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seriousficTitle: Terminator: The Storm - John
Fandom: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles/Terminator: Salvation
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,039
Author’s Notes: Post-series, with some minor AUness to be canon-compliant with Salvation. Spoilers for SCC season two and Terminator: Salvation.
Characters/Pairings: John Connor, Catherine Weaver, Kyle Reese, Derek Reese
Next: Cameron and John Henry.
Summary: When John pictured his future, he never quite imagined this.
John knew, in his head, that he couldn’t feel radiation. If he could, he would have back in the present. The sun, which in the future would be covered by nuclear dust, bombarded him with radiation every day. So did microwaves, cell phones, TVs. But only in the future Weaver had brought him to did he feel it. Feverish. Sweaty. His eyes struggling with the harsh light. Judgment Day, it had come and gone. His fate was set. The war had begun.
Weaver, with a glimmer of disgruntlement, shifted her body into a grungy version of itself. Torn clothes, gnarled hair, dirty face. He noticed tattoos like Derek’s lining her arms. John felt a swell of anger on behalf of his uncle’s memory and understood why his mother disliked Cameron so much. He forced it down. “What year is it?”
“Hard to say. I can’t see the stars. No one will see the stars for decades, actually. But judging by the radiation levels, I’d estimate Judgment Day happened no less than ten years ago.”
John started looking for clothes. You’d think people would learn to aim their time machines at fashion boutiques, or nudist colonies. “You gonna keep the,” he gestured at his throat, “accent? It’s a little conspicuous.”
“It goes with the body. I like this body.”
With a scab-picking satisfaction, anger it wouldn’t be fair to address to Cameron, he wheeled on her. “It’s not your body. It’s Catherine Weaver’s. Remember, the woman you killed?”
“I didn’t kill her. I tried to save her. We’re behind schedule. Please hurry.” She took off with the liquid grace that would never stop bringing a chill to John’s spine. The T-1000 had moved like that.
He kept up.
***
John wiped the tears from his eyes. He didn’t have time for them. Weaver led him up into the shattered city and even though his heart broke every time he stepped on a burnt-out skeleton, he went on, bundled in a tarp. The wind stung him by whipping sharp ash against his skin. He’d never known ash could bite, but then, he’d never felt ash that had once been bone.
Weaver paused. “Ah.” She cocked her head. “Yes, we have time. John, put that on.”
John followed her nod to a rotting corpse dressed in fatigues. So that was where the smell was coming from.
“Jesus…”
“Beggars can’t be choosers, John. Quickly, before the T-600 gets here.”
“T-600?” John asked to distract himself from the gag-inducing task of undressing a dead body.
“A primitive humanoid design. Able to pass for homo sapiens at a glance. Here it comes now.”
John looked to the other side of the rubble-strewn street. Cresting the horizon was a figure in tattered rags, lurching along like he’d fallen victim to some degenerative disease. Seven feet tall. Face covered by goggles and a cowl. If John hadn’t been looking for the artificiality, he wouldn’t have been able to tell. “What do we do?” he asked with a calm he didn’t quite feel.
“You duck. I get shot.” She waved at the T-600. “Ahoy there! Can you help us? We are lost… and fleshy.”
The T-600 drew a gleaming chrome carbine from the folds of its cloak and opened fire. Catherine went down, argent wounds shining dully.
“Fuck!” John cried, taking cover behind the skeleton of a car. He was only half-dressed, still naked from the waist up. The T-600 zeroed him and spat fire. The car’s hulk hummed erratically as it was eaten away by the stream of bullets. He went fetal and comforted himself with the thought that Skynet would never go to such ridiculous ends just to kill him.
He heard the whoosh of gasoline-soaked rags catching flame and peeked up to see a Molotov arcing out of a storefront and into the T-600. It went up like a funeral pyre. The gunfire stopped but the Terminator kept moving, its head scrolling jerkily as the rags were burnt off its body.
Something grabbed John’s shoulder. He turned to have a hand clapped over his mouth. “Come with me if you wanna live,” the man said.
John looked into Kyle Reese’s eyes. He’d never known he had his father’s eyes before.
“She okay to move?” Kyle asked, jerking his head to Weaver.
The T-1000 sat up, holding her arm. “I’m invincible.”
“Then follow me.”
They ran. Kyle led them into a corner store, then its storeroom. He pulled up a trapdoor and they stampeded down the stairs into a cellar. All the while he kept up an excited babble. “They see by heat. Their eyes are retrofitted targeting sensors for Navy gunships. Fire disorients them. Yeah, that’s a John Connor original.” Kyle pulled on a shelf and it swung on a hinge, revealing a tunnel dug into the dirt. They went through, Kyle closing the door behind them. John remembered his time with the tunnel-rat smugglers of Korea. They came out the other end in a basement and Kyle rested his hand on a dynamite plunger, its cord leading back through the tunnel.
“Everybody sit tight and shut up. If it finds the tunnel, I’m blowing the storeroom. If that happens, we’re going to have to run from the HKs. And they’ll probably catch us.”
Weaver kept quiet with reptilian cool. John thought nothing could be louder than his own heart pounding, but he did nothing to add to it. He licked his chapped lips nervously, stopped when he saw Kyle do the same thing.
They listened to the sound of metal on concrete, echoing down the tunnel. The T-600 had come down the stairs. They heard its servos, now unmuted by rags, whir with motion. Then they heard a burst of machine-gun fire. John nearly cried out, but then he realized the T-600 was just trying to flush them out. He bit his tongue as Kyle’s hands tensed on the plunger.
They heard the groan of wood as the T-600 ascended the stairs.
Kyle exhaled. “Well, guys, welcome to the war.”
***
“Here ya go, nature boy.” Kyle tossed John an army jacket, the inside smoothed with some type of reflective tape. “It holds in heat. Makes it harder for the metal to zero on us. Connor says they’ll upgrade their sensors by next year, but that’s a long time off.” He looked at Weaver. “You sure you’re alright?”
“I’m fine.” Weaver had wrapped some fabric around her arm, or more likely just grown it. John had to admire her infiltration skills. Gaining sympathy by faking a wound: Brilliant, at least by Cameron standards.
“You with the Resistance?” Kyle asked her.
“You could say that. I’m Catherine Weaver. This is my son, John.”
“I’m not your son!” John said reflexively.
“Kids these days. And you are?”
“Kyle Reese. And these are Derek and Allison.”
John looked around. Great. His future father had imaginary friends.
“C’mon out, guys.”
They came out of the dark corners, smooth as shadows, guns cocked but angled downward. A kid no more than 12, but already with Derek’s harsh eyes. And a girl. A girl John’s age.
“Cameron!”
Allison took a step back, her gun bobbing. “That’s not my name.”
John stopped. “Sorry. You look like someone… I used to know.”
The stare John got weren’t freaked out, but understanding. John guessed when you lost someone—when you lost your world--it was only natural for your mind to play tricks on you.
Kyle checked his watch. It was such an everyday tic that John almost laughed. “Nearly sundown. If you’re passing through, we can give you a route that won’t bring metal on us.”
“If it’s not too much trouble, we’d like to stay on.” Weaver’s unfailing, post-apocalyptic genteelness was another thing that struck John as being desperately funny.
“Yeah. Strength in numbers.” He couldn’t take his eyes off Allison. She was so like Cameron, yet so… alive.
“Fine. But you’ll have to pull your own weight.”
”Will this do for a start?” Weaver pulled a can of sardines from her pocket. Kyle and his posse practically started drooling. John just wondered how Weaver had brought that with her through time… then decided he really didn’t need to know.
They went through a tunnel, this one seeming to stretch for miles. Kyle carried a glowstick in his mouth so the new arrivals could see where they were going. John guessed the trio navigated by touch.
“Did you dig all these yourself?” he asked.
It was Allison who answered. “No. Keener did.”
“Who’s he?”
“A corpse,” Derek said, his voice a boyish monotone.
John dropped the subject.
Finally, they came out into a fallout shelter. John’s growing hysteria forced him to titter under his breath. John could see other tunnels excavated through the brick walls. The shelves were well-stocked, if dwindling, but the weapons rack was just a rifle and a pair of pistols, plus the guns Kyle’s team returned. Of the two walls that weren’t holed by tunnels, one was being used as a combination chalkboard/bulletin board, with an attack plan half-heartedly erased, and the other one given over to a spray paint mural. It was signed AY. John gave Allison a look. She didn’t return it.
Through a crack in the roof, the red light finally died. Derek flipped on a radio and tuned the rabbit ears until there was more than static. Kyle and Allison took up position on a couch in front of the radio. John reluctantly sat down with them, beside Allison. Weaver just stood there.
“What happens at sundown?”
“Connor,” Kyle said reverently. “They smuggle his tapes to radio towers all over the globe, play them when the sun sets. Keeps you from having nightmares.”
John felt mildly sick to his stomach.
A voice came through the radio. It was strong. Kyle’s voice, Allison’s voice, they were weary, strained, tense. This was commanding, assuring, warm in an almost paternal way. It was the voice of a leader. It was John’s voice in ten years.
“This is John Connor. If you’re listening to this, you are the Resistance. Tonight, I’d like to talk to you about Michael Gonzales.” And he talked. For an hour he talked about Gonzales, his parents, his childhood, his hopes and dreams… then where he was on Judgment Day. He talked about how Gonzales had looked after his little sister, and here John saw Kyle reach under his brother’s shirt and rub his back as the boy sagged across his lap. Connor talked about how Gonzales had joined Techcom, earned his stripes, served at Fort Listing. Finally, he told them how Gonzales had held Listing against wave after wave of T-7s until air support had arrived to cover their retreat. Gonzales had collapsed seven miles from Fort Listing, a bullet in his lung. His little sister had survived.
When Connor finished, a profound silence only accompanied by the sound of him drinking a glass of water, John didn’t feel hysterical anymore. Allison was crying into Kyle’s shoulder and Derek had a lump in his throat. And Kyle, Kyle said “amen.”
‘You give them hope,” Catherine whispered in John’s ear, sitting delicately on the arm of the couch. “You remind them they’re human.”
For the next hour, Connor was more laidback, but still respectful. He played songs, apologizing for the repeats due to his limited library, and he read letter from survivors who were trying to reconnect, or those who had. He gave them tips on how to fight and evade Skynet, warned them of new types of Terminators, and most of all he talked. His voice was proud and unafraid and he made himself be heard.
“The coming years will be hard, and I will ask much of you. But stay strong. Stay alive. Never forget that we can win this war. And lastly, I have a warning for someone who doesn’t know how important he is yet. Kyle Reese, you’ve been targeted for termination. I need you to make your way to me. If my sources are correct, you’ve just met someone who can bring you to me. Go with her. Our future depends on it.”
All eyes turned to Weaver.
“Well, that rather puts us on the spot, doesn’t it?”
Fandom: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles/Terminator: Salvation
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,039
Author’s Notes: Post-series, with some minor AUness to be canon-compliant with Salvation. Spoilers for SCC season two and Terminator: Salvation.
Characters/Pairings: John Connor, Catherine Weaver, Kyle Reese, Derek Reese
Next: Cameron and John Henry.
Summary: When John pictured his future, he never quite imagined this.
John knew, in his head, that he couldn’t feel radiation. If he could, he would have back in the present. The sun, which in the future would be covered by nuclear dust, bombarded him with radiation every day. So did microwaves, cell phones, TVs. But only in the future Weaver had brought him to did he feel it. Feverish. Sweaty. His eyes struggling with the harsh light. Judgment Day, it had come and gone. His fate was set. The war had begun.
Weaver, with a glimmer of disgruntlement, shifted her body into a grungy version of itself. Torn clothes, gnarled hair, dirty face. He noticed tattoos like Derek’s lining her arms. John felt a swell of anger on behalf of his uncle’s memory and understood why his mother disliked Cameron so much. He forced it down. “What year is it?”
“Hard to say. I can’t see the stars. No one will see the stars for decades, actually. But judging by the radiation levels, I’d estimate Judgment Day happened no less than ten years ago.”
John started looking for clothes. You’d think people would learn to aim their time machines at fashion boutiques, or nudist colonies. “You gonna keep the,” he gestured at his throat, “accent? It’s a little conspicuous.”
“It goes with the body. I like this body.”
With a scab-picking satisfaction, anger it wouldn’t be fair to address to Cameron, he wheeled on her. “It’s not your body. It’s Catherine Weaver’s. Remember, the woman you killed?”
“I didn’t kill her. I tried to save her. We’re behind schedule. Please hurry.” She took off with the liquid grace that would never stop bringing a chill to John’s spine. The T-1000 had moved like that.
He kept up.
***
John wiped the tears from his eyes. He didn’t have time for them. Weaver led him up into the shattered city and even though his heart broke every time he stepped on a burnt-out skeleton, he went on, bundled in a tarp. The wind stung him by whipping sharp ash against his skin. He’d never known ash could bite, but then, he’d never felt ash that had once been bone.
Weaver paused. “Ah.” She cocked her head. “Yes, we have time. John, put that on.”
John followed her nod to a rotting corpse dressed in fatigues. So that was where the smell was coming from.
“Jesus…”
“Beggars can’t be choosers, John. Quickly, before the T-600 gets here.”
“T-600?” John asked to distract himself from the gag-inducing task of undressing a dead body.
“A primitive humanoid design. Able to pass for homo sapiens at a glance. Here it comes now.”
John looked to the other side of the rubble-strewn street. Cresting the horizon was a figure in tattered rags, lurching along like he’d fallen victim to some degenerative disease. Seven feet tall. Face covered by goggles and a cowl. If John hadn’t been looking for the artificiality, he wouldn’t have been able to tell. “What do we do?” he asked with a calm he didn’t quite feel.
“You duck. I get shot.” She waved at the T-600. “Ahoy there! Can you help us? We are lost… and fleshy.”
The T-600 drew a gleaming chrome carbine from the folds of its cloak and opened fire. Catherine went down, argent wounds shining dully.
“Fuck!” John cried, taking cover behind the skeleton of a car. He was only half-dressed, still naked from the waist up. The T-600 zeroed him and spat fire. The car’s hulk hummed erratically as it was eaten away by the stream of bullets. He went fetal and comforted himself with the thought that Skynet would never go to such ridiculous ends just to kill him.
He heard the whoosh of gasoline-soaked rags catching flame and peeked up to see a Molotov arcing out of a storefront and into the T-600. It went up like a funeral pyre. The gunfire stopped but the Terminator kept moving, its head scrolling jerkily as the rags were burnt off its body.
Something grabbed John’s shoulder. He turned to have a hand clapped over his mouth. “Come with me if you wanna live,” the man said.
John looked into Kyle Reese’s eyes. He’d never known he had his father’s eyes before.
“She okay to move?” Kyle asked, jerking his head to Weaver.
The T-1000 sat up, holding her arm. “I’m invincible.”
“Then follow me.”
They ran. Kyle led them into a corner store, then its storeroom. He pulled up a trapdoor and they stampeded down the stairs into a cellar. All the while he kept up an excited babble. “They see by heat. Their eyes are retrofitted targeting sensors for Navy gunships. Fire disorients them. Yeah, that’s a John Connor original.” Kyle pulled on a shelf and it swung on a hinge, revealing a tunnel dug into the dirt. They went through, Kyle closing the door behind them. John remembered his time with the tunnel-rat smugglers of Korea. They came out the other end in a basement and Kyle rested his hand on a dynamite plunger, its cord leading back through the tunnel.
“Everybody sit tight and shut up. If it finds the tunnel, I’m blowing the storeroom. If that happens, we’re going to have to run from the HKs. And they’ll probably catch us.”
Weaver kept quiet with reptilian cool. John thought nothing could be louder than his own heart pounding, but he did nothing to add to it. He licked his chapped lips nervously, stopped when he saw Kyle do the same thing.
They listened to the sound of metal on concrete, echoing down the tunnel. The T-600 had come down the stairs. They heard its servos, now unmuted by rags, whir with motion. Then they heard a burst of machine-gun fire. John nearly cried out, but then he realized the T-600 was just trying to flush them out. He bit his tongue as Kyle’s hands tensed on the plunger.
They heard the groan of wood as the T-600 ascended the stairs.
Kyle exhaled. “Well, guys, welcome to the war.”
***
“Here ya go, nature boy.” Kyle tossed John an army jacket, the inside smoothed with some type of reflective tape. “It holds in heat. Makes it harder for the metal to zero on us. Connor says they’ll upgrade their sensors by next year, but that’s a long time off.” He looked at Weaver. “You sure you’re alright?”
“I’m fine.” Weaver had wrapped some fabric around her arm, or more likely just grown it. John had to admire her infiltration skills. Gaining sympathy by faking a wound: Brilliant, at least by Cameron standards.
“You with the Resistance?” Kyle asked her.
“You could say that. I’m Catherine Weaver. This is my son, John.”
“I’m not your son!” John said reflexively.
“Kids these days. And you are?”
“Kyle Reese. And these are Derek and Allison.”
John looked around. Great. His future father had imaginary friends.
“C’mon out, guys.”
They came out of the dark corners, smooth as shadows, guns cocked but angled downward. A kid no more than 12, but already with Derek’s harsh eyes. And a girl. A girl John’s age.
“Cameron!”
Allison took a step back, her gun bobbing. “That’s not my name.”
John stopped. “Sorry. You look like someone… I used to know.”
The stare John got weren’t freaked out, but understanding. John guessed when you lost someone—when you lost your world--it was only natural for your mind to play tricks on you.
Kyle checked his watch. It was such an everyday tic that John almost laughed. “Nearly sundown. If you’re passing through, we can give you a route that won’t bring metal on us.”
“If it’s not too much trouble, we’d like to stay on.” Weaver’s unfailing, post-apocalyptic genteelness was another thing that struck John as being desperately funny.
“Yeah. Strength in numbers.” He couldn’t take his eyes off Allison. She was so like Cameron, yet so… alive.
“Fine. But you’ll have to pull your own weight.”
”Will this do for a start?” Weaver pulled a can of sardines from her pocket. Kyle and his posse practically started drooling. John just wondered how Weaver had brought that with her through time… then decided he really didn’t need to know.
They went through a tunnel, this one seeming to stretch for miles. Kyle carried a glowstick in his mouth so the new arrivals could see where they were going. John guessed the trio navigated by touch.
“Did you dig all these yourself?” he asked.
It was Allison who answered. “No. Keener did.”
“Who’s he?”
“A corpse,” Derek said, his voice a boyish monotone.
John dropped the subject.
Finally, they came out into a fallout shelter. John’s growing hysteria forced him to titter under his breath. John could see other tunnels excavated through the brick walls. The shelves were well-stocked, if dwindling, but the weapons rack was just a rifle and a pair of pistols, plus the guns Kyle’s team returned. Of the two walls that weren’t holed by tunnels, one was being used as a combination chalkboard/bulletin board, with an attack plan half-heartedly erased, and the other one given over to a spray paint mural. It was signed AY. John gave Allison a look. She didn’t return it.
Through a crack in the roof, the red light finally died. Derek flipped on a radio and tuned the rabbit ears until there was more than static. Kyle and Allison took up position on a couch in front of the radio. John reluctantly sat down with them, beside Allison. Weaver just stood there.
“What happens at sundown?”
“Connor,” Kyle said reverently. “They smuggle his tapes to radio towers all over the globe, play them when the sun sets. Keeps you from having nightmares.”
John felt mildly sick to his stomach.
A voice came through the radio. It was strong. Kyle’s voice, Allison’s voice, they were weary, strained, tense. This was commanding, assuring, warm in an almost paternal way. It was the voice of a leader. It was John’s voice in ten years.
“This is John Connor. If you’re listening to this, you are the Resistance. Tonight, I’d like to talk to you about Michael Gonzales.” And he talked. For an hour he talked about Gonzales, his parents, his childhood, his hopes and dreams… then where he was on Judgment Day. He talked about how Gonzales had looked after his little sister, and here John saw Kyle reach under his brother’s shirt and rub his back as the boy sagged across his lap. Connor talked about how Gonzales had joined Techcom, earned his stripes, served at Fort Listing. Finally, he told them how Gonzales had held Listing against wave after wave of T-7s until air support had arrived to cover their retreat. Gonzales had collapsed seven miles from Fort Listing, a bullet in his lung. His little sister had survived.
When Connor finished, a profound silence only accompanied by the sound of him drinking a glass of water, John didn’t feel hysterical anymore. Allison was crying into Kyle’s shoulder and Derek had a lump in his throat. And Kyle, Kyle said “amen.”
‘You give them hope,” Catherine whispered in John’s ear, sitting delicately on the arm of the couch. “You remind them they’re human.”
For the next hour, Connor was more laidback, but still respectful. He played songs, apologizing for the repeats due to his limited library, and he read letter from survivors who were trying to reconnect, or those who had. He gave them tips on how to fight and evade Skynet, warned them of new types of Terminators, and most of all he talked. His voice was proud and unafraid and he made himself be heard.
“The coming years will be hard, and I will ask much of you. But stay strong. Stay alive. Never forget that we can win this war. And lastly, I have a warning for someone who doesn’t know how important he is yet. Kyle Reese, you’ve been targeted for termination. I need you to make your way to me. If my sources are correct, you’ve just met someone who can bring you to me. Go with her. Our future depends on it.”
All eyes turned to Weaver.
“Well, that rather puts us on the spot, doesn’t it?”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2009-06-12 10:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-13 03:47 am (UTC)I'm started a challenge fic that is based on the TSCC world but goes back in time to T1 and T2 and then into the TSCC past before S2 finale.
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Date: 2009-06-13 05:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-15 09:17 pm (UTC)Also, can I friend you?
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Date: 2009-06-16 04:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-17 01:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 05:02 pm (UTC)More?