Epilogue, Part II – What John Kept from Cameron (a.k.a. The Reese Boys Really Know How to Fuck)

Once Cameron's time displacement was complete John Connor felt drained. Is it finally finished? Have I done everything for the past to create this future? It had to be. He was too exhausted to continue with the burden of maintaining the time line. The present still held up so the past had to be secure. Besides there was no one left to send back. At least no one he remembered. It was time to go back to Crystal Peak to three sons still angry that he had remarried so soon after their mother's death and a new wife whose last words had been to say she hated him.

He relied on Morris to keep him briefed. Morris had been one of his best men since before the war, but the man had never been a warrior. His strength was organization. An army travels on its stomach and Morris could organize those supple chains in his sleep. Physically, things were going well. They were actually growing significant amounts of food now rather than relying solely on scavenging. Within his cabinet, things were as stable as they could be. The breach with the Amazons appeared contained though not necessarily healed and Adam Reese deserved full credit for that.

John prepared to face his personal demons. "And my family?"

"One of Robert's friends died in the San Francisco campaign. He's foaming at the mouth to go fight," Morris said.

Robert was his oldest. "He's too young," John said.

"Other fourteen year olds are in combat," Morris reminded him.

That was true and it burned him to think about using children as soldiers, but sometimes there was no other way. He tried to be fair. He tried share all burdens equally with other survivors and accept no privileges of rank, but whenever the subject sending Robert into battle came up something else, primitive and tribal welled up inside him screaming; not my son, not yet. Robert had not defied him on that. But since John remarried everything between them had changed.

He asked about his younger sons. "Michael and Daniel?"

"Applying themselves to their lessons, doing the chores assigned to them, and accepting the fact that they have a stepmother with considerably less problems than before you left. Anastasia's good with them, John. They're bonding as a family," Morris replied.

Well, there was one thing he could be glad about. "And my wife?"

Morris's voice shifted from loyal administrative officer to old friend. "Anastasia's still angry. She is going to be angry for a long time, John. Cameron was her mother!"

. . . .

It wasn't that he hadn't loved Kate. She had been his lover, his best friend, and his second-in-command, but she was dead. Dead by only a few weeks when he first saw Cameron's daughter as an adult, but dead none the less. Anastasia was alive. And she wasn't a little girl anymore. She was the living image of his first love.

He had bribed an Amazon officer to leave her at Crystal Peak, so he could have her nearer and safer, so he could pretend to accidentally encounter her in a library or a hallway or visiting old Dr. Silberman. They would talk for hours. Anastasia had her mother's mannerism and some of her personality too. It was like being sixteen again only without the adolescent angst. Pure bliss, or at least the closest he had ever had. Anastasia was everything that he loved about Cameron except there wasn't a possibility of malfunctioning circuits or her being in love with his uncle.

He introduced her to his family as the Amazon daughter of brave Resistance fighters. His sons were still too young to trust with the full truth about their family origin. Her presence barely registered with Michael and Daniel. Robert stared goggle-eyed at her the entire evening and John realized how obvious, and probably humorous, his adolescent infatuation with her mother must have been.

She became a fixture at his table. The bright cadet turned into the General's mascot. And why not? For all their new faith, the Amazons educated their children about the Old World considerably better than many other survivors. Anastasia knew languages. She knew history. She knew the little cultural things that he hadn't picked up over the years. Before she died, Kate had always handled those things for him. Now Anastasia did.

And it felt good to have someone to talk to about things other than supply problems and human wave attacks. Before she died, Kate had been his confidant. Now Anastasia was. He told her as much as he could about her parents without revealing any ultimate truths. She told him about her loneliness growing up without a mother or a father, about how much she loved her brother, and about how now that Adam had a family of his own the loneliness had come back burning her so hard even the strength of Amazon sisterhood didn't lessen the pain. Then the moment came when they didn't talk at all.

She had laughed at one of his jokes. Her nose crinkled up like her mother's. He leaned closer wondering if her eyes would be the same. Cameron's eyes were always confused in laughter as if she still didn't understand the purpose of humor. Anastasia's eyes were amber with specks of gold. Suddenly he was able to control his urge to stare at her because all he wanted in the world was to kiss her.

He had loved Kate. That flashed through his brain for a millisecond before everything melted in nuclear fire. What he felt for Anastasia went beyond love. Maybe this was what Cameron and Derek felt for each other. Cameron had only rarely described her feelings for his uncle as love. More often, she had simply said he completes my programming. Anastasia completed him in a way no other human did. It was the way his uncle had completed Cameron that had forced her to betray her own creators and everything she was to be reunited with Derek.

They had fallen back onto the couch. Anastasia's hands went to his chest, but not as barriers, but as explorers. He welcomed the invasion shifting most of his weight onto his knees to give her better access. Her fingers were the sweetest touch he had experienced. Kate had been the passion of young love and his desperation to cling to anything that helped maintain his humanity. Anastasia was being touched by an angel and transcending all the pain rather than just being able to endure it. He gazed into her eyes. It was every memory, he ever had of her mother's eyes only this time the love was for him!

He felt her tremble. Suddenly, he grew painfully conscious of the differences between their ages. Anastasia never mentioned a lover. Maybe she thought her personal life was too or immature insignificant to discuss? That was semi-wishful thinking. They had talked over the most intimate details of her life. There had been no fumbling with a radiation thin teenage Resistance boy to lessen the impact of what they were on the verge of doing. He was her hero. But he didn't want hero worship from her. Could she love him as just as man? Maybe if he could steal them enough time together. All her parents had, all his parents had were scraps of time stolen from the machines. It was the only way people could love now, but that didn't change the fact that he was twice her age. He stroked her satin check. "We shouldn't rush."

Mass confusion reigned behind her eyes. He kissed her. Her lips became magnets dragging him closer to her. Then the door flew open and Morris and his sons were standing in front of them. Immediately, he got off her and immediately she ran out, red-faced, passed an enraged Robert. Daniel and Michael grimaced and walked away. At their ages, evidence that their father might have a sex life was merely gross, not traumatic. John met the fury in Robert's eyes until the boy stalked off. Morris was calm, but stern. "John, this has to stop. She's an Amazon. We can't afford a rift with them."

The next time he saw Anastasia, she brought two Amazon officers with her. The four of them went into his office. She spoke first, but wouldn't look him in the eye. "General Connor, please, do not be offended that I asked my Aunties to stand with me as I speak."

He wondered how much of what had happened had been discussed among the Amazons. Right now, he was so close that he could take her in his arms if he wanted to, but her aunties would probably beat him senseless. "I'm not offended. It is the Amazon way."

She nodded, but still didn't look up. "I will always treasure memories of the time I spent with your family. However last night a barrier was crossed that should have never have been breached. It was a mistake . . ."

"It wasn't your mistake. I kissed you first."

She blushed. Her mother had certainly never done that!

"It was a line that should never had been crossed. Though it causes me much grief, it is necessary for the greater good to end our friendship."

John nodded. "I agree."

She relaxed, so he crossed the final few inches between them. Her chaperones went on alert, but did not make a move in his direction. He tilted her head up until she had to meet his gaze. "Miss Reese, will you marry me?"

She stared at him speechless. Behind her the two Amazon officers exchanged cryptic glances. He wondered what they had expected he would do. His focus shifted back to Anastasia. Her eyes were wet. Was she happy? Or was she trying to think about how to reject him diplomatically?

"Say that again," she whispered.

She wouldn't ask that if she planned on rejecting him. He took the ring out of his pocket. It wasn't Kate's ring. That would go to Robert. This one he had made last night. "Jewelry has only sentimental value now, but in the world that was, this would have been more than most people earned in a year."

Tears lined her eyes. She seemed lit by some inner fire like some mystical creature gracing his life. He sank down on one knee the way it was done in great romantic stories and repeated the proposal slowly to give emphasis to each word. "Miss Reese, will you marry me?"

She grabbed his hand pulling him from the floor. "Yes! Yes! I will marry you!"

By all standards of the world they lived in, it had been a celebrity wedding. He was John Connor. She was an Amazon by birth, goddaughter of the order's founding mother. The marriage certainly symbolized an alliance of more than two people and it was certainly the most elaborate ceremony of any kind ever held at Crystal Peak. They made him a new uniform that would become the "dress" uniform of the Resistance. Anastasia had been radiant in white silk and pearls from one of the bunker's old storage rooms; not a woman, but an angel, and certainly not a teenager only a few years older than his eldest son. There had been a bridal bouquet of orange blossoms and silk flowers and a cake unlike anything the younger Resistance fighters had seen before that brought tears to the eyes of more people than the bride. And he tried not to think about three oranges and a bare, white room in his Forward Command Post.

That night after they consummated the marriage, she asked him if it had been different with her than when he had been with his first wife. He honestly told her it was. She had been curious and asked him how. Over and over, she asked him until in desperation or maybe it was exhaustion, he really had forgotten just how much energy eighteen year-olds had for sex, he blurted out what he had never intended to verbalize. "How is it different? I love you more!"

It shut her up and made her radiantly happy. After that they had both been so incredibly happy that he couldn't remember a time in his life that had been better. They were making progress against the machines and he had the love of his life at his side. Then, Acevada showed up.

In all the years, he had known her; Acevada's face had been carved in stone. Suddenly, her expression twisted into something reptilian. Her one eye burned like an HK scanner. "If you don't tell her everything, I will."

"Tell me what?" Anastasia had demanded.

They had both been too absorbed with anger and fear to notice she had heard their conversation. And for one damnable moment he had froze unable to think of the right thing to say.

Acevada leapt into his weak point. "That he loved your mother!"

"So did you. You were sisters together." Anastasia said.

She had no comprehension of the expanse that stood before her. But who could? He had lain awake for years trying to unravel the circles and still there were no answers.

"Not like that. He used to follow your mother around like a dog after meat. Hell, if I hadn't been there when your father died I could almost imagine John had something to do with it."

Holding back the truth had never burned so hard. "I loved Derek Reese like a brother!"

"The first murder was when Cain slew his brother."

If Anastasia hadn't been there his rage might have killed Acevada at that moment. At least, Anastasia didn't act as if she even considered it possible that he had anything to do with the heroic death of her father. But he could see the wheels turning behind her eyes and knew he had to act fast. He grabbed her hands and led her away from Acevada. They sat down together and slowly, it took hours, he told her everything, every last detail. Once he started talking about the past he couldn't stop. He had held so many secrets for so long once he loosened the pressure everything poured out. She didn't look as shocked as he would have expected when he revealed the ultimate. I'll send your parents back in time to fight the machines and that's when you'll be conceived. Indeed, she seemed to accept it, unquestioning, as part of the Amazon's Great Cycle.

Then suddenly, fatally, her expression changed. Her face was illuminated with the same brightness as when he had asked her to marry him. "My mother is alive? Right now! She's alive?"

"Major Acevada has contact with Cameron at Alpha," he admitted.

"Then I could see her! The next time you go to Alpha if I went with you, I would be able to see my mother! And my father!" Her voice reached its highest octave. "I've always wanted to meet my father! John! And Adam, we have to bring Adam with us!"

He had tried to calm her down. "It's too dangerous."

"You travel to Alpha all the time!" She objected.

"Out of military necessity. But you can't be at the same place as them. Your parents, Adam and you, all of you look too much alike. It'll be obvious you're related, closely related. That's too much dangerous information in too many heads."

"That's silly!" she protested. "I want to see my mother, John!"

He tried to explain. "You can't. It's too dangerous. I can't take any more chances with the timeline."

Her expression forced him to recall the time when Cameron's chip had been damaged.

"Can't or won't? Are you afraid of something, John?"

He had tried to deny it, but suspicion had already been planted in her mind.

"You are afraid of something!" Her eyes resembled a Terminator's at that moment. "Are you afraid you won't be able to tell the difference between us? I always wondered why you kept the lights so dim in our bedroom. Is it to enhance the fantasy that you're with her?"

"Don't be ridiculous!" I keep the lights dim, so all the scars on my body won't repulse you.

She had continued to stare at him coldly. "Am I? You loved her, but couldn't get her to love you. And I have her face."

Since then a civil word hadn't passed between them. She had a scream that could shatter glass and she could be very creative with insults too, something that had been completely beyond Cameron's artificial brain. Luckily so far the arguments had been confined to their quarters. Rumors were flying, but most people seemed to consider the situation funny. John Connor and his new wife were fighting. As long as the details stayed private, the rumors might even be to his advantage. It made them seem more ordinary. Of course, he had left orders that in his absence the new Mrs. Connor was not to leave Crystal Peak. At least, so far it appeared those orders had been obeyed.

At Crystal Peak, Robert was waiting for him. He wore a uniform without insignia, which meant he hadn't yet found a commander desperate or crazy enough to take him as a foot soldier.

"We will talk about this later," John said.

"Curtis Brandt is dead."

John nodded. "I know he was your friend, but everyone has lost friends."

Robert glared at him. Sometimes John regretted that he had not dealt more openly with Robert's crush on Anastasia at the time he remarried. Other times he was afraid that he hadn't because it would have forced him to confront how much closer Robert was to Anastasia's age than him.

"Anastasia stays in your room all the time. She's took all the furniture out and replaced it with mats and a practice dummy. The living room is an obstacle course now. And she's always playing music. Classical music. She says it's good for us." Robert said.

"It is," John replied.

"Yeah, well I moved into a training barracks," Robert announced.

There were worse places he could be. Robert was smart. He had an actual education. His instructors could probably convince him it was more important to continue that education than risk his life immediately in combat. John glanced at his watch. "Then I suggest you not be late for roll call."

. . . . .

Robert was right about the living room. It was too crowded. He remembered how he and Anastasia had argued over their bedroom furniture before they got married. His quarters at Crystal Peak had been designed to house the President of the United States and the antiques contained within were probably the best furniture left in the entire world. But she didn't want to sleep with him in the bed he had shared with his first wife. In the world that had been, she would have been right, so he conceded and they had traded furniture with Morris and Sheryl. He tried not to imagine the rumors it might have spawned. Hell, most people don't have an actual bed to sleep in, let alone a bedroom with matching furniture. Who is Connor's new woman to make such a fuss? If that was the worst criticism his people had for him, he would live with it.

She had put most of the things he had given her in the living room. Clothes were scattered everywhere. Anastasia had plenty of clothes other than her uniforms. They were the impractical flimsy shadows of the world that once was that women at Crystal Peak made and sometimes wore. Decorations from their bedroom, mostly wedding gifts, things he never imagined people needed or could use, had been tossed out also. They would sort it out later. At least nothing appeared broken. He picked up the trinket chest carved by a man who would have probably been a great artist in the world before Judgment Day. When he traveled from base to base people pressed tokens into his hands, baubles that had been scourged or saved from the nuclear fire. Sometimes it was about gratitude and sometimes it was about giving him good luck. In the past, he took those items back to Crystal Peak and gave them to Anastasia, along with whatever little bits of the Old World he found from the scav vendors. Her relic collection had been one of her greatest joys. He scooped up the pile of jewelry dumped on the floor and placed it back in the chest. He probably should have spent more time talking to Anastasia after they were married than just handing her things confident that since no other man on earth could give her this kind of lifestyle, he was safe. Before he left for Foxtrot, she had accused him of trying to buy her. Oh yeah, she thought of things that had never occurred to Cameron's programming. He picked the box up and walked into his bedroom.

Inside it was nearly as bad as Robert had said. She had left a footlocker, mats and a practice dummy. Anastasia noticed his appearance and delivered a smashing kick to the dummy's groin region.

"I see you're still upset," John said.

She didn't look up when she replied. "Just training. I'm going to rejoin my unit."

John put the box down. He noticed her uniforms and some gear in one corner. She hadn't thrown those things out. "Not possible. I can't risk putting you in combat."

She glared at him. "Why, because I'm your wife? We can undo that easy enough."

"You are too valuable for me to put you in a situation where you could be captured," he explained.

"Valuable! As what your favorite fuck toy? I don't think even Skynet's most flawed defense program would design a strategy like that." Fire rose in her eyes. "How could I have been so stupid? I was so thrilled. The Great John Connor loved me! How could I have been so naïve. You're a bastard!"

He remained calm. "Some of our parents weren't lucky enough to marry before they died."

She came closer. Her fury was barely contained. "How will you explain the past? Will history know you sent your father back in time in order for you to be conceived?"

"Stop it. You're angry and you'll say something we'll both regret," John said.

"You don't have regrets, John. You just move all our lives around on a giant chessboard." Her eyes blazed the closest to a Terminator's fire flesh could reach. "Will you tell everyone your greatest intelligence triumph was because a Terminator fell in love with your uncle? Are you going tell the future that the human race survived because the Reese boys really know how to fuck?" She slapped him. Luckily she was too angry to remember proper Amazon hand-to-hand combat techniques. She hit him with her open hand again and then again. "I hate you! I hate you!"

For a few minutes, he took it silence. Then he grabbed her wrists. She was young and Amazon trained, but that was no match for decades of living on the edge and fighting the machines. Oh, but she was still very angry. Once he was sure she wouldn't attack him again, he should have let her go, but he had been so long without her that even holding her in anger felt good. He wanted to stop the hateful words coming from her mouth and she was too inexperienced in relationships to know how close passion and anger lay on the intensity scale, so he kissed her. For a moment he hoped, or maybe he prayed, that sex would be enough to stop the fighting for awhile. He knew she had been celibate since they started fighting. No man at Crystal Peak would ever touch John Connor's wife. Her lips were molten steel, but she didn't bite him and for a while with that heat pouring through them he didn't worry. But he had to stop for air. Anastasia shoved him away and went back to pounding on her practice dummy. Sex wasn't going to be enough. He would have to talk about feelings. Going against a pack of T-888s was easier.

"I'll send some men in to help you move furniture. You can keep some of the mats and the dummy where they are, but I want my bed back in this room by tonight."

She threw something at him. He caught it. Her wedding rings. He laid them on the chest. "This changes nothing. You're my wife. You know too many secrets which means you're too valuable to go into combat, so grow up."

"Why can't I have a baby?"

He should have expected a kitchen sink battle in which everything they had ever fought over would get thrown in. He wondered if they would be back to arguing over the furniture before dinner. "It's too dangerous."

"We have the best hospital facilities left in the world here!"

He fought to keep the bitterness out of his voice. "And still your mother died here." And my Uncle Derek, he just stopped living after that. I lost everyone when you were born. Everyone until you came back. He met her gaze. Tears were in the edges of her eyes, but anger still clouded her face. Years of battle had taught him when to retreat and when to stay in the fight. He went to the door. If she cried alone, at least they both kept some of their dignity.

. . . . .

Anastasia Reese Connor grew up the daughter of a dead Amazon, nursed by many aunties, and raised in the communal children's room, but even then she knew there was something different about her and Adam. Far too many adults seemed interested in them. There was always another medical exam or another series of questions, not like school test questions, questions about how they thought and felt. She remembered the silver-haired man who everyone said had a Nobel Prize. He called them fascinating and spent hours looking at their blood and cells under his microscope. Her favorite had been Dr. Silberman. When they visited his place he gave them fun snacks and told them stories about their parents: wonderful stories about heroism and defying the machines. Her mother was as much a hero as John Connor in Dr. Silberman's eyes. What she hated most was when the scientists talked amongst themselves as if she and Adam were too stupid to understand anything.

"The girl has the same genetic makeup as the mother. I think they may have been bioengineering the mother's body was to be a cloning machine."

"Incredible. They'll never be children like them again."

"If we're lucky."

For years Adam and she had lived with the voices behind their backs. But they had friends among the other Amazon children. The arms of many aunties held them in place of the mysterious parents that were already dead. It was as much happiness in life as anyone had in the world devastated by the machines until Adam became a man. He married Mercedes who had been her best friend since childhood. Adam said it wouldn't change the bond between them, but it did. How couldn't it? And for a while the whispers around them became a symphony. Then Derek Thomas was born. It seemed like all the scientists in the Resistance relaxed at once. Everyone seemed more happy than usual that her nephew had his father's hair and his mother's eyes. She had never felt more alone.

Her Amazon sisters said take a lover, but it wasn't that easy. At least, not for her. Every man she encountered seemed either too old or too mentally limited. Dr. Silberman had shown her letters her father had written to her mother, rare, priceless artifacts that he had managed to save. They had been so beautiful, so filled with the world that once had been. From birth she had heard the stories that the Amazons told among themselves. Your mother set all of Skynet to burn for love of your father. One day her legend will be known throughout the world. And later when she was old enough to be initiated, her godmother, Major Acevada, told her even more wondrous things about her parents. By then there were rumors of reprogrammed machines. Using terminators to kill terminators, it seemed like a miracle of human science. She only felt strange for a few moments when her godmother said her mother had been a machine. Considering the oddities of her childhood, it made sense that there was something highly unusual about her and her brother's births. Then Acevada told her the most incredible part. Your mother wasn't reprogrammed by Connor. She fell in love with your father and changed sides. She wanted love like that, love that could transcend the pain around her, love that could alter the course of history, and her curiosity grew even stronger.

Acevada had some photos saved from the nuclear fire and she pondered them for hours. Most photographs she had seen of Derek Reese showed a hardened Resistance soldier, handsome, but not unusual for his kind. But there was one photograph unlike anything she could imagine outside of fairy tales. He was standing with her mother. Their clothes were different, fancy, and impractical. There were flowers in the background and she thought possibly the fuzzy shape on the edge of the photograph was Dr. Silberman. In the photograph Derek tipped her mother's chin upward with the edge of his hand while his eyes gazed down like homing beacons at her. Sometimes she imagined she could feel the heat in his eyes when she stared at that picture. Would a man ever stare at her with such desperate, but tender passion? Derek's lips were open. She wondered what he was saying something to her mother until she showed the photograph to Mercedes.

"He's saying he loves her," Mercedes explained.

"How do you know?"

"That's how your brother looks when he says it."

At Crystal Peak, she encountered John Connor. Of course, she had a crush on him. What young woman born in the world after Judgment Day didn't? She never dreamed he would even know her name. Then the miracle happened. Or at least, she thought it had. John Connor was interested in her! And not just for a night. She knew she couldn't just step into the place of the late Kate Connor, second-in-command of the Resistance, and the ghost of Sarah Connor was a formidable mother-in-law to have. But when John said he loved her, and the force with which he said it, made her feel as if she might actually have more than an incidental role in his life. Except once they were married John didn't talk to her as often as he did before and he seemed to want keep her hidden.

She knew there were members of his council that didn't like her. They objected to her age and that she was an Amazons. She had been prepared for that and prepared to do whatever it took to convince them that she was an adult and was loyal to John and there wasn't some sinister Amazon intrigue to drive the world toward a matriarchy. Then, she learned to whole truth, the full truth, or at least as much of it as she could get at it, and learned the hatred ran much deeper than that. Plenty of them remembered Cameron. They hadn't liked the influence her mother had on John and she was the living image of the Metal, not to be trusted. But how could she prove her loyalty if John wouldn't let her do anything?

. . . . . .

Anastasia didn't come out of their room that night. "She's upset," John explained.

"She's eighteen," Morris replied.

Morris had never approved of his solution to the Anastasia problem. Of all his advisors, Morris had also been the only one to use the words mid-life crisis to his face.

Sheryl ignored the argument that hung in the air. "You should let her have baby, John. Since she can't be in combat, if she has a child, she would still be fighting the machines."

"And if she has a daughter that's an identical duplicate of her, how do I explain that?"

Sheryl wasn't impressed by his concerns. Since watching Russian gangsters torture her mother to death as a teenager, nothing, not even Judgment Day, scared her. "A lot of girls look like their mothers. She won't be identical to Anastasia, she'll be nearly two decades younger. If Anastasia has a boy, there's nothing to explain at all. Adam wasn't a genetic duplicate of Derek."

That was true, but there were other risks. They didn't have the technology to find out exactly what the machines had done in creating Cameron's biological components. And childbirth itself was a risk. It had brought the septicemia that had killed one of Skynet's deadliest terminators.

"If you let her have a baby, it would solve a lot of problems," Cheryl continued. "Acevada stops worrying that Cameron's DNA will be lost. And there will be less division in your council if it looks like you married Anastasia because she was young enough to have healthy children rather than to maintain a connection to Cameron."

John's gaze went to Sheryl. "You've been talking to Acevada?"

She shrugged. "Someone has to. There are things she won't discus with Adam Reese."

"Because he's Anastasia'a brother?" John asked.

"Because he has a penis," she replied.

. . . . .

The bed was back when he returned to their room, but she hadn't moved anything including herself. Anastasia had sacked on a practice mat with a backpack for a pillow and a field coat as a blanket. Without saying a word, he scooped her up and dropped her unto her side of the bed. At least, she didn't fight him over that. Instead, her expression was blank, machine.

"Is this when you tell me I should be glad I have a bed to sleep in, most people don't?"

"No, this is when I tell you, you should be glad you have someone who loves you to sleep with, too many people don't."

He undid his uniform blouse. "Your mother never called me a bastard. She never said she hated me. She never tried to hurt me when she was in her right mind."

"You mean when her programming was functioning right."

"No, your mother was a person, like me, like you. She just had metal in her instead of bone." He pulled his T-shirt off. "I had a crush on her when I was a teenage boy, but I've always known that you weren't her, just like I'm not the boy I was at sixteen."

He took the ring out of his pocket. It seemed he did that lot with her. "Here, a gift from your brother."

She shot him a dirty look and proceeded to ignore him.

"It's your mother's wedding ring," he explained.

Her features came alive at that. She snatched up the ring. "At least, you let Adam meet her." Her voice was cemetery low. "Did you let him see our father?"

"He can do that by looking in the mirror," John replied.

"It's not the same. Oh, how would you know?"

"I sent my father to die with a pat on a back and a handshake!"

She didn't say anything for awhile. "I'm sorry." Her voice was even softer than before.

She was crying. He wasn't good at dealing with crying women, at least not when that woman was Anastasia. This wasn't a time to retreat. It was however time to calm down and lower his voice. "Apology accepted." He wiped her eyes. "Now you have to listen to me for awhile." He took a deep breath. "You were right. I probably could have found a way for you to meet your mother. But I was afraid of what that might do to the timeline. The Cameron Reese I knew said she only met Adam before her time displacement. I was wrong and I'm sorry. But I can't change what's happened."

Her soft hand touched his shoulder. He realized this was the first time he had undressed without turning out all the lights and she was seeing his scars for the first time. Across his chest bullet wounds ran into laser burns. "Skynet leaves rough calling cards."

She rolled her eyes. "John, I felt your scars the first time we made love. I've seen worse."

He should have realized that. He should have realized a lot of things. "I was wrong about something else. There's no reason we shouldn't have a child, if you want to try."

"Accept my apology?" he asked.

For the first time since he told her the truth about Cameron, she didn't look angry. Her hands went to his shoulders. "Apology accepted."

He climbed into bed. Holding her was the only home he had every known.

"If it's a boy, I hope he has your eyes," Anastasia said.

"I got my mother's eyes." That would be something, a boy with Sarah Connor's eyes and half his DNA from a terminator biosystem.

Anastasia shook her head. "You have Reese eyes."