Chapter Three

Will the Circle Be Unbroken

The sun was shining brightly over the busy city. Every denizen was like a worker ant, running from job to job, from one task to the next. Each one in their own little world built on dreams and practicality. None of them seemed to know what was coming. Maybe there were a few out there that might feel it in their guts - the occasional chill down the spine. Seeing a news story about tech companies or a secret moment of fear watching a TV show about cyborgs and knowing something wasn't right. But no one knew the sheer weight of the future. The streets littered with ash and skulls. On that front Derek Reese couldn't fault them, couldn't hold it against them.

He used to be one of them.

It seemed strange that he could remember some days so clearly. He could tell you what it was going to be like. What it was going to feel like. He wondered if he was the only one who ever felt like that. If he would be the only one who could ever feel like this. Waking up, flicking on the tube and saying the headlines before the anchor could. Like some sort of twisted deja-vu. John smirks, the metal tilts her head in disinterest, but Sarah … Sarah watches him with unreadable eyes. But she never fails to smile into her coffee when Derek misses or misremembers things. Sometimes it's a movie star with a surprise pregnancy, or a football score he confuses with another from next year. When he comes up short he always looks to Sarah and knows why she smiles, because it relieves her. When Derek Reese couldn't remember something, when something happened he didn't expect it gives her hope. They were the days when his memory didn't make her feel like they were sitting on a load of dynamite watching the fuse burn away. And he would be lying if some mornings he misremembered things just to comfort her, just to see her smile … and later sitting in his truck feel guilty not over the lie, but the want.

But today, today he couldn't fake it, couldn't lie. Though, Derek would do anything today to have that comfort that came with Sarah's rare smile. Everything that ever happened today, Derek had memorized, internalized, and pictured it in his head since the first time he experienced today.

Many years ago, this morning, he had woken to find his mother gone without a note or a phone call. He had shrugged it off, showered, and poured Kyle his cereal. You know, it's funny, but Derek didn't really read the newspaper. Jesus, what twelve year old did? But Kyle had seen a cartoon that morning, before Derek had woken up, and he had said that all grown-ups read the newspaper. He had shaken his head, and read the headline to humor him. Afterward he would never be the same again.

But waking up this morning in Jesse's hotel room, he feared seeing that paper on the nightstand. Maybe he could've avoided it if he had slept at the house. But knowing what was coming, he needed some solace. However, even when he had tried to focus on Jesse, and tried to make up for the shrinking feeling in his heart, Derek didn't care. He tried. Tried to focus on his relationship and ignore that paper sitting on the table like it was the big ugly son of a bitch in every corner of a dive, looking for a fight and finding you. But the truth was he couldn't ignore it anymore. He had a small talk with Jesse about to do lists and expectations for the week- conversations that he thought might bring him comfort. But he found them so empty when something else was on his mind, someone who shouldn't be. So eventually he would slide on that stool across from the coffee-sipping stranger with his old girlfriend's face. He'd take a deep breath and glance at the headline of the paper when she picked it up.

There on the front page, Detective Lieutenant Jonathan Derek Reese killed in the line of duty trying to save a couple of stripper's brats. He credited that moment all those long years ago, today, when he read that his father had been killed, as the moment he became the man he is. Long before the bombs fell.

Jesse had asked him what the problem was when he got up and started collecting his things. He tried to make room for her, tried to tell her what today was. But he just couldn't bring himself to do it. He and Jesse's relationship was born in the blood and disease of a war. To let her inside the part of himself that existed before all of this, to let her touch the reason he fights, to see the cause … it just didn't feel right. He couldn't explain it and damn it if the thought didn't keep him up half the night. Maybe someday he'd come up with a plausible reason why he couldn't tell Jesse about his life before J-day.

But it wouldn't be today.

Some hours later he was sitting outside a glass and chrome plated Rockabilly diner in Van Nuys, feeling like a selfish bastard. Derek thought he should be sad that his dad was dead. But all it did was make him feel an overwhelming sense of relief in a dark and remorseful way. Now that his father was gone, Derek was no longer alone carrying that memory, that loss. Maybe all the yesterdays in his life had made him think he was some noble son of a bitch who can take that on his shoulders. But today he gave a moment to selfishness. That twelve year old, who shares his name, who loves the hell out of Star Wars. The kid who watches "The Spectacular Spider-man" with his brother, and makes him swear to never tell anyone on pain of the rack. That Derek Reese lost all that today. He'd never grow up with all the love and care of a complete family. Just like Derek, the soldier, hadn't. Now the thirty-two year old selfish bastard's only family was a teenager with his brother's grin, and a pension for resenting him. The other was a hard ass GI Jane Pin Up who hated the soldier's guts for an even better reason than her son.

He wouldn't linger too much longer on the time traveler's remorse, his time cut short even more by the arrival of an old ford pickup truck. Its aquamarine paint was rusting and flaking off with age as a door opened. With the action, nine or ten empty beer cans clattered to the asphalt. He knew it was the one he was waiting for when the four passengers piled out. The lead was a tall dark skinned boy. He had a mess of tight, crunchy, black curls. He wore a letterman's jacket with the same school colors that John and the Metal attended. There were two skinny guys and, of course, the big one. Derek remembered the big one. With the crew cut and wide eyes, he looked like a pig.

He watched them as they sashayed into the joint, the entitled little shits, laughing, and swaggering as if they were something. A moment later a couple ran out of the restaurant. The woman screamed, and the older man covered his head with a newspaper. Customers began trickling out, though no one called the cops. As people rushed past the truck, he watched through the windows as a familiar scene played out in front of him: two bag boys filling a sack from the register, the black kid standing by the door armed with a baseball bat, and fat boy eating the order ups. Then Derek could feel it in his gut, the old emotions and the adrenaline coursing through him.

His mind was shouting "Now! Now!" But it wasn't this Derek that it was talking to. It was shouting at the twelve year old boy who had taken his little brother to the family diner the day he found out their father was murdered. He wasn't supposed to tell Kyle. Their mother had made that very clear over the phone. He remembered eating that grief, like being crushed under a thousand pound weight as he had taken his baby brother to a place they had always gone on the weekends for breakfast. Then these thugs had busted in.

He watched the idiot boy, filled with the heroism of four generations of Reese war stories, spring out from behind the bar. He watched himself break the all-state offensive lineman's nose with a pan. Derek smirked like it was yesterday.

His arm gave a tremor in muscle memory of the impact. His body still felt every blow, breaking the ketchup bottle on bag boy number one's face. Not knowing which was tomato sauce and which was blood. He remembered getting hit in the stomach with a bat by the ringleader, and being stomped on by all four of them- the impacts against his back, his arms protecting his head, and his legs.

Hazel eyes watched calmly as the teenage thugs exited the building. Their sack was full from the breakfast rush. They peeled out of the parking lot and Derek pushed off the parking break and followed. They may be tearing up asphalt, but they weren't hard to follow. Their jock ringleader wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, but he was smart enough to head toward a rural area. He kept on their trail for a while, till he caught up to them near the hills. Their Ford piece of shit was exactly as it was supposed to be- a set up car. They ditched it at an old abandoned fuel station and garage that looked about used up even all the way back in the sixties when it was closed down.

They piled into the ringleader's shiny sports car, leased by some university looking to sign a star wide receiver. This boy had an entire career ahead of him, Derek thought, moving his truck to pursue. But when you're surrounded by people telling you how special you are, maybe some guys think they're untouchable. The decor of the car, the audacity of the rims, it all showed that this was a kid who came from the slums and stole as a way of life. With his athletic ability and playing for a much better school than Compton, the boy was paving himself a better future. But he guessed everyone knew the saying about old habits. Showing new friends how badass he was. Derek wondered what this superstar's new friends thought when he sped beside them and pushed the sports car off the road.

There was the stench of fried motor works, when the soldier got out of the truck with a slam of his door. He could see the red, sleek automobile nose down in a field of reeds. Three of the teenagers got out of the car- bag boy one, with glass still in his skin. Piggy had an off-angle nose and a shirt covered in blood. And the superstar was smeared with dirt.

He knew their faces. They were as much a part of who he was as the newspaper. Getting beat up in that diner taught him that there were no such things as heroes. He learned that there were survivors and dead men. His father was a hero and he was shot in the head by some two bit loser. He thought he could be a hero, and all he'd done was give his little brother something else to cry about that day in the hospital. He learned that all that mattered was holding on to what you got, no matter what. He learned to hold onto your life by hiding in sewers as the world crumbled, and holding onto your brother by keeping him safe. But mostly, it was holding onto your sanity … by confessing to the metal in the basement of a mansion.

Derek Reese wasn't trying to prove he was a hero when he picked up the baseball bat in the tall grass and threw it to the confused ashy skinned teen. He was simply looking to put a period on twenty years of unfinished business.

Most people think that in a fight possessing a weapon was an advantage. But Derek had been in enough tussles to know that it's only an advantage if you know how to use it. The superstar swung the bat like a Neanderthal, clumsy and uneven. Derek ducked under it and used the spring from his legs to rocket a fist into hard abs in the lower quads. The sound he made knew that there was enough time to deal with the other two before he got up.

Bag boy number one came rushing at him with raised fists and a yell like an extra from "Braveheart". Picking up the wooden bat, Derek jammed the tip into the kid's open vertebra. Flipping the bat around, He swung it like a true hitter into the kid's side. Absorbing the blow, the teen stumbled off and fell into the grass.

Piggy, however, was surprisingly silent for a big lineman. The big corn-fed boy lifted his two large fists like hammers and brought them down. Derek blocked them by turning the bat horizontal and gripping it hard with both hands, meeting the blow. The soldier was much stronger than he looked, but the bat still thumped to the grassy floor out of his grip. The big lineman's hands gripped Derek's jacket and he drove the older man back into his truck. He felt an agonizing ache in his lower back as it stiffened against the door handle. Rearing back, Derek smashed his head into the big boy's already damaged nose. Fresh blood spilled out like a river, filling the cedar thick air with an iron smell. Now reeling, Derek grabbed the big guy by the legs and drove him to ground, where hardened fists smashed into an already damaged face.

Feeling the anger and muscle reflexes of murder take hold. Derek could've killed that boy, had there not been the surprisingly strong forearm that locked around his neck and pulled him off. Bag boy seemed to have recovered and held Derek in a choke hold. While sputtering for air and fighting to free himself, the ringleader picked up the bat and swung. Derek growled as it hit across his lower chest, thunking against ribs. When the star reached back to swing again, the resistance fighter pivoted, so that the strike hit the bag boy in the restraining arm. The action freed Derek to throw a full sole of his boot into the black teen's pelvis and propel the soldier backwards, separating the two like an opposing force. With the momentum he slammed the bag boy into the truck. Picking up the bat he turned and slammed the meat of it into the skinny teen's arm. He heard it crack and then dislocate from his shoulder after he hit him with another swing.

When Derek turned back, superstar was on his knees. The athlete was bleeding all over himself, cradling his abused mid-section. That was when he put all of his anger and emotions eating at him for twenty years in the swing that knocked out four teeth and sent the boy spinning into the dirt.

CLICK!

He turned to find that piggy had a snub revolver. It was pointed at Derek with shaky hands of immense pain. "You son of a bitch … I'm going to …"

SHEEK SHEEK!

"What are you going to do with that pistol?"

Both combatants, bleeding on the side of the rural road, whirled. Standing off to the side was a fierce woman with long tresses of tussled raven curls. She wore a dark jacket over a long hemmed gray army tank top and jeans. The beautiful pallid woman looked dangerous pointing a tactical shotgun that they all knew she was an expert with.

The big kid dropped his piece in the same moment he saw her and ducked his head. He looked like a big turtle trying to slip into its shell. Sarah Connor, who seemingly came out of nowhere, didn't look too happy with Derek as she hiked down into the tall grass. Without mercy or remorse she began searching and collecting from the robbers with hard demands at gun point. After a moment of watching, unconsciously making sure that no one would jump her or try something stupid, Derek Let the tension leave his body. With a thump, Derek tossed the bloody bat into the grass and leaned back, closing his eyes.

It was over.

When he opened them, Sarah was standing in front of him with a snub nose pistol in her waistband, Shotgun resting on her shoulder, three ID's, two hundred dollars in cash from their wallets, and the sack with the stolen loot from the diner. Something in the way she was holding the plundered items said that they all belonged to her now. Behind Sarah the mewling robbers, clawed away slowly with nothing but the clothing on their back and a busted scrap heap. Derek found there was a tiny satisfaction watching them crawl. That was till all of what got them to this moment also caught up with Derek.

He winced, cradling his left rib with his right hand. "You following me now?" He bit at her painfully, before she could start on him.

For a long moment she didn't say a word till she deposited the shotgun and sack of cash on the hood of Derek's truck with a frustrated thunk. "What if I am?" She shot back rhetorically. They traded a hard look between one another.

It was the standard confrontation between the two that never missed a beat. Never had two people been angrier over the seer existence of one another as Sarah Connor and Derek Reese. And yet there were never two people who relied on one another more than they did on each other. It was the strange irony of a begrudgingly close relationship. It showed when Sarah's next move was forcing the man's arms up. He let out a grunt of pain and grudged her every drawn breath as Sarah lifted the hem of his shirt. Her fingers were cold, but surprisingly tender as she felt and prodded the ugly yellow and red bruises on Derek's ribs.

"Nothing is broken." She didn't break away from his eyes as she felt around. "Cartilage damage …" She drew out with a surprising softness in her voice. There were times when this happened, when they'd look at one another and find no reason for it. Derek compared it to looking at the sun too long. A long trek into those jewels and everything goes dark and you can't look away. There was some great power in those emerald eyes that made the world go round, that gave all life the means to continue on. As for Sarah, she always looks as if she wants something from him. But she only wants him to try and see through the brick wall she surrounds herself with just to show him that he can't.

She was self-conscious about herself, about what Derek knew about her. The last time they had been together like this, she had killed a woman. He could still see the tears in her eyes and the urine stain on her pants. Maybe that was what bothered her the most. He was still looking at her like she was the confused and vulnerable woman who begged him to help her. The man who stayed with her through the night and didn't leave her side till they got out of that hotel and back home where John and the machine were none the wiser of what had happened. But Derek knew that he had broken Sarah's golden rules. He had gotten too close, held her too long that night, and most cardinal of their sin was that she had allowed Derek Reese of all people to protect her.

That she could not forgive herself for.

When they had first met she had looked at him differently, not like Kyle he could imagine, but there was a time when she was ready to accept him a lot more. The hard ass look was always there, but she was so desperate to let him in. He felt like shit for those weeks, like he had dishonored Kyle's memory when he lied to those trusting eyes. But Sarah didn't know about Wisher, she didn't understand why he did what he did, and more to the point why she didn't need too. And that was what pissed her off. Sarah Connor could forgive someone for lying, but she couldn't forgive being told it was none of her business. And being in his arms, showing her weakness to this man of all men, it killed her. So now he knew she was trying to make up for that night over and over again, each time more harshly than the next.

So that had become their relationship, the need of some sort of connection, but the defensive nature and hard ass posturing that devolved into who could piss one another off more. They were like an old silent movie nickelodeon. The two main stars, seemingly the best of friends and yet always luring one another into comfort before pulling the rug out underneath.

Sarah was the first to break the stare down to her surroundings. It was like the shake from a deep sleep, a bucket of cold water. "What is this?" She motioned to the bodies and the wrecked car. "What is this all about?" She turned back to the man who was sobering up from being lost in her gaze. Derek breathed harshly and pondered telling her the truth or wanting to prolong their pissing contest. So he did both.

"Closure."

There was something about today that made John Connor smile. To anyone else in this world what he had been doing since this morning might seem trivial and might even seem mind numbing. But for what he had always been living with since he could remember, this was all he wanted out of life. To simply run around town and do the simplest of tasks and not worry about what would happen tomorrow. To the disgruntled husband these tasks would be nagging in nature. But to John it was a reprieve from the usual in his dark world. There was a list, there were things to get, and it had nothing to do with a looming apocalypse or the war that followed afterward.

Suffice to say that though John felt lighter than air, smiles coming easier, and the day seeming brighter. It wasn't so much that it had anything to do with escaping the war. After all he was still a teenager, and getting any teenager up to do any sort of chore or shopping was hard work. No, what made today brighter, the songs on the radio make more sense, and everything seem chipper, was simply this.

John Connor was in love.

When you're in love with a girl who was sitting next to you in the Jeep, who was your partner for the day … nothing ever seemed like work. Everything was new, an adventure, and a good time. Even the places John and Cameron had been a hundred times over together seemed new and exciting now that they were devoted to each other in a more intimate way.

They walked in public hand in hand for a spell. They referred to one another as "my girlfriend" or "my paramour" which was quickly corrected as "Boyfriend" after the first few stores. It was a risk, and they knew it, but John didn't care. They had decided to even do their business on the other side of town just so that it would be far enough to kiss without someone they knew seeing them.

For John it was not only a risk adverse decision, but one that was calculated. On the other side of town were new shops that had moved into old locations that he once knew. He'd like to think that being here with Cameron, as far away from home as they could get, it made them seem alone. Buying these things on his mother's list, household items, even looking for a third vehicle for the family, John could pretend that it was just he and Cameron. For a day, for a couple of hours, he could pretend that there was no war on the horizon. In his mind he and Cameron were buying things for their own house. They could be newlyweds, a serious couple with serious plans on forever, doing their piddling Saturday shopping. For just a heart's wish they could be nothing more than a normal couple of kids in love. That was truly what John Connor wanted from today.

And he smiled because he knew he had gotten it.

"This one seems adequate to our needs."

"Come on, Angel, don't you ever get tired of SUV's?"

"You're accusing me of being preoccupied with size?"

"You are dating me …"

"…"

"Heh, alright, look we got a Jeep, we got a truck, what you need is something with a little more speed."

"I hope speed is something I didn't acquire now that I'm with you."

John's playful smirk melted into a stricken look accented by raised eyebrows at the sudden shot at his manhood. Across the dark hood of the used Dodge Durango, a blank look of unreadable golden eyes studied the young man for a silent beat.

"I fooled you." She stated. There was just the ghost of a quirked lip on the corner of her mouth.

Slowly John grinned in playful mirth. "Good answer." He prodded her sense of humor. The girl crossed in front of the parked car toward him as he led the way from the line of SUV's.

The car dealership they were in was recommended to them by Derek, who was insistent that they get their car from it. Cameron had been wondering aloud all day if his uncle had some sort of deal with the owner. John had to agree with her assessment since almost all of their cars had been brought home by Derek. When he asked him about where he had gotten the truck and Jeep from, he declined to comment. So despite the day they were having, there was a part of John that didn't look forward to having to deal with a chop shop. But after the multi-colored flags on the guard railing, a couple of free hotdogs, and a radio station setting up live under a pavilion, he was actually surprised to see that this was a legit business.

"I don't understand why we can't get an SUV or another pickup truck, John? They're spacious with extra room for the weapons." Cameron strode beside him.

"And extra room for something else?" He gave the girl a suggestive look.

Cameron met his gaze with no emotion and no comment, leaving him to himself after a pause. John chuckled playfully and caught up, looping an arm around her waist. An action she observed for a pensive moment, then allowed it to remain pleasantly.

"We need a get-away car." He stated seriously.

Cameron froze in thought. "Agreed." she nodded as they paced the lot, while children ran by, and salesmen in sweat soaked white button downs and ties grinned slyly, trying to convince their parents why they needed a television screen in the back of their van, for a grand more.

"But I don't understand?" Cameron said over the sound of "Karma Chameleon" blasting from the speakers in the pavilion.

There was a strange amusement on the young man's face at some lost memory connected to the song. "What's that?" He responded.

The girl was quiet, watching John's mind being stuck somewhere where an impossibly young Sarah Connor playfully sung the Boy George song to her flu stricken little child in her horrible Spanish as they lay in his motel bed.

"Despite Derek's directions, we've been observing automobiles all afternoon at several car lots, across the city. Yet, despite stating the adequacy of fifteen other vehicles, within our price range, you have told me that they aren't right for us." She frowned.

Blinking, John just grinned at her quizzical look. He tilted his head, causing her to match his movement. She couldn't tell if he the glimmer of his happiness was related to the memory he had just left or the feel of her in his arms. Never realizing that might possibly it could be both.

He stared at his boots for a moment before he sighed out a chuckle. "Look … this is what you don't understand." When he looked up, he pushed a long lock of glossy hair behind her ear. "This is big for us." He said.

A frowned furrowed her polished features. "How?" She seemed lost.

"We're not looking for just any car here, Cameron." He explained. "We're looking for our car." He paused, hoping it would be good enough. But when she tilted her head again it didn't seem to sink in.

"Look, this isn't mom's car, this isn't Derek's car." He explained. "When we buy this thing, it will be ours." He disconnected from her and strode forward. He raised his hand out to the horizon. "Don't you get it?" There was something excited about the way he spoke to her, anticipation for her to share this with him. "This is our first step into a bigger world. When we get our car we can go anywhere we want, do anything we want, when we want." He explained excitedly. "It'll just be you and me out there on the road." He seemed breathless. Behind him, people watched with interest as they passed.

Cameron was silent. "You're a minor for one more year, John. I will be a minor for the rest of our existence … crossing state lines will cause problems till you're old enough to plausibly look like my father." She contradicted.

There was a true moment in which John Connor looked like one of the deflated balloons in the pavilion. He gave a long sigh and rubbed the back of his neck as he limped back to his ballerina. "Thanks a lot for that, Angel, really needed to be reminded that's on the horizon." He muttered in disappointment, tossing his arm around the girl's shoulder as they walked the sunny lot.

After watching John squint on the bright reflections off the shiny hoods, Cameron spoke up. "You don't think I understand, do you?" The cyborg asked. Her deflated paramour turned with slight agitation.

"Do you?" He asked shortly.

"Yes, I understand what you are saying." She nodded. "And having a vehicle of our own will help with every aspect of our relationship." She looked into his eyes. "But I don't understand why this car is particularly special. The first three days that we knew each other, we went through three different vehicles." She tightened her cheek.

"Because it's our first." John shrugged. "People in relationships tend to remember fondly their firsts. You know, like their first kiss, their first apartment, and the first time they …" John cleared his throat.

"The first time they get a car?"

"Yeah … uh, that too." He chuckled nervously glossing over what he was really getting at.

The ballerina squinted. "Our first kiss was in front of a restaurant in the hills, we were over-looking the city lights." She stated.

It might have been months ago, but like Cameron, John could remember every moment of it like it was yesterday. He could still taste her lips, the feel of the cold leather of her favorite jacket. But most of all there was nothing that beat that first time that one felt complete. Of reaching the satisfaction of finding that missing piece in one's life, in one's soul, and connecting it together. There in that magical moment, bathed in the light of their emerald city, knowing that the search for what all humans eventually sought was at an end for John. He tasted forever on the forested hill and it was surely something he would never forget as long as he lived.

"We were then promptly attacked by an angry albino Silverback gorilla." She added.

Anyone else might have been annoyed. But John just grinned grudgingly at the bucket of cold water ever carried by the impossible girl of metal that he had only ever loved. "And then that happened." He conceded, giving her a peck.

"If it is any consolation, John, it was very memorable." She added helpfully after their lips came apart with a satisfying smack.

"Yeah, well no one can ever accused us of doing anything the easy way."

"Indeed."

Hand in hand they strode through the dealership, aimlessly looking at the shiny chrome of the new models of cars. When they had arrived John and Cameron weren't sure what they were looking for or if they were even looking for something at all. In truth when Derek had first sent them to this place, John figured the hard part wasn't find the car, but dealing with purchasing it. Usually he wasn't above under the table dealings with the unsavory types that were drawn to this city like a magnet. But John did prefer to keep things above table and if all possible uncompromising of principle. The young man wasn't sure what it meant to be a hero, and with all the darkness that he was barely fighting off as of late he wasn't sure he'd ever get there, but for now he'd insist on a more honorable existence than what his mother and uncle constituted.

Years of growing up in eye shot of the people that taught his mother her new life, had made John bitter and resentful of the criminal enterprises of men and women in this town. He never understood, even when he was small, how learning to hurt people the way his mother had done, was going to help save them later. It was a question that used to make him feel guilty with thoughts of his mother sacrifices for him. But these days it was a question that set him apart from his upbringing. He'd find a new way to live, teach a new way to go about their lives. It was just one more thing that John put on an ever growing list of reasons why Cameron and himself would soon be leaving.

He hadn't told anyone, even Cameron, about it. But a part of John knew that the magic one-eight was coming up and it had to mean something. He had fantasized about it, of course what teenager hadn't? Leaving home and finding your own place in the world, becoming your own man. But lately what was usually fantasy was slowly taking shape into reality for John. He couldn't pin it down, couldn't compartmentalize all the things wrong in his life that he couldn't control anymore. It was the all-consuming darkness that was starting to eat him alive. It was sitting silently while his mother blundered from one disaster to the other, thoughtlessly, arrogantly, ordering them into mine fields. It was seeing her haughty sneer, the look of contempt for everything good in his life. He wanted to snap, to tell the spoiled brat that she was wrong, but he couldn't turn his back on her.

The worst was in the still of the night, lying on the too small bed, staring at the glowing stars on his ceiling, and feeling the beast inside him. In his heart and mind it twisted and turned, frustration warping to rage, the resentment of a stagnate life of danger and futility turning to hatred for a beloved face he saw every day. It was only Cameron now that held it all back. The seconds' reliefs of holding her hand, a stolen kiss was like water on dry lips in the desert. Cameron had become his only cure to the demon's that lay on him as he slept in confinement. And on such a night as that when he was at his wits end, that's when Cameron came to him in the dark.

He remembered the way she looked from the open bathroom door. He thought he must have been dreaming the way she had floated to him wordlessly, soundlessly. The slivers of moonlight peeking through the blinds catching on her satin slip as she slipped in bed with him. She formed to his body perfectly and didn't say a word as she lay in his arms, her eyes stoic and concentrated, as if asking him if it this was alright, if he needed her like this. And that was when he knew she was an angel, his angel, and she had no other name from that point on.

He wasn't sure what alerted her. Whether, Cameron heard the anger in his thumping heart, a heat signature way past normal through the wall, or the harsh breathing of a fully clothed young man in his bed. But she was the ice pack on the burn, the warm bladder after a cold dip. She had become everything he needed in that moment when hormones and the darkness he married himself to came to consume him. It was some hours later, lying there in that bed so closely, caressing her silky skin, the smell of her freshly washed hair, all the tactile nature of love, that John Connor realized that this shouldn't be one night. The two of them together, just holding one another, it shouldn't have to be a desperate last resort when his demons crowded around him. By the morning he knew what was the inevitable.

John Connor and Cameron were going to leave. He was going to find some secluded place, and lose the madness in the solitude of the mountains. John was self-aware enough to know the he was sick from a festering mortal wound to both heart and soul inflicted in the fires of a battle he got too close too. His cure could only come from nights like those and days like this. A life spent surrounded by this new feeling, this love that had saved his life once. It was the only medicine for the darkness that had been passed from mother to son.

And this journey to healing his soul started with a car … The car.

They were going to give up or at least call Derek for the reason that he insisted that they buy from this place. But just as Cameron was fishing John's phone out of his pocket rather than leaving with him … He saw it. It was past the Chryslers, a haze of Southern California heat lingering in the dry air above their shined chrome. It was pushed against the fence, covered by a dusty olive drab tarp.

There were only three times in John's life when he had felt this way when he gaze upon something for the first time. Once in Red Valley, a girl with golden eyes and a serious look asked for his name, and he knew he'd never be the same when she smiled. The last time it would happen to John was when faced with a squirming and cueing infant with matching emerald eyes and a head of raven curls. Though it would seem impossible to anyone else, the two would meet eyes and he swore till the day he died that the new born smiled at him. But after Red Valley, and before the baby, there was what was under the tarp.

Cameron had called after him, but John couldn't hear anything. He paced to the back of the lot, Cameron, rarely, at his heals. Beyond the cars, next to the chain linked fence was the auto shop where hard working men in green overalls serviced cars under warranty in the heat with only the sounds of a Mexican base run to comfort them. Cameron gave a look around as John knelt in front of the covered object. He hitched his breath when he pulled the cover off … and he smiled.

Under the army tarp, was a black 1973 Mustang, with a chrome finish. The tires were low, it was rusted on the edges, and there were certainly parts missing on the inside. But it was like something out of a dream. Standing in front of the car, he could feel it, like it was calling to him. He woke up this morning joking with his uncle that he wasn't going to have any religious experiences when instructed to choose wisely. But this was something different.

"This one?" Cameron sounded skeptical.

"This one."

John popped the hood and saw that some of the inner workings were rusted and corroded, while some of them had already been replaced by refurbished pieces. It was clear that someone was already attempting to restore it before it ended up in this forgotten part of the dealership.

"I thought you said we were looking for a "Get-away Car", John?" The cyborg joined him.

"Do you know the horse power this will get?" He asked defensively.

"Do these horses have broken legs or just twisted ankles?"

The two lovers shared a glare, the young man smirking his contempt for the stoic girls cutting comment. But before they could continue their banter a man in a green jumpsuit stalked toward them, cleaning his hands with an oily white towel.

"What's going on?"

"What's up?"

The Hispanic man who greeted John and Cameron was just a sneeze older than the both of them. Short, with a thin dark mustache to hide his youth amongst his co-workers, he seemed energetic and yet haunted by the site of the car.

"Beautiful, huh?"

John raised an eyebrow and his companion tilted her head. But the man hadn't taken his eyes off the car. To this John looked amused as he turned to his girl, who seemed unimpressed by both men's enamor with the vehicle.

"Second best machine I've ever seen." John's teasing grin was ear to ear this time, his eyes, sticking to the glaring cyborg. "Is it for sale?" He asked, putting himself a little further from the girl, he moved closer to the mechanic.

The man in the jumpsuit shrugged. "I don't know … we don't sell Fords here, you know?" He scratched his ear.

"Then how did it get here?" Cameron joined them.

That was when the man seemed to go quiet for a long moment. He seemed visibly shaken by whatever event took place in the story requested of him. "It's fucked up, eh?" He chewed his inner cheek. "This morning, this beautiful blond drove up, right? She just … she's fucked up, you know?" He shook his head.

"She was drunk?"

"Naw, she was, she was just crying and shit … I mean just messed up. Like, I've seen people grieving and shit, I mean have you ever been to a Mexican funeral? Chingo! But this lady was just … I mean it just gets, just gets in you, yea?" He thumped his heart. When John gave a thoughtful nod of commiseration Cameron wondered who John was thinking about.

"I think her husband got killed or whatevers, and like it was his car or like his dad's car or some shit. And like she just couldn't look at it or whatever, she just kept saying she couldn't look at it. And all of us, we were here early, right? And we were telling her "Ma'am we can't take the car, we don't truck with that shit." You knows? And like she broke, man … I mean … fuck." The young man wiped stray tears from his eyes with his sleeve. Whatever had happened to this beautiful woman had seemed to imprint on the mechanic. "And like watching her break, just break in front of us, I mean … We just couldn't tell her no, right?" he shrugged. "Fuck man, just … fuck!" He cleared his throat.

"I've been married for like two years, you know? Like me and my old lady got married two weeks after prom. And like all our friends think it was just because of the baby, and our family don't believe in out of wedlock. But it ain't like that, Nah man, you know? I just couldn't imagine life without her, you know, I just love her, man." He sniffed and motioned John to Cameron as to relate. The young man nodded again and cleared his throat. He understood and commiserated with the sentiments of love. John was still haunted and poisoned, even after the threat to Cameron had been neutralized months ago.

It would seem strange to anyone else but Cameron that a man would open up to John like this. But the ballerina was very aware of the strength and trust that John Connor commanded amongst anyone looking for a friend or an ear for their troubles.

The mechanic tapped the half rusted hood with emotion. "Naw …" He cleared his throat and turned watery dark eyes toward John. "Naw … I couldn't ask shit for it. You know? It ain't right, you know?" He cleared his throat. John nodded one last time. "Fuck it, homes, it's yours, my boy … I'll be happy if I never see this piece of junk again, yea?" He and the young man gave a respectful clasp of hands of tough male camaraderie, parting with an acknowledgment to Cameron with a nod of his head.

They watched him go, still wiping his eyes with his sleeve till he disappeared back into the dark garage. When he was gone, John gave a long breath and braced himself on the hood of the car. The action caused Cameron to step up and observe. It looked as if the story they had been told had gotten ahold of John as well. But it seemed it might have hit John harder.

"John?" She called to him.

The young man shook his head. "I don't know why, Angel …" He cleared his throat. "But I feel like what happened to that woman …" He tried to rationalize before he continued, but he just couldn't. "I feel like it's important …" He was out of breath.

Cameron shifted her eyes. "To the mission?" She asked.

But John shook his head. "To me …" He looked up at her. And in his eyes it was clear as day that the youth was utterly spooked by the second hand incident.

Tightening her cheek, the cyborg frowned. "Seems improbable." She met his sudden emotions with the cold logic of an artificial mind.

He was trying to rationalize this sudden sorrow inside that was dragging him down like an anchor to the bottom. It had been so long since John had allowed outside tragedy to affect him and his life. He couldn't think that way, couldn't put his heart out there for strangers when the few people he loved and cared for were in constant danger. But this time it wasn't just being relayed the strange story of the broken beauty, but he could feel it inside the car. The love, the hopes, and dreams of a long term love filled with so much history and yet such a sort time in marital bliss. He felt insane somehow knowing that about this woman and her now dead husband. Having this intuition about their relationship and this car being restored for the day when they finally came together to make their family whole. And the strangest thing of all was that somehow he couldn't shake this feeling that this long suffering love affair directly affected his life.

The youth rested his hand a moment longer on the car hood, before he gave a long sigh. He stood up straight and cleared his throat. "You're right." He looked into her golden eyes. "I guess it hit a little too close to home." He gave her the roughest of smiles.

Suddenly, to John's surprise, she lifted a hand and cupped his cheek. "I'm not going anywhere, John." There was a measured assurance to her speech, but intensity in her eyes that almost shattered the illusion of a stilted mechanical being. The young man was caught off guard by the action. But slowly it started to sink in what she was trying to do, and eventually what she accomplished. With a soft snort John gently wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against him.

Squeezing her tight, John smelled Cameron's glossy locks and kissed the side of her head. Closing his eyes, he relived all the long nights and days in all the years in which he didn't have this. Forced to live his life without these treasured tactile and spiritual comforts from someone he loved so dearly. Afterward he thanked God, or whoever was high above them moving chess pieces on the board, that he didn't have to spend another lonely hour wondering, afraid that this space inside of him that he was only vaguely aware of would never be filled.

When they broke apart, both touched their foreheads together, eyes still closed. "I love you." He spoke in a breathless whisper. Cameron nodded against him.

"I know you do …"

She didn't say it, she'd never say it. She would be lying if she repeated those magical words. He didn't take it personally, and it didn't bother him. John Connor knew that what Cameron felt for him was beyond emotion, beyond the words that humans conceived to describe the intensity of inter-connections. John Connor was her hardware, John Connor was the software. To Cameron he wasn't someone she met waitressing in a diner or at a bar during a girl's night out. She could claim the one thing that no human could ever say or even fathom. He was her existence, her world, her entire meaning for being. John could use hyperbole, metaphor, to try and match these sentiments, but he knew it wouldn't compare to what it truly meant to her. It was something more fundamental than devotion, something beyond the meaning. He didn't need to hear those three words from her, he didn't need to see it in her eyes, to know what it was or how it made him feel to know what forever felt like in a kiss and a touch of bare skin.

He gently pulled the cyborg's head to his lips, giving her one last peck, while she looked out on the Mustang in question.

"Do you still want it?" She asked.

John moved from the side of her head back toward the car. Even so close to Cameron, he could still feel the sorrow inside him and living within each wire, pipe, and machination under the hood. And yet for some reason he couldn't let go. Imprinting? A sense of almost entitlement toward the vehicle? To see it go to someone else, to even just leave it here to rot in this dealership, forever ignored by traumatized mechanics, made it seem wrong, criminal. It felt almost like a part of him now. It was a part he couldn't leave behind.

"It's ours."

Cameron looked surprised by the admission. "But it's a hunk of junk." She protested.

John smirked. "Yeah?" He crossed behind the cyborg and wrapped his arms around her waist and placed his head on her shoulder as both shared the view of the half rebuilt Mustang. "Give it time, Angel." He pulled her closer.

"You and me … we'll make it the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy."

There was a stillness in the night that made the darkness in the corners of the half lit scenery seem sullen. The sound of tiny, non-threatening insects chirped and wheezed in the foliage that lay beyond the perimeter. It was the kind of night that afforded a sense of solitude that could be rarely found in this city. Even high in the hills, there was no endlessness to the moans and groans of the metal and glass towers that over looked the lit grids below. Choppers, party music, the doubts in one's own head, even being above everyone didn't give you a peace of mind in this town. But here, on the other side, in the secluded rural areas away from both ocean and mountains there was a chance for that badly needed sense of isolation. It was why Sarah Connor rented the two story home on the hill and its property.

But it wasn't what Derek Reese wanted from it tonight.

What he wanted was to know what it was like. Not the solitude, the isolation, or even the scenery, he was outside because he wanted to know what this night was like. People loose time in their lives, comas, sedations, simply oversleeping. Tonight was a night that Derek Reese had lost long ago. In the stillness of the night he could still hear the heart monitors of his hospital room, the sound of "Buffy: The Vampire Slayer" playing in the background on his television. He was a boy of twelve fading in and out of consciousness for days after the beating at the hands of a couple of thugs. Today was the single worst day of Derek Reese's life. No matter what happened after that, Judgment day, Kyle being taken by the machines, The Ashdown offensive, he'd always tell himself that it would never be as bad as the day his father died. To be a kid and see your mother shut down and never recover, while the real world showed its true face to you for the first time. No kid, however tough, would forget that kind of trauma. But for all of it, Derek could only remember half of what happened today. There were spaces in his memory that were missing as he lay unconscious. So despite his mantra of the myriad of all the horrible days that would follow that could never top this one, he could never say for certain that had lived through all of it.

Swigging a beer, he sat on the porch bench and waited. He waited for the sky to fall, waited for an asteroid, hell, even for the Archangel Michael to arrive and fight a scaled Hell beast in the sky over Los Angeles. There had to be something that would put a cherry on top as the worst day ever, something unreal to mark its importance. But as he waited, he began to realize the cruelest thing of all. The world spun on. His father had died today, a good man, a good cop, was murdered by a low-life nut-job who had been obsessed with a stripper. And no one cared. Somewhere today a woman, a man, was sitting at their desk sipping coffee, and took a moment to read the headline. Then they turned the page as if it meant nothing. At thirty-three, Derek Reese thought nothing could surprise him anymore, but somehow even a lifetime later, it still hurt.

It took four hours out here to realize that nothing was coming out of tonight. That he didn't actually miss anything. When Derek looked out across the perimeter he saw the moonlight glinting off his truck and Sarah's Jeep's windshield. Behind that, from the shed, the lamp light revealed two silhouettes, as the soft sound of a "It's the same old song" from the shed radio pilfer out into the quiet rural setting. But there were no falling stars, or apocalyptic battles of good and evil. To the rest of the world, both the normal one, and in his, it was just any other Saturday night.

He heard the front door next to him and he turned from the shed to his left and saw the dark shadow of someone watching him. He knew she had been there for a minute or so, just leaning against the frame, wondering what he was doing, or possibly just watching him. She stepped out onto the orange tile porch and crossed her arms.

"Derek?" Sarah's voice was like the night around them. It was still and soft.

"Yeah …" He confirmed.

He waited for the most plausible question for his activity, but it never came. He looked up and saw that she was still watching him, but she remained silent. He was sure the raven haired woman was waiting for him to explain himself. Or maybe she realized that she had intruded on a private reflection. As she stepped into the light, a sliver of moonlight caught the side of her face. Somehow in the darkness of the porch and in the house behind her she looked different. There was otherworldliness to her. All the primalness and severity in her looks had been softened in the dark and shadows. He'd hate to admit it, but there was a different side to her beauty in the comforts of the night's obscurity, almost enchantingly so. But he averted his eyes when she turned back to the door wordlessly, both realizing that they had been gazing too long at one another. But then she stopped.

"I was … uh, I was doing a load of laundry, the sheets, and I was wondering if you want me to wash a pillowcase or something?" She paused by the door.

"The Sheets?" he asked. "Didn't you wash those, last week?" Derek frowned.

There was a long pause as if he had caught her. But she snapped back with a sudden defensive tone. "So what? When I wash I like to do everything." She retorted harshly.

But after a long stare down he merely shrugged. "Seems like a waste of detergent if you ask me." He muttered into his beer.

The woman rolled her eyes "No one did." There was something dark in her low growl.

Whatever Sarah had come out there to tell him was dropped. He watched her retreat into the house. But before the screen door closed there were voices from the shed.

"Alright, I think that's it, punch it, Cam!"

BBBBZZZZTTTT!

"Woah! Turn it off! Turn it off!"

"…"

THUNK!

"Ouch! What the … is that a bat?!"

THUNK!

"What are you doing?!

THUNK!

"Stop hitting me!"

"John you've been electrocuted."

"Give me that! … Yeah, trust me I was there!"

"When someone is electrocuted you hit them with a wooden object to kill the charge. Everybody knows that, John …"

"Don't take that tone with me, Cameron. I know electrical safety."

"Then your anger was meaningless."

"Oh, okay, miss high and mighty. Except that you only hit them if they're stuck on the conductor. And FYI you only hit them once! Not go at them like they owe you money, Professor."

"This would not have happened if you would have allowed me to work on the electrical."

"You said you didn't know the electrical."

"I would have if you had checked to see if there was an owner's manual before we purchased it, John."

"First, we didn't buy the car, we found it. Second, forgive me, if I didn't check to see if the abandoned car we found had a thirty-six year old owner's manual in the glove box."

"You're not forgiven. There was a suitable Grand Cherokee with excellent mileage we could've acquired."

"Sure, but would we be having as much fun as we are now?"

"We could've been doing other, more pleasurable, things."

"Whatever you do, Angel, don't remind me."

Derek and Sarah watched the two silhouettes part at the mouth of the shed. As Cameron walked away, John took the baseball bat and gave it a playful pop against the cyborg's rear. The girl snapped back to him, but John only gave her a satisfied smirk in response and tossed the bat away.

The quiet was broken by a hard growl. "They must think we're idiots, don't they?" Sarah Connor's glare was dangerous as she watched from the darkness.

There was a slow thoughtful nod in response. "I don't think they give us even that much credit." Derek responded gruffly.

Both had known for a long time that something had been going on between the two. It was no secret that John was in love. It was the first thing that anyone could point out when he and the machine were in the same room. Both Sarah and Derek had watched it grow and warp slowly. Till what they had wanted to dismiss as teenage hormones, was now clearly much worse, if the "Back Alley Murderer" Case was any indication. They had watched John lose control and lose himself under the threat of something from the future coming to destroy Cameron. There had been no lines or brutality that John would stop at to ensure the cyborg's safety. He had truly frightened both of them in those dark weeks.

After all of that, to see them so close, so intimate in the way they stood, talked, and touched. It was only obvious that they were now in the middle of a relationship. No matter how hard they tried to hide it, how well they covered their tracks, when someone was in love it was impossible to hide in such close quarters as the Connors lived.

"We should do something." Sarah watched them intensely.

Derek shook his head. "Should've done something … it's too late now." He corrected.

"It's never too late for anything." The way the shadowed woman spoke, she could've spat.

"For this it is." He warned. "You remember what he was like just a few months ago?" Derek asked seriously.

A jolt of worry and fear crossed emerald eyes. "I do." She confirmed.

Derek pointed to the two pairs of boots that were side by side sticking out from underneath the frame of the Mustang. "That is what's keeping it in check. It is what's keeping away all the dark things inside that kid." He explained. "If we try and take that from him …" Derek trailed off.

"We'll lose him." Sarah finished.

He nodded. "He's a seventeen year old kid, in love, and now has a car." The soldier explained. "What do you think his next move would be?" He asked with an annoyed grunt.

There was a long pause in which Sarah Connor could've been set to simmer. She looked annoyed, outraged, and just a bit sad. Then with a long sigh, she glared. "We send him to get a vehicle for himself and instead of getting some sports car … he goes dumpster diving." There was cringing amazement in her tone. "And people wonder why I don't treat him like a normal teenager." There was some endearing amusement in the woman's voice. It was the kind that mothers reserve for their idiot children when they love them with every grudging inch of their soul, despite their baffling decisions.

Even Derek felt a sense of affinity for the boy, more now, than he ever had. "He'll get it running." He chuckled despite himself.

"I'll be surprised if it even runs." She said facetiously. There was something petulant and childish in her voice. For a heart's beat Derek thought he even heard the spoiled aristocratic tomes of an debutante.

"It runs." Derek said with assurance. "It's the fastest hunk of junk in the Galaxy." the slightest smirk betrayed him as he lived in old childhood revelry.

His confidence intrigued Sarah. Twitching her eyebrow, she turned from the shed to the man sitting in front of her. "How do you know?" She asked suspiciously.

Derek sniffed. "I've helped work on it before." He nodded.

"You've worked on it? How?"

Turning back, he shrugged. "It's my dad's car." He continued to watch the black and chrome mustang half hidden by the tarp.

Derek still had memories of the old car that had sat in their garage since he could remember. Both he and Kyle had played inside of it, used it as their club house, and their home base during play. It had been their dad's car, and their grandfather's before that. The story had gone that on their parent's first date, his mother's manager had crashed into the car on purpose. He was trying to save the young actress from career suicide, by dating a rookie cop, when a TV star had her on the hook. She had sent their father a check in order to fix it, but he never did. He had always said that it was a memento, a remembrance of the one night he had with the most beautiful woman in the world. For years, even after Derek was born, his father refused to fix the car. At first it was out of memory, and sometime after the Hollywood "it" girl fled the paparazzi from an obscure hospital in Texas, leaving her newborn baby for his father to come pick up and raise, it became a symbol. Jonathan Reese wouldn't fix his father's car till she came back for them.

Years after leaving her newborn behind, and three flops in the box-office later, the lady that Derek had saw on interviews from "Entertainment Tonight" came to their door in a rainstorm. She gave him a hug in tears and told his dad that she couldn't do it anymore, a life without him, without them. She stayed for a year and left again. Derek would've resented her had she not given them Kyle. It had been the three of them for so long afterward that Derek didn't even know what it was like having a mother.

Then one Christmas, she was there. She brought presents, wonderful and intimate gifts for all of them. All the years she had been gone, she had followed her children every day to school, asked vendors and employees what "that boy and the toddler were looking at", in toy stores. She had kept her distance, but still knew everything about their lives. It went on and on till eventually the studios didn't want her. The jealous manager and love struck directors that had held the starlet captive all those years, all fell in love with another girl. And just like that, overnight, it was the end of her fifteen year career. She didn't wait to mourn or even try to fight. She immediately sold her house and stocks, and used that money to pay off his dad's mortgage. And ever since that Christmas she had been there with them. Derek had just gotten used to her being there every day, used to having a complete family when today had happened.

When Derek started telling the story Sarah had been standing, by the time he was done she was sitting next to him, his beer in her hand. If it was one thing that Derek knew about Sarah it was that she loved Kyle. He told himself that it was the only reason that she kept him around. So to hear him tell her the tale of their origins, of the family that both of them consider her to be an apart of, she had never been more invested in a story. And Derek had never had an easier time telling anyone about his life before Judgment Day.

"I guess I never forgave her for that, giving it away the way she did." Derek shook his head. "That car had meant something to us, to Kyle and me." Derek cleared his throat. "I yelled at her, she cried, and I didn't feel any better and neither did anyone else." He sniffed.

Sarah passed back his beer. She watched him take a swig. "You didn't try and get it back?" She asked. Derek shook his head.

"No, after a while I didn't want to see the damn thing either." He swallowed. "And after a while I guess it didn't matter, bombs fell and I had a lot more pressing things to worry about." The man's shoulders sank. "But it always bothered me that dad's car was out there. That some stranger, who owned it now, they just didn't know what they had." He shook his head.

Sarah searched his eyes. "So you sent John down there to find it." She confirmed.

He nodded. "It would've been his one way or the other, anyway." He gave a private smirk and paused. "Hell … I'm just happy "The Millennium Falcon" is back where it belongs." He took a swig of his beer. He handed the beer back to Sarah.

The woman gave him a genuine smile at the name. "So am I." She nodded and took a draft.

As he watched Sarah drink, Derek was suddenly haunted by what had happened earlier that day. In his head he could still see an attractive Asian woman in her underwear chasing after him to her hotel door. Hear her Australian accent as it begged him to stay, for him to talk to her about what was going on. He felt guilty, because she was his secret, his shame that he hid from the world. She was a woman from a past life that he held onto, but couldn't bring himself to accept as his future. When he had tried to tell her the important things about himself, about his family, it didn't feel right. No matter how he had tried to convince himself, Jesse would be an outsider. She was a comfort when he needed her, when Kyle was gone, and he was alone in the dark hell of war. But now that Derek knew the truth, knew what was in front of him, Jesse had fallen to the wayside. Watching Sarah drink, seeing her sitting next to him like they were a couple of damn teenagers at summer camp whispering secrets to each other. It made him feel guilty, because he liked it, liked her like this. Sarah Connor was the first person since Kyle that made him feel like himself, like he didn't have to hide who he really was anymore. Because, knowing her, she'd find out one way or the other.

Sarah was measured when she pulled her lips from the beer bottle with a moist pop. She squinted at Derek as he watched her. She seemed hesitant to speak under his intense hazel eyes in the moonlight. She looked out to the shed as she spoke.

"That's why I followed you today."

Derek watched her hold the bottle to her cheek as she tilted her head. "What's that?" He frowned.

"I saw the paper this morning …" She paused. "And you were the first person I thought of." He saw how uncomfortable she looked saying it. She reminded him of a teenage girl telling a guy that she liked his haircut.

Derek was surprised, but smart enough not to spook her away. He looked to the tile and leaned forward. "Oh yeah?" He asked evenly. His body language was not betraying for how it actually made him feel to hear that from her.

She nodded, her eyes piercing him. "You look like him." She said quietly. "And you hadn't been home since …" She trailed off.

"Since the party?"

"Since the hotel."

When she corrected him he looked up now visibly shocked. He knew that talking about the woman she killed at the party was off limits most nights. But in a million years he'd never suspect that Sarah would ever bring up their night at the hotel afterward. The shower, the two of them together between the sheets, how hard she clung to him as she sobbed all the horror and fear of what she had done. The soft whispers in her hear till she fell asleep against him. Derek Reese had been witness to the unmaking of Sarah Connor, and helped put her back together that night. And he was sure she'd never forgive him for it.

"It was a … hard night for you. I guess I was just giving you space." He cleared his throat.

Sarah nodded and bit her lip. "I thought it was you in the paper." She continued to nod. "And seeing it, thinking that you were … it, it …" She went quiet and tilted her head.

"You had to make sure it wasn't me." They locked eyes.

"Yes." She looked away. That was when he was sure that wasn't what she was going to say to him. But she seemed grateful that he misread what she really meant.

After a long tense moment, Derek chuckled. The woman glared but at the sound of the laughter she still quirked her lips. She watched him scrub his face.

"I have a cellphone, you know?" he grinned roughly.

The longer she stared at him, the bigger her grin spread. By the time she looked away there was a goofy, toothy grin spread across her lips. "I guess you do." She lifted her hand with a shrug taking another sip of their beer.

Never had the metaphor for summer camp been more prevalent. When she turned back he was still watching her with those hazel eyes of million candle power that could pierce through a concrete wall. Never one to back down, nor be out dominated the 'Mother of the Future' matched him, turning into the wave of complex emotions. But like an arrogant captain, Sarah seemed unaware of what she had tried to tackle on her own, and in return became captured in their shared gaze. Derek knew he should have looked away, but he couldn't help himself. But inside he wanted to exploded, the emotions overwhelming him so suddenly. There were emotions that he thought were long dead inside him. But it being today, and talking of his father, mother, and brother, he felt a chink in his armor. But it had been so long since anyone cared, cared the way that only Sarah Connor could care for someone.

Sarah brow furrowed, as if she was seeing something new and familiar. He watched her reach out to touch it, touch this familiar stranger in front of her. Only Derek Reese and God knew how much he wanted to have known what that would've been like, to know what Sarah Connor's comforting hand on his stubbled cheek would've felt like. But he was still Derek, not Kyle, and Derek flinched away from the beautiful woman's touch.

"Been a long day …" He cleared his throat and looked away.

"Yeah …" Sarah retracted her hand quickly. She was still looking at him, waiting, wondering what had happened, not just between them, but to her in those few breathless seconds. The woman sounded winded. "I've got a load of laundry I need to check on." She said sternly.

There was a hard thunk on the bench, when she dropped the mostly empty beer bottle on the bench. She stood above him for a beat or two. Derek wanted to chuckle, despite the emotions, at the classic bully mentality. He had humiliated her and or wronged her with his conscious rebuff, so she needed to make herself feel more powerful. So she looked down on him. She must have been one hell of a mean girl in High School. Derek only thanked god every day that the skinny, ninety pound, quad player that shared his name never met Sarah Connor in her prime, prom queen, head cheerleader, days.

She was making her way back inside of the house when he stopped her with a question he had been meaning to ask for a while now.

"How long have you known?" He asked sincerely. His eyes did not leave the tile under his feet.

She stopped at in the doorway, her hand still holding the door. "Known what?" She parroted but her voice had taken a softer tone.

"That you've been sick."

There was a long pause as Sarah stayed silent. "I might not like them too much anymore, but I still know my way around a computer, Sarah." He didn't blink. "Black outs, memory loss, time loss, Web MD has a lot to say about it … nothing good." He waited on her to speak up.

Sarah stepped back and shut the door.

"Does John know?" He asked.

She shook her head. "No …" Looking down at her toes, she crossed her arms. He watched her pace toward the end of the porch her eyes drawn toward the shed. "I don't know what to tell him." She shrugged.

"What can you tell me?"

To the question she let out a small scoffed laugh. "The machine, when we first got here, she warned me that I die of cancer." She bit her lip, turning back to the future soldier. He saw the smile on her lips but behind watering eyes there was something broken and afraid of the world slowly unraveling in front of her and for her child in the distance.

It suddenly made sickening sense to Derek Reese. For so long the mystery and legend of Sarah Connor had weaved through the very fabric of the Resistance since Derek could remember. Kyle and most of the soldiers had bought into it, worshipped her like it was religion. But for the eldest Reese boy it didn't make any sense. If she had been a martyr, why not say how she died? If she was so important, how come she didn't exist before her seventeenth birthday? Now he understood what had happened to her. It wasn't some epic last stand in the early days of the war, it wasn't a bullet meant for her beloved son, it was cancer. There was an indignity to this irony to solving the great mystery of his age that made Derek sick to his very soul.

"Cancer?" Getting the word out was the hardest thing he'd done in a long time.

Sarah's laugh was pure mirth. "No …" She shook her head. He seemed surprised watching her wipe a stray tear from her eye with a pale hand. She bit her lip, fighting to tell him something.

"What is it?" He didn't realize he was making demands.

"A ghost …"

"Sarah?"

"There's no reason I should be alive, Reese." She cut off his agitated response. "It doesn't make any sense, that's what they used to say to me." She sniffed.

"I don't understand."

She rubbed her arm and bit her lip. "I was very sick when I was little. I had a disease that came from my mother's side, it was genetic. The curse of eugenics being your religion for a hundred and sixty years, when you try to keep blood lines pure, it becomes more diseased. My grandmother took me away to live in their manor house in England … for years and years, I watched the other kids' run around outside in the gardens and I was shut inside with only my grandmother and maids as company. Do you know what it was like, a whole manor, a palace, just waiting for you to die?" She asked.

Somewhere in the back of Derek's mind he heard piano music coming from a dark basement. "I do." He confirmed.

Sarah nodded. "I spent so much time in that house looking out those big windows, the other kids used to think that I was a ghost." All he had to do was see her standing sentry in place to imagine the black haired little girl with bow standing at the windows, looking out over the lush rolling English country side, in a large, haunted house made of Victorian nightmares, its columns and trellises roped in antiquity and ivy.

"But you didn't die …"

"No. For years and years they waited, but somehow I outlived the disease, or it just went into dormancy. So we moved back here. It took a year to integrate me back to modern society before they let me attend a finishing academy in Hollywood. But it gave me a chip on my shoulder, all those years that the other kids made fun of me for the way my grandmother taught me to talk, to act, and how pale I was. They used to say I was a vampire … the living dead, a girl who talked and acted out of time. I became a horrible person when I went to school, afraid that I would be bullied there too, and the more the servants and my grandmother's friends told me I should've been dead, the worse I got. Till my mother took me away, we both finally escaped, ran away from that place, from them … from her." There was something haunted in the woman's emotional voice. It hadn't been since the party that Derek had seen the look in Sarah's eyes, cast into dark memories of whoever "her" was.

"But Kyle?"

"He gave me a reason, Reese. He made sense of my life, of why I was still alive, what my purpose was. Why all the bad things that happened to me, had happened. I was alive for John." When she spoke Derek wasn't sure he ever heard as much love in one's voice as the way Sarah Connor said her son's name.

He watched her look out to the shed, where John and Cameron where still underneath the car frame. Both of their feet were close, too close for it to be auto work they were doing under there. The sight brought on a deeper sorrow from inside the mother.

"But maybe my job is done …" a single tear fell from her eye.

"It's back isn't it, this genetic disease?"

She nodded slowly.

"There's nothing we can do about it? Treatments, drugs, anything?"

There was something stoic about the way Sarah Connor looked out to the horizon. "I can fight the machines. I can fight men, and I can even fight cancer." Her eyes were filled with tears. "But I can't fight my fate." She broke as she turned to him. "They were right, Reese. They were right. I should've died a long time ago … long time ago." There was a single sob in her whispered voice.

A thought, a hesitation of stream of self-consciousness got in the way of Derek Reese doing what only came natural. Standing from his seat, he took the implausible warrior martyr of humanity in his arms and held her tightly. He didn't shush her, didn't try to comfort her, he knew it would do this strong woman any good. He only held onto her, held onto the only family he had left, one of the last people he had left.

"I know what I was supposed to do, Reese. I know what I was supposed to do. It's my fate." She sobbed into his chest quietly. The eldest Reese's face was made of stone as he ran his hands through her long regal curls. His thoughts ran back to that night at the party. The woman that was lost and confused, with blood stained hands. He hadn't forgotten the way she looked at him, the way she needed him, needed him to help her.

He would never forget that promise. So there was only one thing to do. It was why Andy Goode was found with three shots, two in the chest, and one in the head. Why Charles Fisher was missing fingernails. And why Sydney Fields would live one day to save him.

Derek Reese would change the future one last time all to save Sarah Connor.

Awknowledgements

"Will the Circle be Unbroken" – Troy Baker & Courtnee Draper

"The Same Old Song" – The Four Tops