She was beautiful, soft, with skin that felt like silky warm butter to the touch. She was all hormones and golden flecked caramel eyes. There were times when he slipped up, stroking her face as she rebooted, and coming out swinging defensively when his mother and uncle came after her. But he had rationalized his impulses into a defensive posture, convinced himself that he had overcome these feelings, understood their artificiality.

Then his birthday came …

And somewhere, sometime, whither it was from the very first moment she pulled a gun, or when he saw her lying there on her funeral pyre of junked car. He saw just how wrong he was, how foolish he had been to think that anything he had been feeling, was normal. In the fires of uncontrollable terror and violence of all the days to come in his life, he had shown who he was, what was important on that particular day. And she, it, this metal angel with blood on her hands and purity in her mechanical heart, meant more to him than anything he had ever known. She had consumed him till there was not a mother's love, a ration's explanation, or logical step that he heeded or felt. He was driven by a rage of zealot's adoration, a dedication of a sentry guarding the doors of his goddess's temple in a blizzard. There was no reason, no sanctity, or honor within the snarling brow, and the murderous eyes that glinted in the barrel of the gun pointed at the two people he loved. His commitment, his devotion, it was like a madness upon him. And he had shown too much, gone too far, and for what? A magazine cover, an actress on a laptop screen, for an idealized princess that he knew was too far from reach. She was an emotionless construct, a vessel for everything that a lonely boy, the last hero, had projected onto.

Reeling from all the things he had done, all the things to live down that day, he ran from it. He clung to the first person who he saw. She had said all the right things, and had the right attitude, tailor made for his sensibilities. Now he laughed at the insanity of it, the true madness in his grand schemes of finding that allusive 'normal life' that was around the corner. Her name was Riley, and she is something she's not. He had ran off to escape the trap he had felt himself caged in with Cameron, only to run to Cameron again … for under all of it, Riley was just Cameron with gray matter and blond hair. She had come from a far-flung future to change his fortune in some way, come to be his friend, to influence him like some villain in a Jane Austen Novel. His rebellion with Riley was nothing but the ravings of a madman, parading around with a girl who was just a proxy for the phantom of his heart. A wolf who believed, in a fever dream, that he had gnawed off his own foot to escape the trap. But tonight, sitting in the darkness, he had awoken from his long coma to find the iron still around his paw.

There was no escaping it, there was no escaping her.

Once again, he wondered why he should save humanity, when he couldn't even save himself. A foolish madman chasing windmills was what humanity's savor was. He'd look for a cure, if he thought that he could leave the forested maze that he had been trapped inside since the moment he turned in his seat in Red Valley to the whispered question of what his name was. And like a naïve traveler on the crossroads, he answered the demon back. And now he was in her snare, never to be free again.

Now he sat in the cab of the truck watching the old doors of the ancient brick building. His eyes observed its corroding, collegian, academic architecture from across the street. He didn't know what he was doing here, or even how he got here. But after all the things he had realized was happening in his life, all the lies Riley had told. All the stupidity, all the danger he brought on to his family from the circular wheel of his own madness … it had been a hard day. He felt like an alcoholic, sitting outside a dive, trying to convince himself that he wasn't a complete coward before tasting the sweet pain of his tormented failure.

From inside the back of the building, he saw a shadow cross from a stain glass Tudor window. A new darkness fell on the manicured back lawn as the light went out. It was minutes till dawn and the world was still and quiet, but for the sound of a truck door closing and feet on the grass.

A chivalrous madman had come to chase his dragon shaped windmill.

A slender girl exited the employee's entrance of the library. She carried a stack of books. There should've been a strain in her lithe arms at the size and weight of her haul, but there was a relentless ease and balance to her straight posture as she walked into the early morning. An elegant, regal, stride was in each balanced step. There was never a more aloof looking creature of marvel and beauty that was ever so deadly aware as the teenage girl that walked the concrete path. She moved without consequence till she heard the quietest flicker of movement, a whisper of the early morning breeze upon the dewing grass. It could have been all the things that any normal person would dismiss, but not her. She did not dismiss anything.

Cameron Baum paused her gliding feet, turning to look into the pitch darkness by the public bench. "Hello John." She said with no feeling or emotion but what could be interpreted a thousand different ways.

From the shadows, John Connor immerged from next to the trunk of a large oak. His feet crunched on the grass as he approached the girl. For many he had come to expect anger, indignity, or defensiveness from being caught, being followed to their secret place. But he had come to expect nothing, absolute zero, from the girl who confounded him.

The young man looked torn apart in sorrow and pain as he came to visibility. He hadn't slept in a day and he wore the same clothing that he had left the night before in. She tilted her head in puzzlement, a frown marring her beautiful face. She wanted to ask why he hadn't been home, why he hadn't called. Even if he hadn't called Sarah or Derek, John would have at least called her, even if he hadn't said a word over the line. He had always called, maybe just to hear her voice, maybe so that she'd know he hadn't forgotten her, to reminder her why she was here … to hear his breath, to know he was alright.

It was like their phone calls, like their moments at night when they came across one another in the hallway. John stood in the darkness and stared at the girl, wordless, his pained and longing face hidden in the shadows. Was he waiting for her to say something, to do something unexpected? Or had he thought that tonight would be the night something would happen, that something would change. That he'd look at her and come to realize what the rest of the world had been telling him.

Her voice was like a crack of the whip. "I'm sorry about Riley." She said it like he had failed at his shot of a crumpled paper into the trashcan. He felt the bladed knife, heated by his tormenter, jab him into his open wound.

He snarled, and for a moment, he looked as rash and enraged as Sarah Connor in the dark. He strode forward angrily till he was in her personal space. There was an unafraid, unflinching sincerity in her stoic eyes as she stood unwavering in front of him, her books pressed against his chest.

"What did you say to me?!" He snarled at her in a rage.

The girl blinked in confusion. "I said I'm sorry about Riley …" She repeated as if she had rewound a tape recorder. There was just a hint of tepidness in her innocent voice.

"Why would you say that to me?" He asked savagely.

There was stalwartness to her, a backbone of steel that almost challenged his irrational mood. If she were human, she might have gotten closer so she could throw it in his face. She studied him for a long moment, before she spoke.

"Because, you're hurting and only Riley could …"

THUD!

With all the shame in the world, John knocked the girl's books from her hand in sudden retaliation to her assumptions. There was a loud clatter on the sidewalk as they rained down. The girl looked confused. She couldn't comprehend why he would do what he did. She didn't understand why he was angry at her, why he had come here?

And maybe neither did he?

All he knew was that Riley wasn't actually Riley. She was simply a fever dream, a replacement for what he was really chasing. And with every confused look, with every question she asked, he knew more and more that he was chasing a phantom that a demon of the crossroads in Red Valley had sold to him as an elixir to a missing part of his soul.

"I'm sorry about Riley, John …" The girl repeated, standing still.

John bent down and was picking up her books for her. "Don't Cameron!" He snapped in warning. "Just don't …" He growled as he continued his task while Cameron watched.

"I am …"

"No, you're not."

"You loved her …"

John dropped the books in hand and grabbed the girl angrily by the collar of her purple leather jacket and pushed her up against the tree. John hated her. With every fiber of his being he wanted to burn ever bolt, and melt down every piston. But he knew it was far too late for that. If he did it, he'd have to melt himself down before he could ever give her up.

"Stop it!" He shook her violently. "Just stop it!" He roared at her. You … you don't …" He, for a split second, saw himself. He looked mad, looked like a lunatic, fighting with an angel made of silicone and a motherboard. He lowered his head; the girl's stricken and surprised eyes following him. He let out a sputtered sob as the wind picked up.

When he turned his gaze back to her, the purple of the coming dawn lit her eyes. The wind swept her chocolate curls to the side in a swirl of satiny locks and autumn leaves. His heart convulsed, his mind numbed, and there was only love. It might have felt that his chest was being torn apart, that there was nothing left inside him but blurred world of starbursts and torment, but god knows he knew that it was love. His breath sputtered in the capture of her eyes.

"You don't know, anything …" He whispered as he bowed his forehead into her bosom.

For a long moment Cameron observed the young man. She didn't watch just one aspect, didn't just see what was on the surface, the cyborg saw all of him. Her eyes lightened and the ghost of a sympathetic lilt came over her beautiful face. Slowly, her hand reached out and cupped John's cheek.

"I know that being John Connor can be lonely."

She didn't know how to say it. And she didn't know if she'd ever feel it the way he did. But it was the best she could do, the best way to explain, to justify, why she was there. It could take a hundred lifetimes, a thousand years sitting in front of a mirror with a million faces, but she hoped that one day he'd understand it, understand her …

And still feel the same.

Feeling her soft touch, his affection, even momentarily, returned, if only in his mind. It was more than he could bear. He felt himself sink and fall to his knees at this girl, this angel, this demon, and this figment of his imagination's feet. He slowly wrapped his arms around her waist. With sobbed breaths he buried his face into her belly. There, in the coming dawn, he embraced the one undeniable truth of himself. Slowly, Cameron placed a single hand on John's head as dawn broke above the mountains in the distance.

For now, to the young man so unsure about a world that he never knew if he was worthy to save, he didn't have the time or the heart to analyze his pain. He was a madman chasing windmills in a world that betrayed him with every turn. He didn't know if what he believed in was real. But after the day he had, this belief in an idealized delusion was all he had …

She was all he'd ever have.

Acknowledgements

"Longing" - Inuyasha OST

Author's Notes

Sitting around tonight, I realized that the morning rush will never come again for this fandom.

But, even then, I wondered if I still had it in me …