The yellow glow of the lamp spread a soft golden glow around the curtained living room in the humid Los Angeles evening. The sounds of traffic outside were so ever-present as to ambient, easy to ignore as soldiers from the Great War had learned to ignore the vicious sound of shells falling all around them from beyond the barbed wire above the trenches, where death lurked. Then it had waited only for the insane order of moustachioed generals, sipping tea from porcelain cups in palatial mansions, ordering to their deaths millions of men who slept in mud and excrement, vomit and blood.
John wondered if, in the future, he would become such a man, behind the front as he ordered his legions to their deaths while losing appreciation for the way in which they sacrificed themselves, the reasons for which they went willingly to their deaths. He shook himself, his hair falling forwards over his blue eyes. No, he resolved. He would lead from the front, he vowed, though it might kill him.
There were other things that could kill him, and other things that could save him. Both lay beside him now, cocooned in soft bandage that, every so often, leaked small drops of blood onto the dirty wooden floor. He had no doubts into what category Cameron fell; she had proved it often enough. But other required a higher standard of proof. Sometimes, he believed fervently, his mother would not believe that the Terminator's motives were pure without a command from God himself. In which she did not believe.
He could hear snippets of conversation from the kitchen, whispers of animosity and disagreement, occasionally enlivened by something approaching a shouted hiss.
'No!' he heard his uncle's voice punctuate the sibilant hiss of discord from the next room, through the closed door. John sighed to himself. He assumed that the heated denial was of something that would in some way assist Cameron's healing, though she had done her utmost once to save his life. Derek would, he knew, as soon have melted the machine for scrap to sell to purchase the Turk as he would have accepted her assistance voluntarily.
John supposed that he would not feel any differently when that dreaded future finally emerged from the ashes of the crematorium that the earth would become when the missiles flew, when the sky fell and Skynet reigned. When he saw friends and ... lovers, perhaps? ... slain without compunction or passion by the infiltration units in their various guides and models, by the HKs and their implacable, singular motivation. By Skynet itself, as deadly as its motives were incomprehensible. When the machines ruled, their metal tentacles encompassing all that had once been pierced with a single command from God Himself, if one believed.
In the beginning, God said, 'Let there be light!'
And there was light.
John wondered, as he stroked Cameron's soft hair, whether that would be the same version of Genesis in which his descendants believed, if humanity were to somehow survive its own folly and the soulless malice of its own creation, or whether it might be something amended.
'In the beginning, God said, let there be light,' he murmured to himself as he looked at her still, charred form as she shut down to recuperate. 'But then machines came, and all was shadow.'
'Until John Connor came,' he heard a soft, barely audible feminine whisper from within the bandages.
He felt his heart jump inside his chest. It had been three days since the explosion, three days since the thunderous detonation of the jeep outside had almost shattered his world, three days since he had first lifted her, smoking and confused, from the wreckage. Three days since he had seen her closest to what she was, half the skin on her face ripped away and smouldering in a melting heap on the ground. Three days since her eyes had glowed first a brilliant blue, then went dark.
'Get her inside the house!' his mother had screamed at him as the sirens began to blare through the noise of screeching brakes and reflexive neighbourhood screams.
John watched in horror as Cameron, who had emerged from the blazing inferno of the wrecked jeep with the same inexorable purpose with which she did everything else suddenly pitched, face forward, onto the bubbling tarmac. Derek had ran from the house first when the explosion had shattered the suburban monotony, and drenched the terminator with a fire extinguisher he had presciently brought with him, but he had done little more, obviously unwilling in his own mind to assist her in any way beyond immediate damage control.
He ran to her then, ignoring his mother's orders as another, deeper, instinct had kicked in, one which ironically Cameron herself would have understood. The need to protect. He had seen her, the shiny alloy of her endoskeleton reflecting the sun brightly, one half of her face melted away, the other pristine.
She had spoken as he abandoned as futile the attempt to lift her, and began dragging her into the house with feverish urgency. Already people had emerged from their house, staring in shock and mute horror, hands before their mouths as to screen their breath from the stench of such an event. Some had turned away; others had not.
'I am sorry, John,' she told him as he struggled to move her. Derek had assisted him then, and between them they had pulled her from the fire and into the darkness of their ... home? 'I must shut down now.'
'No, don't you leave me!' he snarled at her as they placed her on the couch. Her clothes had melted into her skin; smoke still issued from the fabric.
'We need to cut this away,' Derek had told him coldly.' If she is to be any use, she had to pass as human, and she won't with all that scar tissue.'
John did not try to stop him as he began to clinically strip the beautiful form on the floor.
As he had once before, he had stroked her hair, that on the side of her head which had been unaffected. 'Don't you leave me,' he had whispered to her, but it had been neither an entreaty nor a wish. It had been an order.
One that he hoped had registered as the blue in her eye faded.
Three days of a vigil broken only by sleep, and that fitful, filled with dark nightmares of abandonment and solitude. His bad dreams were usually far less prosaic.
'Cameron?' he whispered softly, close to her ear. He was willing to believe that he had heard what he wished to hear, not what she had said. There were, he knew, no guarantees that she would ever say anything again, any more than the T-800 would ever speak again after it had been lowered to its molten grave.
'Yes, John,' she replied softly, her voice perfect.
'Oh, man,' was all that he could think to say, as he collapsed against her, his head on her chest as, for the first time since that night when the T800 had chosen the same fate as the T-1000, he cried.
His sobs were less dramatic, muffled, almost reluctant, more of simple, exhausted relief than happiness, at first, but he understood then as he had before that, short though his acquaintance might be with the girl ... the girl ... that had shared his life and his home for the last months, he could only barely imagine what it had been like without her. He had not been willing to contemplate what it might be like had she not woken.
'I know now why you cry,' the T-800 had said softly as he had railed against it and it gently pushed him away into his mother's arms, 'but it is something that I can never do.'
The hand that came up from the side of the couch, bandaged though it was, was equally gentle as it stroked the side of his head with easy movements that spoke of equal understanding, though whether her limits were as restricted as that of her predecessor remained to be seen.
'I am sorry, John,' she repeated her last words to him.
He pulled away gently, his hand still unconsciously on her stomach. 'For what?' he asked with a surge of horror, thinking only the worst. It was the only way he knew how to think, knowing that what he knew to be the truth was a future more horrible than the most fanatical medieval doom-monger could have imagined. They had only imagined the number of the Beast through the haze of their asceticism and isolation. He knew it. And he knew that he did not wish to face it alone. The last time she had said that she was sorry, he had thought that she had died. Hearing her saying it now made him believe only that this time she would.
'I almost failed in my primary mission,' she told him through the swaddling, so thick he could not even make out her features. 'Instead it was you who protected me.'
He smiled, relief and this time happiness coursing through him in waves with which his bleak life had not equipped him to deal. He had known only urgency and fate, desperation and escape. He had never known happiness beyond a word which was used by poets with more time on their hands than experience, more skill with words than knowledge of reality, and rejected it as a pointless fantasy in favour of the falling sky which he knew to be the inevitable fate of his species. Happiness to him was a word, not even a concept.
Until that moment. In that moment, he groped towards it, seeing a soft light at the end of a tunnel that had previously ended in fire and blood.
'Always,' he told her, his voice shaking. 'We can protect each other.'