Title: Patchwork Girl

Author: Elessar-4-TnT

Disclaimer: I don't own Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Summary: I'm attempting to play some interesting circles around the Cameron/Allison connection in ways that fanfic hasn't already beaten to death. Whatever the show has in store for what's going on with Cameron, I think the fans have come up with so many ideas that no matter what, we're probably going to be disappointed with whatever they land on. The last few episodes have put me in a serious writer's quandry with deciding how closely to follow the series and how far AU to go. I'm just going to try and do my own thing, follow the series where I think it's got literary gold to it and depart it when it doesn't make much sense. That being said, obviously our Cameron is special :)

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Chapter 10: Define Your Messiah

Cameron opened the door to John's room and entered a few minutes after he had stormed out of the kitchen. When her eyes fell to the bed and found him sleeping soundly, she moved slower and quieter, easing the door shut. Music poured out of his nearby computer softly enough that the metal instrumentals didn't wake him.

The room was dark, dimly hued with the bathing backlight of his computer monitor shining against the far wall. Cameron heard peculiar words coming through the speakers about a soul machine. Her processor discontinued analysis of Derek Reese's earlier actions to contemplate its meaning as she strode across the room and sat next to John. She fell backwards and slid into bed next to him, her eyes on the ceiling. John stirred next to her.

Mouth, mouth, mouth.

John blinked and found Cameron's neck no more than three inches in front of him. His chest drew in a sharp breath as he drew away shyly, his eyes searching the darkness of his own room and finding Cameron next to him.

"Where's Derek?" John asked.

"He left." She offered no details.

"Where's my mother?"

"Sleeping. I gave her a sedative."

Music continued in the background and John relaxed into his bed, content to doze off next to Cameron. Content to forget a few things.

"Why does her metal armor drag him down?" Cameron asked suddenly.

"What?" John swallowed through a yawn and tried to ignore the heat building in his joints. His palms were sweating. The indentation in the bed from Cameron's body next to him suddenly became intimately noticeable.

John's ears perked up finally. "Oh…ah, it's not metal armor." He threw his hands behind his head and relaxed into his pillow, stealing a glance at Cameron's expression. Her eyes were wide and empty.

"Cameron?" John's brow furrowed curiously. He had only once seen her look that pristine; that still—and she'd been offline. An instant later, her neck turned to answer him. He blinked several times before remembering why he had said her name.

"The lyric," he said, resting on his side, elbow into the pillow. "It's not metal armor, its mental armor."

Cameron seemed to consider this. "Seventy three point four percent of recorded lyrical music is in reference to the object of one's romantic desire."

"Yeaah…" John replied.

Cameron's gaze was drawn upwards once again. "This song is about a woman. But he says she has a silver grin. I have a silver grin, because I'm a machine."

John chuckled. Lying on his left side left his right arm free, the opportunity nearly compelling him to touch her face.

"I've never really listened that closely to the lyrics… but I'm pretty sure it's an expression."

She turned to face him again, but he was certain this time she was somehow closer. "How do you know his lover isn't a machine?"

John took a deep breath, his eyes shooting upwards as he tried to sound clinical and detached about the idea. "Well, the idea of a human and a machine isn't completely unheard of in science fiction. My mom used to make me watch that stuff."

"I watched Battlestar Galactica," Cameron announced. "In the library."

John was about to ask about the library, when the music interrupted him.

Nothing hurts… like… your mouth.

"Why does her mouth hurt?" Cameron's emotional simulator was inactive. From where the question originated was a mystery.

"I uh…" John's throat ran very dry. "I think it's an expression." He mentally punched himself for repeating his previous answer. His brain was barely running at this point, but it found the time to instinctively wet his lips.

"I do not understand." Cameron's voice was a notch lower. Cameron leant closer to him. "I want to understand," she whispered.

"Her…" John paused, considering briefly the unprecedented closeness. He tried to remember her circuits were about as crossed as a functional machine could be, but her eyes were too close to concentrate on those thoughts. He tried to sit up and get away from her, but the most imperceptible quiver of her lips devoured his attention. "Her mouth hurts him because he loves her, and when she kisses him…" Cameron's processor was a trillion operations ahead of him, but it only took one.

Her lips quickly closed over his before he could utter another syllable. She was soft, and yielding. Whether by lines of code or a divining spark of inspiration, her lips moved over his with preternatural instinct. Beneath the caress of her lips, the briefly wandering peek of her tongue across his lip… The reality of a hardened combat chassis was a distant memory, buried far away like a nightmare that runs away from the day as the sun slowly rises. It was between her parting lips that a new reality of Cameron exploded over him like the sun's brilliance over the morning horizon.

She tentatively withdrew from him, and with her kiss took the breath from his chest as his hand came to rest on her cheek. Strands of auburn between his fingers and her skin told only of a woman, a girl. In that moment she was not what she had been made; but what she had become, what she saw reflecting in John's captivated gaze; what she contemplated how to be with each passing picosecond.

Maybe not 'human'… but more human.

"Thank you for explaining."

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A single, thin turquoise sheet covered their bodies, sinking between their intertwined limbs as John held her tightly against him, cursing the cold as Allison shivered in his arms.

"Let me get you another blanket," John whispered into her hair as he planted a kiss against her forehead.

She tensed instinctively, her arms gripping his shoulders as she lie cradled half-atop him. Her mouth quivered and her brow flexed with a moment of distraught fear.

"Don't leave," she asked earnestly.

"Shhh," John whispered, stroking her naked shoulder, pleased with the soft touch of her skin. As his fingers met the sheet's textile edge, he lost the connection with her warmth.

"I like the way you touch me." The words came out of her mouth absently. John peered down to find her eyes unfocused. He wanted to follow her wherever she went in there, but he had left those doors untried and intended to leave it that way.

"Nobody ever touched me that way," Allison's voice eked from her lips just above a squeak. "I…" she began to explain. When he'd found her in the dilapidated rubble fields of what was once a mall in Valencia, she was huddled in an industrial drain pipe that had rolled off of a derailed train. Inside he found four dead men and no answers. Gangrenous sores on her wrists were all that remained of a long captivity, but even after they had healed, the sun never set on the dark memories. It was when she didn't think he was looking that John saw Allison reliving them, a moment at a time, a hundred times a day. She never had answers for him, but something about her made him look past the question.

"You can't go," John said, pushing his fingers beneath the sheet, traveling down her arm and trapping her fingers against her abdomen where they stayed. Allison sighed, this time of frustration, thoughts of the mission comingling with what she wanted to say about a tragic past.

"I'm trying to tell you what happened to me, John," Allison argued. John's eyes lifted to the ceiling and found black cracks in a cement sewer. He idly considered the irony of a death by collapse of a sewer arguing with Allison whether to send her on a suicide mission. The great John Connor felled by a lazy civil engineer's shoddy design; a man who had probably already received his judgment, and then some, on a fateful day years earlier in 2011. 'Where had he been when it happened?', John wondered.

"You don't have to."

He blinked several times, pushing the stupid question out of his head just in time to see Allison propped up on one elbow, staring down at him. She was so stern, so serious. Eyebrows flexed in dangerous dismay; a woman who had brutalized four men for keeping her as their 'thing', still he could only see the spiraling curls of hair falling from her brow, tickling his chest. His lips quivered instinctively as he appreciated the moist part of her lips, her eyes… elegantly bare shoulders and neck; and just the hint of the curve of her breast. Given just an instant's hint of his growing distraction, Allison furiously squeezed her lips tight and lightly slapped him on the cheek.

"Stop that," she commanded, a mischievous light in her eyes conspiring with a smile on her lips.

"Ow," he bit back playfully, tackling her and rolling her over until he rest atop her. The scorn upon her lips ran away, replaced with a contagious giggle as her eyes lit up and her arms instinctively rose to pull John closer.

"You were undressing me with your eyes," she scolded sarcastically from beneath him. "I was trying to be serious."

"When I'm with you, I don't want to be serious," John shook his head, lowering his head towards her. An instant later, his lips collided with hers with such soft suspension that she hung by them, held hostage by his warmth and his tender fingers on her thigh.

Withdrawing from him, she placed her palms flat against his chest and dipped them around his torso.

"Don't say that," she said with crisp sincerity. "You're 'Connor'…" her fingers traveled to his face and cradled his jaw. "I can't take you away from the world..." Her voice cracked and she swallowed through her guilt.

"You have to let me do this," she begged. "Please. It's the only way we can get the TOK model."

"We'll find another way to fight it," he insisted.

"There is no other way, John," Allison argued, her voice teetering on the edge of tears. "Don't you get it?" she cried. "They will get to me eventually and you won't know it…" she kissed him as a tear rolled down her cheek and touched their lips.

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Four hours later, Allison quietly dressed at the edge of the bed, every three seconds looking nervously at John. First she wondered if he would catch her… then if he could forgive her.

She didn't dare to wonder if she would see him again, for she feared the pain would overwhelm her courage and change her mind.

On worn and rotting wood beside a rickety bed on which they made a love they didn't dare to believe they deserved in such a torn up world, Allison left a note for John, carved in the wood:

I have to.

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Cameron awoke from a strange dream – if she could call it that – in John's bed. Of course she did not sleep, nor dream – but upon regaining proper mental function after an anomalous system shutdown for approximately seventeen minutes, she arrived at no technical solution. She decided that it was a similar phenomenon to what humans called 'dozing off'. Her state of disrepair seemed to worsen, though she did not intend to make John aware of the full scope of her malfunctions. John was sound asleep beside her, his head above hers. His lips were slightly red and swollen.

She searched through files. Files about Allison, files about future-John, past-John, present-John. An anomaly stuck out. John stirred and crept closer to her. He briefly awoke without opening his eyes, reaching down to pull his comforter over himself, and in the process, over the two of them. Cameron's eyes fell on the door cautiously… preparing to disengage herself from his bed. Their present position was extremely compromising in the presence of Derek and Sarah. Before she could move, however, John's sleepily roaming hands fell upon her bare shoulder, and stroked her arm, where it fell limp as he again dozed off. Cameron knew little about the human subconscious, as it was not one of her vital subroutines for understanding human behavior. What little information she had assimilated, she had done so through direct observation of just one – John Connor. He had told her once that sometimes humans dream to relive experiences. Good ones, if they were lucky – bad ones, if they weren't so lucky. Not many people in the future were lucky, Cameron realized. That future hadn't come yet, so Cameron closed her eyes and tried to dream again.