Futures (A Cold Night For A Lifetime)
Title: Futures (A Cold Night For A Lifetime)
Fandom: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Pairings: Sarah/Derek, John/Cameron, John/Other
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Season 1
Description: Let's assume the best-case scenario for the gang: they destroy Skynet and live happily ever after. This is one version of their "happily ever after".
Why is it so hard to find balance between living decent and the cold and real?
"Futures" - Jimmy Eat World
In the future, Derek and Sarah Croft live in Steinbach, Manitoba.
Skynet was gone, finally destroyed after the umpteenth explosion. Judgment Day had come and gone. It was over, and they were still alive. They had fought hard for their lives. Now all they had to do was live it. They couldn't stay in Los Angeles. The Reeses were all still alive and well, and there was a younger Derek Reese running around in the city. They didn't know what would happen if Future Derek ever encountered Present Derek, but they could guess that nothing good could come of it. Plus, there was also the fact that they were both still wanted fugitives. So Derek suggested Canada.
"Besides," Derek had said to Sarah. "The Reese boys would never go to Manitoba."
Of course, Sarah wasn't too keen on leaving her son behind. She had spent the last twenty years of her life dedicated to him. The thought of leaving his side was nothing short of abhorrent.
"He doesn't need you to protect him anymore. Let him live his life," Derek said to her. "You've got to let him go."
So they moved to Steinbach in the province of Manitoba, changed their names again, and bought a gray two-story in the suburbs.
Sarah is a psychiatric nurse. Derek owns a shoe store. They visit the mall on the weekends.
///
In the future, John Croft lives in Pittsburgh.
At thirty-five, he's one of the youngest research professors at The Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. No one doubts that he'll be Director one day. He would have liked a different career in a different place. A pediatrician in Colorado. A family lawyer in Vermont. Maybe a shoe store owner in Manitoba. But he's a research professor in Pittsburgh because that's where he's needed. They may have destroyed Skynet, but nobody can stop the changing of the times and the evolution of technology. All they can do is make sure that the technology doesn't get out of hand.
He met Kate in college. It was the only relationship that's ever lasted more than three months because Kate was the only woman he'd ever met who didn't mind that he always had to sit in the seat closest to the exit in a movie theater, or that he slept with a loaded gun in the nightstand. After two-and-a-half years, he finally decided to tell her everything. It took many late-night conversations, drawn-out explanations, and his original birth certificate, but in the end, she believed him. So he married her.
They have two kids now. The kids don't know about their father's past, and don't ever need to know. They'll born and die as Crofts. As far as they know, John had always been a Croft. Derek and Sarah are their biological grandparents. The name Connor means nothing to them, nor Reese, nor Kyle. Most importantly, Skynet means nothing to them.
Kate loves her husband. She doesn't nag him about the late hours he works, because she knows that all he's trying to do is keep the entire world safe. She doesn't begrudge him the guns he keeps in the house, because she knows that the fear and paranoia instilled in him since childhood can never be eradicated. Kate is kind. Kate is understanding. But there are some things that even kind and understanding Kate can't stand. Like his monthly weekend trips to Nebraska and before that, Wyoming, or the occasional Friday night dinners that stretch into Saturday morning.
Cameron can't stay in one place for more than five years. She doesn't age. So every five years, she packs up, changes her identity, and moves to a new rural town. Her visits to Pittsburgh are short and discreet. It wouldn't do for John to be spotted running around town with a younger woman. It would have been safer to have her destroyed or powered down, but John forbade it. Not even Sarah could get him to change his mind.
"I still dream about it," he told her. "I can still see him going under into that molten vat... disappearing, his hand jutting out..." He trembled. "I'm not letting that happen to Cameron too."
And so Cameron stayed. But not with John.
Kate's never met her, but she lies awake at night wondering about her. She wonders what it is that John does with her on these visits. She's always too afraid to ask.
///
In the future, Derek Reese disappears.
Derek Croft finds out on one Sunday morning, sitting in the kitchen as Sarah breaks the news to him.
"I didn't know that John was keeping tabs on me... him... The Reeses."
"He can't help himself," Sarah replies.
From that day on, neither could she. They look up the Reeses and find out that the parents died in a car accident long ago. It still ended up being just the Reese Boys. Now it's just Kyle. Without Skynet, without an enemy to rally against, without a place to direct his teenage anger, Derek Reese faltered and got mixed up with the wrong people. Derek reads about himself on the internet, looks at his arrest reports, and learns what he would have been like without Skynet. It creeps him out, but he can't stop.
In June, Sarah goes to a medical conference in Los Angeles even though she's never been in the years past. But she doesn't go to the conference. Instead, she drives to the Reese house and waits. Waits and watches. She sees Kyle, twenty-four years old, young and handsome. He looks exactly like how she remembers him. Then she looks down at her hands clutching the steering wheel, wrinkled and veiny, betraying all of her fifty-five years. She drives away and gets on the next plane home.
She still keeps tabs on him. She searches for him on the internet, looks for his name in his local paper, even subscribes to his university's alumni newsletter. Kyle graduated from UCLA with a degree in sociology. He's a teaching assistant at a grade school. She smiles at that. Even though she's only ever known him as Sergeant Reese, a Human Resistance soldier whose body and mind had been scarred by war and turmoil, she could still just as easily see him as a third-grade school teacher.
She hides her clippings from her husband, but he knows anyway. He reads those clippings as obsessively as she does. He thinks she doesn't know. Late one night, he finally asks her about it while they're lying side by side in bed, not touching. The passion has transitioned into comfort, as most long-lasting relationships tend to do. Derek knows that this is perfectly normal, but still he wonder if things wouldn't be different if they were still fighting Skynet.
"What does it matter?" she asks. "He'll never know. It won't hurt him." It doesn't occur to her that it hurts Derek.
"It's weird."
"I just want to know about him. I'm... curious."
"You're stalking."
"So what if I am?" She comes back at him a little too defensively. "He's John's father. Aren't I entitled to know a little bit about him?"
"But he's not your Kyle. He doesn't even know who the fuck you are." In the dark, he can't see her face, but he knows that she winced. When you've spent twenty years with someone, you know exactly how to make it hurt. Trading barbs have always been a cornerstone of their relationship. It used to be foreplay. Now they're just hurtful words.
"Thank you. Good night," Sarah says icily. Derek's sorry, but he doesn't apologize. Neither of them are very good at that.
They lie quietly in the dark.
Finally, he says,
"You've got to let him go."
And this time, she says:
"You first."
///
In the future, Cameron's an animal trainer.
Before that, she was an anesthesiologist, and before that, an air traffic controller. After her five years as an animal trainer is up, she plans on being an animator. She's going down the alphabet until she hits 'zoologist'.
"What happens after five years as a zoologist?" John asked her once.
"Start over," she replied.
She's learned a lot over the years, but she's still learning more. She's gone far beyond mere mimicking. With relative ease, she can talk, laugh, interact socially. She even dates, much to John's chagrin.
"So what's going on with that guy? Bill?" John asks as he watches her toss raw fish into the pool. Cameron trains seals at The Doorly Zoo. She stays away from the canine species, who still go nuts when they're near her. No matter how human she seems, that's never going to change.
"We're not together anymore."
"Oh?" John doesn't bother trying to sound disappointed. She'd see right through him anyway. "What happened?"
"He was emotionally unavailable."
John stares. Cameron looks over her shoulder at him, and smiles. As John comes to a realization, his jaw drops, just a little.
"Cameron, you made a joke."
"Yes," Cameron replied. "According to the female humans whom I regularly associate with, I can be 'quite a riot'." She can act and speak more like a human being, but she doesn't with John. With John, it's okay to be on her default setting.
After the seals are fed, they spend the day touring the zoo. They see tigers, bears, and amphibians, but not the wolves. They walk and they talk, but they don't touch. Not until the end, when it's time for John to go. Then he takes her by the hand, and he asks her again.
"Come with me."
"No."
"Then I'll go with you."
"No."
"It's an order."
She smiles. Somewhere along the line, she's learned how to smile, not because it's a preprogrammed socially acceptable response, but because she wants to.
"I don't take orders from you."
"You would've taken orders from him," he says. "John Connor, the leader of mankind. But not John Croft, the research professor from Pittsburgh."
"You're the same John as you always would have been," she assures him.
"So what's different?"
"When you're at war, you don't give orders you don't mean."
She takes her hand away from him.
"Go home, John."
And he does. He goes back to Pittsburgh, to his job, his wife, and his family, then he'll start counting the days. He'll be back in a month, and they'll have this conversation again.
///
"I'm not really here, am I?" John asks Derek. They're sitting in rocking chairs on the porch of the Croft house in Manitoba, each nursing their fifth beer and a good buzz that's slowly sliding into drunkenness.
"What?"
"Me. I'm not really here because I can't be here." His speech is only slightly slurred. "How can I be? My father's here. If he's here, he's not in the past, and if my father's not in the past, I'm not in the past, and so I can't be here now. Therefore, I'm not here and I never will be."
"Kid, you're giving me a headache," Derek says lazily. "Don't over think it."
John doesn't say anything. There was a time when his uncle-father's word would have been good enough to ease his troubled mind. These days, oddly enough, only cold logic coupled with the earnest emulations of emotions made him feel at ease. And there was only one person who could give him that.
"You shouldn't see her anymore," Derek says, as if reading his mind. John turns to him, his surprise apparent. "You've got that look. Kyle used to get that look when he looked at your mom's picture." Then he says again, "You shouldn't see her anymore. It's not fair to Kate."
"Kate doesn't mind," John replies, but then realizes that he doesn't need to lie to Derek. "Well, Kate's fine."
"You're a married man. How would you like it if I stepped out on your mother every month?"
"I wouldn't care," John shrugs, then broke into a wide grin. "She'd castrate you herself."
"Yes," Derek agrees with a nod. "But Kate wouldn't stick up for herself."
"It's not like that. Cameron and I, we're..." He stops short. He knows that Derek still doesn't like Cameron, even after all these years, even after Cameron's proved her loyalty time and again. And anyway, his relationship with Cameron isn't something that's easily understood by anyone. "Remember our first house?" he asks. "That little house with the swings in the yard?"
"Don't change the subject, John."
"I'm not. Just listen. You remember that house?"
"Sure."
"I liked that house."
"You didn't have to sleep on the couch," Derek replies dryly.
"A lot of the nights, neither did you," John scoffs. "What? You think that I didn't know about you two back then?"
"I thought we were being discreet."
"Uh, no. The walls weren't all that thick."
"Shit." Derek makes a face, but he's not quite embarrassed. It was too long ago. "Sorry, kid. Hope we didn't traumatize you too much."
"Some mornings I'd wake earlier than usual. I'd be lying in bed, and I can hear you sneaking out of her room and back onto the couch. Then we'd all sit down at the breakfast table like nothing happened." It's an odd memory to be nostalgic of, but John smiles fondly of it. The thought of his mom and Derek having sex is still horrifying, but thinking about the four of them at the table more than balances it out. "Mom would burn some pancakes, I'd be trying to finish up some homework, Cameron would be cleaning the guns, and you'd just be glaring at her."
"I hated that robot," Derek says, but he's got a grin on his face wide as a Cheshire Cat's.
"Things were different then."
"Yeah, we were living as fugitives and feared for our lives."
"It wasn't that bad," John says.
"It wasn't that bad," Derek agrees.
"I miss that place."
"It was a crappy house, John."
"No, not the house. I miss that place we were in." John looks down at the beer can in his hand. It's easier to say these things if he's not looking at Derek in the eyes. Derek isn't judging, but John thinks he is. "Cameron reminds me of that place."
Derek understands all too well. He wants to tell John that he understands. He wants to tell him that sometimes he wishes they were all back there again. He wants to tell him that sometimes he wishes they'd never destroyed Skynet. But instead, he says:
"That place where everyone was trying to kill us? When you had to survive high school and killer robots? That place?"
John just shrugs.
"You save the world and get the girl. You should be happy, right? And that place you used to be in, that crappy little house at that time when everyone was trying to kill you - that's supposed to be the bad times."
"That's right." Derek reaches over and clasps his hand gently on John's shoulder. "This is the good stuff, kid. Your family, your career, a normal life. Enjoy it. This thing with Cameron... I don't know, you've got some kind of fucking masochistic streak." Derek laughs. It sounds hollow to him because he knows that it is, but John doesn't notice. He just feels ashamed for wanting the past more than he wants his family.
"How's the store?" he asks now, changing the subject for real this time.
"Fine." Sensing John's extreme discomfort, Derek wisely goes along with it. "Doing well. I'm thinking about moving the storefront to Main Street."
"Oh," John says. What did he know about shoe stores? But for that matter, what did Derek?
"Yup."
"I hear that you've taken up bowling?"
"Yeah. I think I'll join the bowling league next year."
"Sounds..." John struggles for the right word. "Fun."
"Yup."
They sit in momentary silence, awash in vivid orange-and-gold as the sun slowly sinks into the western sky. They can hear the children screaming and laughing from inside the house, the clattering of dishes and pans as Kate and Sarah bustle inside the kitchen. Their chairs creak against the wooden floor boards as they rock in their chairs. There's a cool summer breeze kicking up.
"This is bliss," Derek finally says.
"Yeah," John agrees.
Neither wants to admit how empty they feel inside.
Fandom: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Pairings: Sarah/Derek, John/Cameron, John/Other
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Season 1
Description: Let's assume the best-case scenario for the gang: they destroy Skynet and live happily ever after. This is one version of their "happily ever after".
Why is it so hard to find balance between living decent and the cold and real?
"Futures" - Jimmy Eat World
In the future, Derek and Sarah Croft live in Steinbach, Manitoba.
Skynet was gone, finally destroyed after the umpteenth explosion. Judgment Day had come and gone. It was over, and they were still alive. They had fought hard for their lives. Now all they had to do was live it. They couldn't stay in Los Angeles. The Reeses were all still alive and well, and there was a younger Derek Reese running around in the city. They didn't know what would happen if Future Derek ever encountered Present Derek, but they could guess that nothing good could come of it. Plus, there was also the fact that they were both still wanted fugitives. So Derek suggested Canada.
"Besides," Derek had said to Sarah. "The Reese boys would never go to Manitoba."
Of course, Sarah wasn't too keen on leaving her son behind. She had spent the last twenty years of her life dedicated to him. The thought of leaving his side was nothing short of abhorrent.
"He doesn't need you to protect him anymore. Let him live his life," Derek said to her. "You've got to let him go."
So they moved to Steinbach in the province of Manitoba, changed their names again, and bought a gray two-story in the suburbs.
Sarah is a psychiatric nurse. Derek owns a shoe store. They visit the mall on the weekends.
///
In the future, John Croft lives in Pittsburgh.
At thirty-five, he's one of the youngest research professors at The Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. No one doubts that he'll be Director one day. He would have liked a different career in a different place. A pediatrician in Colorado. A family lawyer in Vermont. Maybe a shoe store owner in Manitoba. But he's a research professor in Pittsburgh because that's where he's needed. They may have destroyed Skynet, but nobody can stop the changing of the times and the evolution of technology. All they can do is make sure that the technology doesn't get out of hand.
He met Kate in college. It was the only relationship that's ever lasted more than three months because Kate was the only woman he'd ever met who didn't mind that he always had to sit in the seat closest to the exit in a movie theater, or that he slept with a loaded gun in the nightstand. After two-and-a-half years, he finally decided to tell her everything. It took many late-night conversations, drawn-out explanations, and his original birth certificate, but in the end, she believed him. So he married her.
They have two kids now. The kids don't know about their father's past, and don't ever need to know. They'll born and die as Crofts. As far as they know, John had always been a Croft. Derek and Sarah are their biological grandparents. The name Connor means nothing to them, nor Reese, nor Kyle. Most importantly, Skynet means nothing to them.
Kate loves her husband. She doesn't nag him about the late hours he works, because she knows that all he's trying to do is keep the entire world safe. She doesn't begrudge him the guns he keeps in the house, because she knows that the fear and paranoia instilled in him since childhood can never be eradicated. Kate is kind. Kate is understanding. But there are some things that even kind and understanding Kate can't stand. Like his monthly weekend trips to Nebraska and before that, Wyoming, or the occasional Friday night dinners that stretch into Saturday morning.
Cameron can't stay in one place for more than five years. She doesn't age. So every five years, she packs up, changes her identity, and moves to a new rural town. Her visits to Pittsburgh are short and discreet. It wouldn't do for John to be spotted running around town with a younger woman. It would have been safer to have her destroyed or powered down, but John forbade it. Not even Sarah could get him to change his mind.
"I still dream about it," he told her. "I can still see him going under into that molten vat... disappearing, his hand jutting out..." He trembled. "I'm not letting that happen to Cameron too."
And so Cameron stayed. But not with John.
Kate's never met her, but she lies awake at night wondering about her. She wonders what it is that John does with her on these visits. She's always too afraid to ask.
///
In the future, Derek Reese disappears.
Derek Croft finds out on one Sunday morning, sitting in the kitchen as Sarah breaks the news to him.
"I didn't know that John was keeping tabs on me... him... The Reeses."
"He can't help himself," Sarah replies.
From that day on, neither could she. They look up the Reeses and find out that the parents died in a car accident long ago. It still ended up being just the Reese Boys. Now it's just Kyle. Without Skynet, without an enemy to rally against, without a place to direct his teenage anger, Derek Reese faltered and got mixed up with the wrong people. Derek reads about himself on the internet, looks at his arrest reports, and learns what he would have been like without Skynet. It creeps him out, but he can't stop.
In June, Sarah goes to a medical conference in Los Angeles even though she's never been in the years past. But she doesn't go to the conference. Instead, she drives to the Reese house and waits. Waits and watches. She sees Kyle, twenty-four years old, young and handsome. He looks exactly like how she remembers him. Then she looks down at her hands clutching the steering wheel, wrinkled and veiny, betraying all of her fifty-five years. She drives away and gets on the next plane home.
She still keeps tabs on him. She searches for him on the internet, looks for his name in his local paper, even subscribes to his university's alumni newsletter. Kyle graduated from UCLA with a degree in sociology. He's a teaching assistant at a grade school. She smiles at that. Even though she's only ever known him as Sergeant Reese, a Human Resistance soldier whose body and mind had been scarred by war and turmoil, she could still just as easily see him as a third-grade school teacher.
She hides her clippings from her husband, but he knows anyway. He reads those clippings as obsessively as she does. He thinks she doesn't know. Late one night, he finally asks her about it while they're lying side by side in bed, not touching. The passion has transitioned into comfort, as most long-lasting relationships tend to do. Derek knows that this is perfectly normal, but still he wonder if things wouldn't be different if they were still fighting Skynet.
"What does it matter?" she asks. "He'll never know. It won't hurt him." It doesn't occur to her that it hurts Derek.
"It's weird."
"I just want to know about him. I'm... curious."
"You're stalking."
"So what if I am?" She comes back at him a little too defensively. "He's John's father. Aren't I entitled to know a little bit about him?"
"But he's not your Kyle. He doesn't even know who the fuck you are." In the dark, he can't see her face, but he knows that she winced. When you've spent twenty years with someone, you know exactly how to make it hurt. Trading barbs have always been a cornerstone of their relationship. It used to be foreplay. Now they're just hurtful words.
"Thank you. Good night," Sarah says icily. Derek's sorry, but he doesn't apologize. Neither of them are very good at that.
They lie quietly in the dark.
Finally, he says,
"You've got to let him go."
And this time, she says:
"You first."
///
In the future, Cameron's an animal trainer.
Before that, she was an anesthesiologist, and before that, an air traffic controller. After her five years as an animal trainer is up, she plans on being an animator. She's going down the alphabet until she hits 'zoologist'.
"What happens after five years as a zoologist?" John asked her once.
"Start over," she replied.
She's learned a lot over the years, but she's still learning more. She's gone far beyond mere mimicking. With relative ease, she can talk, laugh, interact socially. She even dates, much to John's chagrin.
"So what's going on with that guy? Bill?" John asks as he watches her toss raw fish into the pool. Cameron trains seals at The Doorly Zoo. She stays away from the canine species, who still go nuts when they're near her. No matter how human she seems, that's never going to change.
"We're not together anymore."
"Oh?" John doesn't bother trying to sound disappointed. She'd see right through him anyway. "What happened?"
"He was emotionally unavailable."
John stares. Cameron looks over her shoulder at him, and smiles. As John comes to a realization, his jaw drops, just a little.
"Cameron, you made a joke."
"Yes," Cameron replied. "According to the female humans whom I regularly associate with, I can be 'quite a riot'." She can act and speak more like a human being, but she doesn't with John. With John, it's okay to be on her default setting.
After the seals are fed, they spend the day touring the zoo. They see tigers, bears, and amphibians, but not the wolves. They walk and they talk, but they don't touch. Not until the end, when it's time for John to go. Then he takes her by the hand, and he asks her again.
"Come with me."
"No."
"Then I'll go with you."
"No."
"It's an order."
She smiles. Somewhere along the line, she's learned how to smile, not because it's a preprogrammed socially acceptable response, but because she wants to.
"I don't take orders from you."
"You would've taken orders from him," he says. "John Connor, the leader of mankind. But not John Croft, the research professor from Pittsburgh."
"You're the same John as you always would have been," she assures him.
"So what's different?"
"When you're at war, you don't give orders you don't mean."
She takes her hand away from him.
"Go home, John."
And he does. He goes back to Pittsburgh, to his job, his wife, and his family, then he'll start counting the days. He'll be back in a month, and they'll have this conversation again.
///
"I'm not really here, am I?" John asks Derek. They're sitting in rocking chairs on the porch of the Croft house in Manitoba, each nursing their fifth beer and a good buzz that's slowly sliding into drunkenness.
"What?"
"Me. I'm not really here because I can't be here." His speech is only slightly slurred. "How can I be? My father's here. If he's here, he's not in the past, and if my father's not in the past, I'm not in the past, and so I can't be here now. Therefore, I'm not here and I never will be."
"Kid, you're giving me a headache," Derek says lazily. "Don't over think it."
John doesn't say anything. There was a time when his uncle-father's word would have been good enough to ease his troubled mind. These days, oddly enough, only cold logic coupled with the earnest emulations of emotions made him feel at ease. And there was only one person who could give him that.
"You shouldn't see her anymore," Derek says, as if reading his mind. John turns to him, his surprise apparent. "You've got that look. Kyle used to get that look when he looked at your mom's picture." Then he says again, "You shouldn't see her anymore. It's not fair to Kate."
"Kate doesn't mind," John replies, but then realizes that he doesn't need to lie to Derek. "Well, Kate's fine."
"You're a married man. How would you like it if I stepped out on your mother every month?"
"I wouldn't care," John shrugs, then broke into a wide grin. "She'd castrate you herself."
"Yes," Derek agrees with a nod. "But Kate wouldn't stick up for herself."
"It's not like that. Cameron and I, we're..." He stops short. He knows that Derek still doesn't like Cameron, even after all these years, even after Cameron's proved her loyalty time and again. And anyway, his relationship with Cameron isn't something that's easily understood by anyone. "Remember our first house?" he asks. "That little house with the swings in the yard?"
"Don't change the subject, John."
"I'm not. Just listen. You remember that house?"
"Sure."
"I liked that house."
"You didn't have to sleep on the couch," Derek replies dryly.
"A lot of the nights, neither did you," John scoffs. "What? You think that I didn't know about you two back then?"
"I thought we were being discreet."
"Uh, no. The walls weren't all that thick."
"Shit." Derek makes a face, but he's not quite embarrassed. It was too long ago. "Sorry, kid. Hope we didn't traumatize you too much."
"Some mornings I'd wake earlier than usual. I'd be lying in bed, and I can hear you sneaking out of her room and back onto the couch. Then we'd all sit down at the breakfast table like nothing happened." It's an odd memory to be nostalgic of, but John smiles fondly of it. The thought of his mom and Derek having sex is still horrifying, but thinking about the four of them at the table more than balances it out. "Mom would burn some pancakes, I'd be trying to finish up some homework, Cameron would be cleaning the guns, and you'd just be glaring at her."
"I hated that robot," Derek says, but he's got a grin on his face wide as a Cheshire Cat's.
"Things were different then."
"Yeah, we were living as fugitives and feared for our lives."
"It wasn't that bad," John says.
"It wasn't that bad," Derek agrees.
"I miss that place."
"It was a crappy house, John."
"No, not the house. I miss that place we were in." John looks down at the beer can in his hand. It's easier to say these things if he's not looking at Derek in the eyes. Derek isn't judging, but John thinks he is. "Cameron reminds me of that place."
Derek understands all too well. He wants to tell John that he understands. He wants to tell him that sometimes he wishes they were all back there again. He wants to tell him that sometimes he wishes they'd never destroyed Skynet. But instead, he says:
"That place where everyone was trying to kill us? When you had to survive high school and killer robots? That place?"
John just shrugs.
"You save the world and get the girl. You should be happy, right? And that place you used to be in, that crappy little house at that time when everyone was trying to kill you - that's supposed to be the bad times."
"That's right." Derek reaches over and clasps his hand gently on John's shoulder. "This is the good stuff, kid. Your family, your career, a normal life. Enjoy it. This thing with Cameron... I don't know, you've got some kind of fucking masochistic streak." Derek laughs. It sounds hollow to him because he knows that it is, but John doesn't notice. He just feels ashamed for wanting the past more than he wants his family.
"How's the store?" he asks now, changing the subject for real this time.
"Fine." Sensing John's extreme discomfort, Derek wisely goes along with it. "Doing well. I'm thinking about moving the storefront to Main Street."
"Oh," John says. What did he know about shoe stores? But for that matter, what did Derek?
"Yup."
"I hear that you've taken up bowling?"
"Yeah. I think I'll join the bowling league next year."
"Sounds..." John struggles for the right word. "Fun."
"Yup."
They sit in momentary silence, awash in vivid orange-and-gold as the sun slowly sinks into the western sky. They can hear the children screaming and laughing from inside the house, the clattering of dishes and pans as Kate and Sarah bustle inside the kitchen. Their chairs creak against the wooden floor boards as they rock in their chairs. There's a cool summer breeze kicking up.
"This is bliss," Derek finally says.
"Yeah," John agrees.
Neither wants to admit how empty they feel inside.