Disclaimer: I own nothing; for fun, not profit; etc.
Spoilers/Setting: Through Born to Run, but there are references to several other episodes (especially Queen's Gambit) and T2. Future!fic.
Notes: In honor of Mother's Day, because it seemed appropriate. The title is the first line of Las mañanitas (These are the little mornings), a traditional birthday song that Sarah sings a little of to Kacy in Allison from Palmdale, reminiscing how she sang it to John the day he was born. However, it's also often sung by children to their mothers on Mother's Day - a beautiful way to bring things full circle.
When John Connor was six years old, his mother broke out a borrowed chess set for the first time. He'd always been a fairly bright kid, and while chess was a long game, it wasn't too complicated for him. His mom would tell him local fairy tales while they played, and at that age it had seemed like her voice alone could animate the characters into the pieces on the board. They started before dusk and played until the game was over, or until his eyes drooped too low and she chuckled and pulled him up and pushed him toward their single bed across the room. Then he'd curl up against her, his small hand straying a little to find its usual spot under her chin, and drift off against her still-tense body.
These were long, lazy stretches of time with Sarah that John hadn't come to appreciate until he was much older and had been long without her. Underground in tunnels crammed with survivors, he'd come to terms a long time ago with the fact that his mother had been sick before he'd left her, that she'd probably died before Judgment Day, that his last glimpse of her stepping away from him before he jumped forward was the last; but it didn't stop him wishing her face on a nearby woman hunched over and cleaning her gun, or wanting her light touch against his cheek or forehead. John would close his eyes and dream of unrelenting heat resting moist and heavy on his shoulders and lungs like the breath of the world, the rustling of the jungle just outside their one room home, the smell of sweat and guns and rotting flora in the air, his mother's long dark hair braided loosely to the side, and her sharp eyes resting tenderly on his face.
These are easier days to remember, even if they'd been the longest ago. His love for her, and his mind's comprehension of her in her overwhelming totality, untainted by Pescadero and everything John at twenty-two still doesn't understand about the place and his mother's place inside it. Her love for him, running ribbon-like around his world, big and wide and weaving through everything. It had been enough. It had been everything.
"Whatcha thinkin' about, Connor?" Kyle Reese throws across the way. A common enough game.
John thinks about the picture of a softer, pregnant, nineteen year old Sarah in his father's pocket right now. "My mom," he replies in a rare moment of complete honesty. Sure enough, Kyle's hand ghosts to his jacket pocket. It had stopped being weird a long time ago. "Mexico," he continues. "Chess. One thing she could never teach me. Not playing against me, anyway."
She hadn't, it was true, though she'd tried. One day she'd sat him down with Arturo – gentle, intelligent, deadly, and one of the only men she'd ever trusted him with in Mexico, including the ones she'd lived with – and gone off on her own. She hadn't come back until he'd checkmated a pleased Arturo, John's tattered old white queen still freshly in Arturo's hand. Something heavy had settled low in his belly at that, and he hadn't been able to look at his mom when she'd come over and ruffled his hair, somehow both unaccountably angry with her and ashamed of himself.
She'd never played with him after that, but much later – fifteen, sixteen years old and weighing intel and formulating attack plans and exit strategies with her, establishing and cataloging weapons caches and safehouses with her, running while she provided cover with a rifle, a shotgun, a 9mm, strangling a man to save her life – he'd understood that she'd never actually stopped.
"What, is John Connor telling me he got beat by a girl?" Kyle jokes. He's laughing.
John just shrugs mildly. "The queen's the most powerful piece on the board, Reese."