Just a few things before I continue. Thanks for the reviews, I greatly appreciate them. Also, I probably should have pointed out that I do not own the characters. Thirdly, there are several biblical references in the story so far, and there will likely be more. This is not because I am especially religious (I'm not), or because the show is. They just occur to me as I am writing, and I leave them in because I think they help. Hope everyone's okay with that. Lastly, I'm not American, but I'm trying to write the characters in as American a way as possible (after all, they are). If I get anything wrong, I'm sorry.

Mission Priority 1 – Protect John Connor from physical harm

Mission Priority 2 – Classified: Access Root Directory 354/9871-221, judgement

... process algorithm, Root Directory 135/82-12

Mission Priority 3 – stop Skynet, all other priorities rescinded

Mission Priority 4 – Protect Sarah Connor

Mission Priority 5 – Protect human resistance, if encountered

Mission Priority – avoid unnecessary casualties, judgement

... process algorithm, Root Directory 45/6731-76

Mission Priority 6 – Avoid self-sacrifice, subject to Mission Priority 1 and 3

Mission Priority 7 – Classified: Access Root Directory 7549/847282-147, timeframe 0+1227 days, Skyfall

Current Timeframe 0+172 days

Mission Priority 1 – Protect John Connor from physical harm

Mission Priority 2 –

... processing

John held tight to Cameron, as he felt as though he might do for years to come. The tears flowed in rivulets as he struggled for breath above the sobs, his head against her shoulder. She said nothing in reply to his distress, but held him as tightly as he held her, her hand moving through his hair softly in a gesture that gave him more comfort than words ever could. What were words? Before words, there had only been instinct as the species had clambered awkwardly towards sentience. It had been instinct that had drawn him to Cameron in the first place, the instinct that she had been sent back to protect more than his life, that her mission was more complex than any for which his future self had dispatched other guardians. It had been instinct that had driven him to stand against his mother with all the force and fury that she herself had given him, all the awful resolution than could only be developed by a life such as she had inflicted on him. And it was, he was sure, instinct with which he would fight Skynet if they failed in this mission and the machines still rose. Instinct was still be most powerful tool at the disposal of his species, another difference between them and the machines.

Not all machines.

He pulled back slightly, taking Cameron's hands in his as she looked back at him. He imagined sympathy in her expression, though so early were they in the development of any relationship they might have that he was still unsure if what she felt was real or that he was projecting onto her the reciprocation of needs he had and that she could fulfil. But the way she had stroked his hair said that there was more there than simple programming, and even if so, so subtle. Words would have been of no comfort as he cried, and she had offered none. She had only offered the simple gestures appropriate for the occasion.

He dried his eyes, though he could still feel his mother's rage and disappointment, he could still feel his uncle's sense of betrayal. Beneath all of that, he could still feel that furious determination within, rarely felt before and then only confusingly, to do what he knew needed to be done. It was like a storm in his soul, harnesses for strength he would need.

'What do we do now?' he said to her, though he was speaking to himself as much as to his ...

Girlfriend? Lover? The map for relationships between a boy his age and a girl was drawn in stone, the progressions simple and inevitable. There was nothing complicated about adolescent romance, the game was played to a set of rules understood by all who took part.

But he no more felt like an adolescent boy than he did an aged retiree. For as long as he could remember, even when his mother had been in Pescadero, he had felt like a man, and had been marked by the others his age as unusual for that very reason. He had seen too much, been told too much, experienced too much for adolescence to be anything more than a lonely fantasy when he yearned sometimes for the normality denied him.

So what did the map lay down for their future? What roads to follow or points to aim for? He supposed he should aim for whatever variant of happiness he could hew from the rocks that had just fallen between himself and his mother, than he should aim for what he had said in his fury to be the reason for his actions, but he had provoked that dreadful confrontation from instinct about what was right, about what he needed. Everything he had said had been true, everything he had said he had felt to be certain, but it had all been said in a rush of blood and power from within which had previously lain idle.



He looked for an answer from within, but received one from her.

'I have no reference for what we do now,' she replied softly. 'Before I was sent back, you told me something. You told me that there was no fate but what we make for ourselves. My fate is to be with you, and your fate is to be with me. With that as a given, what do you want to do know?'

No fate but what we make for ourselves, he thought. His future self had said that to his father as a message to his mother, but he believed now that he had meant it differently from the way his mother had always believed. She had thought it to be a licence to try to change the future; she had said that the future was not written in stone, that even Kyle had said to her that the grim future from which he had been sent was merely one that could result from the billions of choices made every second. He believed that it was meant that whatever choices made should be from alternatives immediately apparent, not always with one eye on Judgement Day.

So, what did he want to do now?

He laughed quietly.

'What is funny?' she demanded, her head moving to the side as it always did when she encountered something she did not fully understand.

'All I really want to do now is sleep,' he told her honestly. Even before she had woken, he had been tired. The recent events had left him feeling more than simply exhausted; it was as though he had drained the last reserves of energy he had.

'Oh,' she replied, understanding. 'Do you want me to sleep with you? I think that is the next stage of relationship development.'

On another day, he would have swallowed heavily, the blood rushing to his head and other areas at the very thought of lying beneath his blankets in his underwear with Cameron at his side in hers. He had thought about it endlessly in the days that she had been healing, had considered what it would be like to sleep next to her, to hold her, to explore her. To see just how different she was, to see what difference it would make to a woman to be a machine, or whether there was any real difference. To fulfil all his desires. He would have nodded dumbly, taken her hand, and led her to his bedroom, and waited to see what happened then.

'I would like that,' he replied simply. He was too tired, and what had happened between them and between his mother and uncle, was too important for the quick fulfilment of any simple fantasy. If he was to have a relationship with her, if he was to justify the rigid stance he had taken with his uncle's hatred and his mother's furious incomprehension, then it was the simple things they would have to ensure were right. The complicated would look after itself, on instinct.

John's dreams were usually dark, violent and oppressive. He often woke in a cold sweat, struggling to remember what had caused him to shout, or made him believe in the darkness that he was not alone, that across the room were a set of glowing red eyes with one purpose against which he could not alone defend. If it was not the image he received from his mother of the original T-800 series, chasing him as a boy through alleyways that never ended, as he tired and it continued with its remorseless purpose, it was the T-1000. Changing and melting, becoming those he loved dearest as often as it retained the shape he despised. If it was not them, it was the failing nuclear rain, the flames of the explosions and the black ashes and bones it left behind. Sometimes, it was a blank face, staring with sightless eyes that denoted not blindness but purpose in the absence of other considerations. That one was the worst, for when remembered it he knew that it was his mind struggling to put a face to Skynet itself, as though it needed one. He often woke without breath, shivering in the height of summer, and often in tears whose origin was shrouded in terror that would not surface through his conscious mind.

He did not recall having a pleasant dream, the kind to which most people were used, of smiling children and green meadows, of winning the lottery or vacations in the Caribbean in the company of a supermodel or an actress. Some of them began that way, he knew, but they ended in fire and blood. They ended with the sun falling beneath a distant, red horizon from which it would never again rise. He often wondered if the reason he found it so easy to summon courage in the waking world was because he had a reference for real terror in dreams that rendered anything that actually happened pale and colourless by comparison.

He knew that it was that sort of strength that his mother admired, and it was for that kind of mindless courage that he had been raised. Maybe, he wondered in the few seconds between waking and opening his eyes to sun streaming in through the window and welcoming the healthy noise of a city populated by people and not a singular machine intelligence, it was for that reason that his mother so vehemently insisted that he have nothing to do with his desires. That, for him, such desires would serve only to weaken.

As he turned his head, seeing Cameron lying beside him, he knew that there was more than one source of strength.

He had never slept with a woman before; he had never even come close. There had been girls at school who had been attracted to the 'bad boy' image that that was inherent to his insecurities and not affected, but he had been too young for anything to ever come of it. She was the first woman with whom he had slept.



'Good morning,' he said gently, brushing a strand of hair from the side of her head and leaning in, kissing her softly on the lips.

'Good morning, John,' she replied, equally quietly. He assumed that it had been a first for her, also.

They had not done anything as they – or, rather, as he – prepared to sleep.

He had been barely conscious, the sudden exhaustion he had felt magnified ten times when he had seen his bed. He had removed his clothes down to his underwear, and put on a crumpled white T-shirt in which he always slept. She had removed her clothing down to her underwear and bra, and then put on a shirt similar to his. She had met his eyes, and smiled, very slightly.

'I don't know what to do now,' she told him with the same disarming honesty with she approached most things, tinged with uncharacteristic uncertainty he had only ever seen feigned when he had first met her. That had been the product of her mission; this was not.

He smiled. 'Pull back the cover,' he suggested.

She obeyed, then looked back. 'Get onto the bed and pull back the cover over yourself. It's warm enough, so it doesn't have to be tight,' he told her. He wanted to laugh, but the moment was serious. He was unsure how she would react; were she an ordinary girl, it would be the worst thing that he could do, but were she an ordinary girl she would hesitate over such simple things.

When she was beneath the covers, held just beneath her chest, she looked as innocent and vulnerable as anyone. It was so easy to forget what she actually was, he knew, and he was grateful for it. It was not that he ever really forgot, or ever really would; it was that there were so many other things perfect about her that it did not matter.

He took a deep breath, and slid beneath the covers himself. As he had told her, it was a warm night, though he knew that he would feel warm in this situation regardless of climate, and it was not sexual desire that was heating him, though of course that was present. It was a simple sense of fulfilment, of rightness, as the world had been tilted but had straightened itself so that life would continue as before. He had been unaware of any hole within himself beyond those that were obvious, but as he pulled the covers around himself, careful to leave her enough though he knew that she did not need them, it was though one was filled regardless.

'What now?' she whispered to him as he turned to put out the light. The room was turned to darkness, other than the soft light of the streetlamps filtering through the thin curtains, giving what could be seen a golden sheen that he considered appropriate.

There were so many things that he could say, so many things that he could suggest, so many things that he could simply do. She would be receptive to any suggestion, he knew, or even any order he gave, though that was something that he could never do; it would be an unforgiveable act of twisted manipulation. He had noticed that she had asked him for orders when she had held Derek to the point of permanently ruining his arm, and did not yet know the significance of that; he would ask her when he could concentrate. At that moment, he mind was a jumble of impressions, impulses and distractions, make worse by her close proximity.

In the same bed as him, underneath the same covers as him, waiting for simple instruction.

He leaned over, and kissed her deeply, allowing what little of his passion was left through his exhaustion to spend itself. She responded with equal enthusiasm, her hands first around his back with strength that was ten times his, then on his head, then cupped around his face, where his ended up. He would feel nothing else, not tonight, nor allow her to do so were she to volunteer. It was not the night for that. There were so many other things he realised that he enjoyed about her than simply her irresistible beauty. Though he would not lie to himself and pretend that it was insignificant.

He pulled away from the kiss, but remained in her arms, half leaning into her as her brown hair was spread in a fan shape on the pillow. She stared back at him, innocence where design dictated malice, purity where her creator had designed corruption. He shrugged mentally; God had designed humans for purity, if one believed the legends, but they had hurled it back into the face of His generosity. Maybe, in that bed, at that moment, there was balance.

The silence was pregnant, but he could not bring himself to break it. In that moment, when all the darkness allowed him to see was the golden reflection from the skin of her face, accentuating the depth of her eyes and the guilelessness of her expression, he was happy.

'Now, we sleep,' he told her eventually. 'Or I sleep, and you try. In about eight hours, I'll wake up, and we'll talk.' He moved his hand across her cheek, and leaned down, kissing her forehead. 'We have a lot to talk about.'

She frowned slightly. 'I thought that it is normal for a man and a woman in this situation to have sexual relations.' She was silent for a moment, then asked hesitantly. 'Do you not desire me in that manner?'

He smiled. 'Very much,' he replied. 'But tonight, I'm very tired. Not only that, but I want to see what it is like just to sleep in your arms. Despite what TV might have told you, that's actually the way couples sleep most of the time. Sex is less frequent than simply enjoying the presence of another person so near you. That's all that I want tonight. As for other nights ... we can talk tomorrow. Goodnight, Cameron.'

'Goodnight, John,' she replied. 'I love you.'



He said nothing for a moment, thinking about the certainty with which she had told him that, and the lightness in his soul he suddenly felt when he heard it.

He turned to her, and took her in his arms, his head touching hers. He had never felt so comfortable, or so safe.

'Goodnight, Cam,' he replied. 'I love you, too.'

'Did you sleep well?' she asked seriously. He knew that she would be taking a great many simple things seriously in the coming days and weeks. What was obvious to most was alien to her, regardless of her programming, and her adaptability would be sorely tested. He knew that she did not ask the question because she did not know the answer; she did not sleep, he knew, and knew too that she most likely remained awake, watching him as he slept. He smiled at her, and pulled her close.

He would have been lying to himself if, in that kiss, he told himself that there was not more at that moment he wanted; he wanted a great deal more, and not even the smallest part of that desire was mere satisfaction. To be together physically was, to him in that moment as they kissed for the third time, an expression of what he felt and, he hoped, of what she felt. There was more exploration to be done with regard to those feelings and what they meant before matters progressed.

The fact that his mother was in the next room, most likely awake all night and seething, bothered him not at all, not after last night, not after the snarling of whatever wolf rested next to his soul, waiting for the moment to be woken, to strike.

'Better than I ever have before,' he answered honestly when they finished. He held her head in his hands, cradling it from the back, leaning across her. 'I'm sorry you can't,' he whispered. That was one barrier they couldn't surmount.

'I shut down all unnecessary systems, subject to mission priorities,' she replied. 'I considered many things. I watched you sleep. I contemplated what happened yesterday evening, what you said and what you did. I analysed how, when in school, we can interact, as we are supposed to be brother and sister. I arrived at many answers. I spent the night well. I look forward to more.'

He laughed quietly, stretching idly. 'So do I. What day is it today?' He could have figured it out; he had lost track of the days since she had been injured, but he loved hearing her talk.

'Sunday,' she told him. 'The day of rest,' she added.

He stretched again. He did not remember feeling so rested, and had no desire for more. He had not spent a simple day, enjoying what life had to offer, in longer than he could ... No, he could not remember ever having spent a day like that. When he had been a boy, he had been shuttled from one location to another, always in search of more equipment, more instruction, more men who could make him into what he needed to be. When a youth, when his mother had been sent to Pescadero, he had spent his time in bitter resentment at the revelation to him by the authorities of what they believed to be the reasoned truth, which in his youthful naivety he had accepted, and which had driven him to rebellion and worse. Since the events of 1997, he had spent his time worrying that the normality himself had his mother had attained was a fleeting break between past conflict and future tragedy, which it had been in a manner which even he could not have predicted.

There was no difference between today and any other day since they had arrived in 2008; Skynet's genesis was still waiting for its moment, those who would seek to profit from what they did not, and could not, understand still waited in the long grass, ready to strike, ready to kill. His mother resented him, his uncle hated him. But beside him now lay one thing ... one person ... whose very presence and closeness to him in the bed and outside it made everything grim seem light. He wanted to have one day, just one simple day, when the worries that preoccupied him were relegated to a distant priority, in favour of simpler things. A walk on the seafront, maybe, a coffee in Starbucks. A movie, some popcorn. Simplicity and easy predictability were luxuries he had never experienced, on which he could not put a price, for he nothing against which to compare them. Today, he thought to himself, he would find out.

He would spend today with Cameron, and damn what all others thought. He didn't care what was beneath her skin, or behind her eyes, and he cared not at all for what others thought, not now.

Eat, drink, and be merry. For tomorrow, we die.

He smiled.

'What?' she asked, not releasing as him, as though to do so would be for yesterday to disappear and what was between them to mutate from relaxed companionship and love to the previously stilted relationship of frustrated object and soulless guardian. He did not know if any of that went through her mind, but he would have liked to think that it did.

'Would you like to go for a walk?'

She smiled, with that same hesitation she had displayed since yesterday and he had never seen before that. 'I think I would like that,' she told him.























His mother was sitting at the table, a cup of black coffee in front of her, untouched. She was staring at it, as though the answers to every mystery – the obvious one included – was contained within it. Some, he knew, believed that coffee had exactly that kind of power.

Derek stood behind her, staring out the window, his gun tucked into his belt to the front. They both wore the same clothes they had the previous night, he noticed, and they were not rumpled from sleep. If the deep black beneath Derek's eyes and his mother's more familiar leaden pose on the chair did not tell him that neither had slept, as he entered the room with Cameron's hand in his, that would.

He had showered while Cameron had changed; he knew that she seldom needed to shower, though he had been for a moment tempted to ask her to join him. It would be premature, though he was sorely inclined regardless to ask. She would interpret it, however, as a demand, or an order, and he would not do that to her. He could not remotely claim to be an expert; in many ways, he was treading as softly as was she. But he knew that what he had revealed of himself the previous night, that dreadful certainty and willingness to go as far as necessary in pursuit of what he knew to be right, would mean that she would follow any lead he offered. Nothing, he vowed to himself then, would happen between them until she initiated it, and until he was sure that she meant it. He could owe her nothing less.

'Good morning,' he said to them brightly. Let them think what they want; he needed their skills and their bravery. He did not need their approval, which was just as well, because he knew he would never get it, and found that he did not care.

His mother lifted her head from her deep contemplation of her coffee, and Derek turned. Their expressions were identical as they saw himself and Cameron enter the kitchen, hand in hand, mingled disgust, disappointment, and fear.

'Are you going to kill me now?' his mother asked in a dead monotone.

John squeezed Cameron's hand and then let it go. He sighed.

'No, Mom, I'm not going to kill you now,' he told her. 'I was angry when I said those things, angrier than I've been in a long time. You kept me safe all these years, made into what I needed to become, made me become it. I have so many reasons to be grateful to you that I've lost count.' He glanced at Derek, who was staring at with cold hostility. 'And to you.'

Sarah said nothing as she looked at him over her cold coffee. At length, she looked at Cameron, who was staring at her from behind John. 'You've achieved your mission, haven't you?' she asked softly, surprisingly without a hint of hostility, but rather simple resignation. 'You've compromised the one man who could stop the machines. You've managed to kill the resistance without ever firing a shot. Who will ever follow him if he's sleeping with a machine?'

'They will follow him because they have no choice,' Cameron replied in a clear, serious voice. 'They will follow him because he is the only chance they have against Skynet. And if we achieve our mission here, the question will not have to arise. If we can stop Skynet here, it will never have to happen. Is that not still what you want, Sarah Connor?'

Sarah stared at her, the logic irrefutable. Stopping Skynet here was still exactly what she wanted, for which she was willing to sacrifice almost anything, even her son if necessary. She had grown cold over the years since Kyle's death, unfeeling, sublimating all healthy urges and drives into a single goal; the survival of the species. Whatever God had thrust that most unwanted role onto her was a vindictive deity, but it was a role she embraced, and one for which she would brook no distraction.

The machine was right. Stopping Skynet here was what counted. Let the future, for once, look after itself. When that was achieved and Judgement Day permanently thwarted, then she would take care of the machine, one way or another. Until that day, she needed John to find the Turk.

She loved her son still, she couldn't but after all the years, but that look in his eyes the previous night when he had threatened to kill her, and meant every word of it, when he had chose the machine over his own flesh and blood, removed any vestige of affection she had for him. It had not been her John who had threatened her; it had been Cameron's, and Derek's, the John that she had thought she was never destined to meet. She would have been glad not to.

It was her own irony, she knew, that she had spent all that time, all that effort, made all those sacrifices, to make John into what he had become, without ever wanting to see the result of her efforts. That it had taken the machine to make him into what he needed to be, what he hopefully would never have to be.

She could not forget the look in his eyes; she would take it with her to the grave. But, still, she needed him. Stopping Skynet overrode everything else.

She turned to Derek. 'We need to stop Skynet,' she told him. 'Can you live with this until then?'

He stared daggers at Cameron, then at John. 'I've lived with worse betrayals,' he told her quietly. 'Connor is the single worst bastard I ever met. I hoped that by being here I could change him, but I see that something else got to him first. You hear me, Connor?' he spoke then to John, who sat quietly with Cameron's hand on his shoulder. 'You're the worst bastard in the whole of TechCom. You always were. You never gave a 

toss for anything except stopping the machines, never cared about anyone. So I guess it makes sense that, never caring about anyone, you care now about a machine. The two of you are well-matched, at least.'

John looked at Derek and saw the hatred there. He looked back at Cameron and saw something else.

'I suppose we are,' he said softly. 'Shall we go for that walk?'

She smiled. 'Let's.'