Sign in or 
Share this
Chapter 20: Like Father, Unlike Daughter
[May contain what could be considered explicit content. Reader discretion is highly advised. Mature readers only.]
He felt her touch him softly on the shoulder. Normally this would have comforted him but now it only complicated matters. He had not wanted her to know, but when she had attacked him it had triggered the nanoattrioids and his brain had felt on fire again.
He shrugged her hand off.
“Ty,” she whispered hurt, confusion etched deep into her voice.
“I’m him now,” he stated in a soft but determined voice.
“You’re not him. You’ll never be him,” she protested vehemently.
“But I am… He was me. And now I am him,” he sighed.
Had they tempted fate by taking their destinies into their own hands? The other Tyler had been secretly in love with her, never acting on it, never telling her, only to suffer in silence after she had died.
“I can’t be trusted anymore, Sarah,” he added, unable to keep his voice from trembling.
She kept silent as to where he had hoped that she would object to that statement, reassuring him that he could still be trusted.
“Sarah? It’s been a long time since you addressed me that way,” she sounded disappointed.
He raised his head a little and looked at her shyly. She noticed and sent him a warm and comforting smile. Suddenly he knew: no one else called her Connor in the way he did. Connor was his pet name for her.
“I’m sorry, Connor,” he whispered.
“Sorry for what?”
“For addressing you with Sarah,” he mumbled, averting his eyes again.
“So? You do it all the time. It’s either Sarah or Connor, and both are fine with me,” she laughed with relief.
“But you just said,” he began, only to realize that it had been a shard of his nightmare.
“I said what?” She urged when he remained quiet.
“Nothing,” he muttered. “It’s all in my head.”
Lucy wandered through the halls and tunnels of the Base. The first and only time she had been here before, had been a few hours after the siege.
As she progressed to the deeper tunnels where the private quarters of the troops were, she heard the voice of Sergeant Rooker call for a young Rook and her: “Peterson, Owens, I need a hand here!” It was after he had found the body of a woman in her early fifties buried under beams and other debris for the most part.
It messed with her mind to see that this Base bustling with activity and she wasn’t really paying attention to where she was going until she bumped into a young girl.
“O’Conlin,” she muttered confused when she recognized the girl.
She had never known that her good friend and sister in arms had lived on IT Base.
“Do I know you?” Robin asked frankly, staring at her.
She looked at the girl again and smiled vaguely: “No, but I heard a lot of good things about you.”
It was the truth in a way, only it wasn’t heard but witnessed. O’Conlin had been an excellent fighter and a strategic master mind. When the General had sent Rooker’s team to the fallen base, he had pulled O’Conlin from the team. At that time, she hadn’t understood why but now she understood. If O’Conlin had lived here, this would have been the worst place to be send to after the machines had overrun it. It had been a complete massacre.
“Yeah, right,” Robin shook her head. “Must be my dad you’re talking about… The great hero.”
She frowned at the disdain with which O’Conlin had said ‘my dad’ and 'the great hero'. Who was her dad? It couldn’t be the General because she remembered O’Conlin telling her that her father had died when she had been a girl. O’Conlin’s father had been a hard and distant man, who had only trained and educated her but had never been willing to spend time with her aside from that, on a personal level.
“Lieutenant Colonel Devlin?” She hazarded a guess.
“Who else?”
Sarah had known that not a thousand of carefully chosen words could have ever reassured him so she had shown him. Slowly she had gotten to her feet and had held out her hand to him. All words would turn out to be superficial or superfluous. He had let her help him up and she had gently pulled him with her to her bed.
Now he lay with his face half buried in her hair, his right arm casually across her chest, his right knee pressed firmly against her right thigh. Absentmindedly she caressed his right forearm, sometimes gently scratching him. He needed to know that she was still there with him. It had not been the most romantic encounter she’d had with him. In his desperate passion he had been selfish and had only sought his own pleasure. Still there was a deep feeling of satisfaction burning inside her.
Carefully she turned her head a little and looked at the right side of his face, at the scar that ran from just above his eyebrow to just a little below his cheekbone. In another four years he would get a new even more distinctive scar that would run across his left cheek.
She removed her hand from his forearm and brought it up to his face, running her index finger along the ridge of the scar. He had so many scars, so many visual reminders of battles won and lost, of escapes from and raids on Skynet death camps. Nevertheless the latest scar wasn’t visible. It was a fault line across his soul, where it would only take so much for it to rupture and unleash the machine that now lay in waiting inside of him. Knowing that the machine would never leave him, tears began to well in her eyes. It had been a very long time since she had really cried and there was nothing she would like to do more than have a good cry right this instance but it would wake him up and cause him to worry about her. She had not even cried when she had thought that he was dead or had that been because she could not cry? As if she had been out of tears to shed.
“So much pain,” she whispered barely audible, tracing another scar that ran over his shoulder with her fingertips.
He began to stir a little: “It comes with the territory,” he muttered drowsily, slowly rolling onto his back before turning on his other side.
“But the nano’s, Ty?” She sighed, trying to hide her disappointment from her voice now that the intimacy was gone.
“Don’t worry… I’ll deal with it,” he sounded very sleepy.
She reached out to him, tenderly touching him just below his shoulder blades. With him, she didn’t have to be the badass soldier who could kick anybody’s ass, human or tin man. He knew her like no one else had known her before. Her darkest secrets, her deepest fears, they would always be safe with him. Suddenly she felt stupid for being jealous like that. Of course he would never do such a thing, and certainly not to her.
“I’m sorry too,” she whispered, sliding over so she could cuddle up to him, hoping to find back of the earlier intimacy.
“Sir, can I talk to you?” Lucy asked when she ran into Tyler on her way to the command center the next late afternoon.
“What is it, Sergeant Owens?” Tyler asked, stopping in his tracks.
“It’s about O’Conlin, sir,” she answered in a soft voice so only he would hear.
“What about her?”
“She doesn’t like you very much, sir,” she replied, looking at the floor just in front of her feet.
“So?”
“I know that it is none of my business, sir. But she needs a father, and not a teacher.”
“How would you know? And you’re right, it is none of your business,” he grumbled.
“Sir, she,” she paused to find the right words. “She’ll be my friend, sir. And she’ll hate you.”
“And what do you want me to do about that, Sergeant Owens?”
“Maybe you could spend some time with her, sir?”
“I already spend enough time with her,” he answered gruffly.
“That’s not what I meant, sir. With all due respect, she does not need a mentor. She needs a father,” she said intimidated.
“And what does she want me to do as her father? Book a nice family trip to Disney World? Have I got news for you: Disney World doesn’t exist anymore. It’s been wiped off the face of the earth on April twenty-first, two thousand-eleven.”
“Just try to find something in common, sir,” she offered hopeful.
A week later, it was a cold and clear night. An almost arctic wind swept through the streets of the ruined city. Snow flakes danced, mingled with the dust, in the harsh wind. The nuclear winter after Judgment Day had changed the climate drastically. In the old world, this time of year would be marked by nice temperatures and sunshine, but in the new world it was hellishly cold. It was a lifeless world, emphasized by the presence of the machines, lifeless beings on their own. They had no soul, no feelings for their prey or victim. They hunted and killed without guilt or regret.
The wind faded and picked up again. Swirls of snow danced over the white blankets that covered the street and the ruins of the tall buildings that had once determined the skyline of Los Angeles. On the rooftops of one of the buildings mostly intact stood a man and a young girl, watching the night sky for aerial recon units.
“It all came down to a Thursday in April,” the man told the young girl. “Just your ordinary week day, people went about to do their daily things. We took everything for granted, our empty and pathetic little lives filled with insignificant events and useless things, depending on the ever advancing technology to improve our standards of life… An ordinary day, except for the part that it would become the day the world would come to an end. You’re too young to remember how the skies caught fire and how flaming waves swept across the surface of the earth, wiping out most of the world population.”
The young girl hung her head and looked at her gloved hands. The light shrugging of her shoulders told him that she was fighting back her emotions.
“The few who survived that day saw the rise of the machines. It started with only a few of those bastards, but soon you saw metal everywhere. Built to hunt and kill the survivors of the day Skynet seized control over the world,” he continued. “It makes no sense to Skynet that we keep on fighting for a better tomorrow. It is sentient but it does not understand the first thing about the humans. It knows feelings like fear, anger, accomplishment, but it cannot combine it to the very thing that makes us humans tick. It doesn’t understand that facing defeat will make us chase victory even more.”
The young girl nodded slowly, raised her head a little and looked at the man shyly. Her attention was drawn by the low grumblings of turbines and she looked up to see a drove of a.r.u.’s fly by. Steel birds on their way to the numerous battlefields of that cold winter night. Just like the man she was fascinated by the sport of a.r.u. surfing, one of the few things they had in common. With the difference that he was skilled at it and this would be the first time for her. She was two years younger than the average age for joining the Resistance but already she knew more, had seen more than most Rooks.
She looked at the man again, at the scars in his face, the one that drew down from his brow to his cheekbone catching her attention again. She didn’t want to stare at it, because it was rude but it was hard to not to.
“You ready?” He asked while he got ready.
She nodded and copied his actions. Counting back from five, the run and jump off of the edge roof. Panic welled in the pits of her stomach when she couldn’t get a grip on the rough metal surface and started to slip. His hand closed around her wrist. With a firm tug he pulled her into safety.
“That’s why I don’t wear gloves,” he grumbled, sending her a dark look.
“Sorry, sir,” she muttered. “It won’t happen again.”
“It better not. I might not be there to catch you before you fall to your death,” he said matter-of-factly, ripping open the hatch to expose the electronics.
“I understand, sir,” she nodded.
A big grin spread across his face and his eyes started to sparkle when he looked at her again: “Let’s have some fun!”
| Chapter 19: The Phoenix |
|
InstantEntertainment |
Latest page update: made by InstantEntertainment
, Jan 8 2009, 12:59 PM EST
(about this update
About This Update
added 1 link
- InstantEntertainment
6 words added view changes - complete history) |
|
Keyword tags:
Connor
Devlin
fan fiction
John
Sarah
Sarah Connor Chronicles
Terminator
Tyler
More Info: links to this page
|
There are no threads for this page.
Be the first to start a new thread.
