Disclaimer: I own nothing; for fun, not profit. Title comes from Mumford & Son's Timshel.
Spoilers/Setting: Set sometime in early S1 before Sarah comes to strongly dislike Cameron, and when Cameron was still offering Sarah little bits and pieces of future John, presumably out of some sense of kindness or desire to forge a common ground. Spoilers specifically for T2 and The Demon Hand.
Notes: As far as the East of Eden reference goes, I figure Sarah's read Lord of the Flies (as per her voiceover in What He Beheld) so it's not as unlikely as one might think. Timshel – the literal translation of which is "thou mayest," specifically referring to God's promise to Cain that he might overcome sin/evil of his own will – seemed to me to be a kind of passive "No fate," a similar axiom in that both profess free will, except that "timshel" implies self-determined possibility rather than the actual action and change inherent in the full statement "There's no fate but what we make for ourselves."
Sarah's doing the dishes when Cameron silently enters the kitchen at the end of her first nightly round of the house, stopping at the edges of Sarah's peripheral vision.
"John gave me a message for you," she says after a moment.
Sarah snorts and doesn't turn, stacking plate on plate on plate. "Well, he can come down and tell me himself. Don't you have more self-respect than to let him use you as an errand girl?"
"I act as a courier between resistance camps several times in the future," Cameron replies, a quizzical look entering her eyes. "It's a necessary wartime function. I am less easily harmed than a human. John trusts me. It's a logical choice."
Sarah sighs, as much in exasperation as in exhaustion. "When we're talking about my fifteen year old son who can't be bothered so much as to yell down the stairs at me, it's a different story."
Cameron moves her head fractionally down in a way Sarah is coming to understand indicates her perception of error or misunderstanding. "Not this John," she says.
Sarah feels like they repeat this exchange far too often, even as a chill steals through her body. "Oh," she manages. "And this John, does he know?"
"The message is not for him," Cameron says by way of answer. "Would you like to hear it exactly as he said it?"
"What other way is there, girlie?" Sarah asks naively, because in the next moment she can only listen, wide-eyed and breathless, at the eerie disconnect between Cameron's face and a masculine voice.
"Mom," not-her-son addresses her, "I know how much I've always asked of you, but now more than ever, I need you to trust yourself, and trust me. I'm always listening. Timshel. No fate. You taught me these things – don't forget them now. I love you."
Cameron straightens imperceptively when she finishes, as if waiting for some particular response from Sarah, who is only capable of staring wordlessly back at her for a few moments, her heart cramping so painfully it's difficult to breathe.
"How soon?" Sarah demands abruptly, because suddenly this is important, suddenly this means something. She'll worry about the content of the message later. "How long after he sent Kyle Reese back did he send you to us?"
"Approximately three weeks," Cameron replies. "Why is that significant?"
Sarah shakes her head and smiles tightly. Her son is upstairs, she thinks to herself. She pictures him doing homework.
"He called me 'Sarah' in the last one," Sarah explains. "Reese was saying the words, but he couldn't stop them from sounding cold."
Cameron visibly processes that information. Sarah wonders if she's unsure what to do with it. She's not even sure where the impulse to offer it came from, and is already starting to regret it.
"Your name is Sarah," Cameron finally points out in a manner that suggests that Sarah may be overreacting.
Sarah rolls her eyes. "Never mind. Got anything else for me?"
Cameron's eyes stray to the dishtowel Sarah's still holding. "I can dry," she offers.
Sarah's desire to be alone after the message she'd just received wars with her desire for company, any company. But she eventually replies "Okay," and hands Cameron the damp towel.
They work in an efficient and surprisingly comfortable silence for a few minutes as Sarah shifts around her son's words. Don't second guess. Let go, but not too much. Thy trust is sufficient for me, her mind paraphrases, and her lips quirk ironically. Trust is messy. Sarah hazards a glance over at Cameron's profile as she hands her a fist of soapy silverware, blank in the face of the task set before her, stacking plate on plate on plate once she dries them, only then accepting the silverware. She wonders how Cameron processes information and stimuli; and what, if anything, she's thinking now, or is capable of thinking.
It's true, she knows: John would have known exactly how much he was asking of her in that message. Cameron meticulously dries and sorts the silverware onto a towel, watching the forks and spoons fit together like puzzle pieces, and the knives spill into a pile. Cameron frowns. Sarah does the same.
Timshel, John had also said, and thinking about it at all unsettles her, because she's never shared this word or its history with him. The idea of free will as a God-given axiom is a gift, a luxury: Thou, O mortal, thou may choose thy path. Sarah likes to believe she's doesn't doubt it, remembers carving two words into the wooden planks of a table in the desert with her knife, and the way they rose up to command her: Now, mortal, thou must act.
She'd learned the word in Pescadero. There'd been a sympathetic nurse in her wing for all of two months who had brought her books, and Sarah had devoured them as long as Silberman had allowed it. Lord of the Flies. Catcher in the Rye. Slaughterhouse Five. Catch-22. East of Eden. Banned books. Absurdity and crazy people and bad mothers. Sarah had laughed when she realized, and not cringed at the sound.
But Sarah's never shared anything from Pescadero with her son, and John's always understood enough not to ask, intuitively knowing that as much as he doesn't want to know how close the place and its doctors came to breaking her, she wants it even less. She'll wear her signature on a relinquishment form branded into her heart until the day she dies.
(Timshel, she thought the moment the pen hit the table, and hated herself for consenting to be a pawn. She saw universes of possibilities whirling inside her mind, and picked one. No fate. She broke out that night and stole the world back.)
"You leave him tapes, for the future," Cameron breaks the silence to tell Sarah as she puts away the last of the silverware, information seemingly as impulsively offered as Sarah's earlier words. But Sarah knows this much; the tapes and recorder and player are in the bag she keeps packed at all times stowed under her bed next to her weapons.
"For things he needs to remember," Cameron continues. She watches Sarah. Sarah does not look up. "He listens to them a lot. You always end them with an affirmation that you love him. It pleases John, but it makes him sad, too."
"He told you this?" Sarah asks evenly, picking up a stack of bowls and turning to put them away in a cupboard.
"No," Cameron says. "But I can tell."
Sarah can't bring herself to give any overt sign that she's grateful for Cameron's words, unable to express even in her own mind how something heavy lifted from her heart that had until now been held in a perpetual anticipation of becoming a woman she was never sure she could be, of reforming herself into the "Sarah" of future-John's Thank you, Sarah, for your courage through the dark times.
It's a paradox: eighteen-year-old Sarah hadn't conceived him yet, but had already been his mother. They were strangers, but he was still her son; and even past-Sarah had shivered at the formality of her own name.
She'd wondered sometimes as John was growing up if he would miss her in the future, or if he would even remember her fondly as something other than his taskmaster, his teacher, the woman who happened to raise him by virtue of having given birth to him. She wondered if he knew how the sound of his voice and the warmth in his eyes soothed something wild and unstable in her that hadn't existed before he had, before she'd held his tiny form close to her sore breasts on a chicken bus and felt her already-fractured reality finally collapse around her, only to reconstruct itself, piece by piece, around the fragile bundle in her arms.
Until that moment – even alive and moving inside her, his heart beating under hers in cut time – her son had always been an abstract concept. Her son had existed in her mind as a man who'd sent his father back through time to protect her, a product of war, faceless and commanding. He'd called her Sarah, like a stranger or a child or a creation; and she'd felt the weight of his prophecy like a rule to which the rest of her life would conform, even as she'd tried to fight the urge to shrink in all her youth and naïveté away from this too-large being that loomed over her life and laid it out before her.
(No fate, he'd told her with another man's voice. But thou, O mortal, O mother – thou must.)
That bus ride was one of the happiest moments of Sarah's life. But even so, as she sat there something had quietly snapped inside of her and grown hard and cold, even as a love so fierce it was painful ripped through her. There was no turning away from any of it, even if she'd wanted to. John was staring up at her, eyes already open wide to his world, threading a connection through her eyes into her very soul. Sarah stared back, and it was one of the most terrible moments of her life, too, feeling her abstract son reaching out of her mind to grasp the life of her baby in her lap, feeling him call out to her in Kyle's voice, Sarah, Sarah: You must be stronger than you imagine you can be.
Sarah wanders into John's room later that night when Cameron's wandering the shadows on the other side of the house, and can't bring herself to do anything more than brush a gentle hand over John's hair and press a kiss to the crown of his head. He's unsure as ever of what to do with shows of affection from her in a situation that, for them, passes for normal; and there's an unasked question in his eyes when he turns to face her. He doesn't pull away, though. He never does.
She wonders sometimes if he ever feels how she lets herself rest in his presence when she allows herself to rest at all, grateful beyond words that this is her son and he's with her.
I love you, she thinks at him in return, willing him to know it, feel it, carry it in his heart. It's not just the difficulty of expression, Sarah thinks; it's the difficulty in understanding.
(I'm always listening, he'd said. Timshel. No fate. Thou mayest, thou must. These are her words, he said; but Sarah had had them from him first.)
Like mother, like son.