A/N: Love this fandom, hate that it was cancelled.

"The Demon Hand" is a masterpiece of an episode, and Derek during the epilogue is heartbreaking. These are some observations of mine, transformed into prose. Enjoy and feedback and well appreciated.

I don't own the Terminator franchine or anything belonging to it. Made for fun, not profit.

He's crying and the tears are burning him. He stands in the shadows, behind the door, and he prays to some kind of god that she doesn't see him there. But why would she? Maybe she always knows.

Under his shirt Derek bleeds, a bullet wound. Metal in flesh, not flesh on metal like her.

But he watches her and she's so human and it makes him sick, because what will they become? What will any of them become?

It's beautiful, dangerous and he can't look away. The way her body moves, fluid like water passing through rocks in a stream.

She places her feet, shuffles and prances on the tops of her toes and it's easy to forget there's metal in there, everywhere.

Derek thinks of his own body, broken and so fragile, able to be cut down with a simple slice of a knife. His blood is drained, face a mask white as a ghost and he thinks it shouldn't be like that. He should be the machine, bullets ricocheting off his skin—maybe then he'd be able to sleep.

He thinks of killing her then, but knows he'd be dead before he could finish thinking it. He'd never be that close, close enough to open her skull and pull everything out. But if he could he'd do it, he would kill her if he had the chance.

Her body twists impossibly in pirouettes, long fingers soft as they fold together. Cameron dances while Derek cries, the machine and the human painted together in shadows as the day wanes.

He should take a shotgun to her head but he can't bring himself to move—her beauty is flawless, her grace learned and the most dangerous thing of all.

So Derek watches as the dance finishes, and in silence he waits for the machine to start the next one.