Summary: Four times John Connor meets Allison Young and one time he doesn't.
Improbabilities
I
Judgment Day is everything Sarah feared and more and with the passing days and years to come, John's glad she isn't around to see it. She spent her life training, preparing him for this, but he isn't sure she'd like what she saw - in the world or in her son.
It's a recon mission (he leads but he isn't John Connor yet, not yet and some part of him is still hoping it never happens) and he can hear the faint whispers of the men behind him, knows that their eyes are darting in every direction, taking in yet another mile of devastation, searching for a glint of enemy metal. And then he hears it.
A single gesture grants him silence and stillness. He hears it again and a quick glance at his men tells him he's not imagining it. It's a short trail around the half-crumbled walls of what's left of a two storey building to find the source.
A little girl sits in the shadow of debris and wreckage, curled up into a tiny alcove, wiping the steady stream of tears from her dirty cheeks with a sleeve that only seems to leave more smudges on her face. She watches him carefully as he steps closer, wary and alert, her little hands twisting in her lap.
He sets his weapon aside to crouch low on the ground - not the smartest move and he can almost hear Sarah berating him like he's ten again - but there's backup and he'll be damned if he freaks out a little girl. John clears his throat, remembering a doctor's office and red hair in braids.
"What's your name?"
She looks up at him with brown eyes wet with tears that belie the dehydration they're all suffering from. "Allison."
"My name's John." He doesn't ask her where she's from or where her parents are or anything he might've asked a lost child. Judgment Day made every question, every story, every person the same.
Allison's eyes focus on something new, discerning the hidden shape. "What's that?"
He grins, slipping it over his head and into her hands without hesitation. He knows the face in the three year old girl.
"Pretty."
"Pretty," he echoes. "It's very special. Do you think you could keep it safe for me?"
She nods quickly, clutching her prize.
"Don't forget. Keep it hidden like I did."
Allison fumbles with the long chain, but manages to slip the heavy pocket watch beneath her clothes. Her smile is infectious.
John reaches out and takes her hand in his. "Let's go home."
II
It's the first day at a new school, but he's done this so many times before, there's nothing first about it. He knows the routine like he knows every other one that makes up his life. How to run, how to hide, how to go through high school without being noticed. He's good at it. No one looks at him, no one talks to him, until -
"Hey."
He glances up, up, up at a tall, slender brunette smirking down at him. It takes him a few seconds to realize she's talking to him. She blinks, all dark lashes and big eyes and he's not sure if it's because he's just been dragged to yet another new town or if it's because he hasn't eaten yet or if it's because she's hot but -
"You're staring."
He slings his backpack onto his shoulder as casually as he can. She's at eye level now and still smiling with the corner of her mouth. "And you're in front of my locker."
John steps back. "Sorry." He's about to turn his back and disappear back into the crowds moving down the hall when she says -
"You're the new guy, right?"
"Yeah." He's always the new guy. "I'm John."
Her locker slams shut and the lock turns with a spin. She smiles again, over her shoulder as she walks away. "See you tomorrow, John."
He smiles back, too late for her to see. It isn't until he's walking home that he realizes he doesn't even know her name, but her smile stays with him, distracting.
He doesn't see her climb into a black SUV with a woman whose Australian accent carries on the warm autumn wind, or the girl who could be her twin watching from across the parking lot.
But he does notice when she walks into his English class the next day. He does wonder if she cut her hair. He reminds her of his name and when she tells him her name's Cameron and smiles -
He smiles back and tries not to wonder if this town, this time will be different.
III
She's always been good with her hands. Recruited into tech work by age nine, but that isn't anything special. Childhoods are short because life is and work isn't what it used to be. It's not her sister scooping ice cream for shopping money or her parents leaving the house at nine and coming home at five. Work is life. It's being part of the fight for the survival of her species, it's breathing and eating and being. Work makes her useful, makes her more than another unkempt sewer rat, makes her human.
When she's sixteen, the work brings her to metal.
She doesn't hate metal. She hates Skynet, but she doesn't hate metal, and maybe that's because she's a civilian 'cause the military techs hate them, hate them so much she wonders how they manage to do the work at all.
The CPUs are delicate and complex (beautiful) and the programming…the programming. It's more than lines of code, rigid in their left to right, up and down. It's a crude word for the worlds, the universe under her hands, hot and cold, vast in a tiny shell.
It's like there's a life in there, she thinks. Not one that breathes or eats or sleeps, but the logic and the flow, the paths old and new, heavy in the core and light, faint and spindling, underneath heavy locks and protocols. An almost life, maybe.
She gets lost in them until reprogramming becomes more than a routine, more than a language, more than work. It's in her brain, her fingertips.
"It's something, isn't it?"
She jumps and nearly topples off her rickety seat (uneven legs on an uneven floor and she thinks that when it was new it used to swivel.) A man sits opposite her worktable; the uniform says military but it's void of any denotation of rank. She'd almost wonder if he stole it but he has that rigid sense of authority they all do, intensely so.
And then he smiles a little, just a little and she forgets.
"Them," he says. "Being in there."
It takes a moment before she finds the words, but they spill out in tangles and threads but he seems to understand anyway.
"They are - they could be like us," he says and it's a dangerous statement, even in the silent emptiness of the bay.
It makes her weak inside, the mix of apprehension and excitement. The rush of newness, of voicing thoughts buried while half-formed.
"Yes." The whisper is barely audible, the deafening quiet swallowing it before it can reach ears other than his.
His smile is satisfied.
It could be hours or minutes but she's never been any good at keeping time here anyway and when it's goodnight, John, it's also goodbye, Allison.
Two days later a new work order arrives at her console in the same plain, metal case as always, but red tagged; high priority. Narrow dark chip in the standard vacuum sealed interface, programming parameters…
Parameters is the wrong word for the folded slip of paper where the mission list and behavioural modification outlines should be. Programming is the wrong word for what she's being told to do (and she's beginning to wonder if it's the wrong word for what she's been doing here all along.)
John Connor isn't what she thought he'd be, she thinks as the systems hum to life.
The interface connects with a pneumatic hiss and glows blue.
Allison gets to work.
IV
He's been expecting her for years but it's still a surprise when she shows up. Halfway down the third page of transfer orders, in tiny block letters. He finally learns her last name but his brain is already pushing another name to the forefront. The changes are made and she's reassigned within hours.
She arrives halfway through the third shift, trying not to flinch at the slow grating of the hatch lock turning behind her. He can't help but stare, long minutes as she fidgets nervously. That isn't right.
He clears his throat abruptly and she straightens, reins in the trembling with tight fists. That's better. Not right, but better, and she'll learn. She will, and a burning, mad dance of hope lights up inside against the loneliness.
"You look just like her," he says, his voice low and quiet and somehow nothing like what she expected John Connor to sound like.
"Like who?"
His lips form a name without sound and she's never been any good at reading lips, but it doesn't matter because she'll learn soon enough.
She's starting to forget her name. She's starting to forget a lot of things, she thinks, staring at the opposite wall in the dark. They all do, she tells herself, bits of pieces of the past get eaten away by the hell that is their reality. Faces and voices and memories fade. His breath tickles her neck. But maybe not like this, she amends.
Allison, she says to herself. Allison. Over and over, late at night when he can't hear. But the vowels are slipping off her tongue and the consonants feel wrong. Wrong. He makes her feel wrong when she's like this. He doesn't love her when she's like this.
She presses back against his warmth, shifts so she can feel where his skin touches hers. She looks just like her. She feels and sounds and smells like her. She doesn't know who her is, but she knows that she's close enough, close enough that maybe one day she'll be her and when he mouths it against her skin and into her hair it'll feel the way it's supposed to feel. Because her will be you. And you will be everything.
She's smiling into the darkness at her midnight wandering (she can't remember where those words came from but they too, in time, will pass), a curve of lips that is hers now.
John Connor is everything. The past and present and future, a whole cosmos in one man. A man who wants her. And she is just like her and this is the truth he has made for her.
His lips and breath and will rush over her like a wave. Cameron.
But a little voice whispers on her every exhale.
Allison. Allison. Allison.
V
Cameron can lie and does lie, but she isn't lying when she tells Jesse Flores that telling her is the same thing as telling John. She will tell John if it's logical to do so and then John will know what she knows. This is not what the executive officer of the lost Jimmy Carter means, but John isn't the one making those decisions anymore and she isn't authorized to know that. No one is.
So she says what she thinks John would want her to say because humans require orders and direction and hierarchy and John is busy. Time travel is very complicated and requires concentration.
She helps John Connor be John Connor in every moment past and yet to come and he's safest in his quarters; her mission priorities are at a sufficient equilibrium.
Later, when she's reviewing her interactions, she determines that her response to Jesse Flores was not syntactically accurate. Telling her is not the same as telling John. She's not the same as John, a parallel naturally drawn by the erratic human brain. It was inefficient and incorrect of her. She won't make the same mistake again.
Tissue-thin papers rustle. Hers are heavy with closely set letters and numbers, lists and accounts, approvals on dotted lines. His are chaos, lines and dates, mad scribblings, cause and effect, the fabric of time in synthetic pulp.
Transfer authorizations into the camp. The thirty second name presents the need for a decision. She isn't John Connor but this is what she does, what John needs her to do, so she does.
Allison Young must be stationed in the satellite camp south of Serrano in six months' time. There is no one to tell her no. She needs to do this and John needs her to do these things. This is what she knows.
The pen moves across the paper, John Connor's signature flowing perfectly from her hand.