Disclaimer: See part 1

Note: I had a lot of trouble establishing a voice that rang true for this timeline's Derek thus this part may get taken down, scrambled and posted again.

The road was wide and open, vanishing ahead in the bright sunlight like a first attempt at perspective drawing. The truck was old but it had a new car smell, at least, Derek thought it did. He could smell the earthy tang of leather that came off the steering wheel, worn to fit the palms of the truck's former, legal, owner. There was a piney smell about the truck too, like maybe the guy who owned it had been in the habit of hauling around woodchips. There were food stains here and there and water damage to the floor mats. The cabin smelled like someone else's life. He could say the same for himself.

"What are my orders, sir?" Derek had asked two weeks ago, in the future.

"Teach me what you know. Try to keep me safe."

"That's all, sir?" He asked of the man who was more than ten years his junior.

"Protect my mother. Protect Sarah. I'm not sending you to me, I'll already have someone watching out for me, I'm sending you to her." Connor drew a breath. "You take your orders from her. It won't be easy. She's spent her life preparing for a war she knows almost nothing about. She has her own way of doing things. Help her, tell her what you know but whatever she asks of you, you do it Reese."

"Yes, sir."

"Whatever she asks, Reese."

"Derek," The boy, John Connor, finally spoke. "What are you…doing...?"

"Doing here?" Derek finished for John who seemed to have been struggling over one combination of words or the other for the past three miles.

"Uh…yeah?" John said and Derek heard the years falling off the familiar voice. "I was gonna say 'alive' but yeah…here."

John Connor hadn't been the first person to tell him he was a dead man. "You sent me. Almost twenty years from now. You sent me back to-"

"To wait for me and my mom and keep us safe until Judgment Day." John had been staring at him with a kind of furious intensity like figuring him out might be a matter of perseverance and strategy. But now the boy looked away, out at the passing North American landscape. "Yeah we did that part already. You died."

"So I've been told."

Sarah Connor had told him a few days ago. There had been so many things in his conversation with Connor's mother to distract him from the task at hand not the least of which was the fact that the living legend before him knew him as a ghost. She knew him and she seemed to know a shadow of his brother as well, a shadow cast by the light of a past that never happened.

Then Ellison had waited for him outside of L.A. County Detention center to tell him again. Derek might not know James Ellison but he knew men like him, men who saw miracles because they looked for them, men who tried to fit life between the pages of a holy book. The part of Lazarus was not one Derek was ready to play. He wasn't resurrected. He hadn't been reborn. For the first time in years his mouth didn't taste like ashes. He didn't feel like he was back from the dead, he felt like the world was.

Still, Ellison's faith might help them. It might cause the hesitation in a trigger finger that meant life. "What's that verse in the Bible? God tells some king he's got plans for him…?"

Ellison gripped the wheel, his face unreadable. Maybe he'd buy in, maybe he'd call Derek's bluff. Finally he spoke, " 'I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for peace and not for evil, to give you hope and a future.'"

"Yeah," Derek said. "That's the one."

"It's from a letter to the exiled people of Jerusalem from the prophet Jeremiah."

"That verse," Derek replied, "it doesn't say what God's plans are right? It just says they're for something better."

Ellison nodded.

"Well maybe God never knew either then, because the world I'm from is fucked. But John Connor has a plan." Whatever she asks, you do it Reese.

"John Connor?" The name sounded familiar coming out of Ellison's mouth. "And what is John Connor's plan."

"Me."

"You? Isn't the boy supposed to 'save the world'?" For as much as he thumped a Bible James Ellison talked about salvation of the world with a heavy note of skepticism. "What's a man like you gonna do for John Connor?"

I'm going to scare him. I'm going to train him. I'm going to make him just like me.

Derek could see John's head snap back out of the corner of his eye and that was all it took to bring him to the present. "My mom? You talked to her? What'd she say?"

Derek paused. The John Connor he knew was quicksilver tempered cold logic. He tried to remember the kid he'd known once, the one he'd met that day in a section of collapsing tunnel. The boy who'd fallen from the sky but neglected to crush the witch.

A week ago he would have been unable to remember what that John looked like but now he, John the boy, sat in the seat next to him. "She agreed with you. She wants you safe and nowhere near her or that prison."

"If you know me in the future you should know I don't give a damn about what anyone wants."

John had taken a risk there and they both knew it. John had never met his future self but Derek was starting to think that kid must've run across a few people that had. He'd made an eerily accurate prediction of who he would be, except.... "I met you in another life, John, but even then you worshipped Sarah Connor." Even now the name made the hair on the back of his neck prickle. Men prayed her name into the dark and hurtled it through the air with their bullets and grenades.

"Worshipped?" It lingered on their lips as they lay dying, memories of their own mothers long since faded.

"Yeah, worshipped. My brother learned that from you. We all learned that from you. You give a hell of a lot more than a damn."

"She's my mother," John said but his voice was a little less steady, it clung to the argument a little more desperately. "They think she killed people. They think she kidnapped Savannah Weaver. She…."

"She's Sarah Connor. She'll take care of herself." Derek said and wondered how long it would be before John tried to run. Derek had come across dozens of kids in the tunnels, orphans of the bombs or the starvation and sickness that followed. The resistance fighters started calling them the Lost Boys. Kids would turn up, silent, half-feral, their memories chased away by years of terror. The fighters would call them Peter Pan , John, Michael, Wendy Darling because if the kids had names of their own they'd forgotten them long ago. They ate, they slept, and then they ran.

But this kid was different. He might look like another John Darling but the bombs hadn't dropped yet and if he broke before the war did, they were finished. "We'll lay low for a few days," Derek said. "Your mug is still showing up on the evening news now and then. If those border cops catch it they might put two and two together but they won't guess where you're going next."

"And where's that?" John said in a clipped tone.

"Yosemite." Derek said. "Not a lot of people watching TV there."

John sat in an angry, brooding silence. He didn't speak for hours, didn't fiddle with the radio dial, didn't move at all. The only person Derek had seen match John stubborn glower was a ten-year-old Kyle, angry about being left behind while his brother went to war. If the passing landscape hadn't been so utterly different from the scorched earth and rank tunnels Derek might have forgotten who sat beside him.

But as things were, Derek barely noticed the sullen boy. His mind was trying to run through lists of contacts, and safe houses, and leads, but the blue of the sky kept trying to swallow him up. He'd convinced himself, in the years after Judgment, that the world couldn't have been like he remembered. The pictures he had in his head must be postcard images of a duller world. They were retouched by nostalgia, made Technicolor by longing.

He'd been wrong. The Washington sky was cloudless and deepest blue. Derek looked at it and thought he must have spent the last fifteen years condensing the rainbow between charcoal gray and mud brown.

Then, without provocation, John spoke. "So I guess you didn't come back with any messages or anything, huh? Like, 'John Connor, whatever you do, don't cut the red wire.'"

Derek laughed then thought of the words that would be cut into rocks, into sheet metal, into the earth itself. Fighters would trace them over and over again, deepening the letters with sharp bits of metal and sympathy. Alone. Abandoned. Forsaken. Derek shook his head.

When the silence was broken again, Derek did it himself. "What's with Toto?" He said, jerking his head toward the expressionless face of the machine visible in the rear view mirror. Those eyes had known him twice before. Once when he had been someone else and once when she had been. "You know those things will follow you around for months and then one day just turn and rip your throat out."

&&&

Everything here worked. Everyone here was alive. Derek sat in the cabin in the woods, cleaning the guns and listening for explosions but he only heard the rustle and creak of trees in the wind.

"We need to get moving. She doesn't have a lot of time." Four days in the middle of nowhere didn't seem to have softened John's resolve in the slightest. Try to keep me safe, Connor had said. Here John Connor wasn't the General yet. Here he was a living boy with a dying mother.

"You're mom killed people." Derek said. "They'll want to give her the needle. That takes years." He looked down a barrel to check the sight. "As long as you don't do it in Texas."

"She doesn't have years," The machine, 'Cameron' John called it, put in. Derek didn't like metal as a rule. I'll already have someone watching out for me.

"She's sick," John said grudgingly and he saw Kyle once again, fighting back tears as the world burned around him.

"I know." Derek said. He lead men future, ordered them toward their deaths or next battle, whichever came first. Part of that was knowing what drove them, knowing why each and every one of his soldiers was willing to die. If a man had a strong enough conviction, he couldn't be dissuaded from action but he could be directed. Whatever she asks of you, you do it. There was no mistaking Sarah Connor's intentions as she prayed for a son that wasn't dead. Whatever she asks.

But the first order had been to keep John safe and to do that Derek would have to keep him.

John tried to speak but Derek cut him off. "She doesn't want you anywhere near that prison. So you won't be."