Fandom: Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles
Fandom: Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles
Title: Home
Characters: Derek, Sayles, Timms, Sumner & Kyle (with just a dash of John Connor and Billy Wisher)—but mostly Derek and Kyle, I think.
Author: connell
Rating: Gen fic, rated T for language.
Word Count: 7,918
Disclaimer: Some things borrowed, nothing owned.
Author's Note: It's a one-shot, Derek's POV, set about a week after the boys jumped in Dungeons & Dragons—except for the parts that aren't. Spoilers are pretty much for the first season of T:SCC.
Beta thanks go out, as always, to overnighter and to crashcmb for tightening this up and making it—you know, make sense. For reals. All remaining mistakes are my own. Poor, poor betas, I have trouble enough with my tenses when I'm not dealing with time-travel. If they ever abandon me in a new fandom all by my lonesome, I'm well and truly scrod.
This is for dorabelle on her birthday.
And for brandywine421, who makes me awesome icons, when she's not indulging me (or because she is) in my pathetic obsessions.
Home:
That Sayles had been the first to fold surprised the hell out of Derek. He thought that the odds had favored Timms. But it was Sayles, when all was said and done, who succumbed the quickest.
They hadn't even been jumped through for a full week yet when they heard the sound of footsteps quickly ascending the stairs; the unfamiliar and jarring thunk, thunk, thunk of steel-toed boots rhythmically striking the hollow wooden risers.
The noise instantly jerked the rest of them to their feet—he and Timms rushed to stand on either side of the room's opening, their weapons drawn and pointed towards the door, their bodies still. The circumstances were new, but they moved with the ease of long-time practice, trigger fingers very nearly twitching with something close to an eager anticipation. After all, it had been nearly a week since any of them had fired a weapon, pretty much a personal record for each and every one of them since they'd been old enough to pick up a gun. They had all been itching to shoot at something, anything, even if it was a tin can—a tin can with a decidedly profound advantage.
Sumner was crouched beside the door, ready to launch himself at knee-level if the visitor proved itself to be metal. It was a surprisingly simple, yet effective, maneuver that the resistance fighters had perfected years before; using a machine's own massive upper-body weight against itself to topple it over and gain just a few seconds of precious time. It had helped that the machines, or at least the models that had been in circulation at the time that they had jumped through, still scanned the whole room upon entry at eye-level initially, before broadening the scope of their visual range.
And damn it all to hell if Sayles didn't sound exactly like one of them, anyway, his tread quick and heavy and, at least to Derek's unaccustomed ears, sounding with a much-too-perfectly-rhythmic cadence.
So much so, in fact, that Derek nearly popped him, the familiar form not registering, when Sayles suddenly burst into the main room of the shabby little apartment they had established as a safe house on Connor's tenuous orders.
Sayles had a big-assed, goofy grin on his face, the likes of which Derek had never seen before, and which Sayles was not even attempting to contain. Not even after he was knocked backwards on his ass by a quick-to-tackle Sumner, and he was left staring up into the double barrels of Derek's and Timms' shotguns from a flattened position, splayed out in the hallway—the muzzle of Derek's gun just inches from Sayle's right temple—just inches from where he could potentially take out the maybe-machine's neuro-processor.
Sayles scrambled up quickly enough, his smirk still improbably in place despite the fact that he had almost just gotten himself good and dead. Seeing that, Derek kind of wanted to deck the idiot again—hell, he wanted to deck him but hard—knock him right onto his back with a nose that sprayed a crimson arc and that shit-eating grin sent all the way back to—well, all the way back to—aw shit!
And just like that, Derek knew. Not that it mattered, since it took Sayles less than fifteen seconds after regaining his feet to spill. Actually, it was probably closer to ten—ten seconds to spew it out all in a rush, his voice a full octave higher than any register Derek had ever heard emitted from the likes of him before. Truth be told, it was the kind of high, giddy voice that Derek hadn't heard from anyone—male or female—since they had started living in the tunnels.
"Guys, I saw them…I saw them…hell, guys, I saw me."
Jesus fuck! Was all Derek's mind could process in the moment. Well that and how absolutely absurd it was to see a grown soldier with an irrepressible case of the giggles.
It wasn't that Derek had never seen strong emotion. Derek had seen grown men cry plenty of times before. More times than he'd care to recount, actually.
Tough fucks, lying prone on the floor, huddled in the most darkened corners of the bunkers, their bodies reduced to convulsive, wracking gasps, pulling close in on themselves, foreheads resting on the whitened knuckles of clenched fists, while their tears carved a muddied, but telling path down their otherwise grime-encrusted cheeks.
Tougher fucks, reduced to loud, heart-rendering wails, kneeling in the harsh spotlight of the bare electric bulbs hanging from the low and narrow ceilings, faces uplifted, cursing God, well beyond caring who was there to bear witness to their tortured agony.
Hell, Derek had been both types of those fucks. They all had.
But, Jesus fuck, though—Derek wasn't able to remember the last time he'd seen anyone giggle, much less a grown man, especially not one whom he'd known for as long as he'd known Sayles.
Sayles had been a lot of things, a lot of things that Derek would have copped to easily enough—some good, some bad, same as the rest of them.
He could be a jackass at times; an idiot, careless to a fault, even; hell, he could even be a whiny little bitch, full of doubt—doubt about himself, about others and about their mission. But giddy as a schoolgirl? Derek's mind couldn't quite process that.
Despite Sayles' periodic bellyaching, in the end, Derek knew, he was much more like the rest of the squad than he was different. He had his strengths and he had his weaknesses, but in the end, the list of his strengths filled out the longer column, otherwise Derek wouldn't have loved the stupid fuck like he did. Sayles was one of them.
What Sayles was not, however, was the kind of guy who stood before the rest of his squad in his ill-fitting civvies, nose slightly sunburned and eyes wide, laughing like a little kid, like Kyle before—Derek cut the thought off ruthlessly.
Sayles—the Sayles he knew, at least—was as tough as titanium and quicker than a tunnel rat; hell, he was even as quiet as a cat when he wasn't trying to actively get himself shot. And when he had—which he had, they all had—he'd had the fortitude to reign it in and bear down silently, getting through the pain with tightly gritted teeth and a couple of swallows of whatever the hell they'd managed to ferment the crap out of and transform into a barely ingestible rotgut, even while inexpert fingers clumsily prodded and groped inside his open wound in an attempt to dig a bullet out of his side, or out of his shoulder, or out of his buttocks or—or really, out of any number of other places where he was pretty damned lucky it had not yet been lethal.
"Jesus, fuck!"
Derek finally managed to say it aloud, as he laid the gun carefully against a wall, still within arms' reach, and pressed the heels of his hands to his temple, scratching his fingernails deep into his scalp, all the while doing his damnedest to not physically launch himself at the stupid son of a bitch.
"Are you fucking kidding me?"
"Wait, wait—what's going on?" Timms asked, a little slow, as always, to board the transport.
"We talked about this," Derek spat out. "We fucking talked about this, Sayles, and we agreed that we weren't gonna do it. None of us were gonna do it. You promised, damnit—you fucking promised!"
The urgency in Derek's voice finally seemed to get through to him, and Sayles turned toward him, the smile leaving his face for the first time.
"I wasn't followed. I swear, Reese. Nothing followed me."
He dropped his head for a moment, then looked up, eyes almost glittering.
"We've been here for a week now—a week—and you tell me if you've even heard a dog bark more than once or twice," Sayles was quick to explain, in that clipped, staccato way he had of speaking, "—okay, maybe three times—four tops, and there's no way I'm including that beagle on the first floor, because he's fucking nuts, man, no lie. But this, this here—it isn't anything like where we came from, Reese. You know that. This is before. There's no metal here. There's no—"
"You don't know that, Sayles, none of us do," Derek cut him off. "Just because we haven't seen any machines yet doesn't mean that they're not out there—or that they're not coming. There're a lot more people here, in case you haven't noticed—it ain't exactly gonna be a piece of cake clocking a soup can in these crowds."
Sayles nodded, reflexively agreeing, but he kept talking all the same, his voice rising, "But even if they are here, Derek, even if there is metal here, just how're they gonna make us?" Sayles asked. "You know as well as I do that most of the records were wiped out in the war."
"I don't know, Sayles," Derek said, enunciating his words slowly and precisely.
He realized that he was talking to Sayles like he might speak to a slightly brain-damaged puppy, but at the moment, he probably would have given the IQ advantage to the pooch.
"That's kind of the whole point, though, isn't it? We don't know which records were destroyed and which are still out there. Skynet's plugged into everything. It has the potential of knowing everything. If it has our names—if it knows who we are—and we don't know that it doesn't—well, all of us were alive before the bombs hit. We have birth certificates, Social Security numbers, whatever—we're in the system. Who's to say that Skynet can't look up our address, that it can't find our families? And if it does that, who's to say it won't send metal to sit and wait and see which one of us is just stupid enough to head for home? Or worse?"
Sayles colored and dropped his head again. At least he had the good sense to attempt to look a little cowed. Not that he was succeeding, much. Or really at all.
It was Sumner, to his surprise, who spoke up next, ignoring Derek entirely. Sumner who, of the others, Derek thought would most likely to side with him—to join him in his dismay at the fact that Sayles had been so selfish. So selfish and so careless.
"So, how was it?" he asked, his tone a mixture of curiosity and awe.
"Oh, Jesus, Sumn—it was—it was like looking at a movie or something," Sayles' head bobbed right back up at the invitation to share what he'd seen, that unfamiliar, goofy grin creeping slowly back into place, even as his eyes darted over in Derek's general direction.
"It was like looking at a home video. But one in 3-D. Or—or a hologram, I guess—everything was just so bright and…and so clear and so sharp and—I dunno, so real, I guess. I mean, I could have talked to my mom and dad," he said, voice brimming with emotion. "I could have talked to myself. I could have fucking talked to me."
"Oh, please, God, please tell me that even you are not that fucking stupid," Derek said, eyes rolling and suddenly exhausted.
He brought the thumb and index finger of his right hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose at the inside corners of his eyes in an attempt to physically block the migraine that he felt coming on with all of the tenacity and ferocity and inevitability of a hunter killer—an HK that was locked and loaded and had him dead to sights.
"Please, tell me that you didn't talk to yourself—or to your parents."
"I didn't," Sayles insisted, "I didn't. I swear, Reese, I didn't. But, the thing is? I could have—I mean, I could have. How fucking awesome is that?"
The other men were looking at him, their eyes suspiciously bright. None of their squad had family, except Derek, and he hadn't even had that, some of the time. All of them had lost everything, more than once.
"My mom . . . my mom was beautiful," Sayles almost whispered, and Derek felt his stomach twist.
"There's a reason why we don't go home," Derek slowly gritted out. "There's a reason why we all agreed not to go home. Why we all agreed not to—well, not to do exactly this, Sayles. It's dangerous, it's not part of the mission, and it's damned distracting besides."
Sayles met his gaze full on for the first time, for a few moments, before he started speaking in his own defense.
"The mission—the mission? C'mon, Derek, you don't know anything more than I do about what our mission even is. I mean, what is it that we're doing here?" He lifted his empty gun hand and gestured around the small apartment. "What is it exactly that we're doing?"
Sayles then shrugged and turned his wrists outward, his other hand joining the first as he lifted his palms towards the ceiling in a gesture of futility.
"If you've got some better intel than what you're letting on—if Connor told you something that you're not sharing? Well, fuck you, then, Reese, fuck you all to hell. 'Cause I haven't got a clue. Not one good goddamned clue. None of us does."
Timms crossed his hands over his chest, glaring at Derek, and even Sumner was grumbling under his breath. Derek sighed, running a hand through his hair—already growing longer than he liked it—but Sayles just jutted his chin out, gesturing over Derek's shoulder to the poster on the wall behind him.
"Is that it? Is that all we're supposed to fucking do here?"
"Hang in There, Baby," the poster exhorted, seemingly to the tiny, striped kitten hanging from the tree branch on its face. Sumner had been the one to find it, that first day at the Century City Mall, said it would remind them all of home—and it had proved useful to hide the safe they had installed behind—and wired into the building's electrical supply.
That first day, the day after the jump, they'd all given themselves a mutual, limited, unspoken pardon to forget about the mission for just a little while. To forget about the mission—the mission and the metal and how the end of the world was rapidly approaching, for them and for everyone around them and—and to walk around in wild-eyed wonder at the forgotten sights of an as-yet-unbroken world.
They'd all surrendered to temptation on that first day—Derek too—gorging themselves at the mall's food court, stuffing their long-deprived bodies with—well, with the same old crap that they and millions of other kids had probably been eating the weekend before the machines declared war; stuffing themselves with the once-familiar foods that their systems could no longer recognize, much less digest.
The last time Derek had tasted pizza he'd been fifteen, and the first taste of it on his tongue—had rocketed him back to that day with long-dead friends. The cascade of sensations, of sense memory, had sent them all into a frenzy of consumption, as they had shoveled in almost-forgotten foods, ignoring their bodies' protestations.
If anything should have brought home the message that they should be staying on task, not running around like the goddamned kids they'd been last time they'd been in 2007, Derek thought that the painful and messy aftermath of their food court binge probably ought to have done the trick.
Well, that and the recognition that they were sitting at the very spot where thousands would later be led to their deaths at the hands of the machines and their disposal units, which would begin to run night and day in just under a decade's time.
"I'm sorry," Sayles apologized after a moment, into the silence that had followed his outburst, "It's just—I dunno, Derek—I guess I messed up, but it's not like we've been getting anywhere with the list of potentials and I just—I didn't see much harm in any of it—if I took one lousy afternoon and spent it in Malibu."
"Malibu?" Sumner broke in, incredulously, "Jesus."
"Yeah—wait, why?" Sayles asked, eyebrows raised in confusion.
"Aw, nothing, man, it's just—I guess it's funny I didn't know till right now that me and you—we was practically neighbors," Sumner said, barely suppressing his grin.
"No shit?" Sayles asked.
Sumner lasted longer than Derek had thought he would, nodding solemnly before snorting to himself and giving it up as a bad job, sliding down the wall to take a seat.
"No shit," Sumner repeated softly, as he shook his head, beginning to laugh, "Naw, man. Sayles, take a damn look at me. I look like I lived in Malibu? We ain't neighbors. My folks were inland—are inland, I guess. Wow," he shook his head again, incredulously, "That'll never stop being fucked up."
"How 'bout you, Reese?" Timms asked, dropping his gun to join Sumner against the wall. After a moment, Sayles joined them, dropping cross-legged to the floor, as though they were back at goddamned summer camp. "Where were you and Kyle living before all the shit reigned down? Where are you guys right now?"
Derek found himself at a loss, completely unprepared for Timms' question, or the direction in which the conversation had turned. He joined them on the floor, using the time to decide how to respond, but he still ended up blinking a couple of times, hard, before turning slowly to meet each of their curious looks in turn. He shrugged and hunched over, grabbing his right wrist loosely with his left hand, hooking his knees between the inside of his elbows.
"Torrance," he finally allowed. "I—we're—from Torrance."
"I'm—hell, I'm not even from California," Timms said after him, filling up the silence even though no one had asked. "Ohio—Canton, Ohio. I was here with my parents on vacation, visiting my cousins—doing the Disneyland thing—"
Well, shit, was all Derek could think as Timms voice trailed off, so much for the happiest fucking place on Earth.
For the first time ever, it struck Derek how little he knew about any of the guys he fought alongside of, Sayles included. Though they had been in the same small four-man platoon in 2027, Derek didn't know one goddamned thing about Sayles' life pre-Judgment Day. Not one good goddamned thing. Nor could he recall anyone ever talking about what they had been—or who they had been—before the bombs hit. It was all too—personal, or too depressing, or—or too—too something.
It wasn't that Derek wouldn't die for any one of his unit, Sayles included, but he hadn't exactly wanted to know that much about him, either. Nor had he wanted to know much about Wisher, much to his detriment, as he would now readily concede—but wasn't Wisher the exception that proved the rule?
Kyle had been another story, entirely. At least until Derek had lost him, and then lost him again.
Kyle was his baby brother. He'd known everything there was to know about him. He was his blood, his friend, his burden and his responsibility. Not that he had managed to do a particularly bang-up job on the last part. Not at all.
Poking at the memory of the day he'd lost Kyle—the first time—was like worrying at a sore tooth, and damn Sayles for dredging up their past—their future—whatever the hell it was now.
He had somehow managed to lose Kyle in the tunnels that spread out in an intricate web beneath the lost city, linking the bombed out shells of former government buildings to each other. He had somehow managed to lose Kyle in the tunnels he knew in the dark, in the light, like the back of his hand.
He had somehow managed to lose a twelve-year-old little kid in the labyrinth that they had called home for four long years—the familiar tunnels in which they had roamed every single day, every single damned day and night since the world had ended.
Before they made the jump, it had been twelve years since he had lost Kyle to the machines and in those twelve years, there hadn't been one damned microsecond in which Derek had been able to forgive himself. Derek hadn't been able to forgive himself for Kyle's capture, even though it had been Kyle who had run up ahead, in absolute defiance of his brother's orders to stay close by, and he hadn't forgiven himself for anything that had happened since.
Kyle, who had still somehow managed to maintain a kid's exuberance and sense of indestructibility, despite the carnage and death he had seen in the four years since Skynet had made the instantaneous decision to annihilate the entire human race.
In the time after, Derek had often thought about that day, about whether it had been a combination of those lingering vestiges of childhood invincibility butting up against an emerging desire to prove himself grownup enough—man enough—to be more active in the cause and that had driven Kyle to be more independent—and to be less likely to listen to or heed his brother's words of caution.
He'd insisted—ever since he was old enough to realize what Derek was doing—that he could somehow help, that he could be useful to the men and women behind the cause who fought alongside his brother, who refused to give in entirely. Derek had tried to walk a fine line with him, but that fierce, stubborn independence had only escalated as Kyle grew, especially in those last few months leading up to his capture.
He should have known, should have realized, that Kyle needed a firmer hand, a tighter reign. After all, the first time a seventeen-year-old Derek had returned from sentry duty to find his ten-year-old brother surrounded by mothballs, corn syrup and ammonia, helping to manufacture plastique to build bombs, hadn't he gone ballistic all up and down his kid brother's scrawny little ass? If he had done a lousy job wiping down the threads, just once, or if he been a little reckless with screwing on the end caps—Kyle could have wiped himself out—himself and everyone else within a twelve-foot radius.
But Kyle hadn't looked nervous at all, hunched over the table beside Mr. Bettis, one corner of his tongue poking out of his mouth as he looked on with intense concentration.
"No, unh uh. Not him." Derek had said, after he'd fully released his diatribe and had found himself, suddenly exhausted, shaking his head vehemently and pulling his brother backwards, holding him close, with his left forearm slung tightly across Kyle's chest and an accusatory, and slightly trembling, right forefinger pointed at the man who had been teaching Kyle to make the bombs, the man who had—seemingly a thousand years before—been Derek's ninth grade Civics teacher.
It had been Bettis, who had taught Derek about the tunnels under the heart of the city—the tunnels some twenty miles away from where they'd watched the world end; the tunnels where Derek had immediately thought of seeking shelter when the sky had turned black and the city below it had largely disappeared. It had been Bettis, whom they'd had the good fortune to join up with in those first few panicked weeks, when nobody had even known that it was the machines who had started the war. Bettis who, despite his owlish appearance and timid demeanor in the classroom, had turned out to be a closeted survivalist, surprisingly resourceful—and more than just a tad bit scary.
"Derek, we need everyone we've got," Bettis had wearily explained. Derek could feel Kyle almost shaking in his arms with his need to join in. But to his surprise his brother had kept silent, letting the older man make his case. "In case you haven't noticed, we're losing; we're losing more and more people every day to the junkyard and—well, Kyle's not a little kid, not anymore. You can't save him from all of this—you can't save him from any of it. The machines are winning and we need him. It's time, Derek—he's ready."
Derek had unconsciously pulled Kyle tighter to himself, even as he had inwardly acknowledged the futility of arguing against the undeniable truth behind Mr. Bettis' words, but Kyle couldn't hold it in any longer.
"I did twelve of 'em all by myself," Kyle had proudly said, craning his neck up and gesturing to the floor by Bettis' feet with his chin, since Derek had had his arms effectively pinned to his side. There had been a long row of hollowed-out lead pipe bombs lined up on the floor where Kyle's chin was pointing, "Roger's gonna show me how to do the fuses, next."
Derek had always known that one day he would have to steel himself for this inevitable shift in their relationship—the day when he could no longer protect Kyle from even the known and avoidable hazards that surrounded their daily lives. Derek had always known that someday he would have to willingly let his little brother tangle with an overabundance of dangerous things—people, weaponry, metal and missions—any combination of which, or even alone, could easily get him killed.
As much as he had hoped otherwise, Derek had to concede that there wasn't a chance in hell that any of this was going to somehow miraculously end before he would be required let his brother go—to allow Kyle to stand up and fight, even if it meant eventually going topside and risking a nearly-certain death along with the rest of them.
And, in order to give him the best shot at survival possible, Derek had also realized that when the time came, he would have to let Kyle learn the skills that he would need to become an effective soldier. So Derek had taken a deep breath, and he had let it out through his nose in a slow, inaudible stream; he had pulled Kyle even closer to him for just a moment, resting his chin lightly on top of his brother's head—and then he had resigned himself, releasing his little brother and pushing him gently towards Mr. Bettis.
Hell, Derek had reasoned with himself, if it was inevitable anyway, Kyle might as well learn from the best.
If he had known where it would lead, known how it would end, though, he might have stayed there forever, holding on. Instead, he had put a hand on Kyle's shoulder, and he had tried to look at him, to speak to him, as though he were a new member of his squad.
"Yeah, okay, Kyle. But you need to listen to Mr. Bettis—you need to listen to him real good and do it exactly how he shows you—okay? This isn't a fucking game, you know?"
Kyle had turned to Derek and nodded solemnly, his too-thin face comprised almost entirely of serious big green eyes.
"I just wanna help you out, Derek. If I can make the bombs and you can toss 'em—well between us Reese boys, we'll send those metal motherfuckers right on back to the scrap heap where they belong."
Derek had grinned despite himself even as he had given Kyle a light cuff to the head as a halfhearted rebuke for his language.
"I've only got a couple hours to eat and grab some shuteye, before I gotta head back up to the surface—make sure you got something I can use by the time I do, all right?"
"Yeah, will do, Derek," Kyle had agreed somberly enough, though Derek had been able to tell by his barely-suppressed twitchiness that he was eager to get back to the lesson.
Watching Kyle as he picked up one of the small pipes and pushed the ignition wire Bettis handed him gently into claylike putty of the plastique had left Derek with an uncomfortable and unfamiliar feeling—one of chest-swelling pride somehow coexisting right alongside of a heart-wrenching sorrow—a feeling that would become more and more familiar, though no less unsettling, as the coming weeks and months unfolded.
By the time the small hunting party had been making their way through the tunnels almost two years later, on the date of Kyle's capture, Derek's twelve-year-old brother was not only an expert bomb-maker, but a decent shot with both a pistol and a shotgun. He had developed a killer arm, besides—Kyle had already learned the precision and perfection that he needed to have had a major part in disabling more than a few of the early HK models, the ones that were little more than automated tanks, loudly and lugubriously rolling across the topside, signaling their approach from a quarter of a mile away.
But what none of them had realized in those early years, of course, was just how quickly the machines would adapt and improve. They hadn't realized that those first clumsy HKs would be replaced soon enough by silent and deadly aircraft, which could appear seemingly out of nowhere, spotlighting and then blasting a tracking party clear to kingdom come before any of its members were even aware that they were in the HK's sights.
When Kyle had spotted the rat and had run off several feet ahead in an attempt to be the one to make the kill, none of the rest of them had shouted for him to hold back, not even Derek, who had told him to stay close before allowing him to join them on the hunt at all. Kyle had darted ahead and the rest of them had walked behind, and none of them had been prepared in the least for the distinctive rubber hand of a 600-series that had suddenly reached out from the darkness of one of the tunnel's many alcoves and had grabbed the boy from behind.
Derek's first instinct had been to lunge towards Kyle, but he had been yanked back by Bettis, who had not only anticipated his move, but had shown surprising quickness and strength in shoving Derek roughly back towards the tunnel from which they had all just emerged, propelling him a good distance down the pathway and knocking him off of his feet in the process.
Derek had quickly scrambled back to an upright position with the full intent of charging back towards the 600—towards Kyle—but by then he could hear the loud peppering of gunshots echoing off the narrowed walls and he had instinctively thrown himself against the side of the tunnel, his body twisting, the heels of his hands pressed to the top of his head, his forearms offering a fragile protection against any stray bullet which might blindly find him after ricocheting against the stone walls of the passage beyond.
As Derek had waited for a momentary pause in the exchange of gunfire in order to risk a glance around the corner and an opportunity to join the rest of his group, he had seen Bettis fall hard across the tunnel's exit. There had been a gaping hole where the left side of his head had used to be and it had been immediately evident that his remaining eye would never close again; not that Derek had a chance to fully process any of it before the remaining three men had come sprinting around the corner, right at him.
Two of them had grabbed onto Derek and propelled him backwards as he put up a viscous fight, but they had gotten him turned around quickly enough to beat a hasty retreat, taking practiced turns at every juncture in an attempt to shake the trail of any infiltrator that may have taken up the chase.
They had finally stopped, huddled together in what had formerly been an electrical closet, all of them panting heavily, though on alert with strained ears. Derek had been pacing wildly in the three steps that the confined space allowed.
"We've gotta go back. I've gotta go back. I can't just leave Kyle there," he had finally whispered furiously, making towards the door.
"Unh uh, no way, Reese," one of the others, a kid just a few years older than Derek had been at the time had said, moving in front of the doorway to bar Derek's exit. "It's too late—it's too late, Derek. They've got him. The metal's got him—all you're going to do is get yourself killed—and we can't afford to lose another . . . we can't afford to lose you."
"So—what? We just leave him to the machines? We just let him be killed?" Derek had asked, his voice rising in frustration.
"Jack's right," Phillips, another, had piped up. He had been older—in his thirties, a quiet sort, not prone to spouting off, and when he talked, people had found that he usually had something of import to say, "Kyle's either already dead, or they're taking him to one of the work camps. Rushing back out there to take on the machines now isn't going to do him, us—or you—any good."
"Since when do they hide and lie in wait?" Derek had asked bitterly, running both hands through his hair, before driving the heel of his right hand into the stone wall in frustration, sending a wave of pain coursing up his arm and settling deep into his shoulder. "Since when do they do stealth, for fuck's sake?"
"Since now," Phillips had answered, in a decidedly resigned tone, "From now on, we've just gotta assume that they do stealth—and not only that, but we gotta assume that they're gonna keep on getting better at this—at all of this—at what it takes to be efficient in killing us all off. Sure, they've been easy to spot so far, what with the rubber skin and the noises they make—but did any of you all notice that the three of them out there were silent? You got that, right?"
Derek hadn't wanted to think about it, hadn't wanted to think about anything but Kyle—his brother—now at the mercy of the machines—but the strained tones from one of their most sensible soldiers finally broke through his panic.
"I didn't hear a fucking thing," Phillips continued, "Not from any of them. Not one whir or a click—I think that they're evolving, boys. They're evolving right quick—and I bet you Skynet's just years away from making a model that can walk in, blend in and cause casualties like nobody's business."
"Fu-uck."
Someone—Derek could never remember who—had put words to what the rest of them were thinking. They had stood in tense silence after that, listening to one another breathe in the dark.
"He'll be okay," Jack had finally offered, putting out a hand and resting it on Derek's shoulder. Derek had wanted to scream, but there was no way, not with metal so close by.
"Kyle's a tough kid, he'll be okay," Jack continued, even as Derek had knocked his hand off and turned away—forced to glower at the room's darkened corner, in the absence of anywhere to go.
"The one—that one infiltrator that came out of the hole and grabbed him?" Jack's voice remained quiet, reassuring, as thought Derek had never moved, "Derek, he just held onto him, while he and the rest shot around him. If they had wanted to kill him, they could have killed him right then. He could have snapped Kyle's neck or they could have shot him. They didn't—for whatever reason. They'll probably take him to a work camp, but I—I don't think he's dead—honestly, Derek, I don't think he's dead."
"So they'll take him to a work camp?" Derek had spat out, still refusing to look at any of the other men, "Well that's just fucking awesome, a scrawny little kid like Kyle? He'll be first in line to the slaughter house."
"Maybe not," Phillips had said with a sympathetic shrug, "Like Jack said, they could have dropped him on the spot and they didn't. Why not? Why go through the effort of keeping him alive if they're not gonna use him? He's a scrappy kid, Derek. He's a strong kid—and because of his age, they probably don't see much of a threat in him either. We've all been hearing rumors that they're using kids around his age to haul bodies from the disposal units—who's to say the rumors ain't got some truth to 'em?"
"He'll be okay, Reese," Jack had repeated, more forcefully, "It's been drilled it into him since day one that he's to do what they say and go where they say and do it all when they say to do it. He's not gonna fight 'em. He knows that our lives ain't worth the aggravation. He'll remember what you taught him and he'll be okay."
"Yeah, well for how long?" Derek had asked, horrified to hear an unfamiliar hitch in his own voice.
He had swallowed hard around the sizable lump that had risen in his throat, and scrubbed a grimy forefinger angrily across his face, wiping a tear from his eye, blinking hard and mentally commanding it to stop—mentally commanding his eyes to stop welling up and overflowing.
The silence that had followed had confirmed to Derek that no one had had an answer for that one.
It had been six years later when John Connor had led the Century work camp uprising that had busted out a whole bunch of prisoners, Kyle included—and it had now been another six since the Reese boys had been reunited to fight alongside each other, peers at this point, any real difference that their seven-year age gap had made eaten up in time that Kyle had been away.
After Kyle's return, Derek had found himself at times in the peculiar position of seeing others—others like Sayles, actually—turn to his kid brother in moments of panic and confusion, wondering what superior intel he might have, just by virtue of having been alongside Connor on the night that Connor had engineered the big escape—by virtue of being a part of the legend that surrounded that night.
Truth be told, though, despite Connor's undisputed ability to lead—to organize, and to strike back at Skynet effectively in a way that no one had managed to do in all the preceding years before—Derek had no strong affection for the man.
He admired him, sure, and he was admittedly grateful to him, not only for giving him his little brother back, but for leading the surge that had led the resistance to think that they might stand a chance—that the human race might not actually be on the brink of extinction, after all—but that didn't mean he had to like him.
Of course, the way Kyle had gone around idolizing Connor after their escape had not exactly helped to endear Connor to Derek. Once upon a time, before he'd failed him, Kyle had looked at Derek that way. Well, that and the way Kyle had taken to carrying around the picture of Connor's mother as his good luck charm.
What kind of sick fuck gives an adolescent kid a spank picture of his own mother, anyway, for Christ's sake?
Though, if Derek was completely honest with himself, he might have to admit that part of his resentment towards Connor had stemmed from something else entirely, from the fact that he had somehow—and unforgivably—let himself give up hope that Kyle had lived through that day when Derek had lost him to the machines.
When word had come back about Connor's great escape and the names of a few of the others who had been involved had leaked out, a Reese among them, Derek had felt like he had been sucker-punched in the gut. He had known instantly and without doubt that the Reese of the fantastically embellished stories had to be Kyle.
A few weeks later, when he had finally reunited with his brother, it had been—well it had been pretty fucking surreal—and so much more than he could ever have hoped. So much so, in fact, that Derek had made a deal with the God in whom he had stopped believing years before—he had made a deal right then and there that he was in for the long haul—despite all the shit that had happened to his parents, to Bettis, to—well to just about every other thing and every other person that he had ever known and loved—for the simple reason that it had been a miracle that Kyle had come out of Century alive. It had been a fucking miracle.
Years later, it had been Derek who had suggested that they name their small band of brothers—Sayles, Wisher, Kyle and himself—The Four Horsemen. After all, with almost twenty-five collective t-skulls pinned to their sleeves, who was to say that the boys weren't going to signal the beginning of Armageddon—who was to say that the boys weren't going to be part and parcel of the final battle that would bring Skynet crashing down.
Or at least, that had been what Derek had thought right up until the moment he had been the unwilling recipient of Wisher's confession—when he had learned that it had been Wisher, and men like him, who had given Skynet life to begin with; that it had been Wisher—in his previous incarnation as Andy Goode—who had created an entity that he hadn't been able to control; that it had been Andy Goode and the ten-to-fifteen like-minded people beside him who had not only created Skynet, but had gifted to it the power to destroy mankind.
That had been the only night, since Kyle had returned to him, that Derek had ever doubted in God again, the only time since the miracle of seeing his kid brother's eyes peering out of a near-adult stranger's face that he'd ever wondered why. The only night, that was, until he'd lost Kyle for the second time.
In fact, Derek was still unsure of where he stood in matters of loyalty to God—to God and to Connor—in a large part because, once again, he had no fucking clue where Kyle was, or if his brother was even alive. And this time, for better or for worse, he had some idea of what that might mean.
Connor had known, of course—of that Derek had been sure—but Connor was just enough of a rat bastard to keep the details to himself, saying only that Kyle had volunteered for a classified mission, one that was, at least according to Connor, of critical importance to the resistance fighters' ultimate success.
That had been right before Connor had offered Derek a mission of his own, to pick three men and to go back twenty years time, set up a safe house, gather whatever intel they could find on Skynet's creation and wait—Connor hadn't been explicit on what it was, exactly, that they would be waiting for—but he had seemed to think Derek and the others would know what to do when it revealed itself.
Derek had picked Sayles, of course, and Sumner, whom he had always admired for his tenacity, grit and level-headedness in the heat of battle. For the third—well, for the third, he had picked Timms, for the simple reason that there wasn't any way in hell that he was taking Wisher anywhere with him ever again.
Besides, if they were focusing on intel surrounding Skynet's creation, there was a very real possibility that Goode might be a person of interest, and even Derek couldn't quite wrap his mind around what would happen to the Billy Wisher of the present if the Andy Goode of the past had to be sacrificed in order to set the world back on its axis.
Derek had been eager to accept the mission. Besides the sheer awesomeness of what Connor had promised—and Derek was sure that he in no uncertain terms somehow knew what the machine could do and could do successfully—and the utter mind-blowing potential of actually traveling back in time—Derek had realized that he had been given a unique opportunity to change the past in an attempt to change the future. To change everything—to erase all of their mistakes—to erase all of his mistakes.
If they succeeded in their mission, somewhere out there—well, somewhere out there there was a five-year-old boy who would know never grow up to know anything of starvation, or of hunting down and eating rats for food; a five-year-old boy who would never know anything of making bombs, shooting guns or even what an infiltrator or an HK was; a five-year-old boy who would never know anything of the intense pain caused by bullets piercing skin and organs, or the searing heat of plasma burning flesh; a five-year-old boy who would never know anything of dead parents or renegade machines; a five-year-old boy who would grow up idealizing his big brother, wanting and expecting nothing more from him than a little bit of attention, a game of catch and for his big brother to teach him how connect bat to ball.
By the time Derek managed to snap himself back to the present, or the past, or the—the whenever it was that they were living in now—twenty years prior to when they had made the jump—twenty years prior to when Derek had somehow managed to lose his little brother for a second time, Sayles was in the middle of saying something. What it was, exactly, though, was near impossible for Derek to process, try as he might. Which, admittedly hadn't been much. It was Sayles, after all.
Something about a doctor, maybe, or a phone booth, or—or a rose? Or all three, quite possibly, although Derek couldn't quite connect the dots, or figure out how they'd all fit in this particular scenario in which Sayles had apparently actually entertained thoughts that he was going to get scooped up, flown away and ripped apart by the talons of a—well, as he called it—a time-eater? Which all made perfect sense—at least according to Sayles—as the inevitable consequence of the resulting paradox which undoubtedly occurred at the very moment when he had been there to witness his own former self, obliviously building and knocking down sand castles on a pleasant afternoon at the beach by the sea.
Jesus fuck, was all Derek could think, shaking his head, as he gave up entirely on trying to follow whatever it was that Sayles was saying.
Malibu Sayles really could be an idiot.
Besides, Derek had more important things to worry about, such as whether it would be better to catch Torrance Transit bus from Union Station or the Civic Center, the next time he went out alone.
—The End—
Additional Author's Note: I know that age-wise, this doesn't entirely add up, since Timms is older than Derek (at least going by the actors' ages) and it's more likely Sayles than Timms who was four and in Ohio in 2007. But then again, Sayles has blue eyes and most probably wouldn't have been described as a brown-eyed, black-haired 4-year old. And it can't be Sumner, since he's older even than Timms (again, going by the actors' ages). I--you know, screw it, for purposes of this story, it's Timms. If only because I wanted to write Sayles. I have a soft spot for the boy, despite his major fuck-up, if only because he still kind of seemed stuck in Dungeons & Dragons on the fact that Skynet wasn't playing fair, damnit!
And in response to dracaspina and to clarify any confusion in reference to the Dr. Who reference. I'm dragging that out of Sayles' past. I think given his age (around eight or nine when the bombs hit, if we go by the age of the actor playing him), I could see him watching repeats on BBC-America. Afterall, he is Malibu Sayles.