Title: Some Light Reading
Author: mirroredsakura
Fandom: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Rating: PG
Pairing/Characters: John / Cameron, implied John / Riley
tscc_las Challenge: Round #1 Challenge #2

Warnings: discussions of exorcism?

Summary: Cameron's learning Latin. Humans have made plenty of mistakes in the past, it's up to a machine to analyze how to move beyond them.

Disclaimers: None of the characters belong to me.

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Challenge: Carpe Diem (Seize the Day)

John Connor had been raised to believe that he would save the future of mankind.

In the long stretch of peacetime after a certain liquid metal machine had been reduced to floating pond scum in a vat of molten metal, he had begun to think that maybe, maybe he had a chance at normality.

Several rampaging killer robots, a pretty girl with a coltan-alloy battle chassis, a timeskip, and various attempts at living a life of pancakes and Windows Vista later, he had revised the thought to a less ambitious somewhere-in-between that seemed to be working so far.

"Regna terrae cantata Deo, soli te Domino—"

...Until he walked past the living room and caught Cameron reading out loud with furrowed brow from a book that looked like it'd survived the Dark Ages—and had possibly been soaked in the blood of a thousand babies if the stains on the cover were any indication.

"I don't know how to tell you, but turning to the dark powers of Satan are probably not gonna do much in the battle to save mankind."

She looked up at him immediately, and her faintly puzzled expression didn't change. Nice to know he was as easy to understand as an invocation to the Dark Lord. "I don't understand."

He made an aborted gesture at the book in her hand. "Big scary spellbooks aren't exactly afterschool reading in a town like this. You might want to watch out who overhears you."

"Riley already thinks I'm a freakazoid."

And why was it always back to her? "That wasn't what I meant."

"And I'm not."

"Huh?"

Her voice mimicked his in perfect tones for one, still discombobulating, moment, "''Turning to the dark powers of Satan.' I'm not. This is the Rituale Romanum. It is part of the general corpus of liturgy used by the Roman Catholic Church."

"Still not following."

"Exorcism. Release from demons and foreign spirits. Good deeds."

"And split pea soup."

Her puzzled frown grew deeper. "I don't understand."

"Never mind. Why the sudden interest in demons?"

"Not demons. I'm learning Latin."

"You know it's a dead language, right? I don't know how much you're gonna need for the future."

She regaled him quietly for a long moment with one of those looks, the kind that happened every time John was absolutely sure she knew something and just wasn't telling him. With the smooth efficiency of a machine, she set down the book in her lap and picked up another, definitely less evil-looking tome, to fan through and tap a finger at a line of text.

"Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. Do you know it?"

"...'Seize the day'...?"

"'Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future.'"

For something as forthright and straightforward as a Terminator with a mission in mind, Cameron was definitely in the running for Queen of Cryptic Know-How. Did Future John, illustrious Leader of the Resistance ever get this feeling of God I'm an ignorant dick?

She took pity on him—or, more likely, reacted to the blank look on his face. "It's a line from Horace. The line is from an ode. It says the future is unknowable. That it's better to live in the present, to think only of today."

He drifted closer, edging in to see, even if he couldn't read. "Not exactly the most productive way to live, is it?"

Her head tilted up and she looked up owlishly at him. "No. It's not. Not for us. Not for you."

"So why do you think it's important?"

The next book was an old geography—honestly, did she spend all her mysterious not-here time at the library?—that he had to sit down and help hold onto to look at properly.

"Horace was Roman. He was a poet. The Romans once ruled an empire. It stretched from here—" her finger tapped an outcropping of Europe "—to here." Her finger tapped the borders of Arabia and traced its way up along to Parthia. "6.5 million km of land surface."

She looked down with blank eyes at the yellowing foldout page cradled between the two of them. "There's no Roman Empire now."

"You think that has something to do with Horace?"

"With the way he thought. With the way they thought. When you rule the world, you get complacent. You make mistakes."

"So you're trying to learn from the mistakes of the whole Roman Empire?"

"And their Republic."

"You think they'll still be... you know... relevant?"

"Humans are still the same. Humans think the same. Carpe diem. You know it. Latin is a dead language but Carpe diem isn't."

"Things are different now. That's why nobody knows the rest of that line. It's all about take action today because you don't know what tomorrow will bring."

She just looked at him with serious eyes. "Well it's not true. Not for us. Not for you. You know what comes tomorrow. Judgement Day. You don't take action for today. You fight for one more tomorrow."

John stood up. Everything came full circle around people in this house—his mom, his uncle, her. Always, it was all about what he had to do, all this nameless responsibility that just had no corresponding action or solution. At least Riley...

"Way to get all heavy on me." There was enough meaning in his voice to get through even her thick metal head that this conversation was definitely over. He got enough of this from Mom. He definitely didn't need a malfunctioning machine playing parrot.

She shrugged. "I do the best I can for you." Her hands tightened. "I always do."

John didn't quite know what to say to that.

He left with the distinct feeling that whatever little part of him had convinced itself that there was still a middle ground between Armageddon and apple pie was totally screwed. The life of John Connor was definitely always going to be way past weird.

"…Pre fertum super celum…"

Really weird.

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If ever anyone needed to guess that I was watching bucketloads of Supernatural in between writing this, guess no more! And if every anyone doubted that use a lot of Wikipedia when writing stuff like this, doubt no more. :)b And of course, the title is in reference to Hermione Granger. Girl's gotta keep to her roots.