Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present, and future. -- Gail Lumet Buckley
John's world has been his workshop for the last two weeks, and there's another guard at the door. It's a man this time, John hasn't asked his name. Disobey Perry's orders, steal Derek Reese's kid brother to go on what's likely to be a suicide run, and there are going to beconsequences.
He had kind of hoped getting back alive might count for something, but Derek seems to think that's debatable. John's not sure if Derek's angry because John took Kyle, or angry John didn't take him too. He's not sure Derek knows either and honestly, he doubts it would make a difference.
The last he'd seen of Kyle was when Derek had arrived in the med station to 'escort' John back to his workroom, and Kyle had still been unconscious. It turned out 'alive' had meant 'shot twice carrying John Connor's concussed ass out of Century.'
He'd seen Allison just before she left for tunnel patrol, a flash of a smile and a sympathetic expression and then she was gone. He hated she was out there, somewhere he couldn't see. Hated there was nothing he could do about it.
Derek had told him the west tunnels were the safest place next to Below – safer than the fake HQ it had been her turn to play live bait in. John had told him to go to hell and it had gone downhill from about there. They hadn't talked since.
John had seen Neil once, when he'd told his guard he was going down Below to check the Techs still had everything under control and then started walking before anyone could say no. Neil had apologized; John had said he was sorry too, but he wasn't sure why. His knuckles still sting a little.
Just like before, they keep him occupied with piles of busted up electronics and they bring him his food morning and evening. There's a cot in the corner of the room, behind some boxes, and he's escorted to the washrooms three times a day. Sometimes there's even water.
Otherwise, it's kind of a pity the apocalypse means no birds, he thinks, because The Birdman of the Apocalypse is where he's headed.
In between scattered bouts of morbid amusement he's restless and angry, and frustrated. For the first time, maybe the first time ever, he knows exactly what he has to do, and he wound up in a future where no one's taking his orders. Connor luck.
Plastic shatters under his fingers and a chip spins over his shoulder; he really doesn't care. He doubts there was much he could have done with the innards of a Tamagotchi pet anyway. Figures one of those would survive the end of the world.
He makes his way out from behind the workbench and over to the partially covered exoskeleton by the wall.
Most of the shine is gone; it's covered in dust and the dried remains of the red-brown gunk that passed for blood. It's weird, maybe really weird, but he can still see Cameron there, somehow. No skin, no chip and no power supply - just a metallic skeleton and twisted wires - but it's her just the same.
Allison was right: he's sick.
He laughs to himself, at himself, and wanders back towards the bench, only to swing aside and begin pacing the small area of floor that isn't covered with junk.
There are things to do, places to be, and a growing sense of urgency that gnaws at him. It's a hundred times worse than when he was a kid and he knew in some abstract sense that the end was coming, because there's nothing abstract about this at all.
He needs to think of a way out, any way out, but his plans scatter in front of him. He can't focus.
The door opens; he guesses it's dinnertime and doesn't bother to look around. "Thanks."
"You're welcome," says Kyle.
John turns as Kyle rounds the six foot pile of servers. "Kate let you out?"
Kyle shrugs easily and drops a couple of cans in John's hands. "Eh, more or less."
"Kate turned her back for two seconds and you snuck out," John translates. "Great. Derek'll probably blame me for that too." He puts the cans on the desk; any excitement he ever had at the thought of mystery food is long since gone.
Kyle waves a hand with the careless assurance of someone Derek isn't looking for an excuse to kill. "Don't worry about it."
"You're not the one who's been grounded. I'm under freaking bunker arrest, Kyle. I've spent the last two weeks breaking down toys that don't work so someone else can make filtration units that don't work. Somewhere out there, the machine are winning – completely and forever - and I'm in here, having to ask the guy at the door if I can go to the bathroom."
John stops himself before it gets any more embarrassing, but he can't help punctuating his rant with a thrown scrap of metal casing. It bounces off the wall and rolls under a pile of what used to be TomToms.
Kyle stares at him and then nods slowly. "So you're not happy. I'll bust you out. You got us out of Century, I can return the favor."
John forces himself to bring it down a notch. "You got us out of Century." He manages a smile; it feels small and uncertain. "Thanks, by the way. The whole getting shot thing."
"I guess we're even." Kyle leans back against the wall and crosses his arms. "So where next? What's the plan?"
"I don't have a plan, I have Cliff Notes." John sees the confusion and shakes his head. "Never mind. I need to give Savannah's bracelet to Catherine, that's it."
Kyle cants his head. "Catherine? She gave you the picture, right?" He unconsciously touches the front pocket of his vest. "Back in the barrens? Savannah was her … daughter?"
"Sister," John lies easily. "She'll want to know what happened."
"How do you know where she'll be?"
"She won't be far away, Savannah was her life." John smiles grimly and Kyle looks even more confused.
The confusion gives way to a strange determination; it's the only warning John gets as the friendly demeanor drops and the colder, harder man his mother knew surfaces.
"You know you're not fooling as many people as you think you are with the cryptic comments, right? Allison thinks you're just having a hard time getting past something. Derek can't decide if you're more dangerous to yourself or others."
John looks away. "There's things I can't talk about. I'm not trying to be cryptic, I guess I'm just … I don't know."
"I talked to Kate," Kyle says like John hasn't said a word. "Don't worry, she didn't tell me anything, really. But she thinks you just want someone to ask the right question. So I got a question for you."
Kyle falls silent and John guesses after a few moments he's waiting for John to give the word.
It's a bad idea, he knows it absolutely and completely and he still rolls his eyes like he's fourteen and says, "Fine. So, ask."
"Did you really think I wouldn't recognise you?" Kyle asks in a ruthlessly bland tone that leaves John frozen, staring and open-mouthed in its wake.
Kyle smiles almost ruefully. "I wasn't sure, for a while. If you'd been older maybe I wouldn't have caught it, but I remember being sixteen. You're taller. I bet your mom's tall, right?"
John nods automatically; actually he grew past his mother at thirteen, but he never really shook looking up.
"I thought maybe you were my grandfather come from the past or something - you look a lot like him. But that's not right, is it?"
John shakes his head mutely.
Kyle nods and then nods again; he grins like a kid at Christmas. "I asked Derek, you know – 'are you sure there isn't another Reese kid out there?' Like maybe he forgot one. He tried to get me to go see Kate, but his poker face isn't as good as he thinks it is.
"So then I remembered there was this thing about, you go back in time to kill your own grandfather. Kinda screwed that one up when you saved my life." Kyle tilts his head back until he's staring at John. "But the things you know … you're from the future."
John stares at the pile of junk beside him, but no answers appear. He directs his reply to it anyway; it's easier than speaking to Kyle. "Maybe you should go see Kate," he says flatly. It's a throw away line and his heart isn't in it.
Kyle stands away from the wall, not angry, but even in his peripheral vision John can see that it isn't the posture of someone about to back down. "I deserve to know this, Connor."
John hisses his amusement under his breath and raises his head, speaking to the wall now. Progress. "Why? You haven't done anything that bad."
Kyle says, "Please," and like that, just like that, John gives in. He's spent his whole life wanting to give in. "I was born in nineteen eighty-three, I'm not from the future."
"Eighty-three? That's - but you know all about -"
"I'm not from the future," he says evenly, and turns just enough to meet Kyle's eyes. "But my father was."
Kyle, finally, has nothing to say; John takes a moment to enjoy a bitter kind of victory before he goes on. "The machines sent back an eight-hundred to kill my mom, because in their future I was leading the Resistance. I – we – were winning, they were desperate I guess. He – the other Connor – sent Kyle Reese back, to protect her. It worked. She lived and I was born nine months later."
Kyle is silent as he works though the implications and then he shakes his head. "If you sent him, me, back, where am I now? The older me."
"He dies – he died – saving her."
Kyle swallows.
John goes on relentlessly, because if this is what Kyle wanted it's what Kyle's getting. "But it's out of order, this time. I jumped from two thousand nine to whenever it was that you and Derek found me in the old ZeiraCorp building.
"The machines don't know who I am and I'm pretty sure they haven't discovered time bubbles yet. Or they hadn't - I think maybe that's what Crystal Peak was hiding. The machines knew there was something too important to nuke in there, that's the only thing I can think of worth waiting for."
John stops at last and watches Kyle process. It's probably too much to ask this will end well, so he pins his hopes on just being stuck with the crazies in the last dark room down Below.
After a couple of minutes, Kyle says, "Okay. Now what?"
That's unexpected enough that the only answer John can find is the honest one. "We need to take Crystal Peak. They have time tech now, we have to destroy it or take it, or we're dead. We're all dead."
Kyle nods slowly. "And after that? You send me back in time and this happens again?"
John bites his lip until it stings and asks, "Are you going to tell Derek?"
Derailed, Kyle blinks and then shrugs. "Tell me why I shouldn't."
Kyle isn't really questioning, he's challenging, and John doesn't need to fight him; Kyle will lose this one all on his own. He shrugs back, and just waits.
"If I told him," Kyle begins, and then stutters into silence. John can see his mind opening up to the hundreds of possibilities, and the repercussions those possibilities spawn. The hundred ways it could play out that Kyle can anticipate, and the terror filling the place of the million ways that he can't.
John watches as his expression goes from aggressive, through horror and finally settles on desperately lost. After a few moments, John gives him a sharp smile. "Welcome to my world."
Kyle is silent for a long time and John lets him be; he picks up a screwdriver and goes back to work. It seems like a long time before Kyle finally says, "The tapes?"
John glances at the pile at the end of the workbench. "From my mother. She's still back there. She's stopping Skynet," he adds dryly.
Kyle laughs under his breath. "Yeah, I guess that didn't work out so well."
John grins and barely feels a pang. "No, I guess not."
"Wouldn't she be able to tell you what's in Crystal Peak? What does she say?"
John looks at the pile again. "I haven't listened to all of them."
"Why the hell not?" Kyle's hand reaches for the tapes fast, but John is faster. The screwdriver slams point first into the wooden desk an inch from Kyle's fingers.
"Don't."
Kyle's hand slowly withdraws, fingers flexing. John risks a look and sees shock, not anger. He repeats as gently as he can, "Don't."
In the silence, he pulls the head of the screwdriver from the wood and deliberately sets it down.
He takes a breath and speaks as calmly as he can, like he hasn't nearly stabbed anyone at all. "If I listen to them, I'll act on them. I don't know they're still accurate, I don't even know they haven't been tampered with. And if they're clean, maybe I'll misinterpret or I'll – I don't know. I can't afford to second-guess."
If he listens to those tapes, he'll know too little and too much. And he'll know all the times he never made it home.
Kyle has a talent for finding a target too, and he doesn't need a screwdriver. "Or maybe you just don't want to know how it ends. How she ends. You're risking everything – us - because you can't deal with it."
John flinches. "If there was anything really important, it would have been on the first tape. It would have been written on the walls in blood, okay?" He shoves the pile of tapes and they scatter over the bench. "All they are is a really long goodbye."
"You don't know that."
"But I do know where it ended." He grins and feels his lips stretch over a snarl. "For them. For her. Bishop - it's near Crystal Peak." John feels himself slipping into the space where the world is cold and sharp and the path is achingly clear. "You want to know a secret?"
He takes Kyle's close-lipped silence as an answer and smiles faintly. "Whether I listen to those tapes or not, it doesn't matter."
"It has to matter-"
"It doesn't," John interrupts. "History, the future - fate finds a way." He smiles painfully. "I used to wonder how many times we'd done this. How many times John Connor had sent you back. How many times you'd died. Could be a couple times, could be thousands.
"And there must have been a least one John Connor whose father wasn't Kyle Reese, right? Maybe he was meant to be my father. Maybe it should have been him, later, only she never met the guy because she never got over you.
"Maybe I'm a mistake; that would be a pretty big change, right? But we're still here, still doing the same thing over and over. I think we never win. Or lose. We go 'round and around, with me or without me; with these tapes, or without them."
He's breathing hard when he's finished, hands fisted tight and the skin white at his knuckles. Carefully, he unclenches his hands and then says quietly, "My mother says we make our own fate, but we don't. Fate makes us. It makes us, and it pushes us where it wants us to go, and it does not stop. Ever. It doesn't stop until it kills us. Maybe not even then."
Kyle shakes his head like John's landed a punch, but his voice is strong – and angry. "If you really believe that, why even keep fighting? Why give us light and weapons and hope and then say it doesn't mean a damn thing?"
John stares up at him and then he brings his hands down so hard on the workbench that the tapes slide to the floor. Kyle jerks back, Johns palms sting but he doesn't really feel them. "Were you even listening? I have. No. Choice."
"You can't believe that," Kyle whispers. "I don't believe that."
"Neither does Derek." John's tired. He doesn't remember ever being so tired. He raises his hands and laces his fingers behind razor-rough hair; hangs his head and murmurs to the ground, "So that's good. That's great. One more pawn on the board."
He can feel the chill of the machine against the skin of his wrist and he tries not to listen to the little voice that says, surely, this has to be new. He can't afford to hope; he'll leave that to everyone else.
Kyle coughs. "I guess I'm sorry."
"What?" John's head jerks up, surprise overriding the exhaustion.
Kyle flicks his gaze to the side, his turn to look away. "I'm sorry I get killed. I'm sorry I'm not there. It must've been - I'm just sorry."
John laughs, he doesn't know what else to do with the awkward words and uncomfortable expression. "Kyle, you aren't my father. The other Kyle was, and he pretty much died for me, so I think we're even. He probably never even knew about me, I don't think I would have told him."
"But you told me," Kyle says.
"I'm not sending you back." John hadn't meant to say that, but it escapes anyway. Maybe it's just as well.
Kyle stares at him incredulously. "Didn't you just get through telling me fate has us cold? There was this really dramatic moment with the bench."
John flushes. "Like I said, there must have been other variations. Maybe we take this turn out. Just keep the machines from sending a Terminator back and let whoever comes next start over. Maybe it needs to start over."
They're both silent for a long moment and then Kyle says, "You knew Derek. When you arrived."
John makes a non-committal sound and Kyle laughs. "Little late for secrets, Connor."
"It's never too late for secrets," John says ruefully. The chill is warming and there's a lightness there he hadn't felt since Century. He doesn't even want to think about exactly how wrong that is.
Kyle looks like he's not leaving it alone and John rolls his eyes. "Connor sent him back with a cell of Resistance fighters. They were all killed by a Trip 8; it shot him too." He can still remember Derek just standing there, making sure Vic didn't start paying attention to other targets. Waiting to die. He can remember the blood under his mother's hands.
"He dies?" Kyle asks quietly, lost all over again. "He died?"
"Not – no."
"You mean, not that time." Kyle's expression clears of anything much and John nods.
"He was with us when we went to rescue Savannah. None of us were there when – when. But. I think it was quick." He remembers Derek hadn't even closed his eyes, and he says more firmly, "It was quick."
"Good." Kyle stands straighter. "Look, he's only got you in here because he knows you're not telling him something and he thinks you'll run out into the barrens first chance you get."
"He's pretty much right," John points out. "He can't keep me here if I want to leave though, right?"
Kyle says nothing and John frowns. "Right?"
"People we don't trust, they're left outside if we think they're no danger. If they know too much … we can't afford to let them go, and we can't keep them here."
That's a picture drawn in really broad strokes; John cants his head. "So why am I still alive?"
"Because Allison likes you. Kate likes you. You got us supplies. Light. Freaking Math lessons." A smile flickers. "He'll figure it out sooner or later, you know that, right?"
John returns the smile wanly. "Sometimes I wish he would. I kind of miss him."
"It's not him though, is it?"
"No." John shakes his head. "It isn't." He stares down at the machine wrapped around his wrist for a moment, then raises his arm and looks to Kyle. "This? Is part of a T-1000. Actually, it's part of the machine that gave you my mother's picture. It came through the time bubble with me, looking for a machine it built. Savannah's been carrying the remains and when she was a kid, Savannah was with my mother."
He looks at the band thoughtfully. "It's a record of everything that's happened between then and now, it'll tell us more than the tapes can."
Kyle's eyes follow the metal band like it was a poisonous snake. "When you decide to spill, you don't mess around, huh? That thing dangerous?"
"Yes, but it needs us to get it to Weaver. I think in the future Weaver's from, Connor has the machines fighting each other. Or maybe he had nothing do with it and they evolved enough to turn on each other just like real people." He smirks bitterly. "Anyway, Weaver said that Connor owed it. This is the debt. I give Weaver the bracelet and Weaver tells me where the picture came from."
"Does it matter?" Kyle tears his attention from the band, picks up a can and opens it with a few twists of his knife.
"No. Not any more. But we still need to get into Crystal Peak and Weaver can help us. T-1000s make Trip-8s look like pocket calculators, just this part managed to re-write enough of their local directives to make the machines help us at Century. Weaver could get us the time bubbles."
Kyle nodded. "And then?"
John really doesn't think they'll make it that far, but while he's never actually taken leadership classes he'd guess Leadership 101 would not involve suggesting they're all going to die screaming. "I told Allison I'd take out the machines," he says after a pause. "Sound like a plan?"
Kyle hands over the can – peas or something – and nods dubiously. "Sounds like one of your plans."
John laughs, startling himself and Kyle both. "So what would you do?"
Kyle stops with his knife half into the next can. "What?"
"The fate of the world is in your hands," John prompts. "What do you do?"
John means it as a joke, but he can see Kyle thinking about it. He scoops out peas with half a cell phone case and waits.
He eats silently for maybe a minute, watching the varied expressions flickering across Kyle's face with a certain amount of fascination. After a while he takes pity and says, "It doesn't matter if we don't even make it past Derek."
"Derek will help us."
John snorts. "Some other Derek I haven't met? Why's he going to help us?"
"Because Derek remembers what Kyle looked like at sixteen just as well as Kyle does," says Derek.
There should be a law, John thinks breathlessly, where he only gets shocked stupid once a day.
"Door's open," Derek explains mildly, as he walks around the pile obscuring it. Derek's hand is on his gun and John thinks wildly that it would be really stupid if he got shot now.
Kyle looks wary, but not worried. "How long?"
"Long enough to know I have a nephew, not a Gray." Derek stops a few feet from them, looking impassively at John.
Seriously, John hates that look. He goes with what he knows. "We have to go to Crystal Peak."
"We do," agrees Derek, with an expression this time, but it's not one John can parse. If he had to guess though, he'd guess his uncle was amused. He'll take amused.
There's a knock somewhere near the door, he keeps staring at Derek as he responds. "It's open. Apparently."
A woman he vaguely recognizes as his first guard – Samantha, maybe – appears around the side of the servers and jerks her head to Derek to bring him closer. John glances at Kyle, who shrugs. John can't hear much of the muttered conversation, but he gets the gist.
And then Derek is gone, and Kyle is gone, and John is left sitting alone with the words "west tunnels" and "machines".
-o-
When Derek comes back it's hours later and John has been staring at Cameron's exoskeleton for so long he can see the shape of her.
"We lost the west patrol," Derek says bluntly. "It looks like a raid. No bodies. We'll go after them when it gets dark."
John shakes his head. "It's too late." But hey, a voice inside whispers, never mind. It's always been too late.
"When Allison-" He stops, he doesn't know it will be Allison this time, that was a stupid assumption. "When one of them comes back," he amends, "we won't be here, so you have to tell the patrol to meet whoever it is in the barrens. It can't be allowed on the base, and they shouldn't ask it questions. It won't like questions. Tell them to tell it you left orders to go to Crystal Peak."
For once Derek doesn't ask why, but John tells him anyway because there are tears pricking his eyes and Derek has to understand. "Cameron will find us. It's what she does."
It's all she does.