Author's Notes: I do not claim any rights to the Terminator universe. After seeing faithful little Star always at Kyle's side in T:S I believe she's one of his companions in the war fields seen in T1.
Absence of Motion
He's painfully aware of the sheen of sweat rank on his skin. It seems the others are too, or maybe it's his assemblage of stolen clothing, for they all lean and flash away from him in their vivid fashions. Their noses wrinkle. Soon enough they forget him when they lose themselves to the music and sway with those strange colored liquids in their glasses.
That's okay, he reasons as he fingers the notches of the forestock roped to his chest. To him, they've never existed until this very night. The only eyes familiar to him sweep through the crowd and mercifully right past him.
Sarah Connor sits alone with her shoulders subconsciously rolled forward in fear. The most she moves is enough to look around the corner and knock her bottle over. He sighs and scans the club as she leans to pick it up.
Star misjudged when to move, when to fall still and it cost her everything. She was there - right there - and then she wasn't. Gone in one second of heat and flash burn. For weeks afterward every time he blinked he saw her frozen in that crouched position. At that moment he had wanted to fall down where she had been and let the fucker take him too. Instead self-preservation pushed him on before the fire could catch him. He remembers how she liked to draw pictures on the walls, dragging her fingers through the dirt to draw up field tactics. Then the rains came, polluted with ash. The bunker walls leaked and what was left of her settled into the floor.
Now the sight of Sarah huddled in that chair makes him uneasy. The dancing girls swing their bodies around. The people seated over lamplight gesture with words and lean into one another. She stands out against everything flowing around her. And, he realizes all too late, he has made the same mistake. In reverie he's let himself fall still for too long. Her eyes lock his and the horror of recognition overtakes her.
She looks away. Just then he notices a break in the patterns around them. A man, hulking and still-faced, steps through the crowd as if he is searching so for someone so intensely he doesn't see anyone around him. The music doesn't seem to register. To him it may just be repetitive noise and the wavering octaves of a human female.
Reese spots all this and knows before the terminator can pull the gun from its waistband. He pulls back the folds of the trenchcoat, levels the gun to his eye.
She's paralyzed with the sight laser burning its damning mark against her flesh. Death beckons with a trigger finger. Time moves faster and faster.