Knight in Shining Armour

"It wasn't meant to be like this, you get that right?"

The Terminator stared at him.

"I mean, I thought I'd be the hero, y'know? Sacrifice my life such as it was to go back in time, safeguard the mother of John fucking Connor. Meet the legend."

The Terminator kept staring at him.

"Now, of course, I'm not that perturbed at not having the chance to take on a T-eight-hundred and win. And hey, this other Terminator wasn't in the mission briefing either. But, well, what I'm trying to say is-"

"You appear distressed."

"No shit," Kyle said, meeting the gaze of the freak for the first time. "You've been living amongst humans for ten years and-"

"Correction. Nine years, one month, twenty-one days-"

"Oh shut up."

Kyle looked over the nightscape of Los Angeles. A Los Angeles that was still standing, and hadn't been reduced to a mausoleum. He hadn't even really thought about this before stepping through the time-displacement sphere. He'd never known what life was like before Judgement Day. He hadn't considered what the city would have actually looked like, or functioned. Or how human society had really functioned at all before being pushed to the brink.

Come to think of it, General Connor must have known that too.

Well, what John Connor thought no longer applied, he reflected bitterly. Because right now, his mission of "protect Sarah Connor" seemed like a moot point. On one hand, she already had a protector – a T-800. An old looking T-800 of mode-101 type, but a fully functioning one all the same, no different from any of the metalheads he'd wasted over the years. And on the other, he had to deal with something else. A Terminator made out of liquid metal that even the T-800 standing beside him had barely managed to hold off. And between both of those freaks was Sarah Connor. The Sarah Connor. Mother of John Connor, the woman whose photo he'd kept on hand for-"

"Your temperature is rising."

He looked at the freak. "What?"

"Rush of blood to the skin. Elevated heart rate. Indications of vasocongestion."

"The hell?"

"Vaosocongestion. Swelling of body tissue due to increased blood flow. Typical causes include menstruation, sexual arousal-"

"Okay," said Kyle, getting to his feet. "That's enough."

"Strong emotions, illnesses…"

"I said that's enough!"

The Terminator stopped talking. For a moment, Kyle dared to hope that it had followed its orders. Terminators could mimic humans in many ways, but their social skills were terrible, and he figured the only way the Terminator would have actually stopped talking was if it was obliged to follow his orders. After all, he'd told it to shut up before.

"Hey boys."

But no, of course not. At least this time, he figured that the only reason it had stopped talking was because Sarah Connor had exited from the back of the van she'd rescued him in. Like a soldier, the killing machine stood still, as if to attention. As if it were human.

"You alright Reese?"

Reese. Not Kyle. But I mean, of course it wouldn't be Kyle. And…wait, do I call her Sarah? Miss Connor? That's what people did for unmarried women back then? Or right now, damn, gotta get my frame of reference right and-

"Reese!"

He shot to attention. "No ma'am. Nothing's wrong, ma'am."

She raised an eyebrow. Kyle hoped simultaneously that the Terminator wouldn't give another diagnosis of his condition. Because right now that whole vaosocon-whatever thing was definitely occurring.

"Right," she said. "At ease then."

Definitely her son's mother. Huh.

He shooed the feelings away. Or tried to at least. Because as Sarah…no, Miss Connor, began laying out their plans to get out of Los Angeles, he realized that "Miss Connor" was all he could ever hope to call her right now. On one hand, she had her knight. A killing machine programmed to serve her. Defending her from a knight even more deadly that he had no idea how to kill. Even the T-800 that had been sent to 1984, the one he'd been sent in pursuit of, had apparently been destroyed within minutes.

"You listening Reese?"

He nodded and looked at the map. A map that showed Los Angeles as it once…no, now, existed. A map that was as alien to him as everything else the Los Angeles of 1984 featured.

Time travel, Reese reflected, listening as Miss Connor outlined the plan. It did weird things to a man.

Dashing hopes that never should have existed was one of them.

A/N

Am I a shallow person for watching the trailer for Genesys and thinking "damn, Reese got cockblocked?"

Well, whatever. I will say that while the title is still silly, the trailer does hold some promise. It's a rare case of the Model 101 Terminator to actually have reason to be in the film (as opposed to the contrivance used in Rise of the Machines) and hey, we get a T-1000 too. And with the setting allowing for AR material by its very nature, it does seem to provide a potentially interesting twist/point of divergence from the events of the first two films.

Time will tell I guess.