The Note
Disclaimer: I don't own T:tSCC.
WARNING: Character Death.
Cameron stood in her room and looked out the window with optics that recorded everything but did not really see.
She wondered if there was damage to her chip, because she couldn't stop accessing her databank's files about that night.
The night she failed in her mission and John Connor was terminated.
A good portion of her organic layer had been destroyed in the blast when she'd attempted an extraction. It would take approximately three months before her endoskeleton was once again sufficiently covered to interact with humans.
She wondered if this was necessary.
She'd failed in her primary mission objective and her secondary mission objectives hinged on the survival of John Connor.
John Connor was dead.
Again, without consciously choosing to access the file, the recorded footage, the memories, of that night replayed.
Ruthlessly Cameron overrode the action.
Even if Cameron reverted back to her original programming there was no mission for her to complete, she had been designed specifically for the Termination of John Connor and with him dead she was nothing.
She found she even found his absence disturbing beyond the question of what she was going to do now.
She...missed John.
She wanted John back.
He was dead. He wasn't coming back.
She was a machine. She didn't feel.
Except that, now she did.
She'd never known emotion before John Connor now the complexity of the feeling of desire, selfishness, want, raced through her processors registering as foreign code and sending up red flags.
It was disturbing, the illogical feeling of wanting John back and knowing that he would never come back because he was dead.
Cameron wondered if Sarah Connor and Derek Reese would call this disturbance grief.
Certainly it didn't resemble their grief. Both John's mother and uncle had taken to sleeping longer and eating less than was recommended for optimum function of the human body and consuming large amounts of alcohol. They also broke things and cried a lot.
Cameron thought that if she could, she would cry for John Connor. But expressing human grief as she'd studied it was ineffective.
It didn't alleviate her grief.
It wasn't enough.
She didn't know what to do.
She remembered what John taught her about grief, when the girl at school committed suicide and Cameron stopped him from saving her.
"What are they doing?"
"They're writing notes... for Jordan."
"She's dead."
"Yeah, I remember watching her fall."
"Me too. How will she get the notes?"
"She won't."
"But you said-"
"Sometimes things happen and they are so bad... that people don't know how to deal with their sadness, so they write it in a note."
"But I thought people cried when they are sad?"
"Sometimes it's not enough."
Sarah Connor hadn't wanted to write notes when Andrew Goode had been terminated. She didn't write notes to John now.
But Sarah could cry...
She couldn't cry.
Cameron sat down at her desk and took out a pen and a piece of paper. She considered what she would write in a note to John about her grief. She'd read all the notes to Jordan but none of the things she'd learned seemed to apply.
John would know how to explain what she was feeling and what she wanted to say.
She wanted to tell John.
John was dead.
She felt the sensation of desire and then loss roll through her and her processors began cataloguing and cross referencing the emotion.
She started writing.
AN: Another ancient bit I've polished up for your pleasure. Please enjoy!