A/N: A portion of my more serious writing interests. Anton Yelchin was beautiful as Reese. Disclaimer - I own nothing of the Terminator franchise; it belongs to James Cameron,
And though the movie was disheartening to say the least, I believe I must pay a homage to the father of the future.
Liberation Day; May 18, 2015
Los Angeles, California
At last, after years of searching, years of desolation where rays, if even the thinnest of nature, of hope shone through the darkness were vanquished with the fires that annihilated the human race. They have been restored. John Connor has given us a reason to fight back, to wage a full-scale war against Skynet and reclaim the meaning life used to hold for those who had lived to see the last days of the world play out. Some called it a swan song. Its last notes had been so beautiful, some said, that they would never forget it as long as they lived. The lush, green Earth beneath a pearly blue sky, and the rain was so clear that one could dash through its torrents and open their mouth to drink it in. No having to purify it, no having to clamor for shelter when a tumult of clouds heavy with acid rain would encroach upon the hazy brown horizon.
But it was bittersweet, for those who had lived before the ruins. Their swan song had destroyed everything they'd ever loved, their hopes, their dreams. Everything was gone. Everything was ash, and souls of the lost fluttered, white-washed and grey-tinged, within the winds of radiation that consumed all life. All hope. All we'd ever known.
Most of us had never witnessed such a perfect place and would listen solemnly....darkness stealing over our faces in watery shadows of jealousy as we'd listened to the stories of a world we'd never known. We merely lived in a shell of what the world used to be. Now it was a machine. Heartless, desolate, decayed. And as we had hauled the stiff, cold remains of our kindred souls, we began to detach ourselves from all sense of reality. Immerse ourselves into a disconnected sort of dream-world, even though most of us had surrendered our imaginations to the machines and rendered ourselves completely soulless. Easier to exist when it was harder to feel.
We considered our fallen kin to be lucky. Those that were left had a burden to carry, a heavy load to shoulder under the weight of a nearly extinct existence. We had a legacy to keep alive, and for most, the burden proved too much. Sometimes, we'd wake to find many a lifeless body, motionless beneath a thin coat of gathering dust. The rest of us had soldiered on.
The first time I saw him, I was fourteen years old. I knew nothing of him, not his name or his age, not the sound of his voice…only that infinite sorrow that seemed to unwittingly affect all of us, like a broken mask dangling from the edges of a stolid face. Even for one so young, as he was inevitably so, he had a ferocity that hardened his sorrow. An anger that would never yield to the metallic hand of a machine. His eyes were cold and fierce, and he carried himself in a manner that suggested pride and courage. I found myself often wondering, under such harsh and decimating conditions, how a boy his age should happen to find himself capable of grasping a bravery none of us dared hope to have. And so I watched him, and found myself drawn to his unwavering strength.
We never spoke, not once, until Liberation Day, May 18, 2015.
Night had fallen over the ruins of the city. Darkness was mostly hollow, filled with the empty whistle of the wind passing through unmarked graves and the plethora of human skulls riddling the morbid scene. Those of us who were salvaged from the Century Work Camp huddled away from the grisly aftermath of the blast, shielding our eyes, and our children's eyes, away. But it was too late for their innocence; it had long since been carried away with the last gust of the nuclear winds.
John Connor led the procession, looking just as weary and battle-worn as the rest of us, fresh wounds glistening in the moonlight, eyes flashing with that same unwavering arrogance I'd seen in the boy in the work camp. I did not know if he had survived the first resistance, and my heart began to sink as I scanned the crowd of trudging survivors. And as we entered a tunnel, beneath which John Connor had established a military base, I lost all hope in the boy's survival; I realized my folly in attaching myself to the idea of the young soldier too late.
Everyone always said it was better not to invest too much heart into someone who could be living and breathing beside you one moment, and scattered across the desert ruins, dead, the next. Procreation would no longer be an act of love, but a matter of surviving the last of the human race before it was extinguished entirely. It was a sacrifice, and nothing more. In the days to come, John Connor would advise his war-hardened soldiers not to love at all.
As one of the few who harbored enough strength to endure walking when we'd reached the tunnel, I volunteered to help provide those who had been wounded in battle, or otherwise substantially weakened by the conditions of the cruel work camp, with what little supplies could be offered. A grim-faced soldier with sharp, unseeing eyes, shoved a pile of threadbare blankets into my hand as another, beside him, handed a bucket of what looked to be a sort of porridge. I began to wander through the makeshift tunnel, giving blankets to the chilled survivors. Some that I had come across, however, were already dead, many of which were children. I had been given orders upon discovering injuries, severe or minor, to dress them as best I could with what scanty medical tools I'd been given. Needles to say, many of whom which I came across were severely, if not fatally, wounded.
It was as I neared the end of the tunnel, only a few left of the weathered blankets in my arms, when I saw him. He was shivering noticeably, his heavily callused hands attempting to caress a bit of warmth back into his frozen arms. But his expression manifested no discomfort, not even an edge of pain that would have normally sharpened the creases of worry in a wounded man's face. He was determined, I knew, to show no weakness.
I ambled, hesitant, toward the boy, clutching the blankets so hard in my grasp that I felt my hands begin to tingle, the taut skin that stretched over my knuckles turning a chalky white. This boy had become somewhat of a beacon of hope for me, his undaunted courage in the face of such a merciless fate inspiring to a slowly dying race. Even so, he was wounded and, as the other women were tending to their own responsibilities, it was my obligation to address mine as well.
"Blanket?" I asked, masking the timid shudders that rippled throughout my voice.
He had apparently been concentrating, and once I had disturbed him in his state of weakness, he became instantly alert. Flashing green eyes penetrated my line of vision, and he studied me for a moment, brow furrowing darkly. "No," he muttered. "There's no need."
"You'll catch your death down here," I retorted quietly. "The cold will only get worse."
"Surely you are aware that we have faced much crueler conditions," he snapped. "There are others who need them much more than I do."
I kneeled beside him, setting the bundle of tattered cloth at my feet and took out the first aid tin box out of my faded green overcoat. His muscles tautened visibly and, as I averted my eyes away from the opened kit and into his face, I saw his jaw clench.
"What are you doing?" He asked.
"Dressing your wound," I replied. "Under John Connor's orders."
"Listen, I can tend to my own wounds," he insisted wearily, as if annoyed by my persistence. "Go and look after the others. I'll be fine."
"No, you listen to me," I responded, grimly, feeling a flare of fiery anger burst throughout my exhausted body. "It is my duty to tend to your wounds. If you will be stubborn and refuse well then….I'll have one of the soldiers come over here and restrain you. It is no use wasting your strength on such silly defiance, so will you behave or not?"
I watched him with a furious glower, but he merely stared back, the markings of a suppressed smile beginning to twitch beneath the corners of his bloodstained mouth.
"Fine," he said, slowly. "If it makes you feel important, go right on ahead and do it. Makes no difference to me."
With a disgruntled huff, I flopped down beside him and tore open a disinfecting swab. Gently, I dabbed the deep, but short gash that tore open his chin. He flinched, but only slightly, and watched with fascination as I scoured the wound.
"Do you have a name, soldier?" I inquired absently, eyes downcast as my hands groped through the dressings and ointments for a long ribbon of gauze.
He did not answer for a moment, his thoughts inclined toward the dressing I was applying to a long, thin slash jutting in a grisly line across his arm.
But at last, after months of desperate musing, of wandering in endless tendrils of lost thought after the boy with no name, I received my answer.
"Reese," he said, voice airy, almost distant. "Kyle Reese."