No Trespassing
Author's Note: This is a continuation of Flight is Right and its sequel, Away. In order to understand some basic things about the characters, attitudes, and happenings that go on in this, I'd advise you read those two stories before moving on to this one. And to the people who have: welcome back.
This is a sequel merely in the sense that it chronologically follows the events of the last two; it isn't that intimately tied and takes place somewhere in the bizarro hellscape that is the timeline of season two, which puts it about two or three months after Away. Maybe.
In the rare instance that a FOX attorney reads this: This is a work of fiction and is divorced from the actual product it is derived from. I make no money off of it, and the intellectual property is not mine.
Getting back to the timeline issue: this definitely takes place after "Self Made Man."
Michael Oxferod will be returning in this.
I think that about covers the confusions and technicalities of all this, so let's get right into it.
----------
Chapter One: World Record
He was running. Again.
In a way, he really wasn't quite surprised. What would getting an attitude do? What would cutting his hair off do? What would fucking a girl do? All it did, all any of it did, was construct new barriers which were as easily broken as the previous ones. In the end, it all turned out the same.
Trivialities. Distractions. He was evading the point. He'd been there, right there at the point of no return, at the moment he knew he should have dived headfirst into the swirling whirlpool of destiny. But no. He watched. He waited. Everything turned out fine. Everything worked itself out. He'd lost the opportunity.
Now he pouted. He whined. He made mistakes, horrible mistakes. A bunch of cops die because you want the holiday suite. Just piddling, right? Drops in the bucket? Not as if you killed them, after all.
But it is your fault.
Was it recoverable? Could it be found again, that opportunity to become Him?
Would he have the strength to dive when it came? If it came.
Things were different now. You couldn't dodge that realization, no matter how much you dodged everything else. The actions were the same. The motivations were what had changed.
He was running, yes, but he wasn't fleeing. He was approaching. Searching? Or did he know?
It was all black. He couldn't see an inch ahead of him, yet his body was perfectly illuminated against the darkness. He felt no fatigue as he ran. That felt appropriate. That felt good. He didn't want to lose energy prematurely. Yet when he stopped running, all he could think about was how best to avoid what he was after.
You know, in a way, things were actually still the same. If you can't flee one way, you flee another. Perhaps a bullet to the head, done by yours truly. Perhaps idle, wistful desires for it all to... melt away. A dream. Or... you escape. You find distractions.
He suddenly wanted to stop running.
He didn't even want to go in the other direction, whatever it was. Things were so black here, in this place, he couldn't be sure of what was left, what was right, what was forward, what was back. What he wanted was to stop altogether. Freeze.
Do nothing. Live a thousand years in this place, and age no longer. What the future held was the biggest trial of all.
And similarly, the past was no easy crucible to confront.
Present was what he wanted. He wanted to go out, to lay in bed for hours on end, to eat something made lovingly and not out of mere necessity, to kiss out of sheer joy and not starving need. He wanted to live the way he wanted.
He willed his legs to stop, and they refused. Like an automaton, he kept going. Perhaps his legs were smarter than the rest of him, but at the moment? He didn't care. He shouted. Yelled. Screamed. Cried. Pleaded. They refused every cajolement, every treaty.
Because in truth, there was no stopping. He had to either face forward, look up, pay attention, or die and become useless.
Everyone else was chipping in while he rescued his drunk girlfriend from a party with a couple of douchebags. Everyone else was chipping in while he went to Mexico.
He needed to be more pragmatic than that, and at the moment, that was the scariest thing in the world. Needed something to shake him.
So unfair.
He screamed tragedy, and his legs called him coward. He kept running, helpless.
--------------
Most nightmares got John up in a rip-roaring hurry, and usually he had no qualms about letting everyone in a five-mile vicinity know about it, too. Luckily, mom and Derek were easily accustomed to night terrors, and at worst Cameron would just saunter in, ask if everything was alright, and then she'd be off. All it took was a yelp of terror erupting from dreamland, some last minute vision or thought that'd send John metaphorically running. It was always loud. Sometimes he thought his dreams were the worst, because he almost never heard Sarah... doing anything while she slept.
Maybe she was just better about it than he was.
But anyway, this time wasn't like that at all. This time, things were much quieter. Johns eyes opened very slowly, as if he were being gently eased out of the nightmare, not just... y'know, ejected from it.
All the other feelings were there. The anxiousness. A feeling of ants in the pants. His armpits getting wet and cold. Some lingering vision from the nightmare being carried on into consciousness, like an imprint. Unlike the other times, though, he did nothing.
This wasn't the same sort of raw "holy shit what was that?" feeling he usually got. It was more metaphysical. More nagging, really, than frightening. Sorta like watching a suspense flick as opposed to a straight up horror movie. It was definitely a bad feeling, though. Not terrifying, right? Yet more potent than any metallic monsters appearing in his dreams could ever hope to be.
The star lit ceiling twinkled cheerfully at him. All was utter silence, like a suburban street just after a snowfall.
John grumbled and pushed himself up further against the back of the bed, staring at the door now, at the rest of his kiddie-themed room.
Okay. So what was it this time?
Details were typically forthcoming. I saw a Terminator. It shot me. I died. Or, more horrifically, someone else died. Sarah, usually. As much as he fucking hated her sometimes, the thought of her being gone one day was too much to describe. Too much tothink about, even.
And on the flip side, sometimes he got betrayed in his dreams. By Cameron, usually. She was an easy target, admittedly. She'd already tried to kill him once, so why not? The truly frightening instances were the ones he didn't expect. One time he saw Derek pointing a murky gun at his head and... pulling the trigger. Now that was freaky.
But this time? The dream was like fog, there one day, maybe one hour, and gone the next. All he could remember was that he'd been running towards something, and he wanted to stop.
That was it. Not exactly your cinema style nightmare, but it was the metaphorical ones that were the most disquieting to him.
The last time he'd dreamed about shit like this, he ran away from home, got innumerable people killed, almost got killed himself, and had another boy kiss him, and then ended up kissing the robot.
So yeah, these were the dreams he hated most. He was beginning to crazily wonder if he didn't have some sort of Cassandra complex, some kind of... pre-recognition?
Heh. In a way... he did. He knew exactly what the future held for him. He was John Connor, the leader of the human race against the machine intelligence Skynet in a world ravaged by the flames of nuclear armageddon. The big ol' important guy who knew shit all about how he was supposed to become important in the first place.
That was probably what this was about. The last dream was him running away from it. This was him running toward it, while wanting to stop.
Wonderful. At least he was getting better at interpreting this shit. And the next set of dreams would be him running while not knowing how to get there, right?
Well, it was a red herring, anyhow. All bullshit. He didn't want to stop. He fucking killed a guy. You can't go back from that. You can't stop after something like that happens. All he wanted to do was...
Slow down. Breathe. Not let everything get so heavy. Life goes on, y'know? Life would go on, whether he liked it or not. All he had to do was go through the motions, be there, along with the ride.
No, see, that's a bad thought to have. In fact, this whole entire thought PROCESS was a bad thing to have. He was self-analyzing too much, that was never good. That was very bad. He should just stop. You had a dream. Great. Everyone gets those, not like you're special for having it. Not like it means anything important. There's enough important shit going on now, you idiot. Stop it. Stop it and focus.
God, he was in such denial already. It was a fucking world record.
------------
For all of John's self-assurances, it was spectacularly useless in getting him to go back to sleep. He laid there in bed, squirming a little, letting nebulous, stupid thoughts overrun him. Anything goes when you're like that. He'd feel sure of himself one minute and existential the next. Stupid dream.
It was this... all of this three dot shit, the lack of leads, all of the bullshit that had been recently happening. Cromartie was either a fucking zombie somewhere or in the completely wrong hands. People kept dying. Derek was getting more aloof, Cameron was getting freakier, and mom was...
He didn't even want to start thinking about Sarah. Riley was his only fucking port in the storm, and they had the gall to criticize him for trying to live a little with her. Shit was bad enough without them breathing down his neck.
Wanderlust started to kick in a little. Maybe moving around would clear his head. He got up out of bed, put on some jeans, and went out the door.
The hall was pitch black, but that wasn't so bad. John knew this place like the back of his hand already. To his left were the stairs and therefore the rest of the house. To the right was the fancy little balcony door, and therefore the outside world. John stared off to the left, scratching the peach fuzz on his chin a little. Home is where your heart is. And in your heart there can be a lot of shit you'd rather not confront. It was no contest. John ducked back into his room, slipped into his jacket, and started off towards the right, already feeling the cool breeze hitting him from underneath the door.
Some shoes would probably be good, but what the heck. He was just going for a walk, after all. He grabbed the door handle and pulled the thing open; slowly and carefully, as he usually did. The thing creaked like no one's business, and he didn't want to be caught up late.
A month or two ago, Sarah wouldn't have cared if he was up all night. Well, she would, but not that much, y'know? Now she was becoming...
She was getting frightened.
John moved past the door and let it close behind him. He beheld a perfectly dark night, interrupted only occasionally by street lamps. Good. He didn't want to see anything. He wanted to mellow out, only feel shit, not...
Goddamnit. She was getting frightened for him. He was slipping through her fingers and she knew it. Probably thought he was acting like an irresponsible brat, but he knew that was bullshit, so why should he care? What was the harm in seeing a fucking girl? Sometimes he felt as if he was getting strangled by Sarah, by her fear.
John sighed, searching blindly for the little deck chair that was up here. He had a pretty good view of the street from here, despite the darkness. May as well... people watch, or some shit. It was a bad situation. Hell, it was a horrible situation. Sarah didn't want to let John go, which only made him react in...
He hesitated to say "stupid ways" but there was no other good word for it, was there?
Yeah. Stupid ways. Like running off to Mexico and...
John hissed and shut his eyes tightly, feeling a spike of pain electrify his head and run along his body, making him sweat a little. That whole excursion had been nothing but trouble. He winked at Riley, made stupid, suave remarks, and a day later a bunch of Mexican cops were dead. This wasn't some drunken, spring break-esque misadventure. It was... life and death.
Mostly death.
With all the shit happening recently with the three dots, he'd never gotten a chance to...
Think about all that. Sarah claimed blame for sparing that kid at the bowling alley, but John chose to run off in the first place. And Riley forgot to reset the security system, which got the house robbed to begin with. So when you go down the pipe far enough, you find John at the end of it.
And a bunch of dead bodies.
The teenager tapped his bare foot against the concrete. It was ice cold by now. Killing a person is one thing. Getting many people killed is a whole different story. It was, in fact, a story he was really fucking familiar with. People died, people would die constantly because of him. That was...
How could you live with yourself?
You detach yourself. And John couldn't do that anymore. Sometimes, when he had a quiet moment, he saw... faces floating up at him. Faces he knew, but wasn't familiar with. FBI agents. Those Mexican cops. Kyle, even. Every death was an elephant in the room, and at this point there were a whole lot of fucking elephants. It was getting...
So what then? How do you deal with it?
He didn't know. It was weird. He was too accustomed to seeing himself as the most important figure in the room, and to suddenly put a value on somebody else felt crazy and uncharted, like he had to worry about everything instead of just himself now. He felt like screaming all of a sudden; it was a stupid, instinctual feeling. Wouldn't solve anything. Would probably make him feel better. He dipped his head a little until it touched the railing, and he shivered as he settled there.
In the end, there was a lot of shit piling up. For everybody. He had to release all the emotions bubbling up inside of him somehow, and Riley was a good, if not... perfectly sane way of doing that. As long as he kept it simple. No more vacations to Mexico, for example...
John giggled at the thought. It was a manic, crazy sort of noise. He felt like he was about to start crying, actually. Or scream. Or hurl himself off the balcony and end this fucking mockery of an existence he led.
He never got the chance to do anything, though, because a figure appeared underneath a street light up ahead.
He pulled himself back up and watched the figure closely, his eyes focusing like binoculars on it. In a way, this was what he was looking for. A distraction among other distractions. Something he could use to dispel every thought from his mind.
It was just a small, indistinct shape at first. All he could make out was color. Purple. A purple jacket. Even before he noticed the shapely form and plodding, robotic strides he figured the person was a woman for the color alone. Then; yeah, the hair, the emotionless face, and the way she walked. All very clear indicators that the "person" was Cameron Phillips. His bodyguard. A beautiful sociopath with fake skin and a combat-hardened, shiny metal interior. A Terminator.
John pulled his head up a tad more as she approached. Was she holding something? He really couldn't tell from here, and he oddly hoped that it was at least something important. Because if it was something like a pocket book, or... god, even garbage or shit like that...
Well. The thing was this: Cameron was getting even more... not frightening, although she was scary, but just... creepy. That was the word. Sticking her toes out and wiggling them in the open wind, complaining about birds in the attic, offering to cook complex meals, shit like that. The stuff John had privately wanted to see in her ever since he realized she was a robot were slowly being realized. She was becoming... not more human per se, but less robotic, definitely. It was hard to explain.
Under any other circumstances he would have been jumping for joy. A few days before Sarkissian tried to kill them all, John was getting more and more certain that... as retarded and screwed up as it might sound... he was getting more certain that they could like each other. Like like. Like like, right? It was stupid, anyway. Almost a week after they kissed she tried to shoot at him.
And the problem was, it was becoming more obvious to John that she wasn't being more human because she was learning, but because her chip was still screwed up from the explosion. It was frustrating, to say the least. If she could go off her programing like this, she could go off completely and either kill everything in sight or just shut down. She was a walking time bomb.
That was the pragmatic side of him talking. The lover boy part of him, stupid shit it was, was fawning over Riley now. Cameron had her goddamned chance, and it was just gone now. All there was to it.
The Terminator caught sight of John and extended her right hand; waving. The tiny bag (there was a logo on it) remained in her left, and John mechanically returned the greeting. The gears in his head were working overtime now. She obviously hadn't just picked that bag up somewhere around the house. She went out and got it. Which meant she left the area. Left him.
It wasn't the act so much as the psychology that bothered him.
Cameron reached the edge of the lawn and made a bee-line for the balcony stairs. John absently turned and looked at the door, wondering what the chances were of him evading a conversation successfully. Not that great. She'd just follow him, anyway. He made a tiny little sighing noise in his throat and turned his head up to look at the stars. It was impossible to see any, though, what with all the lights.
Loud, clacking footfalls on the steps. She could enter a room as quietly as the grim reaper, but everything about robots was pretty much modular, wasn't it? She wanted him to know she was coming.
His left foot twitched slightly; at least it wasn't asleep anymore.
"Hi."
John winced and looked over to Cameron as she crested the stairs, Dunkin' Donuts bag in hand. What the fuck?
"Hey," he said. He pointedly looked at the bag. "I didn't realize robots went out for donut breaks." He smiled, like it was a joke. Like she could appreciate a joke.
Cameron looked down at the bag, as if she'd forgotten it was there. "Cybernetic organism. And we don't. It's for someone else."
John decided not to question it; yet. He reached his hand out. "Lemme see?"
"There's only one left."
"Lemme see." It could be a bomb, or something. Or anything other than a goddamned donut, if the past was any indication.
God, he hoped that was true.
Cameron relinquished the bag, letting John grab it. He immediately opened the thing, tearing the sides a little with an irritating riiip, and peeked inside.
A vanilla donut with rainbow sprinkles sat innocently within, surrounded by crumbs and a few napkins. Gigantic words on the inside screamed THANK YOU. John closed the bag again and thrust it back at Cameron: "Someone else?"
"Someone else," Cameron said, accepting the bag. Not you was the implication, and Sarah basically swore off sweets unless it was necessary to keep up appearances. And Derek? Please.
"Who?"
"A woman at the library." Cameron reached into the bag and took out the donut; she offered it to him. "This will go bad soon. Do you want it?"
John grabbed it and flung it over the side. Cameron watched its departure with something resembling bemusement.
"Why were you at the library?" John asked. He blinked, tilting his head suddenly. "Wait, isn't it closed by now?"
"I bribe the night manager with donuts," Cameron said, and she looked out onto the grass where John had flung the pastry.
John chuckled. "Wow, that's... clever, I guess. Why were you there and not, y'know, here, though? Like you're... supposed to be."
Cameron shrugged. "Cromartie has been disabled. There's no further threat to your life until it can be confirmed again. I've decided to spend these nights reading."
John opened his mouth; then closed it. Damn. That actually made sense, which made it even more irritating.
Cameron looked up at the stars, mimicking John, and she smiled while he wasn't looking.
"Well, still. You're supposed to be patrolling. In case they try again."
She looked back at him, and their eyes met for the first time in the conversation. John hated that now, whereas a few months ago he would have gotten all sappy. Weird how things change, huh? Cameron looked sharper now, less... blunt, really. There was something more subtle about her "personality," and everyone had noticed. It made John feel less secure in talking to her. "You don't have to worry, John. I'll be there when it happens."
"Real fuckin' assuring," John blurted. He felt hungry. Why'd he throw the donut away? When it happens.
Cameron shifted gears; "I can learn more by reading. It's a useful application of my time, at night."
John caught the hint right away. "... And spending time with a girl I like is a useless application of my time, right?"
The Terminator gave him the barest of nods, looking a tad pleased with his quickness there. "She's more trouble than she's worth."
"Oh, fuck you," John said. His foot was tapping of its own intelligence now, separated from his mind. "I'm sick of everyone complaining about her. I mean, what's so bad about me socializing a little? What kind of leader am I gonna be if I can't relate to anyone on a personal level?"
"It's not your personality that drives people to fight for you."
John blinked, and said nothing.
"It's the fact that you're the best chance they have at living," Cameron finished.
He shook his head. "And how does Riley threaten that?"
"What were you two doing yesterday night?"
John threw his hands up. "What do you think?!" Christ, it took him five minutes to get that lipstick off his neck. She probably knew already. Why bother asking? "And why does it matter?"
Cameron took a small step toward him; she was practically towering above him now, and he barely resisted the urge to gulp now. "It does..."
John turned his head a bit, as if to say go on.
"Somehow," Cameron said.
John laughed. "Oh, so you don't know? That's wonderful, Cam. Go inside."
"I like it out here."
"Then I'm not talking about this, okay? What I do is my business."
"You were asking about my business," she pointed out.
"Tha- that's different, okay?"
Cameron frowned distinctively. "Why?"
"Because you're the robot, and I'm the human, okay? I do things humans do, and you have to do things robots do." He was being an utter douchebag to her, and the fact that he realized he was being a douchebag was perhaps the worst part of this.
"Yes," Cameron said, and then she sat down on his lap. "I do things robots do."
John stiffened up like a board. Wasn't the only thing stiffening either, goddamnit. At least she was fully dressed this time. He licked his lips and leaned back as far as he could on the chair as Cameron made herself comfortable. She was incredibly light, which was insane when you thought about it.
He smirked and bopped his head a little. "Point taken. Get off."
"Do you love Riley?" She didn't get off. If anything she seemed heavier now. There we go.
John shook his knee violently, trying to dislodge her; it was no good, of course. She was staring very, very deeply into his eyes, and he made a strange noise in his throat, like he was trying to swallow a ferret. Feeling came rushing into him, like he'd been empty right before this moment. He wanted. Desired. Aspired. Everything else, all of the shit he'd been dealing with, the three dots, his doubts, his distractions, it all fell away. Right now it was, again, him and Cameron, and she was playing him like a fiddle.
"I don't know," he admitted.
"If eyes, corrupt by over-partial looks, be anchored in the bay where all men ride, why of eye's falsehood hast thou forged hooks, whereto the judgment of my heart is tied?"
It took John a few seconds to decipher the Shakespearian nonsense; never mind that she knew it in the first place. "You're saying she's trying to trick me."
Cameron snuggled in a tad more, and now she wrapped her arms around him. They folded together softly. Sweetly. "I'm saying you're doing stupid things because of her."
Oh god, why did she have to do this? He felt overwhelmed all of a sudden, like he could no longer defend himself. He'd had his chance. He failed. She could play any string she wanted now. Why did he question the fucking donuts?
"Dangerous things, John," Cameron said. "We told you to stop and you said you would. You lied to us."
It was us now. She was trying to drag Sarah in now.
"Yeah, I did. So? We're past that now. Who gives a shit?"
A small, barely visible smile grew and brooded on Cameron's face. "Sergeant Julio Escobar had a wife and two children. Cromartie shot him once in the chest, killing him instantly." The smile, quite appropriately, disappeared. "I looked up the news report."
John's eyes started to burn. No, no. Do not cry. You'll lose it entirely. So what? Huh? It's the past. Who cares? You made a mistake, no point in fixating on...
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
"Cameron," he said, his voice low and without the snarky sarcasm it had possessed a minute ago, "Why are you doing this?"
"Because no one else will," she said. "You need to stop seeing her."
"I don't want to," John said. "It's bullshit that I shouldn't be my own person for at least once in my LIFE!"
Cameron leaned her head against John's. Softly. Everything about this was soft. The embrace could only be described now as loving, as warm and compassionate. That was what made the situation so horrifying to him, so surreal. "It's bullshit," she whispered, "that someone innocent must die so you can enjoy yourself with her."
John said nothing. Past saying shit. He... felt like garbage. He bowed his head. He was gonna cry. Great.
"You need to stop seeing her."
He blinked and looked at the Terminator. "It wasn't my fault."
He couldn't stop thinking about those cops now.
"It was just bad luck."
"It was bad luck, and it was your fault."
"Stop it."
"No, John."
"Let me go."
"No. Sorry."
Well, that was it, then. He was helpless. "What do you want me to say?" he muttered. He couldn't see much. His face felt warm. His foot tapped repeatedly, on rapid-fire.
"I want you to say that you'll stop seeing Riley."
Why did it have to be so black and white? "I-I'll be more careful, I won't do anything I can't clear by you or mom, I won't..." He looked down. It wasn't about Riley anymore. Well, yes it was. It was about getting more people killed. But what were the chances if he just took his time, if he was careful?
Last night he went to a party. And he pummeled a high school junior into his own wooden floor. He would have kept going if Riley hadn't pulled him away.
But he... he wouldn't have honestly...
What he needed to do right now was get away from Cameron. He refused to sit here any longer.
She was quiet. Waiting. Smug, perhaps? Probably.
"Alright," John said. Nodding. "Fine. I get it, okay?"
"No, I don't think you do," Cameron said.
"I'll tell her I have to stop tomorrow. First thing when I wake up, okay? Goddamnit, Cam..." He couldn't look at her.
They stared at each other for a few seconds, and Cameron finally completed the circle she'd started drawing. She leaned in and kissed him once on the lips. He barely felt it. It wasn't anything like the first one, which had been...
This felt like she was securing a lock on a door. God, she was a manipulative bitch.
"Promise," said Cameron.
The big difference, actually, was how fake it felt.
He nodded. "Promise."
She pushed herself up from his lap and hopped down onto the concrete. Brushed herself off and laid the Dunkin' Donuts bag on the railing. She stared at him, and John slowly stood up alongside her, his foot having finally calmed down.
This is a matter of you seeing a girl and potentially getting more people killed.
It was weird. It was all laid out, right there for him to see, and still he wanted to resist. He could make up as many justifications as he liked. He'd be more careful with her. He'd clear everything with mom. He'd explain his "special circumstances" in the barest of terms to Riley. He wouldn't act stupid. He'd think. He'd be smart.
But in the end, all he wanted was someone else to talk to. Someone normal to relate to. Riley was weird, yeah. She had her own secrets. It was sort of disquieting, but... couldn't that be overcome just by talking to her? Wouldn't it be great to hear someone else's problems for a change, instead of the ones he was sick of? She was real, she was there, and she was...
John cleared his throat. "I lied."
Cameron's face didn't change, and she didn't move a muscle. She looked almost as if she'd been expecting that.
John hardly noticed. He turned and ran through the balcony door. Sprinted to his room, nearly tripping in the darkness as he ran. Locked the door behind him, and started to breathe in slowly, haltingly. He listened. Nothing. There was nothing. Nothing except the hum of the radiator, nothing except his breathing. Cameron wasn't following. Thank god. He was afraid she would try something horrible next to get him to stop, but at the moment he couldn't bring himself to care.
He felt like a coward for running, but for everything else? Fuck them. Fuck it all. It was his life. He was gonna decide how he was gonna run it. At least he wasn't trying to escape again, right? So screw them. You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. What on Earth could possibly go wrong at this point with Riley, anyway?
Everything, John thought pessimistically. And those faces floated up at him again. Julio Escobar. Riley Dawson. They didn't even know each other, yet one was responsible for the others death. And he was responsible for being the middle man.
John stalked over to his bed and flung himself down into it, losing track of what he was doing, thinking, feeling. Should have never gotten up. Should have stayed in bed tonight. He felt so exhausted that he fell asleep almost immediately, and the dream that pursued him into consciousness originally now returned to follow him again. Fuck this shit. Fuck it. Tomorrow he was gonna do something fun, and he'd stop worrying about this shit altogether.
He'd take some time for himself, and fuck all to whoever felt the need to stop him.