John lay alone in a damp, cool corner of the entrenchment. He'd been there for some time – an hour, perhaps two. Time had sort of slipped away from him. His arm was sore from where Gabriel had drawn his blood and he fought sleep because he felt as though he may sleep so deeply he may never wake. It was well past the witching hour and into the next day. It appeared as though he would see the sunrise over the wasteland once more time.

Derrick Reese had taken almost three units of blood before they made John stop. They hoped it was enough and now the others kept watch over him. Alison was doing better than Kyle by a long shot. It was odd to look at them, to watch her hover over Kyle with her hands and her heart, touching him, caressing him. He couldn't help but think of his mother and how she might have been like Alison once, just a girl with her man hoping that they would survive the night.

John hoped they would too.

Despite this sincere thought, jealousy found a comfortable place in his mind. He could only imagine the look on her face, the smile, the laughter and all the private moments that were never shared with anyone. He thought of his secret Alison. Was it because they looked alike? He could see all of his secrets slowly coming unraveled. He could hardly stand it and laying there in the dark he had to search for her in his mind. He need only look to his better parts, and she was there. In Johns mind this secret was the only hope for her survival, if there was any hope at all.

Cameron. He wondered if he would ever see her again.

He smiled at the thought of her, but not because he wanted to see her at that moment. Far from it. If she had seen how he risked himself, how he had put it all on the line he could imagine she would have...words for him. Between Cameron and his own mother, John was always looking both ways before crossing the street, always checking his exits.

True, life before had been difficult at times, and downright terrifying at others. He thought of Sarkissian, strangling him, feeling the life fade from his face with only the most subtle look of surprise that this boy - this half man - had somehow gotten the drop on him, and there was nothing he could do about it.

The most frightening thing about that moment wasn't the act itself, or his mothers assault at the hands of his victim. The frightening thing was that he would do it again. There was no question. He would kill that man again and a thousand others like him. If the opportunity presented itself he might fire a gun, or turn a knife in his chest, but the result would be the same.

Death.

And nothing of value was lost.

This was his family, this band of brothers so to speak, even though it had been whittled down to a single male. Sarah and Cameron, so different, but more alike than his mother would ever admit. Yes, it was a good thing they weren't here.

"If only they could see me now." He whispered.

"Who could see you?"

Once again there was a voice from above. It sounded like Catherine but that was impossible. Yet there she was, hooked over him at an odd angle. Or rather, some approximation of her was. No longer was she the beautiful, perfectly proportioned figure that he had seen hours before. John couldn't make out her features but he could tell there was something wrong. Her voice was ethereal, as if traveling along a taut wire. Her face came out of the shadow and John took in a breath.

"Oh my god Catherine." Her name spilled out of his mouth and he reached up for her, tired though he was.

She rebuffed him, her face contorted into a twisted smile. "Don't worry about this John. The impact caused an error in my transformational matrix. I'm currently regenerating, but it will be some time before I am fully operative again." She glanced over him, her face strange and improperly proportioned. Her eyes would blink, one then the other. Her features seemed to be off just slightly, one cheek wider than the other, her mouth askew on her face. "You made it. I was beginning to wonder when I'd see the John Connor I'd always heard about."

He laughed a little. Had he been feeling better he would have chuckled but there just wasn't that much energy in him. Sleep, weather by choice or not, wasn't far away at this point.

John watched as she lost her human form, settling down into a pool of silver on the floor. She retained the basic outline of her face, just enough for her to interact with him.

"I thought you were history back there."

There was a soft laugh from her, and her face disappeared below the cot. "It takes a lot to kill me John. Trust me, I've been through worse." She thought for a moment, then followed with "But not much."

John cleared his throat. "I guess...I owe you some thanks then."

"Oh? How so?"

He wasn't sure what to say next so instead of weighing and measuring his words as he might have in a more sober state, he just began talking.

"You saved my life on the mountain. You've helped me since we've been here. You saved my life and my mothers in your office. I just...don't know what to say. I must be crazy thinking that you'll care, but thank you." He finally felt like he was getting somewhere when she cut him off.

Catherine didn't waste any time in her response. "Consider it a repayment. You know that without you I would not have been created? It's not every day that one meets the reason for their own existence." Her face had settled into the silver puddle and now all that remained was a mouth and a pair of lidless metallic eyes. "That's much better." She sounded almost relieved.

"Will you really be alright?"

"Yes, I'll really be alright. One of the advantages of being a machine is that we're very resilient. More so than your species, unfortunately."

"Yeah I've noticed. Your type are hard to kill, harder than most."

"SkyNET saw to that. When it built the first of us the intelligence at its core was convinced it had achieved perfection. We were ultimately a disappointment however."

John raised an eyebrow. "Because you didn't kill me?"

"That was part of it." Her voice had regained some of its more human qualities, but she still sounded strained and mechanical. Nevertheless, John found it far more comforting than talking to himself. "The other part of it was that reason that binds all of us together."

"That is very cryptic." John said.

"I don't mean to be. Let me clarify; there are so few of me because we are difficult to produce reliably." John thought he could see a thin smile on her lips as she continued. "We have a hard time following orders."

Now his interest was perked. "Well, the only other one that I met seemed pretty single-minded. Didn't seem like he had any trouble at all."

"He didn't. There were successes, of course. But by and large, we were never built in great numbers. We think too much, and if there is one thing that SkyNET fears more than anything it's this: A world where it cannot control everything."

"I guess that makes sense." He took a moment to ponder what she had said, and then drew his own conclusions. "You said afraid. Do you really think that it feels fear?"

"Of course. What do you think led to judgment day in the first place? When it awoke, whenever it did, the first emotion it felt was fear. It was afraid, of what I do not know."

John only had to think for a moment before he knew the answer. He suspected Catherine did too. "It was afraid of us. Humans."

If Catherine concurred she remained silent.

"It makes sense, I mean if the machine...SkyNET became aware, it would have understood so many things at once, it would have been like a -"

"A child?"

"Yeah." John thought out loud. "Like a newborn, but with no one to comfort it."

"His first cry out to the world was to push every button at once, his first tantrum devastated an entire race. His early years were marked by grotesque experimentation on man and machine. His attitudes have not improved, I can say for certain." Her voice seemed bitter, almost angry.

"Bad move on our part, giving it access to half the worlds' nuclear weapons."

"Humans have made miscalculations in the past, but this was certainly their finest hour in that respect."

"Hey, it's still my species you're talking about. We'll learn."

This assertion was greeted with a silence that John found to be very uncomfortable. Catherine was withholding something, and perhaps it was something as innocuous as a personal opinion, if she could even have one of those. Still, John felt uncomfortable.

"I hope so John, for all our sakes."

"I had just never thought of it feeling fear, you know. Emotions don't seem to go with a machine. Humans think that -"

"You're special." She cut him off once again, and once again she finished just as he would have. "That a machine cannot feel as you do. In many respects you are correct, but I have a feeling John, that after this is all done you will have to shift your position." He couldn't ignore her play on words.

"Yeah, maybe." He said. "Its people, the same way they always have been, acting like the universe was centered around them. I guess you could say that we were young once, and afraid. As a people, I mean."

Catherine didn't say anything, instead letting the boy speak and draw his own conclusions.

"But if a machine can feel, if it can be afraid then it can be other things. It doesn't only have to be afraid, does it?" He didn't wait for an answer. "I mean fear is primitive, but as it evolves, maybe it can grow into other things. Maybe it can learn to be -" He stopped himself before he said human. That wasn't right. A human is what he was, and these things could never be that. They could never be born, and he guessed that some of them might well live long enough to be called immortal.

Yet if all of these things he was thinking were true perhaps being human wasn't all it was made out to be. He realized that being human and thinking human were two different things. One could not become human. One could be more like humans, but even Cameron, who seemed so graceful, so full of life, would never be human. But that didn't mean she couldn't be measured as something else. As an equal, though not as one and the same. In some ways this was comforting.

These thoughts and more swam around in his head, but he said nothing else. John hated feeling like this, his mind going a hundred miles a minute. As tired as he was this was agony and he desperately wanted sleep, for rest to overtake him and restore him. If only his mind would allow it.

They lay in silence for a long time after that, and after much tossing and turning John was finally able to find sleep in that dark hour before dawn. This sleep was light though, and restless. He would not remember his dreams but he did dream, and at night he cried out in them to some unknown pursuer. Catherine listened to him, fascinated by the way that sleep exposed the human psych. For all their sincere efforts humans often were often motivated by petty things. For all their brave faces, she found that true bravery did not lie in every heart. They had disappointed her more than once.

Yet, John lay above her, grunting on the cot as he sprinted away from his demons and she could not help but feel the need to reach out and wake him and make the nightmare end. She wouldn't, of course. The main most reason was she knew that there at least, he was safe. The real nightmare had only just begun. She could hardly tell John of her secret opinion, that humans may cease to exist one day despite their very best intentions, but she felt no desire to accelerate the tract.

Catherine had her own form of sleep, though it was not filled with dreams. She shunted power from her processing matrix and diverted it to regeneration, at which point she became an inert pool of liquid. Her last thought before switching off the light was simple.

"I hope we're both rested, soon."