Title: Baptism

Author: Alex Foster

Category: Friendship, Fluff

Rating: PG-13

Summary: Ritual cleansing after a termination. Third in the 2017 series

Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by Fox. No money is being made and no infringement is intended.

Author’s Notes: This is the third and probably last part (at least for a while) in the 2017 series. I had never intended to do three in a row, but the prompts over at Taming the Muse just seemed to fit. I wanted to end on a lighter note so I decided to offer up this piece of fluffy goodness. Thank you very much for reading.

And I wanted to cry out at her that I could not put the body apart from the soul, and that the comfort of her body was more than a thing of the flesh, but was also a comfort of the soul, and why it was I could not say, and why it should be, I could not say, but there was in it nothing that was ugly or evil, but only good. But how can one find such words?

-Robert McAfee Brown, Pieter in "Too Late the Phalarope"

“Follow me.”

Steam rolled past the cheap plastic curtain and into the tiny bathroom they shared. John was not a fan of boiling hot showers—too many formative years spent taking cold baths in rural Mexico—but Cameron seemed to have a fondness for them. When he allowed himself to think about such idiosyncrasies, John wondered if she indulged because hot water was a premium in the future—like Derek had done with toothpaste.

Her hand wrapped trustingly around his as she followed him. There were times when they engaged in this post mission ritual—in whatever form it happened to take—that John thought he was merely taking advantage. If he was some sort of fetishist just a couple of decades early.

But then she would give him a smile across the breakfast table, or touch his arm while walking down the street, and John knew somehow that she was acting on programming he did not create for her. That she was more than just an automaton, a post modern antikythera device. What it meant exactly he wasn’t quite ready to admit.

He sat her down next to the stall and immediately dropped to his knees to unlace her boots.

Big, brown eyes watched him with sharp attentiveness. “What are you doing?”

“Guess.” John tossed one steel-toed boot out the open bathroom door and began working the other loose.

She made no move to stop him—something that was certainly within her power, he knew. “You are attempting to conserve water?” Her tone was serious, but there was an odd lightness in her gaze. They were almost indiscernible, but he had discovered the many moods of Cameron.

The second boot followed the first. “Yes, Cam, that’s exactly what I’m doing.” He pulled her to her bare feet and kissed her. Sometimes she kissed like the young woman she appeared as, light and timid and just a little clumsy. Others she was hungry and persistent, her tongue caressing his with expert ease.

It was the latter this time and she silently confirmed that the previous coyness was just another of her mysteries. He knew she had and would always guide him. Even as he commanded the campaign against the machines it would always be her, in these quiet times like now, that set the pace between them.

John pulled away first. The steam had fully permeated the narrow room and he could already feel the moisture soaking through his clothes. Taking a step back, he gathered the hem of her t-shirt in both hands.

Cameron tipped her head and obediently raised her arms to help him. He almost smiled at that. Built to kill and hunt but for him alone she also knew docility. “Terminators don’t do this, huh?” he asked thinly. The name was close to the forbidden topics between them.

Early in their time together as orphans, John and Cameron recognized the things they could never let intrude upon the space moments like these existed in. They did their jobs. They looked over their shoulders for machines sent to terminate. But both simultaneously compartmentalized their new lives to occasionally give each other this.

Sarah taught him the normal had to exist beside the abnormal; John taught Cameron.

“No,” she answered without needing to. “They do not.”

His shirt joined hers on the floor and he reached for the button of her jeans.

“Shared showers are a custom among human lovers?”

John flinched at that word. By definition it was accurate, but such a title seemed wrong for a man and a female cyborg fashioning an existence out of executing people that might cause the end of the world. “I’m not the one to ask, Cam.”

Which was true, he reflected. His entire experience in that area fit inside their small bathroom.

Cameron stood calmly and unabashedly while he stripped off the rest of his clothes. Not a clue as to how she looked. “Sarah Connor and Derek Reese showered together.”

“Jesus. I don’t need to know that! Especially not now.”

“Is that not what we are doing? What they did for each other? Every time we—”

He silenced her by moving her backward and underneath the water spray. The curtain slid along its rod, closing them off from the rest of the world. John took the center of the stall and blocked the initial shock of hot water from hitting Cameron. He held his breath and let the jet work over his shoulders and head.

Sand, dirt, and blood washed from his body and pooled around the drain. Not his blood. John watched the red swirl at his feet like liquid sin and remembered why he had pulled Cameron to the shower. Their mission had been successful but messy.

He stepped back and let her take the center place and heavy spray. More blood sluiced down the drain. None of it hers. Cameron slid her arms around his waist and drew him back under with her, embracing him tightly.

She gave a human sigh against his skin and asked, “Then what are we?”

John didn’t have an answer for her; he no longer knew what he was. Instead he lifted her chin and touched her mouth with his. Gentle and soft like the teenage boy he once was before the future became the now. Understanding she responded in kind. Her hands copied his and slid up his spine to fan through his wet hair.

John twisted slightly with her underneath the spray of hot water and felt its burn spring anew along his bare skin. Her body was slick as it arched against his and he marveled at how small she felt. Cameron could still fool him. In the intimacy he could believe she was innocent and things would always be good and easy.

This was what they were. Existing only in the quiet of their own world, oblivious to the thunder of falling water around them.

End