Summary: John asks Cameron about the future. Originally posted to livejournal 10.28.08
Damning
She's standing outside again, staring into the distance. He wonders what she's looking at, what – if anything – she's thinking. He wonders if she even thinks at all, or if she merely analyzes, if there's a spark of awareness inside that metal skull. He wonders if he really wants to know the answer.
"The sun will set in seventeen minutes." She doesn't turn to look at him; she doesn't need to do anything to know he's there. He's watched her a hundred times but this is the first time he joins her.
He calls her Cameron in his mind, but it's just a name, because he doesn't know how to think about her, how to begin to understand the enigma, the impossibility that is this…girl standing next to him.
"That first day. In 1999. You were different."
"Yes."
"What happened to that?"
"That was a personality matrix designed to optimize infiltration of an adolescent social setting."
It's the answer he's expecting, but not the one he wants. "You know, it would be a lot easier for everybody if you acted more like that. Especially in public."
She tears her gaze away from the horizon to glance at him. "It wouldn't be real."
He can't help the derisive snort that escapes him. "Nothing about you is real."
"I am not organic, but I am not imaginary."
"Fine," he concedes. "But you're a blank slate. Your actions are dictated by programming, pre-defined algorithms, creating personas to accomplish your goals. Underneath all of that, there's…nothing."
"There is me," she insists and to be honest, he'd kind of forgotten she was there. "I am real."
Her voice does not change – the pitch, volume, and inflection remain precisely the same – but there is a steely conviction there that he's never heard before. If she was a normal girl, he would have worried that her feelings were hurt.
But she isn't and he can't help but try to push her, just to see what would happen. "How do you know?"
The sun is a bloody red and low in the sky. "You told me."
He gives her a hard look but if she notices, she doesn't show it. "The other me."
"Yes."
"Do you lie to him?"
"No."
He believes her and that just pisses him off even more. "But you lie to me."
"Sometimes."
"Why?" He grabs her shoulder, forces her to face him (he doesn't want to think about the fact that he didn't force her so much as she let him). "What the hell makes him so damn special?"
There's something different in her eyes, but she turns away, back to the house before he can even try to understand it.
"The sun has set," she informs him, as if the falling darkness isn't enough of a clue. "We should go."
Night is when they shed the façade of normalcy, when they aren't siblings and their name isn't Baum. This is when they do their real work.
***
His bedroom door is open and she pauses in her tireless circuit of the house; John had taken to closing his door at night and she understands this to be a request for privacy. Although sometimes he closes the door even though Riley is there and he is not alone, which she thinks is counter-productive.
When she enters the dark room, her balancing mechanisms compensate for imperfectly laid floorboards, making her approach perfectly silent. Her efforts are unnecessary; John is awake.
He looks up at her from the too small bed, the patterned sheets tangled around his legs. Satisfied that he is safe, if not asleep as he should be, she moves to leave.
"You never answered me."
"Why are you asking so many questions?" she counters, though her voice conveys no sense of irritation or impatience. He wishes it did.
"Don't I have a right to know something about the great leader I'm supposed to become?"
She turns to face him, perfectly straight and still. "Everything we do, whether we stop Skynet or not, has the potential to change the future. You are already eight years younger than you should be. I do not know what other effects the jump to this time, or what we have done here, have had."
Something changes in the way she's standing, in the set of her features and look in her eyes. "The John Connor that I knew, the future from which I came, no longer exists," she says quietly. "But he is – was – everything."
She's as adrift as he is, he thinks. As lost and disconnected, guided only by her mission.
The words escape from their hiding place inside of him, his tongue betraying the secret thought that bubbles to the surface every time she speaks of the future. "You love him."
Just for a second, he swears her eyes burn blue, but it's fleeting and the next moment he tells himself he's imagining things, reminding himself of her real nature, because the look on her face is anything but mechanical. He blames it on the shadows.
Her mouth twitches and even though she's looking at him, he's suddenly sure it isn't him she's seeing, and there's something heavy settling on his chest. "He saved me."
It isn't an admission, nor is it a denial. But she doesn't remind him that she's a machine, doesn't tell him that she doesn't know love.
Taking his silence as a sign that the conversation is over, Cameron steps back and away, preparing to resume her patrol. Her fingers brush the doorframe and her gaze lingers on him.
"Goodnight, John."
He can't say the words back because he knows now who she was pleading with that day, his birthday. He knows who she saw in those moments before he snatched her life away, who she cried out to in her desperation. Who made her more human than he could have imagined. He saved me.
He saved her and she's saving him and it's just another tangled mess that ends with him alone. Lost to want something he can't have, to wish he (she…they) could re-write who they are and who they'll become, to love someone who will never love him back.
She's damning him and she doesn't even know it.