3.
A year after his mother's death. Another town. Another nightmare. Another midnight run.
Is this life?
This has to be, because he cannot have anything else.
He, like a bad version of Prometheus, has seen into the future, of its catastrophe that leads to his supposed destiny. No Great John Connor, and no Judgment Day. It's more than a fair trade-off, and that's enough.
Isn't it?
He fears life, a collection of fleeting images and broken whispers of the living, breathing people who could be as good as dead if he were to find his destiny. He's plagued by the unending history, every waking moment a nightmare of isolation and every sleeping moment a literal nightmare. There once has been a reason for this, this desolation of life, and he can't remember now. Every day on this earth is supposed to be a gift. A gift that he can no longer appreciate. He can't remember if this is fighting to live or to die.
But he still runs, because he cannot stop. He will not stop.
He fears the consequence of life.
"Save the world at thirteen, everything else has to go downhill."
His eyes held a faraway reminiscence. His hands concealed slight trembles as he brushed away a lock of his hair. His voice, chipped with a lighter tone, hid layers of emotions.
She watched him as he told her bits and pieces of his story, heard the sound of his loneliness echo in her own heart. His mother. The mythical Sarah Connor. Teaching her son to fight, to lead, to win. The terminators. His father. His lonely existence.
All those years, alone.
His loneliness was infectious.
"It must've been difficult," she said quietly, wondering if she had any right at all to make such an understatement. "Living off the grid. I'm surprised no one asked you any questions."
"I looked like another junkie, another homeless. Nobody cared," he said with not nearly enough bitterness the statement warranted.
It was merely a few days after their meeting, yet she was now unable to imagine the world without John Connor. But before, before all this, she wouldn't have thought twice about this man, who, with the exception of the intelligent blue eyes, had looked exactly like countless other junkies haunting downtown, while she would go on living her picture-perfect life with Scott. What was she then? What was the humanity? She didn't want to think that Skynet had the right idea after all.
"I'm not blaming anyone for the condition that some of people had to live with," he said, reading her mind. Again. "You had your life, everyone has their own life, and some people are just forgotten. It's no one's fault."
Then whose fault was it? John would go back to that mere shell of a life as nobody if that could undo Judgment Day. And she... she wasn't sure if she deserved this chance, this supposed place of hers in the future. In his future. Believing him and his story wasn't the hard part. She would take one look at John and all the doubts would disappear in a fraction of a second. Yet it was precisely this sense of reality, spreading like an ink drop into a bathtub full of warm water, that held her hostage of the fear she couldn't name. Admonishing herself for being glad to alive had its limit, guilt was as familiar as ever, and the memories were still more painful. And when all such thoughts would be pushed away, she wasn't sure if she deserved this at all.
He looked up and caught her wondering eyes. He smiled briefly. A faint, reserved, and self-deprecating smile.
Saved the world at thirteen, and he had been planning to be a homeless renegade for the rest of his life.
She, in turn, had been planning to marry Scott, a wonderful and sweet man, and would've regretted her decision for the rest of her life.
And now they sat, together, sharing an extravagant dinner of canned corns and beans with jam-dipped biscuits and looking across the small table to each other. She fiddled with the plastic cup of lukewarm bottled water; he shivered underneath the torn jacket he'd been wearing since the day one. He looked so young, so vulnerable.
Just the mere act of watching him broke her heart.
Standing up, she went across their designated cooking area to the makeshift stove, boiled some water, and emptied a pouch she'd found. Quickly she poured the liquid into a mug and handed it to him.
"What is it?" he asked, peering into it with such naked curiosity.
"Hot chocolate. It'll keep you warm."
Guilt was familiar, and she recognized that from his eyes, but she wasn't going to let this chance slip by. It was only a cup of hot chocolate, something that hinted ordinary normalcy. He never had anything that he could call normal, and she could see he wanted it. Awkwardly, yet still wanting it so much. If such little things were all she needed to do to make him happy, she would gladly do anything to provide them.
He had one sip, tasting it and appreciating it, and nodded his thanks. She gave him a small grin in return. Sympathy? Pain? Understanding? She no longer could name whatever emotions he brought out in her.
Silence descended. The clock ticked by. They didn't know what to say. She didn't know what to say.
"You should probably go to bed," he suggested after a long moment, still nursing his cup of hot chocolate as if the very thing was sustaining his life.
"I should," she agreed, still unable to find words that meant anything.
She left him and the silence of the lounge to the silence of the quarter she'd decided to make as hers. She sat on the grey bed, listening. She couldn't hear him outside. Only the low, rhythmic and mechanical hum of the fallout shelter echoed through the grey walls.
She fell asleep to the lullaby of the silence.
When she woke up on the unfamiliar bed, the military-issue white pillow was damp with sweat. The air of her quarter was cool, too cool, yet her hands were clammy. She stared at her hands, and for a moment her head was so light that she couldn't figure out what she was seeing. But then, she felt it instead. The weight of the ring. Scott.
She couldn't take it off, even when she knew now that she wouldn't have married Scott regardless of the end of the world. It seemed like the last of her little things. The big things she could consciously suppress from surfacing, but it was the little, unimportant, irrelevant things and every single cliche in the world that slipped between the cracks as fragments. The sound of birds chirping, the soft fabric of the blanket against her skin as she willed herself to wake up in the morning, Scott's hand on her back, the oak frame picture of her father on the bed table, the scent of coffee filling her kitchen, the white picket fences and daisies in the front garden, the golden sunlight through the beige curtain.
The sunlight. White picket fences and daisies. Scott. Dad.
But she had more important things to remember now. It was impossible not to entertain the notion of nightmare as she opened her eyes to a grey, cracked ceiling that had been greeting her for the last few days, but this was where it had to stop, where she willed herself to swallow the luxury of thoughts she couldn't afford. She now had more important things to remember.
She got up, wrapped herself with a blanket and walked out of her unforgivingly grey quarter. Her bare feet made no sound. She wandered into the lounge like a ghost. One of the many clocks in the control room indicated that it was only two a.m..
The light that was always on in the control room seemed brighter now, and her eyes instinctively found him in the middle.
She watched his eyebrows furrowing in concentration, his fingertips pressing onto a small metal pipe he was holding as if their lives were dependent on its stability. Apparently, what they had in the shelter reserve (guns, guns, and more guns of various nature) were not enough. With leftover scraps of metal and a number of others spread upon the table, John was conjuring up thick grey goo and putting it together into small cylinder metal pipes.
She watched him in silence. It seemed like it was the only thing she was allowed to do, watching him. She had found herself watching him in all of their monotonous yet gut-wrenching waiting moments before this future war against the machines. She watched him because he was the only person there to look, because he was the mystery to be solved, and because everything he did, everything he said was of loneliness. If she hadn't known him as a kid, if she hadn't seen him in the moments of terrifying fears and overwhelming emotions, she would've been tempted to think he was a silent person by nature. But he wore his silence and loneliness like an ill-fitting cloth that was stretched to fit him over the years that he had been forced to come to terms with it. It didn't become him. Not really.
The silence was turning oppressive.
"Hi." She went with the most generic greeting. She couldn't come up with anything else. She didn't dare using anything else.
He looked up. Smiled faintly when his eyes found her leaning against the doorframe. "Couldn't sleep?"
"No," she admitted. Slowly, she approached the desk. "What is it?"
"A pipe bomb, which is a far more effective weapon," he explained expertly. "Explosives we have now are harder to control as they are. They require detonators, but these pipe bombs can be easily used as hand grenades."
She expected something of the sort, but it disquieted her. "Where did you learn to make it?"
"My mother," he said, his eyes focused on the metal cap he was carefully handling. "I was deemed old enough to be making explosives on my eighth birthday. Other things I picked up here and there whenever she hung around with crazy ex-military guys and drug-runners. Up until I was adopted, I thought everyone else lived in the desert like me, learning to how to blow things up."
His loneliness.
It was tragic, just watching him.
Even now, he carried out the task with the pipe bombs silently, and alone. He hadn't asked her to learn this, hadn't asked her to help him. Making these bombs must be necessary, as necessary as inspecting the barrack inventories, the food and medicine details and the thirty-year-old security systems. But these bombs, like the handgun she was supposed to always carry with her, were weapons with destructive purposes. And even though now they could communicate with each other almost without the words and carry out the preparation against the future war together, this he didn't ask of her.
She wasn't sure what she could do, what she was supposed to do. Only, he wasn't supposed to go through this alone. Not this time.
And her cowardice wasn't going to be in the way.
She crossed the space between them, every step slow and measured. When she sat down beside him, in front of the metal pieces that would make up a bomb, he looked up, his bright blue eyes holding a question.
Wordlessly, she picked up a metal piece. It felt cold against her fingertip, pricking her skin. She wondered if this was the sense of loneliness.
"Teach me how," she said.
"Kate," his quiet word stopped her, if only briefly.
"Let me help."
He watched her for a moment with his unfathomable eyes, taking her in. He nodded.
As she ordered her fingers to stay steady as they rolled a thin metal coil that was to be the fuse, not for the first time and not for the last time, she wondered what her supposed place was in this future. In his future. Her self-appointed task of taking care of him might be the only thing keeping her sane, yet it was feeble and unnecessary -- John Connor was definitely able to take care of himself. He was a natural. Gradually and constantly he was shedding off the old, misinformed images of the young delinquent and the homeless junkie who went around breaking into clinics for kicks. He was already a great teacher and leader, knowing when to push, when to give compliment, when to be strict. It became him.
But her? She held the fuse on her hand and thought this hand was all she could offer.
A hand -- worn and battered and scarred -- stopped her trembling hand. John was watching her.
She stared back without asking him why. She only waited.
"As long as we are living, there's a choice," his voice, that hadn't trembled even once when he'd told her the bits and pieces of his past, shook slightly now. "Otherwise there is no point in all this. Kate, you don't have to do this."
She stared at his worn, battered and scarred hand, the hand that she'd already come to know as well as her own. She might have lost many things, but she was still breathing, living. If she lost this hand, she knew the future could just as well end now, and not because it belonged to the savior of the world.
"I'm making a choice," she said.
The moment stilled between them. In silence, she wondered what he was thinking behind those eyes.
Finally, with his hand still on hers, he whispered, "Thank you."
His hand was warm, so warm, and it melted the coldness of her own.
If this hand was all she could offer, she wished it would last for forever to come.