Author's Note: So this didn't come out how I wanted it to at all. And might be a little confusing. So just to clarify, the parts in the basement aren't happening at the same time as the parts with Jesse or John and Cameron. Time travel. It scrambles the brains.

Note: This is a repost of a fic originally published 1.17.09, transferred from a previous account.

Iscariot

The darkness is thick and absolute and he blinks rapidly, his heart pounding in his throat as he tries to discern something – anything – about where the fuck he is. He sucks in a breath, forcing his tense, twitchy body to be still, quiet, alert.

The music is louder here, the same song over and over for days. Something classical, he guesses, all tinkling piano and meandering, practically indiscernible melody.

"Who are you?"

His right hand twitches, reaching for a weapon that isn't there.

"Is someone there?"

Female. Familiar, some part of his mind asserts. He remains silent, wary of the machines' aptitude for deception.

"Please. If there's someone there, say something. Please, I don't wanna be alone, please..."

There's a sob and it sounds so damn real and he's never heard of a machine that could cry.

"Answer me!"

He licks the chapped skin of his lips, his voice dry and hoarse. He's heard of terminators with the ability to mimic the voices of humans they came into contact with, but her wrists were unmarred; she's never been taken. And no machine could imitate that sound, he thinks, all spitfire and demanding. "Allison?"

She thinks it should be a brunette; after all, Connor's preferences are obvious. Jesse Flores has never actually met, or even seen the metal bitch that calls herself Cameron Phillips, but she finds a nineteen year old girl and thinks she's perfect. Cool and aloof. Big eyes and a fighter. Fiercely loyal to the resistance.

But then the machines attack and Sean is lost to their cause and it seems like everything is on the verge of ruin.

She passes one of Connor's tin men and thinks of Derek. It's just one more thing the machines have taken away from her.

It seems impossible, but she hates them more now.

One hundred and twenty seconds to reboot. She feels real to the touch and he wonders what she looks like underneath, the metal bits and pieces that hide under the skin and hair. He wonders if he would recognize her.

I saw everything, she tells him. She doesn't elaborate and he doesn't ask.

It's just another one of her secrets. He watches her watching him and thinks that he has a few of his own.

Derek finds her huddled in a corner, shivering. Rigid and frightened, she lashes out when he reaches for her. His jaw aches but even the best of her blows aren't enough to do much more than bruise. She's weak and thin but he's just relieved that her first punch didn't go through his gut. No coltan pistons and servos powering these arms. Probably.

"Allison." He finds her shoulders in the dark and grips them tightly, too tightly. "Allie, it's Derek."

He can't really see her in this damned darkness, but he can feel the brush of her long hair against his skin, hear her shallow, uneven breathing over the piano.

"Why do you keep calling me that?"

He jerks back. It's her. He knows that. It's Allison, one of only two people he knows that still remembers how to smile and laugh with ease. Allison...and yet, not.

"You don't remember?" he hears himself asking hoarsely.

He's dizzy and it doesn't make any fucking sense; why would they keep her here? Why would they bring him and the others here? Why would they take her? The answer should have been obvious. As with everything, it always came back to one man. One son of a bitch who probably didn't even know she was missing.

That, he admitted to himself, was a lie. Connor probably didn't know – or care – that Derek Reese was missing. Allison Young was different.

"Connor?"

He doesn't say anything. She touches his face, her fingers sliding over rough cheeks and cracked lips as if they can see what's hidden from her eyes in the blackness.

"You know me. Allison. Help me remember."

There's the rattle of what sounds like metal chains and her smooth cheek presses against his and he can feel her breath on his skin. Her lips are warm against his earlobe and he can't stop the shiver that runs through his body. He must be dreaming, delusional and still lying on that wooden floor, driven mad by the music that's still playing rippling notes down his spine. This is insane.

"Derek."

He feels the slightest tug on his wrist and in a single horrifying, sickening moment the haze clears, the illusion fades and he knows.

She – it – knows too. Eyes burn blue in the dark. "My mistake."

There's the bite of a needle and then nothing.

None of the guards posted along the winding path to John Connor's personal quarters make any attempt to stop her as she strides past them. The heavy locks turn with minimal complaint, the thick door opening just enough for her to slip through before it shuts again. In five years, no one else has stepped inside these rooms.

"The south satellite camp was attacked yesterday."

He tears his attention away from the pages of diagrams and notes that cover every wall in thick rustling layers. The rusty metal frame of his cot creaks ominously as he sits on it, but he pays no attention; if there was any danger of structural collapse, she would have warned him. Her devotion to his safety is absolute and somewhere along the way, he's laid that at her feet too.

"And?"

"Allison Young has been reported missing."

"So they took her anyway."

"Yes." Her fingers brush against the temples of his head, as if she can soothe away the ache that lingers there with simple touch. She knows she has no anaesthetic capabilities embedded in her systems, even if he sometimes tells her otherwise. At any rate, her proximity has a measurably positive effect on him, though whether this reaction is limited to herself is unverifiable. John is reclusive, solitary, a stranger to everyone but herself. She does not approve, but says nothing.

Her optical sensors sweep over the latest pages, committing the changes to memory. This is John's war, one fought over the twisting, unpredictable strands of time. It consumes him, leaving him blind to the war they are fighting here, now. He leaves that in her hands. His subordinates are displeased and rebellious but he is deaf in soundproofed rooms and she says nothing.

The familiar directive reasserts itself, forcing her to override it's blinking insistence. It is a reminder of what she is, what she will always be. She is all he has, the only one he will trust, even if he shouldn't.

"Will it be the same? If we don't, if we weren't..." He closes his eyes, trying to keep his tattered history straight, no longer entirely sure of what he's actually lived. "Cameron."

She brushes a kiss to the corner of his mouth, right where she can feel the muscle twitch under her lips and she knows he won't ask again.

Sarah is screaming and Cameron is pleading and there are too many voices tugging him one way and then another.

She isn't fighting back, isn't trying to free herself with anything but words and desperation that seems all wrong on those features.

His fingers touch her exposed chip and he can feel the hum of electricity, of life there, tingling.

She says I love you and he rips her heart from her head.

Later, when they watch him, waiting to see John Connor emerge from the wreck of fire and blood and soot, they remind him that she can lie. Important things. Yes, important things.

They forget that he can lie too.

Consciousness returns slowly, feeling seeping back into his muscles. The pounding in his head intensifies as he opens his eyes, squinting against the bright light. He's sitting on something hard and cold, he thinks sluggishly, strapped down by...something. Doesn't really matter what. He's not going anywhere.

"Derek Reese."

She's perched on the edge of an enormous wooden table, dressed exactly the way she was the last time he saw her. Except for her feet. Those are bare and impossibly clean.

It's like looking through a magic glass, through some kind of portal into another time. Allison with perfect hair and skin. Allison with lips too pink and eyes too bright. Allison if Judgment Day had never happened.

Everything she isn't.

"Derek Reese."

He forces himself to meet her eyes.

"Tell me about Allison Young."

"Fuck you." His head snaps to the right, colliding with the hard back of the chair. It's a far cry from the feeble blows that he now knows to be playacting, an illusion, a deception. One he was drawn into far too easily.

She – this gross facsimile of a woman – slides into his lap, impossibly strong fingers wrapping around his neck, curling around his jaw, forcing him to look up at her. It. His skin crawls in revulsion even as he relishes the feeling. Because these curves pressed against him, these fingers stroking the skin of his throat, these lips curving into a slow smile...these are Allison's. Stolen by a machine, and neither one of them can lay claim.

She puts her lips on his; clenched fists and taut muscles strain against leather restraints and a sob catches in his chest. "Tell me about Allison Young."

Blonde and blue-eyed. A sewer rat that's never seen anything else. Dirty and unkempt. Pretty enough, under the grimy smudges. Jesse doesn't like the choice.

She's weak, she argues. She'll snap and break and then everything will be for nothing.

(She wants to scream her frustration but sound carries in the tunnels and it's a secret because treason is still treason even when you're trying to save the king.)

But it isn't her decision because they give her the star anyway. It isn't her decision, but she's the one who has to handle this mouse of a girl here in the past and she puts more force into the backhand than she probably should.

Because Derek isn't Derek and her family is raising her six year old self in Perth and she's alone here in this beautiful world that's already crumbling to ash.

So when she runs when she wants to cry and she sunbathes when she wants to forget. And at night, when she slips between linen sheets and pulls the duvet around her, she dreams of wafer-thin mattresses on creaky cots, marmite on toast, and burning the tin bitch.

She's quirky and bright eyed. Strange and alone. Smiles too much. Perky. He's never seen perky before.

She doesn't fit, this girl, all curves and waves against the hard edges and spikes of his life. He'll probably break her, but he doesn't really care because what's one more person, right?

Sometimes there's guilt. When Sarah frowns and Cameron is something other than a stone wall.

Girls are complicated.

He thinks that if he wasn't John Connor and if his life wasn't such a convoluted mess, Riley would have been his type. Maybe.

It doesn't really matter because his future's going to catch up with him eventually and the Cameron he brought back isn't the Cameron she was before and that stings more than he'd really like to think about and Riley Dawson feels like freedom.

His head is swimming and his eyes can't seem to focus and there's so much fucking pain he can't think, he can't think and she's asking so many questions and touching him with Allison fingers and Allison hair and lips and eyes and voice and the words are slipping out in screams and whimpers even as he clenches his jaw tight.

Don't you want to play with me?

There is no blood because that would be messy and she spills not a drop because waste not, want not and he's teaching her to be Allison and she doesn't like knives.

There are needles and gentle caresses, raining kisses to nurture the pain she plants beneath his skin.

He won't remember, she promises, won't remember a thing. Tell me about Allison. Tell me about John Connor.

She laughs at his infatuation, smiles when he tries not to beg and wipes his tears away.

She plays the piano with his muscles for keys, dancing fingertips in perfect time with the endless music. It's Chopin, she tells him, a nocturne. Do you feel it?

He doesn't know what that means so she tells him about the night sky and stars. Wind in your fingers and grass between your toes. The scent of the cool velvety darkness and the earth beneath your feet telling you that you are not alone in your solitude. It's quiet, she says, quiet quiet quiet. Safe, and the word wraps around him like a talisman.

Safe, she says lovingly and he can't figure out if she's the snake or the apple. All he knows is that he's damned. Tell me your secrets.

She spends hours poring over the code, analyzing and re-analyzing, searching for the solution, the answer that will keep him safe. He doesn't think there is one, that she should just accept it as one of those things they seem to be unable to change. Besides, I like you better damaged.

It isn't as small as she'd hoped and probably less sophisticated than the ones Skynet will produce, but it is sufficient. A wafer-thin trigger that fits perfectly around the base of the chip. She rolls the tiny explosive between her fingers, running scenarios and probability and variances she already knows. It's a waste of processing power, but she doesn't stop.

[and is it suicide or murder to strap an incendiary device to the brain of someone who isn't you but will be as soon as you rip another hole in the proverbial fabric of time?]

She's still undecided when she lies next to him, when his voice seems to be lost somewhere between her auditory sensors and her higher functions. It's slowing her down and he notices her distraction. Her cheek presses into the thin pillow and she looks up at him, the rhythms of this ritual automatic for both of them.

This is what she will be destroying.

"We do. We will."

Her hand slips into her pocket. Selfishness or self-preservation for his sake...the motives are irrelevant. It shatters easily between her fingers.

She doesn't tell John.

It takes twenty years after Judgment Day to be proven right. The unrest and mistrust is there, simmering, waiting. He finds the others, gathers them.

She has to be stopped. He has to be saved.

Because she's drawing betrayal from the lips of Derek Reese to the sound of Chopin. She's murdering Allison Young and desecrating the body. She's stealing John Connor and corrupting their hope.

He watches from the shadows. The nervous technician bullied and bribed. The crackling blue light.

She has to be stopped. He has to be saved. His nephew, Kyle's son. The hero of the whole damn human race.

Blink, and they're gone.

Going downtime isn't an escape because when he stumbles across Sarah Connor he finds her there too. He's spitting blood and venom and she – it, he tells himself for the hundredth time – is walking around next to John Connor as if she isn't the devil. They call it Cameron.

Allison doesn't mean anything to anyone here. Not for the first time, he wonders if Connor's chest is as hollow and empty as any of his tin pets or if he's just a cruel bastard for sending him here. Living with her murderer who doesn't even remember. Scrubbed, wiped clean of her mind. Reprogrammed at the orders of the man who should have wanted to see her scrapped more than anyone else.

This is hell and she is his punishment.

He watches John with it – her. Cameron. Allison. – and it doesn't matter that this teenage boy isn't the John Connor, that no one knows what he did, who she was, who she will be. He waits. Watches.

It tastes like betrayal, bittersweet and heavy on his tongue and he doesn't know who it belongs to anymore.

"I know you."

"I know you too."

It doesn't really matter.

It doesn't really matter.