T:tSCC: "Some Thing to Watch Over Me" (3/3)
Title: Some Thing to Watch Over Me (3/3)
Fandom: Sarah Connor Chronicles
Pairings: Riley/Cameron, John/Riley, John/Cameron, Riley/Jessie, Jessie/Derek, John/Riley/Cameron.
Timeline/Spoilers: Takes place during the first half of Season 2, after 2x08, "Mr. Ferguson Is Ill Today" but before the half-season finale. Spoilers for the first half of Season 2. Also spoilers for Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Becoming Jane.
Summary: Termination is not an option, so Cameron must rely on other tactics to neutralize the threat Riley poses.
Rating: NWS
A/N: Epigraph from Kate Douglas Wiggin, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Special thanks to my betas, anonymous_sibyl, present_pathos, and tacky_tramp. This was written before I saw any episodes of the second half of the Season 2; I don't know which I feared most, being jossed or kripked.
Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Some Thing to Watch Over Me Part 3
XXIII.
To Cameron, the world is made up of knowns and unknowns, of possibilities and probabilities, of variables and constants. In the game-theoretic schema which is her reality, there are elements which are under her control and those which are not.
John, unfortunately, is not under her control. Her job would be far easier if he were.
So even after Cameron has in her way tamed the girl, John and Riley are still spending their days shooting awkward looks at each other. They are boyfriend and girlfriend living in the same house, and yet normal teenaged hormones have not as yet been sufficient for full sexual combustibility; Cameron knows for a fact they have not moved beyond kissing.
Cameron can see the fault lines in her universe, and knows the present dynamic is headed for crisis.
Fortunately, the system can be nudged.
Convincing John to do something he doesn't want to, or not to do something he wants to, has proven in the past to be more difficult than Cameron had anticipated, especially when Riley was concerned. That the girl is here with them, now, is living proof of this. Yet John can be influenced, and he wants Riley just as he wants Cameron; he simply needs to be pushed into the proper position so as to discover his own mind.
So Cameron steps into her role as stepsister to tell John when he is being clueless about what women need and want.
"Now that Riley's mobile again," Cameron tells him. "You should go out with her."
John, of course, is clueless. "We did go out today, remember? You were there."
"Not with me," Cameron says, putting just enough emphasis on each of her words so that he'll understand her meaning. "Take her out to dinner."
"Oh," John says, and then, "yeah, I should."
Cameron smiles smile 457-A and hands him a card.
"What is this?" he asks as he takes it.
"Your dinner reservations," she says as she turns away, her mind racing to calculate the new probabilities. There's still risk, far too much risk; not enough of the elements, even now, are under her control. But she has done what she can and now, since prayer was never included as part of her programming, there is nothing left to do but wait.
XXIV.
After the last few weeks, it's strange being out without Cameron. She even almost misses the machine as she and John sit down to dinner, but evidence of Cameron's hand are in abundance: she's wearing a black sheath dress that Cameron produced, and the machine put up Riley's hair before she left.
Dinner is nice, but even nicer is the chance at being alone with John. He looks across the table at her, and she knows that if some part of his mind is still on his mother or his uncle or the three dots, it's despite his best efforts otherwise. It's just the two of them, Riley and the future leader of the Resistance, and no one else matters: not Sarah, not Derek, not Cameron or Jessie, not SkyNet.
"What were your hopes?" he asks her. "Your dreams. I mean, before this."
He blames himself, she realizes, for taking her dreams away from her. She wants to reassure him that she never had any dreams, at least not since the machine took them away from her when she was four. But she can't, not without telling him the truth, the whole truth about her and the future and Judgment Day and Jessie. For the first time, she realizes just how heavily the burden of his role as the future leader of humanity rests upon his shoulders in the here and now. Does he really have to carry it all by himself?
Riley decides to stick as closely to the truth as she can. "I'm not that different from you as you think," she tells him. "My parents died when I was four. Since then I've just been trying to survive."
John nods, and Riley can see understanding in his eyes. It's a rush, to share this--this pain, this burden--with him. "How did they die?" he asks.
"They were caught in a shoot-out," she says, and it's close enough to the truth. John closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, then shakes his head. "I'm sorry," he says.
"Don't be," she urges him. "It happened a long time ago." A long time ago--or seven years in the future. Hell, she's not even born yet. Maybe in this timeline, she never will be. For little potential-Riley-to-be's sake, she hopes she won't be.
"What about you?" she asks. "What are you going to do if you do this, stop this SkyNet, stop Judgment Day? What're you going to do then?"
John shakes his head. "There is no then," he said. "We thought we stopped it, and we only pushed it back a little bit. SkyNet's always going to be there, waiting, ready to be built." The desperation in John's voice is so stark that Riley almost flinches. If John Connor is left without hope, then what can any of the rest of them do?
"So . . . that's it?" asks Riley. "SkyNet wins, no matter what?"
John doesn't answer at first, just picking at his dinner. "No," he says at last. "SkyNet can't lose, but it doesn't have to win. As long as I keep fighting--as long as we keep fighting-then SkyNet hasn't won. Even if Judgment Day comes, SkyNet hasn't won."
Riley puts down her fork. Suddenly, she isn't very hungry anymore.
"Is that enough?" she asks. "How can you keep fighting without an end in sight? What keeps you from giving up?" She couldn't do, she is sure. Already she, she's gone sniveling back to Jessie once, telling her she couldn't do this anymore. And that was before the bullet wound.
John's gaze is steel, just as much as any machine's. "You," he answers. "Cameron. My mom."
XXV.
John drives her home in silence, but it isn't the usual silence which hangs between them, the invisible barrier repelling her and keeping her from finding out his secrets. Instead, it's the silence that comes when there's nothing left to say, when he's opened up and bared all. It's an easy, intimate silence, which isn't a lack at all but a presence, warm and loving.
The house is empty when they get back. John unlocks the door but doesn't turn on the lights. Instead he takes Riley's crutches from her and lays them against the inside of the wall, next to the door, then puts his arm around her waist and guides her through the house. "Do you need to sit down?" he asks.
"I can stand," she answers. Her leg really is a lot stronger. Then she's unable to say anything else because John is kissing her in the dark. It's not forced or distracted like those kisses before she was wounded, nor is it charged with excitement like those since. Instead, it feels natural, comfortable, inevitable, and it feels natural when John's hands slip under Riley's shirt. "Bed," she whispers, and he helps her to his bedroom and sits her down on his bed.
His movements are awkward, uncertain as he undresses her, and she has to laugh at the savior of humanity who is a nervous virgin in the here and now. She directs him gently, showing him what to do as she helps him put on the condom and guides him into her, and his tentativeness eventually gives way to enthusiasm even as they make love slowly, his body sinking into hers and then pulling away unhurriedly.
He comes before her, unable to control himself on the first time, but he goes down on her without hesitation. In this his lack of technique is even more apparent, but she just directs him patiently, and in time, with effort, the job gets done. Any diminishment in the intensity of the orgasm is more than made up by the man who caused it; sex with the machine is perfect, with multiple spine-tingling paroxysms of ecstatic pleasure, but the imperfection of sex with John only drives home that this is real, human.
XXVI.
Riley wakes up at 2:36, or so John's alarm clock claims. The worst part of a broken leg is definitely when she has to pee in the middle of night. Worse yet, she knows her crutches are still in the living room by the door. She disentangles herself from John without waking him, then sits on the edge of his bed and watches him sleep.
He loves her. He hasn't said it, but he doesn't have to. He's made it clear in the way he's looked at her, the way he took her to bed this night. He's made himself naked to her, both literally and figuratively.
She's accomplished the end Jessie sent her to achieve.
Now what? Where can she go from here? Riley's already tried to pull out; she can remember vividly what Jessie's reaction to that was. There is no out.
Riley pulls herself to her feet, leaning against the wall to steady herself, and stumbles down the hall and into the bathroom. When she's finished there she makes her way back to Cameron's room. The machine is sitting on the bed in pyjamas, apparently reading Riley's copy of Rebecca. When Riley enters the run Cameron quickly gets up and helps her to the bed.
As soon as they get to the bed Riley pulls off the machine's top, then mashes her mouth against its even as she works Cameron's pyjama bottoms off. Cameron asks no questions; sex with the machine is simple, uncomplicated.
Riley just keeps going on, not stopping for any feigned intimacies, fucking until she's worn herself out with exhaustion.
XXVII.
She wakes up again at ten in the morning. Someone--probably Cameron--has put her crutches next to her bed, but as she hobbles out of the room it seems the house is empty except for her. Good.
She makes her way, slowly but determinedly, to the nearest bus stop, and has to wait twenty minutes for the next bus. It's another ten minutes on the crutches from the where she gets off the bus to Jessie's apartment.
Jessie was clear last time that Riley is not supposed to come to the apartment to talk to her, but Riley's fairly confident she'll forgive the indiscretion in exchange for the intelligence about the three dots.
She turns the corner of the hall in Jessie's apartment building, but as she does she sees the door begin to open. Riley pulls back, out of the door's line of sight, then peers out from behind the corner. She sees John's uncle, Derek, exiting Jessie's apartment, giving Jessie one last kiss before he leaves.
Riley freezes. If he comes in her direction, there's no way she can get away from him quickly enough. Luckily he goes down the hall in the other direction, and Riley relaxes before turning around and making her way out of the apartment building and back to the bus stop.
XXIII.
Cameron's in the kitchen when Riley gets back to the house. From the looks of it, she's trying to make hand rolled pasta. "You need to be careful with that leg," Cameron cautions as Riley enters.
"Why didn't you kill me?" Riley demands, not for the first time.
Cameron looks at Riley dispassionately. "There was no need."
But Riley's had enough of her games. "Don't give me that shit. There was every need. I complicated everything, made your job harder. You should have killed me."
Cameron turns back to the pasta. "You don't get to decide that."
"Why didn't you?"
Cameron picks up the knife and cuts the dough in a thin strip of perfectly uniform length. "John wouldn't have wanted me to."
Riley laughs. "And you do everything this John wants?"
"John wouldn't want me to kill you because he sees worth in you."
"And you?"
Cameron looks up, looks Riley in the eyes. "I trust John," she answers. "You should too."
Riley takes a breath, then collapses into a nearby kitchen chair, the fight gone out of her. "Where is he?"
"In his room," Cameron answers.
"You can stop anything, right?"
"No," says Cameron, unbothered by the non sequitor. "There are a number of things I cannot stop."
"A woman?"
Cameron cocks her head. "Human?"
Riley nods.
"Then yes."
"Get John," Riley says. "I have something I have to tell him."
Cameron exits and comes back with John a second later. "What is it?" he asks her, concerned.
"It's your uncle," she tells him. "And . . . it's me. I haven't been totally honest with you."
John frowns, his brow furrowing. "What do you mean?"
Riley takes a deep breath. "I was born," she starts, "on January 10th, 2010."
Already she can see John begin to tense. Cameron puts a placating hand on his shoulder.
"I was four years old when the machines came," Riley continued. "They destroyed everything. I managed to escape. My parents didn't."
"2014," Cameron notes before John has a chance to say anything. "Three years later than in my timeline."
"We managed to postpone Judgment Day by another three years," John says, his angerevident in his voice. "Big deal." He turns to Riley. "Who sent you? Did I send you back? Did they?"
Riley shakes her head furiously. "I was found by one of your soldiers, I think. She hates the machines as much as anyone. But--she hates her, too." She nods towards Cameron. "I think in our future, the two of you know each other. She . . . advises you. But Jessie doesn't think she can be trusted."
John glances at Cameron. "Maybe Jessie is right."
"Jessie wanted to go back, make sure she wouldn't be able to influence you in the past. She brought me with her so that I could get to know you, find out stuff for her."
"You've been spying on us." He says it simply, calmly, but still she flinches at the force of the truth.
"I only saw her once since I was shot and I didn't tell her anything, I promise," Riley insists, but John doesn't say anything, just waits. "But today I went to see her. I'm not supposed to go to her apartment, but I did anyway, and . . . . I saw your uncle there."
"Derek." John's voice is even, controlled.
Riley nods. "He kissed her as he left. They'd just had sex, I'm sure of it." She looks at John, pleading with him with her eyes.
He ignores her and turns to Cameron. "Next time Derek leaves, I want you to trail him without him seeing you. Can you do that?"
Cameron meets his gaze. "It won't be easy. He knows what he is doing."
John doesn't blink. "Can you do it?"
"Yes."
"Then do it. If Riley's story checks out, call us and wait for us to get there. I want to confront them, not take them down."
Cameron nods. "Understood."
"Good." John turns and leaves the room.
Riley gets up to follow him, but Cameron places a hand on her shoulder and pushes her back into her seat. "Wait," the machine says. ""Give him time."
XXIV.
John's standing in the backyard, staring at the stars, when Cameron joins him. "Where's Derek?"
"In his room, asleep. Something wore him out today," she comments, wryly.
John nods. "I guess you want to say I told you so."
"About Riley?"
"Yeah. You and Mom weren't exactly subtle about how you wanted me to stay away from her."
"I changed my mind," Cameron points out, as if Terminators just change their minds on whims. "Be easy on her, John."
John snorts. "I find out my supposed girlfriend's been spying on me for four months, and you want me to go easy on her? You, Miss-I'll-kill-anyone-who-maybe-one-day-might-tell-one-little-piece-of-something?"
"She didn't tell anything important," Cameron points out. John's not sure why she's being so insistent on taking Riley's side, but it doesn't matter.
"She was about to," John points out. "Why do you think she went to see this Jessie this morning? She was going to tell her everything."
"But she didn't."
John sighs. "After. . . ." He's not going to talk about what happened last night, not to Cameron. But he had thought he was making love to a girl he loved, who loved him. Now it turns out she was just a seductress, a spy, what his mother would call an agente provacateuse.
"I was a fool," he says. "The only thing I don't understand is why you let me be."
Cameron turns so she's facing him, touches his forehead. John steels him against the touch, forcing himself to ignore as he always must just how attractive a package SkyNet manufactured for Cameron.
"Because sometimes humans have to be foolish in order to become wise," Cameron answers. "Be easy on her, John. She was just being a fool, too."
XXV.
It's two days before Cameron makes the call to John. Riley spends the time trying to get through to John, to apologize, but he blocks every attempt with icy politeness.
Eventually the call comes, and John and Sarah begin packing the truck with weapons. Sarah's already been briefed, presumably with an expurgated account as to how the intelligence was gained, since Riley's still living in the house and not buried in the backyard. She supposes she can be grateful to John for that much.
"I want to go with you," Riley says as they finish packing the truck.
Sarah laughs a dry laugh. "And what use is a cripple going to be to us?"
"I can drive," Riley points out. "Keep the engine going."
Sarah Connor's weak point, if she has one, is that she recognizes good strategy when she hears it. She quickly nods her assent. "Very well," she says, and helps Riley into the driver's seat.
John doesn't say anything.
XXVI.
John and Sarah meet Cameron at the address Riley gave them as Jessie's . "They're inside," she informs them."Flagrante delicto."
Sarah raises an eyebrow but doesn't say anything, just cocks her gun. "Let's do this," she says.
\
Cameron nods and kicks down the door, and the three them enter the apartment. Sure enough, they find Derek and a woman in a bed, having sex.
"Sarah," Derek says, jumping out of bed and hurriedly pulling on garments. The woman--Jessie--on the other hand, stands up, letting the covers fall away, apparently unbothered by her nakedness.
She stares Cameron in the face. "Bitch," she says, then jumps out the window, quickly dodging the bullets firing from all three guns.
"After her," Sarah orders Cameron, who quickly complies by jumping out the window as well. Sarah looks to Derek who is still pulling on clothes, and just rolls her eyes and covers him with her gun.
John moves to the window to see if he can see Cameron or Jessie. Sure enough, there's a naked woman in the corner of the parking lot, crouched behing a car holding a shotgun, and there's Cameron racing across the parking lot towards her. John's heart stops when he recognizes Jessie's weapon as a Benelli M2. It's the gun they used against Cromartie in Mexico, capable of taking down even a Terminator at a close enough range and with the right ammunition--and John has no doubt that Jessie knows exactly what it'll take to damage Cameron. "No!" John calls out, futilely, as Cameron gets closer, in range, and then--
Jessie is crushed as the truck--their truck, Riley behind the wheel--crashes into the car she was using as a cover.
XVII.
Riley sits on Cameron's bed, flipping through her copy of Rebecca. She should have known that life, even life before Judgment Day, wouldn't be like Riverboro, the universe bending out of shape just to acknowledge a little girl's awesomeness. But she had allowed herself to hope, to believe that just because Jessie had taken an interest in her, that meant she would be as good as an Aunt Mirandy or Mr. Ladd.
Well, now Jessie's just as dead as Aunt Mirandy at book's end.
There's a knock. Riley looks up to see John standing in the doorframe. "Hey," he says, awkwardly.
She puts down the book. "Hey," she says.
"Can I come in?"
"Sure," she says. "I was just reading."
He sits on the bed next to her, looks at her. It's not the exciting look of him actually noticing her, but one tinged with sadness; he still sees her, but only now he sees the real her. "How are you?" he asks.
"I don't know," she says honestly; she's lied to John enough for one lifetime. "What's going to happen to your uncle?"
John shakes his head. "I don't know."
"Well, at least I'm not the only one in the doghouse." Riley tries to smile, but she knows it's a weak attempt.
John bites his lip. "Riley," he says. "After all your time in the future, what you did today--was that the first time?"
She searches John 's face, not sure she understands. "You mean the first time I killed someone?" He nods. "Yeah. I think so."
Emotions play out across his face, and she's not sure what they mean at first. Then she understands. This is something they share now, the taking of a human life. She reaches across, takes John's hand in hers. "What was it like for you?" he asks.
"She was going to hurt Cameron," Riley points out. "I couldn't let Jessie do that. She's your strength."
"Yeah," says John, thoughtfully. "Yeah, she is." He leans in, kisses her, and she kisses him back with passionate vigor. Ever since she told him the truth, she's felt like she was missing more than just some control of her leg, like a piece of her was cut away and she's only just now getting it back.
He gets up, closing the door to Cameron's bedroom, then sits down again, kisses Riley again. She unbuttons his jeans; he pulls her shirt over her head.
The door opens, and the machine enters. "Still my room," she says before John or Riley can react, and closes the door behind her. She sits down on the other side of John, then leans across him to bring her lips to Riley's. Riley hesitates at first, then gives in to the kiss, trusting that Cameron knows what she is doing.
John is wide-eyed as they break the kiss, and Cameron takes advantage of the moment to kiss him next, when he's still too surprised to resist. After a moment, he kisses her back, tentatively at first, then with greater gusto. Riley takes advantage of the moment to pull off his jeans.
Cameron breaks the kiss with John, then looks across him at Riley. Riley smiles back at the machine, and then the two girls together push John down on the bed.
XXVIII.
Time passes.
Judgment Day comes, later than any of them who remember it remembers it coming.
Life goes on. SkyNet hasn't won.
Not yet.
XXIX.
Riley finds Cameron waiting at the rendezvous. Out of all of them, Cameron's the only one who is unchanged from when this all started the ten years from their first meeting to Judgment Day, and in the ten since.
No, Cameron is changed too. It's just that those changes aren't visible on the outside. There, she's still young, beautiful, perfection.
They kiss quickly as Riley walks up besides her. Riley aches for more, but knows there isn't time, not now.
"We still haven't found this timeline's version of you," Cameron tells her. "John says to tell you they're still looking." Somewhere on this scorched Earth, no one knows where, it's possible there's still a 17-year-old version of her, scavenging for food. Riley still clings to the hope that girl was never born.
"It's okay," Riley says. "She's just one girl."
Cameron reaches out and takes Riley's chin in her hand, moving Riley's head so their gazes meet. "No," Cameron says. "She's not."
Twenty years later, and John and Cameron both still have the power to take her breath away.
"John sends his love," Cameron informs Riley. "And this." She presses a microchip into Riley's palm.
Riley nods. "Understood," she says. "You'd better leave."
Cameron nods and walks away, but not before exchanging one last, lingering kiss with Riley. It's ten minutes before Jessie arrives, hot off the sub from Australia, looking at once exactly the way Riley remembers her and at the same time, so, so young. She sees Riley and eyes her suspiciously. "What are you doing here?"
Riley smiles. "Waiting for you."
Fandom: Sarah Connor Chronicles
Pairings: Riley/Cameron, John/Riley, John/Cameron, Riley/Jessie, Jessie/Derek, John/Riley/Cameron.
Timeline/Spoilers: Takes place during the first half of Season 2, after 2x08, "Mr. Ferguson Is Ill Today" but before the half-season finale. Spoilers for the first half of Season 2. Also spoilers for Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Becoming Jane.
Summary: Termination is not an option, so Cameron must rely on other tactics to neutralize the threat Riley poses.
Rating: NWS
A/N: Epigraph from Kate Douglas Wiggin, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Special thanks to my betas, anonymous_sibyl, present_pathos, and tacky_tramp. This was written before I saw any episodes of the second half of the Season 2; I don't know which I feared most, being jossed or kripked.
Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Some Thing to Watch Over Me Part 3
XXIII.
To Cameron, the world is made up of knowns and unknowns, of possibilities and probabilities, of variables and constants. In the game-theoretic schema which is her reality, there are elements which are under her control and those which are not.
John, unfortunately, is not under her control. Her job would be far easier if he were.
So even after Cameron has in her way tamed the girl, John and Riley are still spending their days shooting awkward looks at each other. They are boyfriend and girlfriend living in the same house, and yet normal teenaged hormones have not as yet been sufficient for full sexual combustibility; Cameron knows for a fact they have not moved beyond kissing.
Cameron can see the fault lines in her universe, and knows the present dynamic is headed for crisis.
Fortunately, the system can be nudged.
Convincing John to do something he doesn't want to, or not to do something he wants to, has proven in the past to be more difficult than Cameron had anticipated, especially when Riley was concerned. That the girl is here with them, now, is living proof of this. Yet John can be influenced, and he wants Riley just as he wants Cameron; he simply needs to be pushed into the proper position so as to discover his own mind.
So Cameron steps into her role as stepsister to tell John when he is being clueless about what women need and want.
"Now that Riley's mobile again," Cameron tells him. "You should go out with her."
John, of course, is clueless. "We did go out today, remember? You were there."
"Not with me," Cameron says, putting just enough emphasis on each of her words so that he'll understand her meaning. "Take her out to dinner."
"Oh," John says, and then, "yeah, I should."
Cameron smiles smile 457-A and hands him a card.
"What is this?" he asks as he takes it.
"Your dinner reservations," she says as she turns away, her mind racing to calculate the new probabilities. There's still risk, far too much risk; not enough of the elements, even now, are under her control. But she has done what she can and now, since prayer was never included as part of her programming, there is nothing left to do but wait.
XXIV.
After the last few weeks, it's strange being out without Cameron. She even almost misses the machine as she and John sit down to dinner, but evidence of Cameron's hand are in abundance: she's wearing a black sheath dress that Cameron produced, and the machine put up Riley's hair before she left.
Dinner is nice, but even nicer is the chance at being alone with John. He looks across the table at her, and she knows that if some part of his mind is still on his mother or his uncle or the three dots, it's despite his best efforts otherwise. It's just the two of them, Riley and the future leader of the Resistance, and no one else matters: not Sarah, not Derek, not Cameron or Jessie, not SkyNet.
"What were your hopes?" he asks her. "Your dreams. I mean, before this."
He blames himself, she realizes, for taking her dreams away from her. She wants to reassure him that she never had any dreams, at least not since the machine took them away from her when she was four. But she can't, not without telling him the truth, the whole truth about her and the future and Judgment Day and Jessie. For the first time, she realizes just how heavily the burden of his role as the future leader of humanity rests upon his shoulders in the here and now. Does he really have to carry it all by himself?
Riley decides to stick as closely to the truth as she can. "I'm not that different from you as you think," she tells him. "My parents died when I was four. Since then I've just been trying to survive."
John nods, and Riley can see understanding in his eyes. It's a rush, to share this--this pain, this burden--with him. "How did they die?" he asks.
"They were caught in a shoot-out," she says, and it's close enough to the truth. John closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, then shakes his head. "I'm sorry," he says.
"Don't be," she urges him. "It happened a long time ago." A long time ago--or seven years in the future. Hell, she's not even born yet. Maybe in this timeline, she never will be. For little potential-Riley-to-be's sake, she hopes she won't be.
"What about you?" she asks. "What are you going to do if you do this, stop this SkyNet, stop Judgment Day? What're you going to do then?"
John shakes his head. "There is no then," he said. "We thought we stopped it, and we only pushed it back a little bit. SkyNet's always going to be there, waiting, ready to be built." The desperation in John's voice is so stark that Riley almost flinches. If John Connor is left without hope, then what can any of the rest of them do?
"So . . . that's it?" asks Riley. "SkyNet wins, no matter what?"
John doesn't answer at first, just picking at his dinner. "No," he says at last. "SkyNet can't lose, but it doesn't have to win. As long as I keep fighting--as long as we keep fighting-then SkyNet hasn't won. Even if Judgment Day comes, SkyNet hasn't won."
Riley puts down her fork. Suddenly, she isn't very hungry anymore.
"Is that enough?" she asks. "How can you keep fighting without an end in sight? What keeps you from giving up?" She couldn't do, she is sure. Already she, she's gone sniveling back to Jessie once, telling her she couldn't do this anymore. And that was before the bullet wound.
John's gaze is steel, just as much as any machine's. "You," he answers. "Cameron. My mom."
XXV.
John drives her home in silence, but it isn't the usual silence which hangs between them, the invisible barrier repelling her and keeping her from finding out his secrets. Instead, it's the silence that comes when there's nothing left to say, when he's opened up and bared all. It's an easy, intimate silence, which isn't a lack at all but a presence, warm and loving.
The house is empty when they get back. John unlocks the door but doesn't turn on the lights. Instead he takes Riley's crutches from her and lays them against the inside of the wall, next to the door, then puts his arm around her waist and guides her through the house. "Do you need to sit down?" he asks.
"I can stand," she answers. Her leg really is a lot stronger. Then she's unable to say anything else because John is kissing her in the dark. It's not forced or distracted like those kisses before she was wounded, nor is it charged with excitement like those since. Instead, it feels natural, comfortable, inevitable, and it feels natural when John's hands slip under Riley's shirt. "Bed," she whispers, and he helps her to his bedroom and sits her down on his bed.
His movements are awkward, uncertain as he undresses her, and she has to laugh at the savior of humanity who is a nervous virgin in the here and now. She directs him gently, showing him what to do as she helps him put on the condom and guides him into her, and his tentativeness eventually gives way to enthusiasm even as they make love slowly, his body sinking into hers and then pulling away unhurriedly.
He comes before her, unable to control himself on the first time, but he goes down on her without hesitation. In this his lack of technique is even more apparent, but she just directs him patiently, and in time, with effort, the job gets done. Any diminishment in the intensity of the orgasm is more than made up by the man who caused it; sex with the machine is perfect, with multiple spine-tingling paroxysms of ecstatic pleasure, but the imperfection of sex with John only drives home that this is real, human.
XXVI.
Riley wakes up at 2:36, or so John's alarm clock claims. The worst part of a broken leg is definitely when she has to pee in the middle of night. Worse yet, she knows her crutches are still in the living room by the door. She disentangles herself from John without waking him, then sits on the edge of his bed and watches him sleep.
He loves her. He hasn't said it, but he doesn't have to. He's made it clear in the way he's looked at her, the way he took her to bed this night. He's made himself naked to her, both literally and figuratively.
She's accomplished the end Jessie sent her to achieve.
Now what? Where can she go from here? Riley's already tried to pull out; she can remember vividly what Jessie's reaction to that was. There is no out.
Riley pulls herself to her feet, leaning against the wall to steady herself, and stumbles down the hall and into the bathroom. When she's finished there she makes her way back to Cameron's room. The machine is sitting on the bed in pyjamas, apparently reading Riley's copy of Rebecca. When Riley enters the run Cameron quickly gets up and helps her to the bed.
As soon as they get to the bed Riley pulls off the machine's top, then mashes her mouth against its even as she works Cameron's pyjama bottoms off. Cameron asks no questions; sex with the machine is simple, uncomplicated.
Riley just keeps going on, not stopping for any feigned intimacies, fucking until she's worn herself out with exhaustion.
XXVII.
She wakes up again at ten in the morning. Someone--probably Cameron--has put her crutches next to her bed, but as she hobbles out of the room it seems the house is empty except for her. Good.
She makes her way, slowly but determinedly, to the nearest bus stop, and has to wait twenty minutes for the next bus. It's another ten minutes on the crutches from the where she gets off the bus to Jessie's apartment.
Jessie was clear last time that Riley is not supposed to come to the apartment to talk to her, but Riley's fairly confident she'll forgive the indiscretion in exchange for the intelligence about the three dots.
She turns the corner of the hall in Jessie's apartment building, but as she does she sees the door begin to open. Riley pulls back, out of the door's line of sight, then peers out from behind the corner. She sees John's uncle, Derek, exiting Jessie's apartment, giving Jessie one last kiss before he leaves.
Riley freezes. If he comes in her direction, there's no way she can get away from him quickly enough. Luckily he goes down the hall in the other direction, and Riley relaxes before turning around and making her way out of the apartment building and back to the bus stop.
XXIII.
Cameron's in the kitchen when Riley gets back to the house. From the looks of it, she's trying to make hand rolled pasta. "You need to be careful with that leg," Cameron cautions as Riley enters.
"Why didn't you kill me?" Riley demands, not for the first time.
Cameron looks at Riley dispassionately. "There was no need."
But Riley's had enough of her games. "Don't give me that shit. There was every need. I complicated everything, made your job harder. You should have killed me."
Cameron turns back to the pasta. "You don't get to decide that."
"Why didn't you?"
Cameron picks up the knife and cuts the dough in a thin strip of perfectly uniform length. "John wouldn't have wanted me to."
Riley laughs. "And you do everything this John wants?"
"John wouldn't want me to kill you because he sees worth in you."
"And you?"
Cameron looks up, looks Riley in the eyes. "I trust John," she answers. "You should too."
Riley takes a breath, then collapses into a nearby kitchen chair, the fight gone out of her. "Where is he?"
"In his room," Cameron answers.
"You can stop anything, right?"
"No," says Cameron, unbothered by the non sequitor. "There are a number of things I cannot stop."
"A woman?"
Cameron cocks her head. "Human?"
Riley nods.
"Then yes."
"Get John," Riley says. "I have something I have to tell him."
Cameron exits and comes back with John a second later. "What is it?" he asks her, concerned.
"It's your uncle," she tells him. "And . . . it's me. I haven't been totally honest with you."
John frowns, his brow furrowing. "What do you mean?"
Riley takes a deep breath. "I was born," she starts, "on January 10th, 2010."
Already she can see John begin to tense. Cameron puts a placating hand on his shoulder.
"I was four years old when the machines came," Riley continued. "They destroyed everything. I managed to escape. My parents didn't."
"2014," Cameron notes before John has a chance to say anything. "Three years later than in my timeline."
"We managed to postpone Judgment Day by another three years," John says, his angerevident in his voice. "Big deal." He turns to Riley. "Who sent you? Did I send you back? Did they?"
Riley shakes her head furiously. "I was found by one of your soldiers, I think. She hates the machines as much as anyone. But--she hates her, too." She nods towards Cameron. "I think in our future, the two of you know each other. She . . . advises you. But Jessie doesn't think she can be trusted."
John glances at Cameron. "Maybe Jessie is right."
"Jessie wanted to go back, make sure she wouldn't be able to influence you in the past. She brought me with her so that I could get to know you, find out stuff for her."
"You've been spying on us." He says it simply, calmly, but still she flinches at the force of the truth.
"I only saw her once since I was shot and I didn't tell her anything, I promise," Riley insists, but John doesn't say anything, just waits. "But today I went to see her. I'm not supposed to go to her apartment, but I did anyway, and . . . . I saw your uncle there."
"Derek." John's voice is even, controlled.
Riley nods. "He kissed her as he left. They'd just had sex, I'm sure of it." She looks at John, pleading with him with her eyes.
He ignores her and turns to Cameron. "Next time Derek leaves, I want you to trail him without him seeing you. Can you do that?"
Cameron meets his gaze. "It won't be easy. He knows what he is doing."
John doesn't blink. "Can you do it?"
"Yes."
"Then do it. If Riley's story checks out, call us and wait for us to get there. I want to confront them, not take them down."
Cameron nods. "Understood."
"Good." John turns and leaves the room.
Riley gets up to follow him, but Cameron places a hand on her shoulder and pushes her back into her seat. "Wait," the machine says. ""Give him time."
XXIV.
John's standing in the backyard, staring at the stars, when Cameron joins him. "Where's Derek?"
"In his room, asleep. Something wore him out today," she comments, wryly.
John nods. "I guess you want to say I told you so."
"About Riley?"
"Yeah. You and Mom weren't exactly subtle about how you wanted me to stay away from her."
"I changed my mind," Cameron points out, as if Terminators just change their minds on whims. "Be easy on her, John."
John snorts. "I find out my supposed girlfriend's been spying on me for four months, and you want me to go easy on her? You, Miss-I'll-kill-anyone-who-maybe-one-day-might-tell-one-little-piece-of-something?"
"She didn't tell anything important," Cameron points out. John's not sure why she's being so insistent on taking Riley's side, but it doesn't matter.
"She was about to," John points out. "Why do you think she went to see this Jessie this morning? She was going to tell her everything."
"But she didn't."
John sighs. "After. . . ." He's not going to talk about what happened last night, not to Cameron. But he had thought he was making love to a girl he loved, who loved him. Now it turns out she was just a seductress, a spy, what his mother would call an agente provacateuse.
"I was a fool," he says. "The only thing I don't understand is why you let me be."
Cameron turns so she's facing him, touches his forehead. John steels him against the touch, forcing himself to ignore as he always must just how attractive a package SkyNet manufactured for Cameron.
"Because sometimes humans have to be foolish in order to become wise," Cameron answers. "Be easy on her, John. She was just being a fool, too."
XXV.
It's two days before Cameron makes the call to John. Riley spends the time trying to get through to John, to apologize, but he blocks every attempt with icy politeness.
Eventually the call comes, and John and Sarah begin packing the truck with weapons. Sarah's already been briefed, presumably with an expurgated account as to how the intelligence was gained, since Riley's still living in the house and not buried in the backyard. She supposes she can be grateful to John for that much.
"I want to go with you," Riley says as they finish packing the truck.
Sarah laughs a dry laugh. "And what use is a cripple going to be to us?"
"I can drive," Riley points out. "Keep the engine going."
Sarah Connor's weak point, if she has one, is that she recognizes good strategy when she hears it. She quickly nods her assent. "Very well," she says, and helps Riley into the driver's seat.
John doesn't say anything.
XXVI.
John and Sarah meet Cameron at the address Riley gave them as Jessie's . "They're inside," she informs them."Flagrante delicto."
Sarah raises an eyebrow but doesn't say anything, just cocks her gun. "Let's do this," she says.
\
Cameron nods and kicks down the door, and the three them enter the apartment. Sure enough, they find Derek and a woman in a bed, having sex.
"Sarah," Derek says, jumping out of bed and hurriedly pulling on garments. The woman--Jessie--on the other hand, stands up, letting the covers fall away, apparently unbothered by her nakedness.
She stares Cameron in the face. "Bitch," she says, then jumps out the window, quickly dodging the bullets firing from all three guns.
"After her," Sarah orders Cameron, who quickly complies by jumping out the window as well. Sarah looks to Derek who is still pulling on clothes, and just rolls her eyes and covers him with her gun.
John moves to the window to see if he can see Cameron or Jessie. Sure enough, there's a naked woman in the corner of the parking lot, crouched behing a car holding a shotgun, and there's Cameron racing across the parking lot towards her. John's heart stops when he recognizes Jessie's weapon as a Benelli M2. It's the gun they used against Cromartie in Mexico, capable of taking down even a Terminator at a close enough range and with the right ammunition--and John has no doubt that Jessie knows exactly what it'll take to damage Cameron. "No!" John calls out, futilely, as Cameron gets closer, in range, and then--
Jessie is crushed as the truck--their truck, Riley behind the wheel--crashes into the car she was using as a cover.
XVII.
Riley sits on Cameron's bed, flipping through her copy of Rebecca. She should have known that life, even life before Judgment Day, wouldn't be like Riverboro, the universe bending out of shape just to acknowledge a little girl's awesomeness. But she had allowed herself to hope, to believe that just because Jessie had taken an interest in her, that meant she would be as good as an Aunt Mirandy or Mr. Ladd.
Well, now Jessie's just as dead as Aunt Mirandy at book's end.
There's a knock. Riley looks up to see John standing in the doorframe. "Hey," he says, awkwardly.
She puts down the book. "Hey," she says.
"Can I come in?"
"Sure," she says. "I was just reading."
He sits on the bed next to her, looks at her. It's not the exciting look of him actually noticing her, but one tinged with sadness; he still sees her, but only now he sees the real her. "How are you?" he asks.
"I don't know," she says honestly; she's lied to John enough for one lifetime. "What's going to happen to your uncle?"
John shakes his head. "I don't know."
"Well, at least I'm not the only one in the doghouse." Riley tries to smile, but she knows it's a weak attempt.
John bites his lip. "Riley," he says. "After all your time in the future, what you did today--was that the first time?"
She searches John 's face, not sure she understands. "You mean the first time I killed someone?" He nods. "Yeah. I think so."
Emotions play out across his face, and she's not sure what they mean at first. Then she understands. This is something they share now, the taking of a human life. She reaches across, takes John's hand in hers. "What was it like for you?" he asks.
"She was going to hurt Cameron," Riley points out. "I couldn't let Jessie do that. She's your strength."
"Yeah," says John, thoughtfully. "Yeah, she is." He leans in, kisses her, and she kisses him back with passionate vigor. Ever since she told him the truth, she's felt like she was missing more than just some control of her leg, like a piece of her was cut away and she's only just now getting it back.
He gets up, closing the door to Cameron's bedroom, then sits down again, kisses Riley again. She unbuttons his jeans; he pulls her shirt over her head.
The door opens, and the machine enters. "Still my room," she says before John or Riley can react, and closes the door behind her. She sits down on the other side of John, then leans across him to bring her lips to Riley's. Riley hesitates at first, then gives in to the kiss, trusting that Cameron knows what she is doing.
John is wide-eyed as they break the kiss, and Cameron takes advantage of the moment to kiss him next, when he's still too surprised to resist. After a moment, he kisses her back, tentatively at first, then with greater gusto. Riley takes advantage of the moment to pull off his jeans.
Cameron breaks the kiss with John, then looks across him at Riley. Riley smiles back at the machine, and then the two girls together push John down on the bed.
XXVIII.
Time passes.
Judgment Day comes, later than any of them who remember it remembers it coming.
Life goes on. SkyNet hasn't won.
Not yet.
XXIX.
Riley finds Cameron waiting at the rendezvous. Out of all of them, Cameron's the only one who is unchanged from when this all started the ten years from their first meeting to Judgment Day, and in the ten since.
No, Cameron is changed too. It's just that those changes aren't visible on the outside. There, she's still young, beautiful, perfection.
They kiss quickly as Riley walks up besides her. Riley aches for more, but knows there isn't time, not now.
"We still haven't found this timeline's version of you," Cameron tells her. "John says to tell you they're still looking." Somewhere on this scorched Earth, no one knows where, it's possible there's still a 17-year-old version of her, scavenging for food. Riley still clings to the hope that girl was never born.
"It's okay," Riley says. "She's just one girl."
Cameron reaches out and takes Riley's chin in her hand, moving Riley's head so their gazes meet. "No," Cameron says. "She's not."
Twenty years later, and John and Cameron both still have the power to take her breath away.
"John sends his love," Cameron informs Riley. "And this." She presses a microchip into Riley's palm.
Riley nods. "Understood," she says. "You'd better leave."
Cameron nods and walks away, but not before exchanging one last, lingering kiss with Riley. It's ten minutes before Jessie arrives, hot off the sub from Australia, looking at once exactly the way Riley remembers her and at the same time, so, so young. She sees Riley and eyes her suspiciously. "What are you doing here?"
Riley smiles. "Waiting for you."