Disclaimer: I don't own Terminator. 18/4/2019: Updated this chapter to make it flow better.

Chapter Three

Los Angeles: October 12th, 1991 (original timeline)

Sarah had spent months planning her attack in detail, and before that spent years contemplating it. The name of the company that would create Skynet was emblazoned in her mind as the architects of humanity's destruction. Kyle's voice echoed in the back of her mind constantly, repeating it. Cyberdyne Systems. Cyberdyne Systems. The creators of Skynet.

She had held off for several years, during which she lived with her son in various parts of South America learning various skills that would be useful for the leader of the resistance after J-Day and instructing John in them in turn. She hoped desperately to prevent the deaths of billions, but if she failed, he had to be ready. Not only because he was the future leader of the resistance, but because he was her son. She had to keep him safe, even at the cost of his innocence.

Finally, when John was almost nine, she took him back to her home city. It was the first time she had set foot in it since she left in '84, and the ghosts of those who died at the hands of the T-800 haunted her. Memories of Kyle had never felt sharper, but she hid her grief stubbornly. John didn't need to bear her pain on top of everything else.

Claiming to be an Army widow, she enrolled John in a local school under the alias John Gale, and gained a menial job as a cleaner in Cyberdyne Systems with the same false surname.

Her access was heavily restricted, but she was an excellent burglar, not to mention the blueprints were publicly available, and she spoke to a local demolitions expert that Enrique had put her in contact with to learn where the best place would be to set her bombs. She decided that it was only fitting to use pipe bombs to bring down the building, and its' research with it. She had long since learned how to make better bombs, but Kyle had been the one to teach her to make pipe bombs, and she decided to use them in his honour.

She ensured the building would be left empty over the Christmas holidays by repeatedly sabotaging the various alarms, driving out all of the workers and making the emergency services lax when it came to responding. She had left a motorbike hidden nearby for her get-away, and walked a complicated route back to her house, where she'd tucked in her son, and then again made her way back to Cyberdyne on foot. She had repeatedly doubled back and checked for any followers, finding none. She had never acted like anything other than a single mother struggling to raise her son, like hundreds of other women, done nothing to tip anybody off as to her destructive intentions. Everything was perfect.

She was in the middle of setting up her fifth bomb when she heard a police siren in the distance. It cut off quickly, but it was enough for Sarah to go on her guard (not that she hadn't been on-guard 24/7 since she was eighteen-years-old.) and hurry over to a nearby window, pulling on her night vision goggles.

Her heart, previously filled with excitement at the prospect of freedom from the terrifying spectre of Judgement Day, dropped to the bottom of her stomach. Four police trucks, and multiple SWAT trucks. No doubt all of them were filled with armed guards. And the convoy was certainly coming towards Cyberdyne.

She'd been discovered somehow, and she had no idea how. All she knew was that she had a minute, if that, to decide what to do. She could try and finish the job, but she already knew it was a lost cause. At best, she would only damage the building, but not enough to destroy the place completely. The research would definitely be saved, and that was the whole point of her attempt to destroy Cyberdyne in the first place. If she stayed, she would doubtlessly be captured by the cops, imprisoned and her son put in foster care.

There would be genuine records of John then. John Connor, not John Gale. Their fake identities wouldn't stand up to a proper police check, and there were records of her, pictures, from back in '84. They'd put the pieces together quickly.

And if she was in prison, who would protect her son? Who would train him to be Leader of the Resistance and ensure that he was safely hidden away in a fallout shelter when the bombs fell? He was so young, they might be able to convince him that she was crazy, and he'd forget all of her training and warnings. His name and address would be a matter of computer records, allowing Skynet to send another Terminator back in time. Only it would be to kill John this time, rather than her. Only Sarah would be able to protect him if such a scenario happened. Only she knew the truth of what was to come, and accepted it. Everyone she and Kyle had tried to warn had dismissed them both as insane. John would be helpless.

The choice, then, was clear. John's safety came before anything else. He was her son, and the future of the human race depended on him. She had to abort the mission.

Sarah grabbed some rope out of her rucksack, secured one end to a nearby pipe and the other to her belt, then began rappelling out of the window and down the wall as quick as she could. She cut herself free the minute her feet touched the ground, and she made a run for it through the coverless-parking lot, climbing over the wall and darting around a corner into an alleyway just in time to avoid being caught in a police car's headlights.

They would have to run again. They had spent eighteen months in LA, partially due to Sarah infiltrating and planning the destruction of Cyberdyne, and partly because of her son's delight at interacting with other, normal, kids his age. Sarah had justified it to herself as letting him learn how to interact with people so that he would be better able to command them in the future, but truthfully she simply revelled in the genuine pleasure he showed at living 'normally'.

Sarah wasn't a good mother, she knew that. But she loved her son, and she hated herself for taking his smile away in the name of keeping him safe. Again.

Los Angeles: May 12th, 1984 (altered timeline)

They'd been preparing for this day for the best part of a decade, and Sarah still didn't feel ready. Oh, the T-800 wasn't a major concern. She and Pops had been fighting the far-superior T-1000 for years, after all, and Sarah sparred with her T-800 Guardian regularly. Her aim with any sort of gun, from every angle and range, whether the target was moving or not, was faultless even when she had a dislocated arm (a fact confirmed by experience). No, dealing with the Terminator wasn't what made her breath get caught in her throat.

The thought of everything that came after, however, did. Meeting (and loving and losing) Sergeant Kyle Reese, pregnancy, having and raising John to be mankind's last hope. All of that terrified her deeply, and she channelled her fear into anger to keep her own sanity intact. It wasn't fair to Reese that she had set herself to hating him before they met, but Sarah was determined. If she could make him dislike her, and leave her, then maybe he'd live. She had figured out a long time ago that anybody who loved her, or tried to protect her, ended up dead. Sarah, however, always survived. She wasn't sure which was harder.

She shook away her thoughts to focus on the events at hand. In the distance, she could see a younger twin of her protector, naked, demanding clothes from a group of young idiots who clearly thought they were tough. Sarah guessed that it'd take her the best part of five minutes to down all three of them without a weapon.

Just before Pops stepped forward and called out to his doppelganger, Sarah split away and dashed for her pre-chosen vantage point. She raced up the steps, taking them three at a time and skidding onto the balcony.

She went down on one knee as she set up her sniper's rifle, inhaling and exhaling deeply as she aimed it. She kept a finger resting on the trigger as she tracked the fighting Terminators through her scope, unable to take the shot while Pops blocked her target from view. Finally, the newer T-800 flung her protector away, giving her a clear view of its' chest as it began stalking forward towards him. She took the shot, and her aim struck true, smirking in satisfaction as the cyborg collapsed in a heap.

Pops rose to his feet, turning towards her and giving her a thumbs up. She was just beginning to put her rifle back in its' case when the blue lightning appeared.

Jumping to her feet, she abandoned the sniper rifle and swung her automatic around from her back to hold it at the ready as she rushed back down the metal staircase. At the bottom, she found Pops waiting with his own shotgun.

"This event is unexpected," he informed her, as if she wasn't perfectly aware of that fact already. "I will investigate."

"I'm coming with you," she insisted, darting off before he could protest. The electricity had dispersed by the time they arrived at the epicentre of the miniature storm, leaving behind the unconscious form of a human man.

He was too old to be Reese, Sarah was sure about that at least. Pops' files on her son's father were limited, but she knew that he was born 2004, and travelled back in 2029, making him twenty-four/twenty-five at the time. This man seemed twice that. Even though they probably aged quicker in the stressful conditions of the future, she was sure it wasn't him.

The man was tall enough, but so thin doctors would have coronaries and start bringing up buzzwords like osteoporosis. She could easily count his ribs. The scars were much worse to see, though. They were thick and ugly and they littered his body. Burn scars, knife scars, and more. The entirety of the left side of his face was covered in a particularly bad one. He was bleeding from dozens of shallow cuts that were scattered over his body, like he'd jumped through glass or something, and it looked like he had pulled a cannula out of his elbow. A partially-healed wound that she guessed came from one of the plasma guns Pops had told her about, was on his back, almost exactly in the centre of his shoulder-blades.

Something about him seemed almost familiar. She narrowed her eyes and tilted her head in thought. Shock jolted through her as she realized that he reminded her of her father. He looked similar to her father, and had obviously come from the future. Did that mean...? Was it possible...?

"Who is he?" she whispered, hardly daring to contemplate her guess.

"It is John Connor, leader of the resistance and your son," Pops announced plainly.

Despite her suspicions, Sarah let out a gasp of surprise, feeling her breath leave her in a sharp gust. "What the fuck?" she snapped, scrambling to her son's side instantly, feeling panic begin to well in her throat as she reached to check his vitals. "John!"

He stirred slightly as she touched him, squinting up at her with uncomprehending eyes. If she'd had any doubt about his identity before, it was erased by his bemused, only half-audible, "Mom?"

"It's okay," she cooed to him in a gentle tone she hadn't realized she was capable of. She stroked the scarred side of his face, forcing a smile. "I'm here, you're safe," she promised. "I'll protect you, I swear John. Just rest, you're safe." The words tumbled out without her even realizing what she was saying as she tried to soothe him.

His eyes, the same colour as the ones she'd inherited from her father, were still confused, but he gave a slight nod. "You always do," he slurred before fading back into unconscious. For one horrific second, she thought that he'd died, but his chest continued to move up and down steadily.

"We need to get him to the truck," she snapped at Pops, who had been standing in silence behind her. "Now! Carry him."

To her relief, he made no protest as he picked her son up bridal style and started for the van. Once there, he laid John down carefully on the bench-seat and went to retrieve the destroyed Terminator. Sarah, meanwhile, covered John's lower half with a blanket for modesty before she grabbed the first-aid kit from the corner of the vehicle and set to work cleaning and fixing up her son with as tender a touch as she could manage.

Only one thing had ever seemed good to Sarah about the future that Pops had told her about, and that was John. She had no idea why she of all people had ended up as the new Mother Mary, but she had. And she'd felt a fierce love and protection for him since she'd learned of his existence, despite only being nine at the time. A mother's instinctual love, she guessed. Half the reason she was so desperate to stop Judgement Day and Skynet was so that her son would be safe, and not responsible for the entirety of mankind.

She didn't want the unborn version of her son to have the scars that littered the torso of this version of him.

"How is he?" Pops grunted ten minutes later, after retrieving his double's remains and starting the engine. Sarah swayed naturally with the movement of the truck, using one hand to hold John steady while the other cleaned and patched him.

"Still breathing," Sarah answered curtly, wiping away yet more blood from her son's chest. He was coated in it, and dirt. She was getting seriously concerned about his cuts getting infected. She briefly debated taking him to a hospital for proper treatment, but quickly decided against it. There would be too many questions, and John wasn't even born yet. At least Sarah had extensive combat triage training. She was just used to patching up herself and Pops, not another human being.

"That is good, as the machines cannot be defeated without him," Pops said after a moment. "However, I am uncertain how this turn of events will affect the timeline. John Connor was not supposed to come to 1984."

"Well, we already knew that the timeline had changed," Sarah pointed out bitterly. If it hadn't, her parents would have lived passed 1973, and Sarah would currently be oblivious to the impending destruction of her life and humanity as a whole, instead of having been dreaming of Judgement Day since Pops had told her about it when she was nine.

"Yes, however certain events must occur to ensure the ultimate destruction of Skynet and the machines, in the event that your plan fails. Such as your and Kyle Reese's mating."

"We're not having this discussion again!" Sarah snapped immediately. "The plan will work. There is no fate but what we make."

She held tightly to that mantra, the same one that her counterpart in the original timeline had been known to say often to keep her sanity through dreams of Judgement Day and dying baby boys and her old home being consumed in a fire-ball of death, her parents with it. She would stop Skynet. And she'd conceive her son as well, but like hell was she going to fall in love with Kyle Reese. She was putting her foot down on that one. He'd thank her for it eventually, when he realised that her keeping herself and John away from him would save his life. Anybody who loved her died, and from what Pops had told her, she'd passed her curse to her son too.

"That belief is the basis on which you have created your plan," Pops agreed before going quiet. They stayed silent for several more minutes as he drove and Sarah continued to patch John up.

As she dabbed at his neck with an anti-septic wipe, he began to stir again. This time, his gaze was thankfully lucid as he squinted up at her with a confused expression.

"Mom?" he mumbled, his voice hoarse. "Wh-how? Am I dreaming? Did I die?"

"No," she murmured, stroking his cheek softly and saying nothing as he leaned into her touch. "You time travelled. It's May 12th, 1984."

"But you're not supposed to know-"

"Things have changed, John," she interrupted. "I'm a different Sarah Connor to the one who raised you. I-"

"We are approaching the location of Kyle Reese," Pops reported from the driver's seat. "I recommend that Sarah come into the front seat and take over driving. It is unlikely that Kyle Reese will agree to come with me, due to his previous battles with Terminators."

John had tried to leap up once he heard the sound of the Terminator's voice, Sarah rushing to stop him. "Gimme a minute!" she snapped at her guardian, turning back to her son and forcing a smile. "Pops is safe, I swear. He was reprogrammed and he's raised me since I was a kid. Just stay here while we grab Reese."

Still wary, John gave a reluctant nod, and Sarah quickly swapped places with Pops. She pressed down on the accelerator, making the truck pick up speed. Seconds before they went crashing through the wall, she called out to her companions "Brace yourselves!"