AN: Obviously, I don't own Terminator anything. I'm writing this, because I've always been curious what started the time paradox in Terminator. What events and decisions led to Sarah and John Connor starting a resistance? How did they get into this circular situation?
Admittedly, this is rushed and not particularly good writing. But it felt good to write it down and get it out of my head so that I could see it. And I thought others might be interested in it. Maybe you have a better version and will write it and share. Hopefully, this will inspire others to write their ideas of how things wound up in the first Terminator.
Without further ado.
How A Time Paradox Begins:
August 29th, 1997
The small group cry out in fear as the ground vibrates and dust and rocks loosen from the tons of rock above their heads. Sarah groans as she realizes she took her kids on an educational field trip underground in a place that experiences earthquakes. What was she thinking? How stupid is she? The people scream and the ground rumbles while she grabs her children and braces her back against the retired gold mines shaft wall.
It isn't until she gets back to her car in the car park that she and the other park visitors realize it wasn't an earthquake. They can see mushroom clouds miles away, reaching high into the heavens. The three of them stare at the sight in wide eyed shock, unable to comprehend what it is they are seeing. It isn't even just one mushroom cloud. Because as they look around, they see two more mushroom clouds from their vantage point in the mountains.
Sarah thought the Cold War was over. The Soviet Union collapsed. Right? Who else could do this? How would terrorists get a hold of more than one nuclear weapon? Multiple mushroom clouds. Her stomach drops. She is safe, but what about Stan? He is usually at work this time of day and the security firm he works for is in downtown Los Angeles. At first she fears for his safety and then realizes they still haven't gotten around to tying the knot. If he is dead, life insurance and ownership will go to his parents and they'll decide whether to give it to their kids. Their wills aren't handled.
Only... what if the attack isn't just a few places in California? What if many more places were bombed? How could she even imagine something so horrific? No. That would be apocalyptic.
"Mom? What do we do?" John asks. She stares ahead as she tries to decide what takes priority. While Stan and home is near that mushroom cloud, so is nuclear fall out and chaos and death. She can't bring her children anywhere near that. Her hometown is across the country near D.C. It will take nearly a week to get there with two kids.
"Mom?"
"Honey, give me a minute to think." Maryland is a long way, but it is the only place she has to go right now. The roads are going to be backed up soon enough with people leaving the metro area. The best thing to do is get as much gas and water as she can and get the hell out of dodge. "We're gettin' outta here."
"Mom? What about Dad?"
Should she tell her nine year old daughter that her father is probably dead? No. Sarah is 32 years old and she has a hard time accepting her partner of thirteen years is dead. This is not the time to send her daughter into the grieving process. "Jeannette, get in the car right now."
"You're leaving Dad back there?" John argues.
Narrowing her eyes, she stares John down. "I'm doing exactly what he would want me to do. I'm keeping his children alive."
While not happy with her decision, John gets into the front seat silently while Jeannette cries softly in the backseat.
It isn't until they reach Arizona that they come to realize that many more cities were blasted to hell. Rumour has it that it isn't just America that was destroyed, but the entire planet has been blasted back to the stone age.
Sarah wakes slowly at first. Disoriented and confused and finding it difficult to remember where exactly she is. Memories of the mushroom clouds on the horizon in three directions and camping out near the highway come rushing back. She hears men laughing and jerks upright and looks around to her young daughter being confronted by a group of dickwads by the public restrooms.
"Jeannette!" The name tears from her throat without conscious thought. All faces turn her way as she tumbles out of the front seat of the car and sprints to her daughter. She doesn't even make it anywhere near her little girl when one of the men wraps his arms around her from behind threateningly. He laughs boisterously. Rage covers Sarah's terror instantly. "Let her go now!"
"Or what? What're ya gonna do to me if I don't let her go?"
She has never been so afraid in all her life as she is as she watches her daughter in this stranger's arms. Searching her mind for a threat, she comes up empty until John intercedes.
"Or I'll cut you down."
Turning her face back, her mouth falls as she sees John standing there leveling a shotgun at the man. She remembers Stan teaching John how to fire a rifle. She doesn't remember Stan having any reason to teach John how to load, care for and fire a shotgun. Sarah also doesn't remember John having any access to a shotgun. She fears he might fire into her by mistake trying to figure it out.
"Is that Eddie's shotgun?" One of the men asks.
"Now how in the hell'd you get that?" Sarah presumes this commenter is Eddie.
"Hand her over." She demands, deciding it doesn't matter how John got the shotgun; only that he has it and they don't.
One moment she is facing them down, the next all of her senses are overwhelmed. An explosion rips into the earth and throws her back into John even from the distance she is standing at. For a moment, she lies concussed on the ground, limbs entangled with her twelve year old son. Her ears ring, her body throbs and her vision is blurry. She tries to stand but her balance is thrown off and she is mixed up with John. Before she can get her bearings, she realizes that the spot Jeannette and those men were standing in, just exploded before her eyes.
Screaming with fear, she scrambles away from John to the scorched, smoking earth. In the dark, she can't make out one body part from another, let alone the gender or age of the owner. She is almost watching herself from afar as she falls apart, screaming like a young child as devastation takes over. She is unable to think beyond her grief as it would seem not just her world, but the very fabric of the universe is torn apart. She had feared, as every parent fears at times, something happening to her daughter. But the reality isn't something she could have prepared herself for. Her insides are a rose crushed under a heel causing irreparable damage.
"Mom!"
She hears him and feels him pull on her with more strength than she would expect from a child. "It's shooting at us! Come on! Goddamnit Mom, move!" Shooting? She feels the vibration of objects hitting the ground in a line coming straight at them in the dark. They could kill John. If losing Jeannette to a fireball is crushing, what would it feel like to lose another? To have none left?
Countenance changing entirely, she launches to her feet and pulls John underneath her as she throws them both out of the line of fire. Aircraft that can't be seen in the dark, stops firing as it passes them and moves up to turn around and take another sweep. She searches blind in the dark on the tarmac parking lot for the shotgun John dropped.
"Mom, we have to run." John pleads with her.
Run? So John can be shot in the back? No. Sarah isn't going to run away and lose another child like this. Her fingers brush against cold steel. Shotgun! "John, get under the car."
"What're you gonna do?"
"Get under the car, John." Her voice darkens as she prepares to see just how close she can get to the aircraft without getting her ass shot off. He hears in her tone of voice that she isn't going to discuss this with him and does as he is told. Shots begin to hit the ground again as it dives down closer and closer to the earth. She lines up her shot. Stan didn't teach John how to fire a shotgun because he was too small. But he did teach Sarah and she knows she is going to need to get in pretty close range to do some damage.
The line of fire comes so close she feels dirt thrown up from the bullets. When she can see the aircraft is an unmanned drone, she deems herself close enough and fires two rounds into it and then ducks. It drops out of the sky not far from her head and scatters across the ground before bursting into flames.
Sarah racks the shotgun and pulls her backpack out of the car. "Let's go." She orders John.
"What? Why? You slaughtered them." John is elated and excited. He has never seen his mother be such a bad ass before. He never knew she had it in her.
"It was unmanned and whoever sent it, could send more. I think it was a chopper or something else that sent the rocket at us. If they have infrared, they can see us but we can't see them. We need to go find cover, now." Infrared or body heat sensors. She isn't sure of the details, but she knows enough to be concerned about being easily seen in the dark.
This is when John remembers those boring discussions Mom and Dad have in the evenings about Dad's work. Mom might not be an expert, but she has. no doubt, learned some things from Dad over the years they've been together. Today, that sort of knowledge might pay off. If only his Mom had shown this level of badassery when those guys took Jeannette. Maybe she might be alive right now.
John feels a stab of guilt as he follows her into the valley below. He heard her sobs. He thinks he has a pretty good idea how keenly she felt Jeannette's death. He quietly follows behind her the rest of the night and the days that follow. He doesn't miss how her demeanor changes. Her face hardens to grim determination and if she still has any plans to go see Grandma out East, she doesn't voice them anymore. As the days turn into weeks and the weeks turn into months, he begins to see her plan take form.
Sarah systematically investigates what is tearing their world apart. He joins in her investigation early on and they eventually conclude that their own computers and machines are turning on them. John thought she would stop once she found out just how faceless Jeannette's killer is. But Sarah only seems to become more determined.
"I'm gonna destroy them." His mother's voice reaches him from across the firepit one night. "I'm gonna find people that will teach us to fight and then I'm gonna find out where the machines are vulnerable and then I'm going to destroy them. They took Jeannette's life and they've taken your future. I can try to honour her death and fight for your future. Because if this is how the machine's are gonna fight, humanity will go extinct."
"You don't have to explain yourself." John gets up and sits next to his mother. "I'm with you on this. They need to pay for what they did to Jeannette and they need to be stopped. I'm with you." She pulls him in for a hug and John realizes silently to himself that he's grown up a lot in the months that have passed since his little sister died. He knows how much he has matured in a short time because he knows what his mother isn't saying but thinking. This fight, this mission to destroy the machines, will probably get the both of them killed. But something big enough to take down the most powerful nation on the planet is going to take that kind of commitment to be stopped in its tracks.
Not long after, Sarah hooks up with a guy attached to a military platoon. They are leading a small collection of civilians to safety, but she uses Alton for training. It takes a few months, but they convince the CO to train the civilians to fight. To begin an organized resistance before many recognized what it was the machines were doing. Exterminating humanity.
Thirty years later, John meets a young soldier called Kyle Reese. He feels an inexplicable kinship to him from word go. It takes him a few days to realize why when he meets Derek Reese. They're cousins. Kyle and Derek's mother is his father, Stan Morsky's sister.
Sarah died in the work camps inside the first five years of the war. But her leadership and tenacity was the stuff of legends. With his own record and his relation to his mother, John had been given a lot of trust and respect before he had even turned twenty. The Connnor name carried a lot of weight.
When they had near won the war only to find Skynet sending a T800 to 1984, before he was born, John knew he should send a more experienced warrior to go after it. But Kyle was family and he didn't have it in his heart to sacrifice a man to a one way trip to the past with a high probability of death for anything less than family. Even if Kyle didn't know it. John had intended to tell the young soldier, but there just wasn't time. He was a good soldier and John trusted him to complete his mission. John would never know that he had essentially erased his own father from history with this decision and changed his own paternity.
AN: I'm sure this can be improved on, but hey, I enjoyed writing it.