I do not own The Terminator.
I have been watching it since I was 10.
Mona Lisa
She didn't understand.
It was okay, he didn't expect her to.
She believed she disappointed him.
Because she was weak, because she was untested, unprepared.
Because she was soft.
Because she was human.
But that was why he loved her.
Because she was still human.
The machines had not destroyed that, had not made her into a heartless, cold, unfeeling thing.
Not yet.
She was just her.
And she was not the mother of the Savior of the Human Race.
Not yet.
But she would be.
You could see that in her eyes.
When she fought him, when she bit him.
When she screamed and cursed and flashed hate at him with those clear green eyes of hers.
When she found herself stronger than she ever thought she could be.
Commanding him to let her check his wound.
Tying her first field dressing without even having any idea what she was doing.
Yelling at him that she didn't want it, any part of the future he had described to her.
Her voice was its own interest all in itself.
High pitched and nasal and insistent when she was edging hysterical, losing her cool, even irate and annoyed with him.
Low and sultry and warm and alluring, words Kyle Reese didn't even know but felt the meaning of when she reached out to him in the dim shadows of the motel room.
The machine apocalypse held no beauty, no softness.
No peace or gentleness or warmth.
Only cold and pain and hunger, teeth gritted in grim determination.
It was why he had broken down in the clearing.
When he chased her, caught her, both of them falling to the ground.
In the green grass.
White clouded blue sky overhead.
Trees and birds and warm breeze and lapping stream nearby.
And, not at that moment being imminently chased by a Terminator, out of the grey, concrete, loud city with its big, hulking metal machines that weren't too different from the ones that had been trying to mow him down all his life, he had actually had a moment to look around as Sarah gasped and grappled with the fact that she simply could not escape him, the future, or any of it.
Look around and actually experience something that . . .
"I'm not supposed to see this."
. . . caused him more physical pain, more mental anguish, than any wound, any dark night fighting the machines and losing fellow fighters in battle ever could.
Because those were things he knew, things he had been raised on, raised in.
He had only heard murmured stories around trashfires of what he had found next to the weeping, terrified woman who kept trying to call his name.
People didn't talk much about the time before Judgment Day.
It hurt too much to remember what they had lost, what they would never get back, even if and when they did win.
And seeing it in broad daylight, well, . . .
"I don't belong here."
. . . was too overwhelming for even the toughest soldiers.
Everything they had lost, everything that had been stolen from them, destroyed, crushed, beneath the relentless machines.
Things the children that hid underground and slaved to make pipe bombs, who grew up to fight and die under the relentless march of the machines would never see, never smell, never touch or hear or taste or know.
It was crushing, all too much.
And Sarah.
He had kept the picture John had pressed into his hands one sunless day while the metal rolled over the earth above their heads with deafening, thunderous tread.
He had looked at it, studied it, over and over.
Entranced by every curve, every line.
She seemed so deep in thought, hidden mysteries behind distant eyes, her sad almost smile.
In the machine apocalypse, there were no museums, art history classes.
He had never heard of those things at all.
Hardly anybody remembered Leonardo Da Vinci, too busy staying alive and armed to the teeth.
So Kyle Reese did not connect the picture John had given him and the once famous painting he had never heard of, never laid eyes on.
She had no idea she was his classical art masterpiece.
That she was his Mona Lisa.
But, without knowledge or understanding, he loved her for it.
"I came across time for you, Sarah."
Before he even knew her.
When T2 came out, I thought, gee, that first one was pretty awful compared to this.
But then I was watching it again with my son many years later and I realized, no, it's not. It's 80s and there is cringe, it's not perfect, it does stumble.
But hey, it's still good. And it's still Terminator so I'm there.
And it's still Kyle Reese so I'm definitely there.
The mention of his breakdown in the clearing is a deleted scene I stumbled across on YouTube. It doesn't exactly work which is why they didn't put it in the film.
But it's still an insight into Kyle and his experience out in the pre-Judgement Day world.
Thanks for reading. :)
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