Title: Patchwork Girl
Author: Elessar-4-TnT
Disclaimer: I don't own Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Summary: I'm sorry this took so long to release. I have been studying for the GRE – but it is tomorrow, so soon I will be free… FREEEEE!!!!
Chapter 7: Beholden
Monday
He might have felt guilty with his eyes against the binoculars, watching the door to Jesse's apartment, were it not for the recent revelation that she, too, had been clandestinely observing his movements with the Connors.
I won't be the sonofabitch who brings metal down on the Connors, Derek had once told Sarah from a dirty, musty jail cell. At the time, he could hardly believe he laid eyes on the matriarch of mammoth renown from his own decade, but his words were born of more than just an initial feeling of hero worship. He and Kyle had sworn a blood oath to protect John Connor; the kind that isn't written anywhere, nor officiated in the dimly lit ornamented halls of secret societies, but born amid screams of agony, wretches of hunger, and tunnels wreathed in the wreak of death and the memory of a world in ashes. It was an oath whose very essence drew the breath from your chest, sealing with its end the solemnity of your life, penned by solidarity among brothers. Derek blinked, taking a sharp breath as the warm California air filled his lungs and drowned out the screams in his ears. Looking through the twenty-four power lens, he managed to refocus his attention and forget the past, just as he glimpsed the inescapable future.
Watching Jesse and Riley trade heated words on the steps of her apartment building, Derek realized he would have to amend his pledge not to bring metal or flesh down on the Connors.
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"What the hell are you doing here?" Jesse demanded. "I told you neva' to come here." Jesse's voice became level and calm as she refocused her anger into calculation. Blowing wide like a shotgun blast, Jesse's wrath was not to be toyed with lightly. But when focused, directed coherently into mind and manipulation the way she vectored it when her objective appeared in question or her mission in jeopardy – the woman was a lethally unstoppable force. Riley only remained alive because she had a function. If the Australian resistance fighter could have junked her and rebuilt a new one the way the machines did, this one would be sporting a smoking hole in its head.
Riley took a breath, steadying herself as she relieved her hands from the straps of her heavy-laden backpack. She had come here looking for sanctuary. "I'm sorry, I just had nowhere else to go… I got thrown out of my foster parents' home…"
"You what?" Jesse's anger was beating madly against her better judgment, threatening to boil over in a hail of gunfire. She took the next best option.
A wild backhand sailed through the air and struck Riley hard against her cheek. Riley went down to the pavement holding a bruised cheek as Jesse stood over her. A few passersby looked on, persuaded to keep on walking by the icy, unforgiving darkness behind Jesse's glare. "Get up."
Riley choked on a sob, trying to hold back her tears. She wasn't so badly hurt physically as emotionally exhausted, totally alone and yet… in a world she couldn't have conjured in her most hunger-stricken dreams down in the tunnels of the bombed-out streets. The emptiness, the abjection of a world doomed-to-destruction overwhelmed her, and amidst it all – she was forced to spy on a boy she truly cared about. A boy that she had learned was destined to die trying to save it. After meeting him and starting to genuinely like John, Riley had tried to abandon the arrangement, telling Jesse she was out. Back then, Jesse still had the patience for misdirection.
She gets him killed, she remembered Jesse telling her. She had never recalled hearing about Connor's death before Jesse recruited her, but it would undoubtedly have been kept a secret to prevent morale from tanking. It was the only condition upon which she had agreed to their arrangement.
Another sob wracked through her throat, dry and painful. Unable to catch her breath, she recoiled from Jesse's outstretched hand. "I said, get up!" Jesse barked.
Riley rose to her feet, her eyes red with tears and her cheek raw. "Fuck you!" she screamed, through tear-filled eyes. "Fuck you! And fuck your mission! I'm done with this!" she screamed. "I'm telling John everything!"
Jesse grew more uneasy by the moment as Riley melted down on the city street in front of her. The entire point of forbidding her from ever coming here was to minimize any visibility of her infiltrator's association with her, and now the girl was screaming obscenities at the top of her lungs and using words like "mission". Visibility be damned, if anyone was watching her, Jesse's entire existence just became a complication in a lot of plans.
Rushing and nearly forcing Riley through the door, she looked behind her, eyes searching the street corners and windows for any sign of observation. By the time she kicked the door shut behind her, Derek was already on his way up the fire escape of the building's north side.
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Derek crawled up the fire escape, estimating how many more floors lie before him and Jesse's kitchen window as he reached the third floor. Thirty feet above street level, he reconnoitered the alley below, the street, and the assorted trash cans and homeless box-tents down the alley behind the building. Reaching into the back of his pants, he removed the Glock 9MM and chambered a round, then returning the weapon under his waistband and covering it with his jacket. Bugging her apartment was a waste of time, not to mention a declaration of war.
Jesse was damn good at her job, sometimes too good. She would find them, and she would know he didn't trust her. She trusted nobody and never let her guard down. He had never met anyone as thick-skinned, as conniving, or as devious. At times, however, he allowed himself to wonder if there could be more to her.
The first time he met her, she had saved his life – saved it from himself. She was never the type to whisper cute pet names, giggle under the covers or make romantic pillow talk. Upon reuniting in this unsullied world, however, she had practically showered him with affection, with acceptance. Navigating a conversation with Jesse in the future had been more like striking out across a minefield than your typical pre-war "Hi honey, I'm home!" Still, their relationship had endured because they endured together. They were kindred in a way; and sometimes, in his deepest, darkest thoughts, Derek worried for his own good just how kindred they may be.
Derek allowed himself to believe that retreating to the past was the shattering of the glass Jesse had walled herself in with, the bell weather of the weakness within: the path of destruction behind the wrecking ball wrought by a life of soldiering and suffering. Part of him was disgusted the first time she told him what she had done, how she had run. But another part of him was amazed; even a little relieved, to finally see a woman behind the eyes of a killer – a woman under the scarred curves of a feminine body. Back here in this place, this time, it was all that a man honor-bound to stop the apocalypse could do not to fall victim to an all-encompassing façade of safety and security draped over one's eyes by the pre-war world. Nowhere in the TV commercials or the rushing traffic or the cell-phone-cradling street-herds would you ever hear hint of a future consumed in metal and flame. Things had changed. Now that he knew Jesse had been watching him, he knew there had to be a reason: A reason to conceal it from him, a reason to spy on him, a reason to gain access to John Connor.
In that moment, little differentiated the fleshy gray matter synapses in Derek's cerebral cortex from the four-nanometer, sixty-four-core parallel processing supercomputer at the heart of a T-888's brain; when a little switch went off at the sudden realization that Jesse represented a threat. Feelings aside, emotions aside… Derek had only felt himself beholden to one man in his entire life. Even if that man wasn't a man yet, Connor was his Captain nonetheless, and he would put a bullet in Jesse's brain if he thought for one second she would act in any way contributory to Connor's death.