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We won. We did it. We stopped Skynet.
How we won is immaterial to the fact that we did. We won. We stopped it. We stopped it and then we came back. We tried to settle down, forget, but we couldn't. I couldn't. I keep watch. I always will. We've lived years beyond Judgment Day with more stretching out unhindered into the future, but I can't say it's over. I can't say we're safe. I'll never say that. Skynet, so long a certainty, is nothing more than a slim chance at best. Or so we tell ourselves each morning the sun dawns clear, bright, and nuclear apocalypse free. We've won and yet, in this unexpected present, lost all at once. We've lived so long with the apocalypse as our shadow, dogging each and every step, that this world without it feels alien. It's hard to explain, even to myself.
There's a picture, John gave to me, of Kyle and I together. It's fake, Photoshop at it's finest, but it's his parents together. The only picture of his parents together. I don't know what he thought when he saw it. I can't begin to guess. I won't. I can't give him much, but I can give him the privacy of his own thoughts.
He's given me the privacy of mine.
The Kyle Reese I knew is a man who will never exist. He's been wiped out by achieving the very cause I dedicated my life and my son to. The Kyle of the picture is a boy working, however unwitting, beneath his own son's eye. If Skynet is truly dead, truly gone, then this Kyle will never grow into that Kyle. Never be molded by unrelenting will of machines bent on wiping us all from the face of the Earth.
This Kyle is a stranger to me, I am even less than that to him, and most days I'm okay with that.
Most.
I never look at that picture. A bastardization of two futures that will never and can never meet.
"I hate these things."
I smile. John looks at one tie, then the other, and rejects them both. Behind him, Kate rolls her eyes and runs after their youngest. Amy. Squealing with laughter, Amy darts behind me, her fingers curling into the fabric of my slacks as she tries to hide. I face down Kate with an obediently blank look that immediately has her grinning.
'Blind' to her daughter's hiding place, Kate passes her by – to Amy's absolutely delight – to unbutton John's collar. "Funny thing," she says, patting his chest. "You're the one who keeps hosting them."
Before she can slip away, he wraps an arm around her waist for a kiss. "I'm the boss," he points out. "It's good for morale." He makes a face. "Or something like that."
Kate's eyebrow raises and she looks at me. Her eyes are full of mischief, but it's not as genuine as she or John might believe. "Tell me again how he's supposed to be the second coming of Patton?"
And there it is. The soft hesitation in her voice. The plea that I, the harbinger of death, her personal specter at the banquet, deny the truth John's lived with for so long and promise of no Judgment Day, no Skynet, no world where her husband will be called on to save the day and she with him.
I spread my hands and smile. "Sorry."
They laugh and I join them, but that doesn't mean I miss the way John presses his face into Kate's hair or the way she leans into him. It's been years since we lived under the certainty of that future. Watching them now, I catch a glimpse of what might have been.
I don't know, not for sure, that they would have known each other there, but still I think there was someone. A space in every shred of the future Cameron's doled out in the past. I've hoped, but I've never been sure and I've never dared ask.
I hope still. That future might be, hopefully is, gone, but I still want to believe they were together. I know that future never included me. Cancer, accident, or Skynet. It is world I was never meant to walk in. Thinking Kate was there, with him, helps.
It's strange to feel relief about a future that may never happen, but it's there. Laced through every moment of their embrace. Yeah, it helps.
Scooping my granddaughter into my arms, I revel in the feeling of her small arms hugging me tight. The idea of Amy or her sisters growing up in a war against the machines makes my stomach churn. I may not trust this future we've been given, but I'm desperate for it all the same.
"Come on," John says after a moment, his voice rough. He kisses Kate's temple. "Can't keep our guests waiting."
Kyle.
The name makes me sigh. Or, almost. I've learned to keep it quiet. Away from John. It's not something I can explain to him. Not something I want to put on him either.
He looks at me and I twirl Amy around. "You'd better get your sisters," I say, putting her down. "They're still in the bathroom."
Laughing, the little girl grabs her father by the hand and drags him out the door. I linger, watching them go, to savor the sight. My daughter-in-law's voice keeps me from moving forward.
"You believe it, don't you?" Kate's voice, quiet and dubious. "Really."
I breathe out. "I wish I didn't."
"But you do," she insists.
My son married a stubborn woman. Good. He needs a firm hand. Not for the first time I regret not seeing this coming. There's so much about this life I never taught him, so much he and Kate will have to find on their own.
It never occurred to me that John might want a family. It should have, but it didn't. I never thought about the future beyond Skynet and the war against it. It was a mistake. An understandable mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. I've spent years preparing my son to be a leader. Years training him in tactics, computers, war. I never prepared him to be a husband. A father.
I prepared him to fight. I prepared him to win. After was a whole other story. After he was on his own. I just never thought After would come before the war. Even when we found it, I couldn't let go of that goal.
I sent my son into his wife's arms on the premise of a surveillance mission. Kate's a general's daughter. An Air Force general in charge of cyber research...
I sent my son in search of Skynet and he found his wife instead.
She's strong. Independent. Capable. If Judgment Day were tomorrow, I think she'd make it. She'd make sure he made it. I don't think she believes that, but I didn't either. All those years ago, hiding that night with Kyle by my side, I hadn't believed him. Not truly.
I watch Kate twisting the wedding band on her finger and see myself.
"I'm sorry," she says.
"Don't be. You shouldn't be." I sit down, sinking into a chair. I'm tired already, but I refuse to show it. Reflex has me smoothing my shirt into place, fingers running over the fine fabric and the chemo port that's hidden beneath.
I sigh, quiet, but she hears it. When I look at Kate, she's watching me with sharp eyes. Doctor's eyes. It's hard to believe that, years ago, she'd planned on being a vet. There's nothing of a that starry-eyed college student in her now.
"Hm," Kate's noncommittal as she assesses me. Her eyes don't miss much. To her credit, she stays where she is, but I know it's costing her. I can see the flex of her fingers. She's suppressing the instinct to rush over, mostly for my sake. I hate it when they hover. "Of course."
I laugh. It's a real, genuine laugh. The kind I haven't let myself feel in years. I'm still getting used to it. To the freedom to just laugh about anything. I don't know how to live without the apocalypse making every pleasure a guilt-trip waiting to happen. I'm a grandmother still learning how to laugh.
The peculiar part is how little that bothers me.
John's left the bedroom door open and I can hear the guests below. Soft laughter mingling with the clinking of stemware. The tools of John's trade. Good alcohol and small-talk instead of computer code and gunfire.
"I wonder sometimes," I admit, turning back to Kate.
"You've beaten it before."
"I don't mean the cancer." As difficult as it is, and it is, I can handle the cancer. At first, that was a lie I told myself to keep going. I could handle it. I could face it. I wasn't gone to lose to it. I lied to myself until, yes, I did handle it and face it and beat it. Now when I tell myself that before every treatment, and every morning after it, it's the reminder of my strength. I taught my son how to face billions dead and more depending on his every choice. I can handle cancer. "I mean Skynet."
"Right," Kate sighs. She sits on the edge of the bed. She's wearing a dress this time. A concession to the summer heat. The last of Amy's baby weight still sits around her middle, slower in coming off than her previous births, but she wears it well. She's beautiful in the afternoon sun. I never had another child. Couldn't risk it, but she's become my daughter in ways neither of us can ever bring ourselves to acknowledge.
It pains me to picture her in muck and mire, hiding in tunnels, beneath the surface, fighting a war at John's side.
And yet.
"I know you can't believe it, Kate."
"I can believe it," Kate says. She chews her lip as she thinks. "I know, in theory, it would be possible." She tries to smile, but it's closer to a grimace and we both know it. "Between my father and John -- " she shrugs. "I just – I can't." There's a world in that word. Despair, the screams of the dying, the grief of the dead, all wrapped up in the determination to deny it's possibility.
I can understand it.
With each passing year, it gets harder and easier all at once. So very easy to forget what I know might have been. Easier to forget. Harder to imagine. Harder to picture the world exploding into fire as Skynet spreads around the globe, riding the edge of the flame and that scares me.
It should be a relief to let go of the nightmare that's dogged us for years, but it isn't. It scares me.
It's almost funny. I'm not scared of the cancer reoccurring, of another round of chemo and exhaustion that buries itself deep in my bones, I'm scared of forgetting.
Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it." It's a buzz phrase. A quote that falls glibly from the tongue with no real comprehension of what it means. I wonder what he would have thought of applying that to the future, of never allowing myself the luxury to forget what might be?
We've stopped it. Skynet is gone. That future is erased. Cameron and Derek are the only traces left.
I don't know what their futures looked like. I can't imagine the apocalypse. For all that it's haunted my nightmares, I've never truly been able to picture it. I don't know the world that birthed Cameron. I can't imagine the girl whose face she wears or the life she lived after Judgment Day wiped the world clean.
And Derek...
This Derek is as much a stranger to me as this Kyle is to us both. I can't imagine his future, but I know his struggle to imagine. I'll never know what he saw, a world without my son at it's fore, and he'll never know the promise I lived with for years.
I want to leave Kate the luxury of ignorance. I want to embrace it myself, but that's the problem. What if we're wrong. What if, like before, all we've done is delay it? If we forget. If we lax our guard and allow ourselves the luxury of dreams, will damn ourselves and our children?
"I can prove it."
Kate nods. "Cameron." She looks guilty as soon as she's said it. "I -- " she laughs. "I don't know why I'm nervous. We haven't seen her in years."
I smile. "It's the elephant in the room. Skynet and all it's peripherals." I've never been certain of how I defined Cameron. I've never wanted to be. Even now, it's a question of identity I shy away from.
"I thought of her as the other woman," Kate admits. "In the beginning. The way John talked about her -- "
"My son's earliest father figure was a machine," I say. "So was his first love." That both of them wore faces stolen from the dead is something I can't bring myself to tell her.
"How fucked up is that?" Kate slaps a hand over her mouth, laughing, and it would be fair to say there's hysteria in the sound. "Sorry," she says, cheeks tinging red.
I grin. "Fifty cents in the jar and we don't tell John it happened."
"Oh, we can tell John," Kate grins, though it's shaky. "I could retire fat and happy on what he's put in there."
She rises, her skirt falling into place around her legs, and I watch her pace. "I humor him."
"I know," I say. "He humored me. For years." Until the T-1000 ripped through his illusions and, nearly, our lives. Kate knows that story as much as she knows the others. I don't need to remind her. "I hope that's all you ever have to do."
"I don't know how you do this," Kate says. She stops by the family photos and there, in their midst, I spot it.
John kept a copy after all.
"I don't know either," I say. "I just do."
It's all I've ever done. I just do.
"If you have to," I add, "so will you."
She looks at me. "I can't be you."
I laugh and offer her my arm. "Come on," I say. "Let's go downstairs, find ourselves a couple bottles of cheap beer and I'll tell you the story of a young waitress and the resistance fighter that came to save her."
Kate grins. "Kyle Reese saving the day." She shakes her head. "I can't picture it."
Together, we make our way downstairs, nodding at party-goers as we pass. The girls are making their presence known, scampering through the crowd, laughing and squealing, and there's John in quiet conversation. Conversation with Kyle Reese.
It's not my Kyle, but it's Kyle nonetheless. I watch them for a moment, father and son, and try, just for that moment, to imagine what my Kyle would have thought. He never knew who John really was. Never understood the true rule he played in history. He was lucky. So, too, is this Kyle. This Kyle will never have asked of him the things my Kyle did. He'll never leave everyone he knows and loves, the people he's fought for and fought with, to protect a stranger.
I watch them, watch Kyle as he stares at John, and I smile. Kyle knows. He doesn't know what he knows, but he does. He can feel it. Something doesn't fit, but that something is so far beyond the pale that he can't even begin to conceive of it.
Funny. There was a time so would I. Now, inconceivable is a future without Skynet.
"Sarah?"
Kate's fingers press into my skin, a gentle squeeze of support, and I look at her with a smile. "Lucky thing, isn't it? He'll never have to."
And neither will I.