templemarker

Immutability
by templemarker

Notes: Set immediately post-series. Filling such_heights’s prompt over at the Fall Fandom Free For All. Sarah, and Ellison, and what happens next.

***

There is only one time in Sarah’s life when she has been away from John, and that was without her consent.

She watches him pop into the future in a burst of light, momentarily blinding. When it’s over, all that remains is her, Ellison, and the lifeless body slumped over the table.

“C’mon,” she says, her voice uneven, “we need to get her out of here.”

Ellison looks at her like she’s crazy; it’s a familiar face on him. “Aren’t you going to burn it?” he asks, even as he moves to the other side of the table to help her lift the body.

“No,” she says. The words taste like ash; she’s not going to burn this one. “I’m not going to burn her. John will need her later.”

They wrap the body in a black bag; Sarah doesn’t ask how Ellison knows the bags exist. It has turned to night in the time they spent in the ZeiraCorp building, and Ellison doesn’t brook any questions getting them out of there. She drives. He sits in the passenger seat. They watch Los Angeles scatter its light through the windshield.

There is an apartment in Silverlake that Derek had set up, a year ago; he only told her about it last month. Now he’s dead, and as they haul the body up the stairs and into a crawl space inside one of the closets, Sarah lets herself feel that death.

She closes the closet door, and stops feeling.

Ellison is sitting at the kitchen table. He’s loosened his tie and is staring out the window at nothing. Sarah can see the beginnings of the same terrible, driven solitude that exists in her written in the lines of his mouth. It was probably inevitable.

“Tell me everything,” she says, sitting across from him and laying her hands on the table. His eyes flick down to them for a moment, taking in their scars and cuts and perhaps the destruction they’ve wrought, but then he meets her own and opens his mouth and speaks.

John told her Weaver’s message. Will you join us? It doesn’t make sense in the context of the things she knows, but as Ellison talks, as he describes how the Turk was made into a John Henry, she sees some of the pieces collect and form.

It doesn’t work, in her head. There is Us, and there is Them. There are agents of death that have been hunting her and her son all of his life and before; there is a mission, a goal, to stay alive and stop Skynet. These are the things that she knows, and the Weaver Terminator doesn’t fit in to that. The Weaver Terminator didn’t try to kill her. The Weaver Terminator was self-directed.

It doesn’t fit.

Ellison says morals and ethics and Sarah’s head spins unpleasantly with possibilities. Her world is easier with black and white, but as John grows more and more into the man he will eventually become, it is clear that his world is full of greys.

And there is the body of a girl that is not a girl hidden in a closet that suggests her world isn’t so negatively spaced either.

The table lapses into silence, and they aren’t looking at each other; they are looking past each other. Sarah’s life has been surrounded by men since the day that first T-8 came to end her life, Kyle and John and the guerrillas and Charlie and Ellison and Derek and another T-8. She hasn’t had girlfriends since she was 18. She hasn’t had friends since she was 18. She doesn’t particularly like men, but then she doesn’t particularly like people. It’s funny how she spends her life striving to protect them when she could live the rest of her life, however long she has, in utter recluse and be satisfied.

Cameron would ask, Funny ha-ha?. John tried to explain humour to her last week. Sarah thinks Cameron knows more than she lets on.

Tomorrow, they will have to construct an explanation for Weaver’s disappearance. Tomorrow, they will have to figure out what to do about the Weaver Terminator’s daughter, and Sarah’s stomach turns at the thought of a child being raised by a thing. Tomorrow, they will have to find some way to conceal Sarah’s escape from prison while keeping her in Los Angeles, because you can jump whens but you can’t jump wheres. John will come back here, to this city, and Sarah will be waiting.

Ellison asks her what she wants to do, and she doesn’t say that she would like to sleep for several years, though that is what she is thinking; she would like to power off, like the machine in the crawl space, until John comes back and he needs her again. Instead, she does something she never, ever does, that she wouldn’t do if her son were here and needed protecting. She rests her scarred hand over that of her former enemy’s and says, I want to go to bed. And I want you to stay next to me. And I don’t want to talk about it.

He looks at her with eyes that have seen so many things, not as many as she has; he has lost so much, though not as much as she has. She asks for the detente with the pads of her fingers against his warm skin, and when his hand tightens on hers it means he accepts, and perhaps understands a little of what it means to have lost your purpose to the unknown future.

J-day is coming, still, and her John has gone to the future to learn things she can’t teach him, and there is a child here who has lost her mother and another who has lost her memory. Tomorrow, she and Ellison will deal with these things, and perhaps she will even come to trust him, though she doubts it. Tonight, she will claim some part of herself back, from seventeen years of living in fear. Tonight she will not be afraid.