Summary: It's your typical story. Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, girl's identity gets stolen by a cyborg. It's his story and he has to live with it. Derek/Allison, implied John/Cameron. Written as a sort-of follow up to tell me how this ends (Chapter 13), but can be read alone. Originally posted to livejournal 10.31.11.
Denouement
One
She looks just like her. (Of course she does.)
It's easier when she's an it, when long limbs move rigidly and a face is an expressionless collection of features. Then she's a skin, a veneer, shallow and transparent so he can see everything she is and everything she isn't underneath. She casts no illusions in the default and he thinks he can do this and it isn't going to kill him. Those are the good days.
There are others.
Sometimes, when she acts like a girl (when she lies) and laughs with a stolen voice and tosses hair that is and isn't hers, the hate is heavy and powerful and poisons him with every heartbeat she doesn't have (anymore) and never will. If he's honest, he keeps some of it for himself; self-loathing is bitter and caustic because human minds and eyes and ears are weak and sometimes, it's so easy to forget for the briefest moments that she's not real, she's dead and she's not her. It only takes a second at a time to defile her memory.
...
The things they call Cameron belong to the ghost of a girl not yet born and not yet dead. It hurts because it's the pieces of her missing everything behind them; they stripped away the surface and killed everything that Allison was to do it. She has her lips but not her smile, her eyes but not her warmth. On the good days, he can look at her and not see Allison at all.
But her appearance is a fact and it's cold but precise and he misses her so fucking much. Pain confuses everything and the metal bitch is twisting his love because he's not a machine, he can't be, and there was only ever supposed to be one of her.
No one else sees it because no one else knows. (And no one asks.)
Allison Young means nothing to anyone, except him. He doesn't say anything because a girl isn't anything to angry Sarah (and John's too young and too taken with the machine to care) and he's always been a little possessive so he keeps her to himself; her memory is his to carry.
Until it's not.
Two
His nephew's a dumb shit. He'll be John Connor one day, but until then, he's a dumb little shit.
(He reminds him a little of Kyle that way.)
He knows. John knows. (He doesn't. Not really.)
He knows her name, her voice, that quirk with her mouth when she's about to let you have it.
Derek wants to punch him for it.
He wants to kill Cameron for it. For ripping some part of Allison out of her and claiming it for her own. For breaking her down like she could be dismantled, like she was made of parts you could pick through and use. Allison was flesh and bone and beauty and he wonders again what they did to her, what they must have done, because they took more than her face. The metal has a piece of Allison he doesn't want to name.
John calls it a glitch when he questions him. A mistake. An error.
Derek turns his back on his dumb shit of a nephew, walks into the bathroom, and throws up.
...
He's always going to hate her. He knows it the way he knows he loves (and hates and fears and resents) John Connor, the way he knows his nephew is in love with the tin bitch.
He watches John teach her chess and watches him laugh when she beats him two matches of three; watches Sarah look at her son and know who she's thinking about; watches his reflection in the mirror behind her when Cameron comes to him one day and says "She was very brave."
He hates her so fucking much in that moment but John needs her and Sarah won't let him burn her and he thinks that maybe stupid runs in the family.
Three
Sarah takes him to see Kyle's marker. They stand with the little slab of granite at their feet and he recognizes the tension in her face and the tremor in her hands. He thinks she'd understand if he told her about Allison and if he'd been a different man, he might have.
He tells her about Kyle instead and thinks about letting go.
...
He goes to see her when she's three. He sits in the park and pretends to mess around with his Blackberry.
It should be weird, seeing her like this, a tiny child whose round face only hints at the girl she's going to grow up to be, a girl he's going to meet on an unremarkable day in the mess. (He hopes to God he meets her still.) She kicks her legs on the swings and laughs and it isn't weird at all, because Allison is lost to him but she's living and breathing, and sixty miles from here he's a boy who could love her one day.
He thinks that's enough, and when he leaves the bike by her front door, it's a goodbye.
Four
Eventually: Skynet wakes and the world burns (he wonders if there was ever any stopping it) and he kind of hopes that he'll die in the fall out.
What he does instead is survive.
He lives through Judgment Day for the second time and Century for the first. John keeps an eye on the Reese brothers and Baum keeps his on Connor. Cameron says nothing. He hates her almost out of habit now: he lost Allison Young a lifetime ago and Derek Reese has never met her and he thinks the place that used to hurt didn't survive with the rest of him and knows it's better this way. But John keeps her out of sight anyway, which is just as well because Derek's not sure he wouldn't still smash her chip to pieces if given the chance.
This future isn't quite the same as the one before – he's both pushing forty and barely in his twenties; he meets an Aussie woman who finds her way into his bed every time she's in port – and sometimes he wonders if the differences will change anything. He doesn't get any further than speculation because he's a man out of time and hope is something for people who've only seen the world end once.
So he survives.
...
At fifty-one, he's the oldest in the company when he's killed three days before his thirty-first birthday. It isn't particularly quick and he decides that it's just his kind of luck. There's someone shouting and the distinctive sound of a metal implosion somewhere close by; he knows he's dying and even though it fucking hurts, he figures it could be worse.
His life doesn't do anything before his eyes, but time gets a little weird, fast and slow all at once and he's thinking about his mom and Kyle and John and God, the way he's bleeding all over the place, it's going to be a bitch to clean when it comes to repurposing the fabric.
He thinks about her because he's too tired to decide against it and he can taste blood at the back of his throat but it doesn't hurt all that much anymore and he's pretty okay with that and maybe his younger self will do better.
They bring his tags to Connor, who watches from across the room as Derek Reese follows a brunette girl out of the mess hall and wonders if he should stop him.
He doesn't.
...
He catches up with her in the tunnels, the long, unconfined hair a dead giveaway as she weaves through the busy hub. It's usually the mark of one of the tunnel rats (because even a post-apocalyptic world with a decimated human population has scavengers) except hers is clean and brushed and looks like his fingers could slide through it without resistance.
"Hey."