I know I took forever. I'm so sorry.

I thought I'd update before the show ended but I had so little recollections of some the episodes after Earthlings Welcome Here & The Good Wound that I ended up having to rewatch them and try to figure out how to fit in my story and still be kind of cannon.

Anyways here's one and I will have Kyle/Cameron/John interaction in the next chapter. I plan on posting that tomorrow!!

Enjoy....

Earlier that day - Connor Kitchen

"What's this about our son?"

Derek sighed this was not gonna be a good day. He could tell.

"What the hell are you doing here? And don't just give me that whole John sent me back crap." Derek snapped spearing an innocent pancake onto his fork. He found himself suddenly ravenous for Sarah's cooking.

Kyle eyeballed his brother, Sarah's straight backed position the exact duplicate of Derek's. "Am I interrupting something?"

As if electrocuted both Sarah and Derek shot up from the table. Their combined dirty looks enough to silence Kyle on the subject.

"Well, ummm right." Kyle continued, "John did send me back but I'm not staying long. You have a very serious problem." Every now and then Kyle tried to figure out what was making him uneasy about the combination of the woman who had given birth to his only son and his older brother.

"Is it about Riley?" Sarah asked sliding another smaller share of pancakes onto a plate for Kyle.

"If it is, we are aware of it, right." Derek answered brusquely, looking to Sarah for confirmation.

Sarah clenched her jaw ready to answer but someone's insistent knocking interrupted her. On cue Derek pulled a gun from his back while Sarah pulled a shotgun from underneath the table. Derek covered her and she used his bulk to look out at the small window.

Casey stood on the front step, a casserole dish in hand.

"It's just Casey." Sarah answered handing the shotgun to Derek who stashed it in a cubby hole along with his own gun by the door. Kyle watched this intricate gun ballet with a mixture of pride and sadness. He might have returned but apparently Sarah did not need him as much as he had hoped.

Casey was welcomed into the home while Sarah handed the casserole dish to Derek.

"I'm so glad to catch you at home. I wanted to ask if you could possibly…oh I'm sorry I didn't realize you had company."Casey smiled politely at the two men in Sarah's kitchen.

Sarah pulled a chair and all four were soon seated at the table. "This is Derek and Kyle Reese." Casey smiled and shook their hands but clearly was waiting for Sarah to give more of an explanation as to the relationship to Sarah and her brood. "These are John and Cameron's uncles."

Derek managed to hold back the angry gurgle of disgust at being associated with Cameron in any way. Kyle's betrayed look almost undid Sarah but she had to think of John first.

"I can see the family resemblance." Casey said looking at Kyle.

Derek knowing that they would not be having their discussion any time soon decided to excuse himself before he had to make anymore unpleasant small talk. Kyle followed suit leaving Sarah to chat with her neighbor.

"What's going between you and Sarah?" Kyle asked following him.

Derek turned so quickly that Kyle ran into him. "What? What are you talking about?"

"I just thought I saw something…I mean well you guys seem to be..." Seeing the dark gleam in his brother's eyes, Kyle changed subjects quickly. "Sarah is in a lot of danger. She needs your help. I am here about Riley but General Connor had intel that we had rogue jumpers."

"You're talking about Jesse." Derek stated.

"She is as big a threat to John as Riley. You need to take care of it. Do not let Sarah know." Kyle paused letting the implication of what Derek had to do dawn on the resistance fighter. "This is a direct order from Connor. Do not tell Sarah. Take care of it."

Derek nodded a lump growing in his throat. "Is that the only reason you are here?"

"No. John needs a father."

"He has a father, Kyle. He has you." Derek said gripping his younger brother's shoulders. "You're here now. Just stay and take care of him."

Kyle forced Derek to let go. 'How was he supposed to encourage his own replacement.'

"I'm not staying. I'm on my way to the past. I stopped here. I have to set up a few sites and stay low gathering materials and putting the beginning of the resistance together. I'm leaving tonight for Arizona after a few years I'll head to a designated site and meet Sarah in 1984."

Derek yanked his brother into the unused living room. "You can't. You'll die. Connor is sending you to die." he yelled. The idea of letting his baby brother go blindingly into his own demise was too much for him to bare a second time.

"Connor is John and he must live if we are to have a future." Kyle responded.

"Don't you understand. There is no future for you. You don't exist. You're just some heroic memory. How can you be ok with that?" Derek cried as he shook Kyle desperate to shove sense back into him.

"Because then you and Sarah can have a future. You can be the ones to help John not be a bastard. To teach him what it means to save not just humanity's future but yours as well. Derek, I need you to care for my boy." Kyle hugged his brother one last time, "I need you to care for his mother. Promise me."

"I promise."

"Love her, Derek."

Sarah entered not a few moments later missing whatever Kyle had said but she heard Derek's response.

"I already do."

"What's going on?" Sarah asked looking between the brothers. Kyle plastered a smile on his face but Derek didn't even pretend. He gave her a strange almost fond look before slamming out of the house.

"Reese, temper. Runs in the family." Kyle answered shrugging his shoulders.

"Why are you really here?"

Kyle eyed the couches as if trying to decide which was the comfiest. Once settled he motioned for Sarah to sit opposite of him. She obeyed but he noticed that she had a gun tucked in her pant's waistline. "Paranoid a bit don't you think?" he said pointing to her gun.

"Getting harder to trust around here." she replied. "So you gonna answer?"

"I was sent back by John but not just for Riley. I was sent back specifically for you."

"Me? Why? I already know I'm not around for John in the future." Sarah replied propping her still wounded leg on the table.

"You don't get cancer from regular sources. We think you get cancer from the terminators. More importantly from looking after John. You need to let John find his own leads and you and Derek are to set up as much resistance as possible."

"I don't understand. How can you of all people tell me that I need to stop looking after our son?"

"Because as long as you shield him, he will continue to make mistakes." Kyle reasoned.

"Like Tin-Miss?"

"No, like Riley. She is not of this time. Truthfully we aren't sure of what time she is from. Either way she is a huge liability. John is in danger everytime he is away from Cameron while you are taking unnecessary risks that push up your death date."

"You have no idea what you're saying. That thing is seducing him. You don't see how he looks at her. She is always walking around him half-naked and just a few days ago I saw them in his bed together. If she had tried anything, I swear Kyle. I would have blasted her there and then."

Sarah pulled the gun from her waistband placing it on the table in from of her. "I feel like he's getting further and further from me."

Kyle scooted over gripping Sarah's hand in his, "I'm going to tell you something that will probably not make you feel any better but that you deserve to know. Cameron or Tin-Miss as you call her, was modeled after a real person. Allison Young. She was just one of the orphans we found around the tunnels."

Sarah had braced herself but the air still felt like it had been punched out of her, "Oh God."

"Sarah, she trailed after John until she was adopted by him. She was just fifteen when the machines caught her. She escaped and reported back to John. Thanks to her we knew that they were coping actual people." Kyle paused letting the horrible information seep into Sarah.

"They caught her a second time but she was a trap. By the time we found out it was too late. John went to pieces when he realized that she had left without his permission. Allison left and Cameron returned."

Sarah covered her eyes. "How he must have suffered." She tried to imagine what it would be like to lose her son and have a terminator replica show up. "No wonder he sent her away."

"He didn't send her away."

"That lying…I knew it. I knew she'd been lying about her mission. She's here to destroy John, she's here to help Skynet." Sarah jumped up from her seat desperate to search out the treasonous bitch.

Kyle held her hands forcibly bringing her back down. "Listen to me. She begged him to send her away. It's true that when she first came to our camp she wanted to kill him but when she met him, well she did something none of us expected…she cried."

Sarah looked as stunned as Kyle still felt. "But she's a machine."

Kyle nodded, "I know. We were pretty freaked out too. She just dropped to her knees and asked for his forgiveness and cried. She told him the entire plan Skynet had for us, for him. The weirdest thing about it was that she told John how to reprogram her and then she told him she was sorry she had died."

"Allison?" Sarah asked more and more confused by what Kyle was telling her.

"Apparently when Skynet duplicated Allison, they duplicated her loyalty and it overrode Cameron's neural net. Once John deactivated her, he also wiped her clean. Including her neural net but the feelings and emotions that Skynet put in were very complicated so it was just a blanket job." Kyle finished.

"So Cameron protects John because she has some of Allison's personality?"

"Yes and no. Allison's personality only exists in fragments not enough for Cameron to use. However Cameron learned love and loyalty due to her exposure to Allison herself. Cameron's love for John and her wish to protect him is all hers. John tried several times to program her to others but it kept reverting back to John. That was why the soldiers disliked her. They thought she was not trustworthy."

"She tried to kill John, when she was blown up by a bomb. Where was her loyalty then?" snapped Sarah.

Kyle glanced at her trying to answer her query. "It probably was a subroutine in her original programming and with her power cell low she had no control over her own brain. Was she fixed? Is that why she is with you now?"

"John cleaned her chip a bit and then put it back in that same day."

Her heart almost stopped at just the remembrance of her son holding a gun on her and Derek and Charlie and then giving it to the machine. His young self a perfect target for her bullet. As she thought about it, Sarah also recalled other things that had not made it through her mind in that terrifying moment.

How the machine had asked John if he was there to kill her. How John had asked her the same thing and the wounded tone of her voice as she answered in the negative. Cameron's head had tilted downwards to the gun in her hand and she had handed it back to John.

"No amount of cleaning would have fixed that kind of damage." Kyle interrupted her memory.

"John handed her a gun and she just stared at it like she didn't know what it was and then she just handed it back. I didn't realize that until now how lost and confused she had looked until John had helped her out of the jeep."

Sarah swallowed the disgust of her new revelations. "Cameron loves John. She told me, he'd made a mistake in bringing her back."

Kyle didn't know what to say. Sarah was obviously not ready to hear how close they had been and maybe like Derek would never be. "After she was wiped clean and only a few months of being with John, she begged him to send her back. Nobody knows why he agreed."

"Because it is the best chance of survival for him. The metal knows that," Derek said from the doorway, "But it does not mean he has to fall in love with it. General Connor made that mistake and it cost a lot more than lives."

Sarah and Kyle turned to look at Derek. "It cost him his humanity. He became a machine just like it."