This is a disclaimer.
After Midnight
This is the way it should have gone:
Sarah escapes from Pescadero and disappears for two years. John spends those two years fixing up his bike, and getting chased by cops, and avoiding any unnecessary contact with Todd and Janice (once he started cleaning his room on a regular basis, he found they were only too happy to leave him to his own devices), skipping school and hanging out with a pretty redhead he'd met one night in Mike Kripke's basement, and, every few months or so, he takes a letter that's arrived for him and locks himself into the garage to read it.
Then, one Tuesday morning, after yelling at John to get downstairs and have some breakfast, Janice stumped up the stairs, flung John's bedroom door open, and stopped short in the middle of the room.
It had been trashed, and John was nowhere to be found.
The police didn't look for him very hard. After all, the kid was a juvenile delinquent, headed straight for a few short years on the street and a very long life inside a high-security prison – much like his mother.
John Connor was mostly forgotten by the end of that year. Everyone had other things to think about: school, family, hanging with friends. Once in a while, though, Kate Brewster would get a mysterious postcard she never talked about, and the subject would come up again.
*********
This is the way it should have gone:
The Resistance fighter finds them in Texas. John's nearly fourteen, shot up like a weed but otherwise unchanged. Two years in foster care left marks on him that Sarah will never be able to take away; there's a wall around him she'll never be able to break through. They fought so much at first, and they've found a kind of peace and understanding, but John is sharp-tongued and cynical, brusque, a liar and a risk taker and, yes, a petty criminal.
Sometimes Sarah thinks he could be the best thief the world has ever seen if he wanted to. Seems to spend enough time practicing. She could stop him – she could put her foot down and issue ultimatums and shout and storm about it – but that, she knows, would be too much weight for their still-fragile relationship to handle. She abandoned him, and he'll bite back at her if she tries to discipline him now.
Every now and then he sends off a postcard, but she never finds out to whom.
Anyway, the Resistance fighter finds them. There's a Terminator on his heels; he's the primary target but if he could figure out who they were then so will it, and he's not so important that the metal won't take a few hours out of its day to hunt down the Connors. You have to leave, now, he says.
Sarah faces him with a gun in her hands and says, who are you?
And when the answer comes, she goes paler than John's ever seen her. Derek Reese. My brother carried your snap for luck, that's how I made you.
*********
This is the way it should have gone:
Dyson's research is barely a year away from becoming a nuclear war when the Cyberdyne lab goes up. Good luck getting those processors to the military now. Derek lets out this gasp when the initial explosion dies down, a choking noise of pure relief.
John looks over at his mother, and thinks, not for the first time, I should have listened.
Dyson leans against the truck and sobs as it sinks in on him: his life's work in ruins. His life's work would have made ruins of us all.
No one in John's family could give a damn about his little tragedy. Harsh but true.
*********
This is the way it should have gone:
They move back to LA, the Connor –Reese family. Decide on an alias – Baum – buy a house, settle in. John gets marched back off to high school, and Derek drives him the first day.
He spends the next week trying it on for size, in a dozen different conversations: yeah, that was my uncle. My Dad's brother.
Not that life is suddenly perfect, as if the addition of Derek to the family had somehow balanced out that side of the triangle that should by rights have been occupied by Kyle. It doesn't and it can't, ever, and Derek knows that as well as anyone. Sarah and Derek hate each other's guts, frankly: she hates him because he's not Kyle, and he blames her for Kyle's death, and all in all, John has his hands full with the pair of them.
He's sure, sometimes, that Dad would have found all this hilarious. He doesn't know how he knows that. He just does. It's a comforting thought: the idea that some day in the future, John is going to tell his Dad about all of this, and Kyle is going to laugh.
*********
This is the way it should have gone:
Derek takes John hunting sometimes. Beats him to Hell in a so-called sparring match when he catches the kid with a packet of cigarettes. Stops the thievery and the vandalism and the bad school attendance records with a similar combination of well-placed blows and well-placed words. Sarah braces herself for an explosion that doesn't happen, and realises that all of John's most unhesitating, almost instinctual trust belongs to Derek, now.
It's not that he doesn't trust Sarah anymore. It's that he feels more prepared to question her decisions. She supposes that's what growing up is about.
Doesn't make her like it, though.
*********
This is the way it should have gone:
Mom and Derek bury the hatchet long enough to order John a motorcycle for his birthday one year. He plays Guns' n 'Roses albums in the garage while he's working on her, and, one evening, disappears down the drive and into the city with a page from a phone book tucked into the pocket of his leather jacket.
Sarah and Derek spend the evening playing Texas hold 'em. Derek'll win one round, and Sarah the next, and they can both see Kyle's ghost standing in the corner mocking them to Hell and back, amused and loving.
*********
This is the way it should have gone:
Kate Brewster opens her bedroom door one evening and finds a boy leaning against the wall by her bed; he's wearing a leather jacket and frayed out jeans, and that smirk of his hasn't changed a bit.
It turns out she loves his bike almost as much as John himself does. They ride down to the beach and sit in the still-warm sand, shoes and socks off and trousers rolled up, and John talks more in that one night than he has in five whole years.
Kate never once tells him he's crazy. Does it matter? she asks when he wants to know if she believes him. You believe it. And. Well, you know my Dad's in the military. I remember him talking about the attack on Cyberdyne and the computers that were lost.
She won't say anything else, and John never presses her. They stand in the waves and watch the sun come up, and then they go to breakfast.
It takes them half the morning, and then there's the bike again, and a highway out of the city that beckons to them, and a tiny cinema on the edge of town that's showing a summer blockbuster that John will never, in future years, remember the plot or even the title of, because he and Kate spend most of the almost three hours they're in the theatre making out like tomorrow is the end of the world, which it isn't.
He takes her home on the bike the next morning, pulls up in front of her house in that neighbourhood he'd once sworn never to come back to if he ever left. The sky is gold and red and orange and pale blue, morning coming. Kate's yawning as she gets off the bike; John's bleary-eyed with weariness, but he's gone for longer without sleep before, he can take it.
She kisses him in the middle of her front yard with most of the neighbours watching surreptitiously behind their kitchen curtains, and wanders away and into the house, red hair a tousled mess, hips swinging lazily. John watches her go with his hands in the pockets of his jeans, and doesn't move till she's inside.
Then he gets on the bike and goes home to face the music. It lasts for quite a while.
*********
This is the way it should have gone:
Sarah Connor dies of leukaemia in early 2004. John is quietly, completely devastated; the only things keeping him from running out of the hospital and disappearing is Kate's hand in his and Derek's presence at his side. Derek is the one who deals with – well, everything, from the funeral to packing up the house. John isn't quite sure how he did it, but he's got an acceptance letter into Berkeley, and after Sarah's cremation, after he's taken her ashes and scattered them into the sea and hoped against all sense that somehow she was with Dad now, wherever that was, Derek and John move.
Kate's at Berkeley too. Derek, in an unprecedented show of emotion, thanks her quietly for everything she's done for John, and then, shock horror, he lets her hug him.
*********
This is the way it should have gone:
On April 21, 2011, the world ends.
Kate's in med school, John's a computer engineer. He figures it was either that or the military, what with his skills. There's a house in San Francisco with a bike in the front yard and their names n the mailbox.
In the early days of April, Derek moves through the world like a restless ghost. Something's coming, he says to John. I can feel it, John. Something's coming. There's not much time left in the world.
John knows he's right.
The frantic call from Kate's father comes around midnight; by morning, she, Derek, and John have been to the research facility and seen what's happening for themselves. Brewster gives them the codes for the mountain and tells them to run, get out now!
What other options do they have?
Derek is killed getting John and Kate to the airplane hangar. In a few more hours, the machines will have broken out of the compound and spread to the streets of LA. By tonight, there won't be any streets left.
John throws a grenade at the H-K that's just killed his uncle and lets Kate drag him into the plane, numb and shocked. She's sharp with him, like he's a recalcitrant child, like Mom used to be in a crisis, and it's that more than anything that hauls him back to himself. Kate's hands are shaking as she steers the plane.
We're saving ourselves and letting them all die, John, she says.
John looks down at the city falling away beneath them, and smiles grimly. It feels more like a grimace on his face, and he touches a hand to the inside pocket of his leather jacket, where Mom's picture sits.
It's the last time I run away from these things, he says. Hard to tell if he's talking to Kate or to Sarah. You hear me? The last fucking time. I'm John. Connor.
So much for our fate, Kate says softly.