They were all there, all of them. When it was quiet or when John was tired, when there was a lull in the day, he thought of them. He thought of all the people that died for John Connor, one way or the other. "We all die for you." That's what Derek said once. Someone might become numb to it as they got older, used to death around them. But John never forgot a face. Had he told them that, would they understand? Would they be at rest with the knowledge they weren't cogs in destiny's machine?

Somehow John doubted it.

Like a pack of wolves they circled. They were the faces of the past, the people that guilt kept alive in his subconscious. Todd, Janelle, Jordon, and … Derek, they all haunted him in the still of a quiet night. All the while his head was rushing with the adrenaline. He couldn't keep a thought in place. His mind felt like they were swept into a twister, spinning and turning. Transporting all of what made him John Connor to an OZ of terror and fear that numbed his body and slowed his movements.

"Kill him!"

The first to lunge was Janelle, blood dripping from her hanging intestines. Her fist connected with John's jaw, sending him reeling. He didn't get a chance to recover, when a heel jammed him in the small of the back. John had been sent backward by Janelle only to be struck by her husband like an ultra-violent volleyball serve. The youth had tried to put up some sort of threadbare defense in an overly anxious mind. But as he was ready to deflect Janelle's next strike, Derek's black, frost bitten fist hardened by ice struck John on the side of the face. His nephew grunted in pain, distracted enough for Janelle to land the blow that John had been anticipating. Todd moved out of the way as John lost his footing and fell to the stone floor. He turned on his side to protect himself, but was kicked with a white shoe laced with school spirit ribbons in the gut. Jordon Cowen had her usual miss bitch face that he always seen the cheerleader with.

He realized more than anything that he had to get his head right. There had to be something he could do to get control of what was going on in his mind. He took stock of the fact that other than the rushing images of everything he ever feared, pain was the only thing that was more powerful than the anxiety.

So he began using the pain to distract himself from the images in his mind. The stinging of his sore face, the burning in his gut was like hitting the breaks on a speeding automobile just before hitting reverse. John got enough control of his body to jam one of his feet under the knee of Jordon's raised leg ready to stomp him and used his other to sweep her planted one. He could feel the hard thump of the cheerleader when she hit the ground.

When the rest of the ghosts of his past saw that he fought back, they retreated. It was enough time for John to find his feet, crouching in the imperfect perimeter they had him in. But the victory was small as he felt his mind slowly begin to speed up again, feeling the hesitation of fear when he looked into his uncle's frozen eyes. The pain was fading and he needed something to spark a new emotion.

If fear led to anger in the emotional wheel, then he needed something to spark the flame inside of him. He looked from face to face, and all he had felt was guilt, till something miniscule flashed in his mind when he saw Todd. It had been a conversation that he was never supposed to hear.

"Damn it Janelle, why do you always bring home these damn kids, They're not goddamn strays you know."

"Shut up, Todd … John's a good kid, he's just a little confused."

"What, was he raised by wolves?"

"No, by a crazy woman."

"Like those people in Waco?"

"I guess …"

"Wow Mama … is that her?"

"That's his mother, when she was a girl."

"Lucky kid."

"Todd, we have no idea what she put him through!"

"So a beautiful woman got naked and diddled him or whatever … worst things have happened."

"You're an Asshole!"

"Shut up …"

"Put that back! It's John's!"

"What … you're the one saying that she did something bad to the kid. Plus if you're not putting out, why not keep it around so at least I can imagine someone naked and bent over the bed ..."

THUNK!

John pushed off like a spring from his crouched position and landed a vicious upper cut that snapped Todd's head up. John's inside was on fire, more of a fire than he was expecting as the pain and the anger was like a spark in a gas warehouse. Todd was being back down as John pushed him out of the perimeter, landing heavy angry punches to the thin man's face each step he took. When John laid off the man fell to the floor and didn't get up again.

The anger in John's heart could be contained, adrenaline rushed through his body at dangerous levels of a wild animal with the scent of blood. He rushed forward and slammed a cement fist right into his uncle's face, ever hearing him second guess everything John ever did. Watching Derek go down, he felt someone jump on his back, a strong forearm around his neck. His former foster mother's attempts to stop John were in vein as he sent a strong upper kick straight into a charging Jordan's chin, knocking her out for the count.

From the corner of his eye he saw his uncle recovering. He gave a tight spin, using Janelle's untethered legs to whip Derek across the face. Within the whirl he got ahold of Janelle and used his momentum to Judo throw her. She landed with a splintering crash into the Voodoo alter. He took a moment to observe the four unmoving bodies around him and took a deep ragged breath.

Suddenly there was a sharp pain in his head that nearly brought him to his knees. It would seem the surge of anger wasn't intended from whatever it was that was working through his system. Now the two emotions were fighting total war through his body, like two tectonic plates gridding against one another savagely. His vision blurred and shimmered, the ground became uneven.

CLANK!

Something metal and hard hit him across the face sending him back. But with the uneven ground and blurring sight he fell to the floor, bracing against his hands. The shadow from before loomed, armed with the same cane in hand. The metal staff had a glowing orb of dark blue mist inside, the longer John looked into it, the more violent the mental earthquake was in his mind.

"You weren't supposed to do that."

The voice was so familiar that it caused the hair on the back of John's neck to stand up. A deep sinking sorrow filled him. It felt like there was a heavy weight on his heart that was dragging it into the depths of his torso. Yet a part of him still burned with the taste of battle, feeling unresolved like a nagging through the pain in his head.

John balled his shaking hand into a fist and brought it down hard on the stone floor. He felt something crack in his hand and the explosion of pain shock everything into silence. The rush of excruciation gave him a window of clarity to find his feet and charged forward to strike.

But his heels grinded to a halt in an impromptu brake when he came eye to eye with the one face that hurt him more than anything. Her little satin party dress was tattered, exposing matching underwear. The sight of his opponent's flawless porcelain skin, which was always as tough as iron, was now pale and lifeless. Her body had an icy blue tint and little veins of icy blue liquid running into her terrifying and yet sorrowfully beautiful face. Her unblinking dead eyes were drawn on him, hard and ashamed, encased in sheet of ice. Icicles clung to a long mane of her raven curls that spilled out of a top hat.

"Mom …" John breathed in fear.

Sarah Connor lifted her cane, and shoved it in her son's face. The feeling of the orb right in front of him was like his head being on the other end of attached jumper cables. He growled in pain and folded like a lawn chair. He fought to keep pride and not crawl into a fettle position.

"Mom!" He begged like a small child as the rod followed him to the floor. He held his head feeling like it was on fire. Yet Sarah only stared, her stoic face turning into a grin of yellow neon in the dark. She lifted her cane overhead and began to beat her child with it.

Forehand, Backhand, Forehand, and backhand. She hit him over and over again a pronounced anger in each swing. She only stopped when John was bleeding from his mouth and ear. Breathing heavily she took a big step forward and delivered a kick to John's torso sending him rolling across the platform. He stopped just at the edge, an arm dangling. His frost bit hand dipped in the running stream of cool water of the Catacombs.

When John turned his head and saw how angry Sarah was, he coughed. "I'm sorry." He said so minimally that she probably couldn't hear him. "I tried too … I really tried to save you." His eyes filled with tears. "Please, let me save you … please, mom, give me another chance." He pleaded sadly.

CRACK!

There was a loud gunshot that echoed through the hallow cavern that knocked off Sarah's top hat. Turning she saw a stiff statuesque shadow standing at an entrance of a Catacomb. There was a second shot of a familiar .45 that whizzed over her shoulder and prompting her to run.

"No!" John muttered seeing the satin skirt twirl away from him. "Mom, come back!" He didn't have the strength for his feet though he tried. Sarah only turned once to his voice. When her eyes found him her lips formed the cruelest of smug grins, before she disappeared into the dark. A bullet ricochet followed her exit smashing an old skull embedded in the wall.

He pushed himself across the floor in pursuit of her. "I'll try harder … I promise!" He sobbed as gentle arms wrapped around him, turning him over to cradle. The soft smell of roses and sweet pea filled his nostrils as a single bloody tear fell.

"I promise."

The moonlight gleamed with a milky pale hue as the darkness resided into the corners of ramshackle buildings and scorched stone of a once easy going community. A city as old as it was mysterious, the center of a cultural fascination, a town as loud and attention getting as the entertainment it provided both on stages and theaters as in headlines.

Like a mistress's caress, the snow fell gentle and unfamiliarly on the dark streets of Los Angeles. The ruins of its glint and glamour of a long lost civilization jutting out in the background, a mocking memory of what this part of town used to be, before the bombs fell, before the Pescadero breakout, before the madness had been unleashed on the City. The blood used to be well covered by the glimmer of movie stars and celebrity, now flowed up from the gutters and into the vision of god's eyes. The area that was as familiar to tourists as to locals was now housing to the dregs of a once great society, the psychopaths and killers.

As soft as a shadow, combat boots raced over scorched and broken pavement down a secluded street. A hooded young man armed with his mother's tactical shotgun ducked behind a cut down palm tree. In front of him he had no clue that a long forgotten club abandoned and in ruins long before it ingested a grenade, held the keys to his origin. Emerald eyes scanned the area, the flecks of frozen precipitation clung to his vintage leather coat and resistance fatigues as a dementia patient held on to their wedding day, tight, but dissolving quickly.

Everything was still, quiet … he looked to the Tech Noir sign, but it didn't respond to his silent query. Where was his enemy, are they watching him? It was on his brain, in his senses, dulled by the cold, and yet enhanced by the need to find the girl his faceless challenger held captive. For a moment, unknown why to the young hero, but he felt a kinship to a ghost of the past, walking into the ruins of a nightclub. Armed with a shotgun, there to rescue someone, someone important … someone he loved.

He gritted his teeth with a long breath and kicked the double doors. They flew open with a crash, one falling off to the floor, the other warping and slumping in restraint like a hang nail. The Club, it smelled of stale alcohol and neglect. The tables were empty, dusty, overturned from an explosion, or a firefight that happened long ago. A rusting chain linked fence stood guard. It funneled new costumers down a narrow path between fence and wall, leading out to a booth riddled with nine millimeter bullet holes from a submachine gun.

Boots crackled against unrefurbished black and white checkered tile. The teen held his gun in a ready position, sweeping the area. He stopped at the silhouette entering his sightline. A slender female shadow lay splayed on a table of great significance, that he had no idea related to him.

Closer and closer he got to her, slowly lowering his guard till his person of interest was illuminated by a sliver of moonlight that found its way through a scorched sun roof. It was pierced by the ricochet of a missed shotgun blast, from a soldier pinned behind the bar during a duel with unstoppable killing machine.

She was the most horrific thing he ever saw and yet her beauty was angelic. A face of half metal, half flesh, one eye a haunting Carmel, the other a camera lens of blue. Her hair in perfect ringlets, but on the other side was shined chrome. She wore a silk sundress he had given her, it was perfect fit to her dancers body and yet a strange mockery of this creation of death.

"Which side?" her voice was strangely innocent as she lay flat on the table in a funeral pose, hands clasped on her stomach.

What …?" The boy asked.

"Which side do you embrace?" She asked again, her mouth unmoving.

He drew down his hood out of some strange respect as he approached her, his features just out of the light. "I don't know …" He responded. "Is there a right answer?" he replied with his own question.

"Is there?"

"You're neither …" He protested, finding himself suddenly angry that he came all this way, and she was now forcing him to face the questions he had been avoiding. Was she a girl or a machine … was what he felt real or was it fake?

"It doesn't matter …"

"It does."

"No … it doesn't."

He took a step toward her, aggressively, passionately. "It does … you matter to me." He protested. "I … I don't know what it is, but I … I can't let you go." He responded.

"You're going to have to learn too." She whispered.

"Why?"

The girl wordlessly turned her head, her face visible, along with the hole in her head, where her chip used to be. "Because I'm dead." Her voice sounded strangely melancholy, not for herself, but for him.

His weapon clanked when he dropped it. His heart sank, he felt numb, he couldn't move, couldn't think. Someone grabbed his shoulders and he threw them off. "No … NO!" He fell to his knees. A tear fell from his eye. "That's impossible … I …I" He couldn't find words, kneeling as if by an alter that her body was displayed on.

"It'll happen … sooner than later." She confirmed.

He couldn't move, he shook, what was he going to do without her. He couldn't imagine life, what was he going to do without seeing her each morning, each afternoon, each night in her room dancing to Rachmaninoff.

"No …" he mustered. "I won't let it happen." He felt someone starting to shake him, he reached back and swiped them away, with a strong blow, driven by irrational emotions tearing him apart.

"How … you're just a man." She asked.

"I'll be more than just a man!" He promised.

"You'll always be more than just a man." She nodded in agreement. "But it didn't save them." She replied.

He took a step back. "Who?" He asked.

A heavy mist swirled around his feet and though the Skelton of the night club. The checkered tile was no longer tile, it was overgrown grass intertwined with weeds, damp and cold. Around them on the walls, tombs with faded golden plates surrounded them.

"What's this …?" He backed away from the crypt the girl was suddenly laying on, replacing the table.

"Your future."

An unbreakable chain of sorrow crippled him, as a slow loneliness hollowed the feeling out of him, like a carving knife to a jack-o-lantern. Despair and fear grew inside him, made him freeze in an anxiety ridden mind. His head was a container filled to volume, ready to explode. Something brushed the back of his leg. He jumped back, whirling to confront it, oversensitive in his rush of emotions.

It was a tombstone.

Sarah Jennette Connor

And

Derek Thomas Reese

October 1968

There were explosions of dirt and two hands shot out from the weed infested ground. One belonged to a female. Her fingers were slender, cold and pale. The other was male, black from frost bite and hard as solid ice. They both grabbed John's legs and began pulling him under.

He thrashed about fighting his mother and uncles grip. He could feel the pressure of someone holding him down. He struggled against their grip, making a strangled noise of fear. He felt a slender hand touch his cheek and the tin echo of a voice calling out his name. The last images of his mother and Derek's hands pulling him down with them into their icy graves resonated strongly in the darkness of his sightless vision.

"John, listen to me … John."

The tin voice was starting to gain a familiarity as his hearing came more pronounced. He felt a half-naked body of a slim female lay on top of him, effortlessly hold him down. Her voice was unwavering and unafraid, solid and entrenched in deadpan. It was actually quite comforting.

"Cameron … help me!"

"It's fine, John."

"They've got me."

"I have you."

Eventually he stopped fighting and started to focus. What he had assumed was the slender half naked body of Sarah trying to drag him with her into the clutches of death, was in fact the comforting warmth of Cameron. The Soil that his mother had trapped them in was in fact bed sheets. Yet his heart still raced and he felt anxiety rush through him all in darkness. He flinched at a gentle touch, the tickle of the tropical breeze.

"You're okay, John …" The cyborg's gentle voice of innocence was like heavy rain clouds in the barren desert. She pressed a hand against his bare chest that heaved. It was like losing the breaks to a car on a hilly road. "John, Please." Cameron requested, but he couldn't stop panicking. He felt her push off the bed and leave him.

"No …" He gasped in hyperventilation. "Don't" He reached into the dark, his eyes unable to open. "Don't … leave … me!" he called out to her. Soft hair tickled his face and lips pressed a firm reassuring kiss to his sweat soaked forehead, not a word was said from her when she was gone again.

His brow furrowed and he tried to overcome the panic that was tearing through his body. He began to grit through a mantra of the lack of realism to the flashes in his mind. He bit his lip till it was bloody, trying to use the pain to shock the system into stabilization. He wanted to cry when the bed dipped again and the slender hand of pure magic rested over his heart.

He jumped to Cameron's silent protests when the painful discomfort of a needle sank into his arm. He began to shake and gasp when she removed the needle. The smell of musty paper filled his nostrils as the opening of a bag was fit over his mouth.

"Breath." Cameron instructed with a whisper in his ear. He complied, being rewarded with a gentle kiss. "Breath." She repeated the order, once again kissing his ear when he obeyed. The pattern of gentle commands and kisses began to steady him as the panic and fear slowly slipped away. When she finally removed the paper bag, his companion planted soft moist lips against his. Though his were cracked and dried like parchment paper. He lifted a shaky hand and pressed it to the back of her head. His hand found relief in her silky curls.

"Not too fast." Cameron broke the kiss. "You need to keep your heart rate down." She said with conviction.

"Then you're the wrong nurse for the job." Even in the grips of his current condition there was still a part of him that couldn't help himself.

"…"

He couldn't see, but he knew that Cameron was just staring at him blankly. He should've known better than to make jokes around her. He changed the subject. "Never mind … How much have you been giving me?" He didn't need to see the syringe to feel the sedative running through his veins slowing his mind.

"A full dose, for two days … and lowering it slowly since." She supplied matter-of-factly.

"I can't see …" John lifted his hands to his closed eyes and felt a mixture of sticky muck half hardened. He groaned in disgust, rubbing out the viscose material between thumb and forefinger. John was sure that had anyone else been here, Riley, Sherri … they wouldn't have touched him with a ten foot pole much less kiss him full on the mouth. But then Cameron was not one to ever care about things like physical appearance.

Almost to confirm his point, he felt slim fingers lightly pick at the slimy coding that had glued his eyelids shut. "The toxin that was introduced through your blood caused the irritation of your eyes, resulting in a mass production of mucus that seeped out of your tear ducts." Her voice was steady and clinical. She reached out again peeling away more crust.

"Cam …" he caught her hand. "Don't …" He pushed it away.

"It's not contagious, John, and even if it was …"

"It's not about catching it."

Cameron paused a moment. "I don't care, John." She stated easily. He opened his mouth to protest the point. "What you look like, what physical changes someone makes to you." She touched his cheek. "You're still you …" His frown fell and he smiled sadly, reaching out and rubbing her bare torso lovingly.

Suddenly he felt her dip down and pull him into a sitting position, the satin of her bra rubbing against his bare shoulder sent a shiver down his back at the over stimulation of his senses. His head felt light and he dipped back into the waiting support of Cameron's chest, he shivered at the bare skin against bare skin contact. She let him have a moment to get used the sitting position.

"What are we doing?" He asked in confusion.

She lifted his arm and slipped her head and shoulder underneath, wrapping it around her. "We're going to take a shower." He felt her other arm lift his strong legs over the edge of the bed. He flinched at the cool tile under foot as she turned him.

"I thought you wouldn't mind the smell."

"I don't … but the rest of the world isn't me."

He smirked tiredly as she moved off the bed and gently helped him stand on his own feet. He thought he was going to fall, his legs feeling like paper underneath the rest of the weight of his broad body. But Cameron pulled him against her. It was only then that John realized that it would take a lot more than just him to knock Cameron over. It was like he was leaning against the frame of a tank, stalwart and unmovable.

Walking toward the bathroom was challenging and his assistant was less than accommodating. Cameron's touches might have been gentle magic, but her patience was left to be desired. When she wanted something, Cameron tended to do all in her power to get it. That sometimes meant dragging John toward their shower, rather than waiting for him to find his feet again.

Once in the bathroom, she leaned him against the counter. "Where did you get the sedatives?" He asked as the air swirled from the motion of Cameron undressing in front of him.

"I've had them since Derek was shot by Vick… I took them from Charlie Dixon's bag." She explained. John felt her hands untie the knotted string of his lounge pants. He felt a chill when she gripped the waistbands of the pants and boxers and pulled them down. He felt the bare skin of her hips under his bracing hand as she helped him step out of them.

The spray of the crystal cool water over his face caused him to call out in surprise. Cameron stood behind him, her arms holding him steady. The way the wide spray of water thundered down on them, hitting John it seemed to wash away the four days in bed and returned him to everything that happened. The faces swirled in his mind. Janelle's intestines hanging limply from her cut, Todd's see through stab wound in the back of his head, and Jordon's smashed in face. He felt the cold eyes of his uncle, lifeless and frozen as they raked him with disapproval and shame.

Cameron turned him around, running her finger through his grown out heavily soaked locks, pushing them back. It was like a baptism, like hitting the fresh air after a long dark dive, the nightmares receding with the sensation. But where the nightmares fell away, the memories didn't. John wrapped his arms around Cameron's frame as she began scrubbing his eye lids with soap. In John's mind he could still see it all, so fresh, so new. The runaway train, Sarah and Derek trapped inside as it fell over the cliff. He saw his mother's beautiful frozen face and the skulls of the catacombs. He felt the burn of bruises all over his body, aching under the shower's spray.

"You can open them now …" Cameron framed his face with a brush of her trailing palm.

At first his vision was blurry from the exposer of light cascading from the small window in the shower. His eyes burnt with the mixture of the disinfecting soap and the scrubbing of a thorough cyborg. But slowly he focused and Cameron came into vision. Her long hair was soaked, pushed back out of her face. Her flawless skin was slick and glimmering in the light, smooth and heavenly to the touch. Her eyes seemed stoic as usual, but hopeful.

It was just the sight of her that had done him in. From the hard stone of the catacombs, to the beating at the hands of the people he couldn't get out of his head. It was the visions of his mother, vengefully striking him for not saving her. These were the last images he had seen, and after it all to see Cameron again, to be in the arms of the only person in this world he loved, and who loved him. He let it all overcome.

She didn't say anything when his shoulders began to shake, she didn't tilt her head when he let out a strangled sob. She only wrapped her arms around his shoulders, pushing his head down into the crook of her neck and let him cry in her embrace under the shower's spray. In the quiet private moments between them, when John let go and finally let all the sorrow, trauma, and anger catch up with him. Her kisses and tight embrace was a silent promise that she would always be there.

The sun looked like a fiery ship making a gallant last stand on the horizon. The flaming decent lashed out the last roars of color before being purged of light as it sunk into the depths of the dark water in the distance. The double doors of the back porch of the small cabana showed the view of the falling day as a single candle cast shadows over the well-furnished living room.

A spiraling staircase led down to an orange tile ground floor, a duel entrances to a modern kitchen flanking the staircase against the far wall. A single recliner made of brown leather sat adjacent to the front of the home and a couch of leather as soft as sin faced the far wall behind the glass coffee table. The dim shadows of nature and candle flickered across the pair of silhouettes lying motionlessly on the couch.

John was flat on his back an arm behind his head as he stared out at the sunset, his eyes hard and his face grim. His bandaged hand was wrapped around a tucked in Cameron who lay curled up on top of him, her arm tossed over him, her head resting gently against his chest. Her emotionless eyes watched him worriedly. Every once in a while his fingers would twirl through a ringlet or he'd arch down and kiss her lips comfortingly.

Cameron had known this was John's time to recover from what happened. He hadn't told her about what he saw that night, not about Derek, or his mother. He wasn't sure she would understand why he saw them, and maybe she already knew what was going on. He had almost hallucinated his way to cardiac arrest. Also apart of him knew that maybe Cameron didn't want to push the trauma he had seen.

From what Cameron did tell him from her blood analysis, he had inhaled a pathogen that had stimulated a region of his brain that controlled his fears and anxieties. Though, Cameron was still unsure how an orb at the end of a cane could trigger it.

All John knew was that someone had used the one person he had ever loved more than anything and used her against him. Someone took his memories of his love ones and those he held in memoriam and twisted them till they nearly broke him. It wouldn't be something that would happen twice or to anyone else.

"We should leave, John …"

"No … not yet."

Cameron lifted her head. "Why?" She asked.

"I'm going to find the man who did this to me."

"And when you do?"

John just looked at her with a mask of stone eyes that guarded his true intentions. Cameron tightened her cheek and nodded.

"I'll make pancakes."