“You must have a stomach of steel,” John laughed, letting himself fall into the recliner like a typical teenage boy could. “I don’t know if I have to be in shock or awe that you can stomach mom’s cooking skills... Not even Derek liked it,” he added while he watched Tyler walk over to the window to push the curtains aside and observe the quiet evening street.
“So you know, er knew, my mom in the future?” John posed the next question when Tyler didn’t answer.
“That’s right,” Tyler replied matter-of-factly.
“You said that she was a remarkable woman who could wield any weapon?”
He grinned when Tyler looked over his shoulder and said: “She was… Truly one of a kind.”
Could he ask? Should he ask about their future involvement as lovers, as husband and wife? He cleared his throat and contemplated it. It was too important to be ignored.
“Were you... Were you two ever involved?”
“In what, kid?” Tyler countered with a deep frown.
“I mean... did you and my mom have a thing?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Tyler grumbled while he turned back slowly to watch the street again. “A thing? Involved? I was assigned to protect her.”
“So no romance?” He asked, knowing that Tyler was lying. “No marriage?”
He waited patiently for the man to answer but Tyler kept quiet, much to his disappointment.
“Cameron said that you and mom were married,” he offered in the hopes it would get Tyler to talk again.
“Cameron says a lot of things. Not all are necessarily true. You added the ability for her to lie where it concerns her mission to her reprogramming.”
“But I saw you… Out on the rooftops. You came this close to kissing her,” he protested, showing a small distance between his thumb and index finger to emphasize his point.
“Is it really that important to know what was between your mother and me?” Tyler growled annoyed. “But if you must know; we were friends. Best friends who would fool around with each other on occasion.”
“I don’t believe that, Tyler,” he stated, pausing a moment to think. “You might think I’m just some snot-nose, but I observe too. And I’ve seen how you look at mom.”
Tyler turned his back to the window, folded his arms across his chest and looked at him curiously: “And how is that?”
Now that Tyler was looking at him like that, he started to feel uncomfortable and began to wish he had never asked. This man was more intimidating than Cromartie on his tail. However he didn’t want to back down.
“There’s a pain because mom reminds you of her. Even if you were just sex-buddies, which I totally don’t believe, there was at least more to it for you.”
Tyler swallowed a few times, cleared his throat and continued to stare at him: “I’m listening.”
“You loved her,” he concluded, looking down at his hands to avoid the staring. “Cameron isn’t lying… You are by denying it.”
He looked at Tyler from under his eyebrows and could see the dark look come over the man’s face: “I guess you’ve drawn your own conclusions already.”
“It’s not a conclusion,” he objected. “I know,” he paused. “I know it’s the truth.”
“I don’t know what kind of utterly ridiculous ideas you have about the future world, kid. But it’s no place for romance or heroism,” Tyler growled through gritted teeth. “Love equals death.”
“I never thought that,” he mumbled timidly.
Tyler stalked over to him: “Oh really? Is that why I had to keep you from plunging to a certain broken bone, kid? This is the future,” Tyler yanked his shirt over his head, threw it aside and showed him the numerous scars on his stomach, chest and back. “This is what it will be like. You fight, survive, no emotions. It’s either life or death. And you know what, kid?”
“What?” He mumbled, wanting to crawl away and hide.
“These scars aren’t even the worst. The ones on your soul... The lost battles, the daily body counts, the people who you have seen die on the battlefields... When you’re betrayed by those you trust because you still have to serve a higher purpose. Turned into a goddamn half-breed, only to be mocked by the very people you would die for to save, to be used as a fucking pawn in a sick and twisted game of chess… Now I see the people in this time, how they depend on false securities and put their trust in an instable but ever-expanding modern technology…. If only they knew a fragment of what I know, if they had seen what I have seen they wouldn’t be so fucking careless with each other, with their belongings, with themselves. They wouldn’t take everything for granted!”
He cowered at the sheer volume of Tyler’s voice. What had he done by pressing this matter? It was a rant that reminded him very much of his mother’s rants about Judgment Day before she had been institutionalized. It had always scared the hell out of him when she had gone into that mode, just like Tyler’s scared the hell out of him right now.

General John Connor of the Human Resistance leaned his head against the cool window and closed his eyes for a few seconds. There was a headache forming just behind his eyes, but it was nothing compared to the headaches the man, he had asked for to be brought to the room behind the glass, had suffered and would suffer. When the door behind him opened he opened his eyes again and slowly turned around.
“Robin,” he greeted the woman who entered the small observation booth.
“General,” she greeted back, her voice dripping with restrained disdain.
“I’m still sorry, Robin,” he said in a firm but apologetic manner. “But this had to be done.”
“Right,” she mocked. “You couldn’t leave him to die.”
“He’s important,” he sighed. “He’s my brother.”
“No, he isn’t. He will be my son, and never your brother,” she growled irritated.
He shook his head: “Robin,” he sighed again. “I know that you blame me, for the fall of IT, for what happened to him-”
“You can bet your sorry ass that I blame you,” she interrupted him.
“But you got to understand. He knew too. He knew that IT would fall. That she would die. That this would happen to him,” he said with all the authority he could muster that moment. “He did nothing to stop or change it.”
“Oh, don’t you start putting the blame on him!” She seethed. “He trusted you and you betrayed him!”
He looked at her and smiled faintly. She was right; he had betrayed his friend. He had betrayed his friend by turning him into something no longer human and not yet metal. Tyler had been called a metal-lover because he had wanted to know everything about each and every Skynet creation. His friend was anything but a metal-lover and possessed a hate so deep for the machines it surpassed everything else. Know thy enemy; it was why Tyler had wanted to know everything about the metal, so they could be destroyed without unnecessary loss of life or material damage.

“What the fuck is going on?” Sarah exclaimed when she came running into the living room after hearing Tyler raise his voice.
“Nothing,” Tyler snorted angrily.
“John?” Sarah asked, kneeling next to her son and looking him over. “You okay?”
“It’s my own fault, mom,” John mumbled with tears gleaming in his eyes, quickly wiping them away.
“You,” Sarah hissed, glaring at Tyler. “I swear-”
“What?” Tyler asked defiantly. “You’re gonna swear that you will going to rip my head if I ever yell at your son again? Why don’t you pamper him again so he doesn’t have to take responsibility for his actions. After all, he has his precious mommy to run to. Come to think of it… What has the kid ever achieved on his own?”
“You don’t know shit, Devlin. You really don’t know half of what’s going on!” Sarah made no attempt suppress the anger in her voice.
“Really, Connor?” Tyler asked with a crooked smile. “Really?”
“What do you mean?” Sarah asked taken aback by his attitude.
“You think that in the twelve years I was assigned to protect you we never talked? Never reflected back on the past? Your favorite pastime was ryno’ing me,” Tyler paused for a moment. “Especially after you left active field operations but we had long talks too... It’s time to let the boy grow up and find his own path, Sarah.”
“So he can become a goddamn bastard like you?” Sarah growled enraged.
“It’s inevitable, Connor. He has to become even worse than me, otherwise miss priss over there,” Tyler said calmly while he pointed at John. “Won’t stand a chance when the machines come. You must stop protecting him and let him earn his battle scars. Let him make mistakes and let him learn from those experiences.”
“He’s learning: against my wishes he tracked a shipload of coltan and stole it from under Skynet’s nose,” Sarah defended her son.
“Having trouble with driving stick-shift, I know... And it immediately proves my point.”
“You’re even worse than Cameron with her ‘not this John’- routine,” Sarah sighed deeply annoyed.
“ And who do you think put that into her program?” Tyler asked sarcastically. “You have three guesses left.”
“Do you have to be so antagonizing towards everybody?” John yelled after he jumped to his feet in anger.
Tyler cocked his head a little to the right and sent John a curious but amused look, a faint smile playing on his lips: “What are you going to do about it, kid? Send your mommy after me? So she can fix it? Again?”
Before Sarah could stop him, John charged at Tyler in an attempt to tackle him at the waist. She watched as Tyler simply did one step aside to let John storm by before grabbing him by the collar of his T-shirt and whirling him around.
“My, my, I didn’t know you had in you, kid,” Tyler grinned while he easily dodged John’s wild and uncontrolled swings at him.
“Stand still, you goddamn son of a bitch!” John seethed beside himself with rage as he tried to hit Tyler again.
“Why do you Connors insist on me standing still?” Tyler laughed with amusement, immediately ducking for another wild swing. “You honestly think the machines will stand still in hand-to-hand combat because you tell them to?”
It surprised Sarah how light on his feet Tyler actually was, ducking and dodging the punches her son was throwing at him with shameless ease.
“Fuck you!” John exclaimed completely infuriated.
“Now we’re talking, kid,” Tyler chuckled amused. “Come on, give it your best shot,” he taunted while he tapped on his right jaw. “Right here, kid. Come on, let me really feel it!”
“OW!” John howled in pain, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Sarah knew that one of her bigger flaws was that she could complete lose it, but to see her son like that. All the pent up pain and frustration of years seemed to pour out. Of course Tyler wouldn’t take a direct hit without putting up some defence, in this case his left arm.
She could tell that he lived off of fights, and if it was peace and quiet she was most sure that he would pick one just for having one. She caught his gaze and saw that he was enjoying this. He was tapping into John’s deeper emotions and at the same time teaching her son a lesson he would not soon forget.
“Enough!” Tyler barked suddenly when John pulled back for a third punch. “Go put some ice on it, kid. It’ll reduce the swelling.”
“I’m not finished yet!” John yelled furiously but Tyler had grabbed him by the upper arms before he could take another swing at him.
“I said: enough,” Tyler said sternly while he shook him roughly.
“I’m John Connor! You better listen to me, jackass!” John growled.
Tyler burst into amused laughter: “I’m not Cameron, John. I’m human, and not programmed to follow orders. Still, it’s good to see some tiny bit of the John Connor I know in you. Now go put some ice on it! Go!”

“Connor.”
His voice was warm and comforting, as if he knew that he had to put her at ease. She looked at the metal skeleton in the corner and felt an icy shiver run up and down her spine. Instinctively her hands closed around the 20-Watt Phased Plasma Rifle. If there was someone who had hated metal even more than him, it was her. People assumed by his natural interest that he was a metal-fan but she knew it to be differently.
Keeping a close eye on the metal man in the corner, she trudged to the chair furthest away from it and sat down, holding the rifle close, alert on any sign of it coming to life. She had learned it the hard way that even if those things were down they could and would still chase you.
“Hey,” he said gently while he came over to her and sat down on his heels. “Don’t worry. It’s dead.”
“They’re never alive to begin with,” she protested, unwilling to take her eyes off the machine.
“You know what I mean, Connor,” he remarked before placing a hand on her right thigh.
The muscles in her thigh twitched underneath his gentle touch. Even if it was dead, having metal around made her extremely jumpy. The faint, sad smile on his face told her that he had noticed.
“I’m sorry, Ty,” she whispered embarrassed.
She removed one hand from the rifle and placed it over his.
“Look at me, Connor,” his voice was soft but demanding.
Slowly she turned her gaze to meet his. Her eyes were met by his, and she smiled. After bringing her hand up to his face, she traced the prominent scar that ran from his right eyebrow to his cheek bone with her index finger. He had so many scars, all telling the story of battle and pain. The faint, sad smile was now replaced by a warm, wide one and it caused her to smile in return.
“It’s dead… The chip’s removed, the reroute gone,” he added softly. “It’s dead.”

“What the hell were you thinking, Devlin?”
He could hear the restrained anger in her voice, but the John he had known had given him his mission objectives, and one of them was to give the younger John Connor a wake up call he would never forget.
“The kid needs to get his head in the game. I talked to him a couple of times and he is way off on his role in the future… Silly heroics stuff. Granted, he is willing to fight but for all the wrong reasons. He seems to think that he’s supposed to be a hero. That he will do all these wonderful heroic things that will turn him into the stuff of legends. But the truth is that there’s nothing glorious about it,”
“How can you know? You hardly know John,” Sarah hissed though gritted teeth while she glared at him.
“I don’t know this John very well, true, but I do know John. We were friends, brothers in arms. This John would never have done this,” Tyler showed her the scars of the replacement surgery. “He just doesn’t have the balls to do it and no matter how much I resent the guy for doing this to me, he will have to do it to the other me again.”
“Because you’re so goddamn important, right? You couldn’t even safe me in the future,” Sarah snapped at him.
He narrowed his eyes to slits and looked at her. That last sentence sent a dagger through his heart and anger welled up from deep within. She might not be the Sarah he had known just yet but this hurt more than all the rynoing he had received from the other her.
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he said darkly, clenching and unclenching his hands at his sides. “I didn’t betray ITBase. I didn’t give up the hidden exits. We were this close to getting out!”
“You know who betrayed IntelliTech, don’t you?” She ventured to ask in a soft and gentle voice. “John sent you here to prevent it, right?”
“It’s classified information,” he said in a strict and formal tone. “You better go see how your boy’s doing.”

Robin felt her heart break when they brought him into the room for observation. He had just suffered through the excruciatingly painful process of regeneration and now the John Connor wanted to know what his ‘improved’ friend could do.
She should have let Tyler die. He had deserved that, but she was just as guilty of keeping him alive as the man she was blaming it on. She knew that Tyler would serve one last purpose in the past, to die for John and Sarah Connor.
Day after day, night after night, she had sat with him, holding his right hand while he cried for her in a tormented unconsciousness. For a while she had thought that Tyler had been nothing but a toy to Sarah Connor. However she had learned that, despite this world, Tyler and Sarah had truly loved each other, finding comfort and shelter with each other.
It was something that she had never had. Derek Reese was Derek Reese, and she suspected him on stepping out on her with that Australian woman, Jesse Flores. Not that she really cared about their relationship anymore. It would make it all the easier to go back in time. It was leaving behind Tyler that she was worried about. He responded well to her during fits of violent insanity, and she concluded that she was the only to break the Skynet-spell.
Nevertheless he would be sent back in time as well, to do good in the past. Just like she would be sent back to do good in the past by giving birth to the ‘next’ him. A wry smile creased the corners of her mouth upwards when she remembered how Tyler called it “C’s little pet breeding project”.
She would always be, but without her he would never be. She had never bothered to figure it out, because it was too complicated and there were more important things to do.
"That's what happened today. A big computer did no longer do what his owner wanted it to do." It was how he had explained Skynet and the end of the old world to her on Judgment Day, the day he had stopped and brought her into safety with them. Had he even known that moment who he had saved or had it been just an act of kindness?
She watched as he inspected the room. He looked dazed and confused. Either it was a sign of things to come or things that had happened. The General had ordered that Tyler should be left alone and not be hassled, but he did nothing when someone disobeyed the order. Someone like Derek, who picked on Tyler every chance he got. It was another reason why her feelings for him had started to fade; the constant need to prove he was a human by reminding Tyler that he was now part human, part machine.
And she knew why the General didn’t call him to order: his little brother Kyle. Just like Allison, Kyle Reese was one of John’s protégés and Derek immediately assumed that it granted him the right to torment Tyler for not being completely human anymore and for his knowledge of the machines. It didn’t matter that Tyler had gotten them out of impossible jams. If Derek got the chance to put down Tyler, he grabbed it with both hands.

Chapter 11: Conversations On A Rooftop

Chapter 13: The Tale Of Two Tylers