Title: A Scorching Hot Sun

Fandom: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Pairing/Characters: Sarah Connor

Rating: FR13/PG-13

Disclaimer: The Sarah Connor Chronicles belong to James Cameron, Josh Friedman, and Fox.

Prompts: Written for LJ's 50ficlets for prompt #14 (sun) and for LJ's 50prompts for prompt #19 (future).

Notes: Set during the Second Season of the show.

Summary: There is a strange absence of sound as the sun bakes the landscape around her.

Word Count: 482

The dream is always the same: she is standing on a long stretch of empty highway underneath a scorching hot sun. There is a strange absence of sound as the sun bakes the landscape around her. She slowly turns in a 360 degree motion scanning her surroundings, which are completely devoid of any movement apart from the shimmering heat waves on the pavement.

She starts to slowly walk forward, trying to find some shelter from the burning hot sun. Eventually she spies movement in the distance and she instinctively knows that it is a terminator. This is her only chance to change the future for once and for all. She has to destroy the terminator in the distance because it is the only way that she can give John a normal life.

As they move closer to one another, Sarah can tell that the terminator that is slowly approaching her is Cameron and for a moment it pains her that she has to destroy a terminator that her son is attached to once again. And she doesn't know if she can do it, not with the history that they share. This is not the time for sentimentality, instead she has to be cold and calculating, yet she finds herself choking on sentimentality for a machine. She steels herself to be emotionless like the machine that is approaching her.

Cameron is closer now and suddenly the skin that deceptively hides what she is begins to melt off under the scorching hot sun. Once the skin is gone and only the metal skeleton remains, things become easier for Sarah. This is a machine and to give her son a future free from the taint of war, she must destroy it. She somehow knows that this machine, that once masqueraded as her daughter is all that stands in her way of changing the future.

Sarah stops moving as she pulls out her gun. She squares her shoulder and puts herself in stance that will allow her to absorb the shock of the gun's recoil when she fires it. For a brief moment, Sarah Connor closes her eyes and she can see an end to this insanity for once and for all. A world where her son doesn't have to be the leader of the Resistance in the future. A world where neither of them have to tirelessly and thanklessly fight against a future that no one can imagine.

When she opens her eyes, the machine has finally come within range of her gun. She squeezes the trigger and at that moment as the gun fires, Sarah always wakes up from the dream. And she wonders if she will ever succeed in her battle to stop the rise of the machines as she lies in her bed sightlessly staring up at a white ceiling with the hand gun from under her pillow clenched in her fist.

**END**