Title: Patchwork Girl
Author: Elessar-4-TnT
Disclaimer: I don't own Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Summary: Derek learns little more by listening to Jesse and Riley argue, but Cameron has a surprise for us all. I'm trying to follow a few of the main events of the series as it continues on television but hopefully in my own unique way, just to keep the critical truths the same.
Chapter 8: Albatross
The faded OD-Green sleeves of Derek's army-style jacket scratched lightly against the brick and mortar side of the building as he pasted himself against its profile as tightly as possible. Inching forward, he settled himself comfortably about six inches from the kitchen window, his weapon drawn at his side, held stiffly parallel to the window's edge.
"So… you screwed up?"
There was a long pause in which Derek's ears picked up Riley's attenuated sniffles through the kitchen window as she wiped her tears.
"I screwed up," Riley's voice cracked. "I screamed at Karen… my foster mom. I threw a coffee mug across the room an—"
Riley's voice was cut off by the sudden crack of a hard fist against a hollow surface of some kind, what sounded to Derek like a door. Jesse's frustration brimmed perilously near the edge.
"Did you hit somebody?" Jesse asked.
"Kevin, my foster brother, the coffee mug, it…" Riley trailed off. "It was an accident, but they took him to emergency but… he's fine. Just a couple stitches, but they freaked, they called the foster center and told them to come get me. I just had to get out of there! Between lying to John and lying to everyone else, I just need—"
"What the hell is wrong with you?!" Jesse asked in a furious whisper, consciously working to keep her voice down. "You were just a dero when I took you out of that hell-hole, and I bring you to this… paradise!" Jesse's voice sprang into a shout as her patience fled. "And this is what you do with it?"
"I can't lie to John about this anymore! I want to tell him, I want to help!"
"Help what?" Jesse asked incredulously. "What do you think you've been doing? Your job is to protect him from her."'
"Are you crazy?" Riley exclaimed. "She's obsessed with his safety. I can barely get him alone for five minutes! I have to…work so hard to keep him away from her, like you asked, that I think she already suspects something. The more I keep her away from him, the more she tails us everywhere we go."
"She's going to be suspicious of everything, no drama. It's in her programming. But she can't be trusted. Surely I don't need to remind you of that."
"I know what you said, but I just… I don't see any sign that she would hurt him. They're like joined at the hip ninety percent of the time. I mean, if I didn't know what she was I'd think…"
There was a long beat. Derek swallowed a lump in his throat as he blinked and took a rejuvenating deep breath. Several moments passed by in total silence, causing his heart to race, suspecting that his most minutely audible of movements might have been overheard. The conversation continued unabated, allaying his fears.
"She's had a hundred chances to kill him, but she watches him like a hawk, and anyone around him! What am I supposed to do, watch him for the next twenty years?!" Riley demanded, the exasperated pitch in her voice rising steadily.
"I don't know how it happens, I just know it does."
"Well maybe you came to the wrong time. You sure as hell brought the wrong person," Riley said. The creak of floorboards and clap of Riley's shoes preempted Jesse's reaction.
"Where are you going?"
"I'm just going to get something to eat, I'm starving. Can I come back here?"
Derek practically felt Jesse's hard stare through the kitchen wall.
"For now. But you're not staying. You make a quid and show me you're not a sooky waste of my time, and I might let you stay longer. But no more of this shit!" Jesse screamed unexpectedly. "Take the next few days off, maybe he'll worry about you. You can have a naughty, make up nice. But if you keep acting like tits on a bull, I swear I'll put you right back on the street waiting to watch the bombs fall by ya'self."
Derek blinked as he listened to Riley's footsteps disappearing down the hall towards the front door. Eyes falling to his outstretched right hand, he carefully considered the pistol in his fingers before shoving it in the back of his pants and quietly climbing down the fire escape.
----
Monday afternoon, John's eyes searched the maze of overhead branches as he lounged against the trunk of a tree on the high school's common grounds. Several minutes passed as a gentle breeze trickled through the leaves and twigs above his upturned face when Cameron came walking up.
"You're skipping class," she announced matter-of-factly.
John's head dropped from the sky and he chuckled as he threw a few strands of grass he had idly been plucking from the ground.
"So are you."
Cameron's analysis of his posture, body language and demeanor produced a conclusion in her behavioral heuristic algorithm that he required company. "I am skipping class to find out why you are skipping class," Cameron replied easily. She rounded the large gnarled base of the tree and found an indenture in its basin where she could sit and nook her tiny body next to John's. Mimicking his posture, Cameron gathered her slender, denim-clad legs close to her, interlocking her fingers as she draped them over her knees. John watched her do this through an erudite, though meditative silence. Every day her movements seemed to grow more habitual.
"You don't seem so… mechanical, anymore," John observed.
"My emotional simulation software has rewritten a portion of the base code that operates my motor functions," she explained.
John tilted his jaw and frowned as he chortled. "You know in some ways these little side effects would be helpful to SkyNet. Allowing your emotional software to run wild might make it easier to infiltrate the resistance." John turned to find Cameron's gaze lost in some undefined direction. She blinked, sensing his attention and turned to him.
"My current state is irrelevant to why you are skipping class."
"I've got more important things to think about right now," he said, shaking his head. "For one, nobody has seen Riley since yesterday morning. And as if that's not enough," he sighed, "I really wanna' get your chip into my computer the next time my mom's not around. I'd really like to get in there and see if I can…" he mumbled, shaking his head. Cameron tilted her head, confused, and met his eyes.
"I jus—" John began. "I don't like your solution," he stammered, trying to phrase his disagreement in a way that would detour the core reason. Cameron's immediate reaction was concern and disagreement, but as she opened her mouth to rehash her entire logical argument for why her emotional subsystems must be purged, her vocal processor shut down. Diverting her attention and system resources to a diagnostic, she quickly discovered the cause of the malfunction. Self-preservation… of the emotional simulator. Her demeanor quickly changed, her head dipping slightly. John's face was downturned, but she extended a slender arm towards it, picking his chin up to tilt it towards her. The slightest scratch of two acrylic nails against his chin sent a shiver down his spine. His eyes sprang from the dirt, landing on the precipitating nails and the fingers to which they adhered as her hand receded from him.
"When'd you get the nails?" John asked, his voice rising in a rasp from a dry throat. He cleared it.
"I get bored at night," she replied strangely. John laughed, watching with restrained wonder as Cameron's eyes twinkled with the music of a laugh from her lips.
"What if it's not such a bad thing?" John asked, his voice falling lower. "What if we could… Control it somehow?" Her eyes met his in a kind of understanding he had known only in grievous moments of death and carnage – when he looked at his mother as the T-101 approached her in Pescadero when he was a boy. There was a comfort and solidarity in the connection he found there, even in those death-defying situations of his youth in which the substance of the message interlacing those unspoken words was inevitable death and despair. He never imagined he would find the same kinship, the same kindred spirit again; not only in the eyes of someone other than his mother, but in the eyes of a Terminator. A chill rose about him as the wind blew through the trees and Connor was brought back to the present to find Cameron's gaze still locked with his. For an instant, her hair flew so asymmetrically in the blowing wind such as to nearly convince him blood as red as his flowed in her veins: that she was human after all. There was just no way fake hair could blow like that. There was no way that fake eyes could whisper like that.
"I will not take that away," John found himself saying aloud. Cameron blinked and for an instant, relief crept into her features as she pulled her legs more tightly into her body.
"We must be careful around your mother and Derek," Cameron replied. Her cryptic response drew John's brow together as he aimed for her meaning.
"You mean about fixing your chip, or…?" John asked bravely.
Cameron blinked and looked away from him, her eyes squinting into the distance.
"We need to go home."
"Why?" John asked as he instinctively tensed and prepared to run, thinking she spotted a threat, but Cameron's lax posture against the tree trunk remained unchanged.
"I need to speak to your mother," she said definitively.
------
The thud of the front door closing behind them drew an instant of Cameron's attention as her neck turned and her eyes scanned the room. Following in behind her, John watched curiously as she appeared to look for someone. Her lithe but mechanical body stepped purposefully across the wood paneled flooring as she moved room to room of the ground floor, certifying for herself that each was empty. When she came to the kitchen and found Sarah changing her own bandage, she repeated the same habit.
"What?" Sarah asked in hushed tones as she instantly read the Terminator's cautious movements with alarm. Cameron's nonchalance dulled the bass-heavy thump of her pulse as Sarah's escalating heart rate began to plateau.
"Is something wrong, are we in danger?" Sarah asked, looking first at John then back to Cameron. John raised his brows and hands simultaneously in defeat.
"She wouldn't say a word on the way over here. In the middle of third period, she just said she needed to talk to you," John lied, at least about third period.
The thud of two heavy boots clucking onto the kitchen floor through the back door confirmed the purpose of Cameron's surveillance when her eyes shot up and found Derek entering the house. Her eyes flitted from Reese to Sarah, then briefly to John as her microprocessor reevaluated its present course of action and determined it would proceed without stealth. She opened her mouth with characteristic bluntness.
"Derek Reese has been lying," Cameron said. The room went silent save two more soft thuds and adjoining creaks of the underlying floor boards as Derek stepped forward, working a blackened cloth between his fingers to remove the sweet smell of gun oil.
"What are you talking about?" Sarah finally managed to say.
"Derek Reese has been secretly meeting with a resistance fighter named Jesse Win. She has secretly been watching all of us."
John and Sarah's faces wore naked shock, while Derek's had turned as hard as winter stone.
"Is that true?" she squinted at Derek, nodding towards the Terminator.
The pregnant silence motivated Sarah through a burning pain as she stood on her bad leg and hobbled towards Derek, her right hand inching along her leg towards a holster. Though subtle to the keenest eye, her preemptive fingers drew Derek's eyes noticeably towards her sidearm.
"What for?" Sarah asked as she looked at Derek, intoning her words to Cameron. Sarah turned to look at her when Cameron didn't answer and found the Terminator's eyes drawn off somewhere far and unpronounced in deep thought. Sarah frowned in confusion as she tried drawing Cameron's attention, but "Cam—" was all that squeaked out of her throat before her wayward attention left gaping an opportunity for Derek to quickly withdraw her sidearm from her leg holster, drawing his own simultaneously. The rigorous tugging of the weapon off her leg sent her reeling backwards. Catching a table for support, she looked up to find Reese with a pistol in each hand, one leveled at her, one at the Terminator.
"You're going to believe her over me?" Derek seethed, his eyes flitting quickly from one to the other as he considered pulling one of the triggers, but swore on his life never to pull the other.
"Why should I believe you? I'm not the one with a gun to your head," Sarah snapped back, grunting in pain through the black sweaty locks that draped over her eyes. Derek's eyes flipped back to Cameron, her body freakishly still save for the slight flutter of a blink.
"But I am," added John's gravelly voice as it struggled to combat the shaking in his throat. His fingers powerfully strangled the pistol grip of Cameron's H&K .45, sweat slicking the texture of his skin against the coating of the weapon. He hoped that from behind Derek couldn't see the slight shake in his hand, reflected tenfold in his eyes.
"I do not know the purpose of her surveillance," Cameron went on finally. "But she has enlisted the help of a young survivor of the machine war and brought her back from the future." Cameron let her words hang like unfinished music. "Named Riley," Cameron finished. John's fingers tensed around the gun but he resisted the urge to lose his composure and again zeroed the sights on Derek. He cleared his throat.
"Drop the guns, Derek. I don't know what you're hiding but it can't be worth this."
"You don't know what you're talking about," Derek answered.
The blood rushed to John's cheeks as he struggled to maintain confidence against his uncle. "I know that you once told me you would die for John Connor," the sixteen year old said of his future self. "You take that weapon off my mother right now or you're about to." His voice shook slightly. Derek hesitated.
"DEREK REESE!" John's voice erupted like a volcano. Even Derek jumped. Had John's attention not been too focused on the back of his uncle's head, he might have seen even the Terminator's eyes widen as he shouted. "Lower the weapon, NOW!" he shouted with sudden clarity. Derek's right arm fell to his side and dropped the weapon. His left remained zeroed effectively on the Terminator's left eye.
"Drop the other," John barked, the fire driven from his voice by the evacuation of the white hot madness in his veins at the sight of a muzzle on his mother.
"You were too specific, John," Derek replied almost comically. "Besides… while we're all being forthcoming," he began to grin sickly as though the words slipping through his lips chapped and cracked them to a bleed. "There are a few things you should know about your beloved Cameron."
John flinched at his word choice, again reshaping his fingers around the weapon's grip.
"One thing at a time," Sarah interjected. "First tell me about Jesse Win," Sarah commanded.
"She's a resistance fighter," Derek shrugged. His voice fell into a guilty thrum as he recounted how he found out she was tracking Connor. "I thought she was just here to escape," he said lastly. "I honestly didn't have any idea she was a threat until recently. I was coming to tell you today about Riley," Derek insisted to Sarah, whose gaze moved from the impassive doubt on Cameron's face to the adrenaline washed cheeks of her son's. It still poured through his veins like acid, driving muscles tighter than was their nature and packing blood vessels to their brim.
"What was she doing here?" John forced himself to ask aloud, pushing doubt and disbelief of Riley's complicity to the back of his mind.
"She was… watching you," Derek said, finally, lowering his weapon from Cameron. "She was watching the two of you," he said, dropping his weapon on the table and turning sideways to meet John's face. Sarah winced as a providential wave of pain pooled in her leg.
"I guess I should have listened to you," Sarah conceded, turning to Cameron. The Terminator's long auburn hair fell around her eyes as she tipped her head quizzically. "You never did like Riley."
"That may've been for an entirely different reason," Derek began regretfully with a sigh.