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Haceldama
Deslea R. Judd
Copyright 2009
DISCLAIMER: Characters not mine. Interpretation mine.
ARCHIVE: Yes, just keep my name and headers.
FANDOM: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and The X Files
RATING: PG.
SPOILERS/TIMEFRAME: TSCC - to Adam Raised A Cain.
CATEGORY/KEYWORDS: John, Cameron, Derek.
SUMMARY: Everyone dies for John.
MORE STORIES: http://fiction.deslea.com
FEEDBACK: Love the stuff. deslea@deslea.com
"You’re wondering why we’re here."
Cameron shrugs, and for a moment he remembers the girl he met
two years ago (or ten years ago, depending on how you look at
it), the girl with studied casualness and a voice like a spray of
wildflowers. The girl who stopped pretending, stopped being like
that once he knew what she was. He realises that sometime while
he wasn’t looking, she started doing that sort of stuff for real.
Not all the time, but now and then. In the downtime between
battles.
"No," she says. "No, I’m not."
He carries on as if she hadn’t contradicted him. "There’s a lot
of my people here."
"Derek isn’t here yet."
"But he will be. Won’t he?"
"I haven’t queried the police database. But if he isn’t
identified then he will be buried here as an unknown or destitute
person. Like the soldiers who came here with him. Like his
brother."
"And Riley." Not Charley, at least. They buried him at the
lighthouse. "What would have happened to them in the future?"
Cameron tilts her head to one side. It means she’s evaluating
multiple possible scenarios. It’s a human movement that matches
the class of computation. He wonders when she connected the two
things together, or if she ever did. Could it be that Cameron has
a subconscious?
"They’re soldiers. They would have rotted where they fell."
"It’s better this way, then. They’re in the ground together,
decently buried. And they had time with the people they loved
before they went."
He knows who that means for Kyle, but for Derek, he isn’t so
sure. There was a shopping list of people Derek was willing to
die for, kill for, or just plain kill, sometimes in the same
breath. Derek was complicated. Not like Kyle - or so his mother
says.
Sometimes John thinks Kyle seemed simple and childlike because
Sarah was simple and childlike back then. He wonders if,
deep down, Kyle was as complicated as Derek. How could a soldier
from that future not be? He wonders if Sarah would have loved
Kyle if that were the case, or if she knew that were the
case.
Which opens a whole new can of worms about who knew what and
when, and how future-him told Kyle to act, and he has to leave
that alone because there’s only so many complicated dead father
figures that a guy can deal with in a single day.
"Riley had people. She would have had a ritual. In the future,
they bury their dead in the tunnels. Like the Roman catacombs."
"So you did know her. I wondered. Did you know Jesse, too?"
She gets this faraway look of recall in her eyes, and he
wonders again whether she is becoming more human, or just getting
better at pretending to be one. And whether there’s a difference.
"I knew them."
"Why didn’t you tell me?"
"I did. I told you people would be angry with you for bringing
me back after I went bad. You said you didn’t have to answer to
anyone. In the future, you told me sometimes you wouldn’t listen
to me and I should let you figure things out the hard way. So I
did."
Six months ago, he would have argued the point. Now, he knows
that people (and machines) will do whatever makes sense to them,
and you can only try to work with their logic. You can’t make
them tell you every truth they know, in case they have that one
piece of truth you need, no matter how hard you try. Otherwise
everyone would spend their lives mining each other’s databanks,
and what would make people any different from the machines?
"They weren’t a threat to me, so they weren’t important to your
mission."
"Yes. But Jesse is a threat to you now. She’s lost faith in
you. And she’ll blame you for Derek’s death."
"What a wonderful thought for the day."
"Why do people have cemeteries?" Cameron asks suddenly. "It
seems illogical."
"Because human life is sacred. When a person dies, you bury
them and you treat that ground as sacred." He doesn’t know how
true he really thinks that is – after all, how many bodies has he
left in his wake, discarded like human trash? How many hapless
cops and foster parents and security guards who were in the wrong
place at the wrong time? Does sacred ground mean anything at all
after you died like that?
"But afterlife is important to most death-beliefs. Yet the
bodies just stay here unused, like a decoration that you don’t
use but you won’t throw out. No trees grow to re-use the
nutrients. The soil is never used to fertilise crops. You
celebrate afterlife by preventing it."
"Yeah, well, I don’t think people think of the afterlife like
that."
"They should. It’s the one kind of afterlife they can make for
themselves."
"I think they like that they don’t make it themselves. They
like the idea that no matter how alone they feel, there’s always
someone looking out for them in the end." He tries to imagine a
life where there is no future-him sending people back to help
him, and he can’t do it. How on earth did he do it the first
time? And how different is pure-John, John who did it alone, from
how-many-timelines-removed-John now?
"Derek believed in the resurrection," she says. "He told Sarah
the night after I went bad that he spent the night talking to
Jesus."
To his horror, he feels his face grow warm with sudden, welling
tears. He pushes them back by brute force. He can’t do that right
now, he just can’t. "Well, maybe now he’s with whoever was
looking out for him. Maybe they were waiting for him." It seems a
more satisfactory outcome than just bang, you’re dead for no good
reason, not even protecting someone right that minute, just wrong
place and wrong time.
"The first Potter’s Field was bought with the blood money Judas
got for betraying Jesus," she tells him. "Judas gave it back.
They wouldn’t put it back into the community because they thought
it was tainted, so they used it to buy a field from a potter to
bury strangers and the poor. They called it Haceldama. It means
field of blood."
"Field of blood?" he echoes. "That sounds about right."
"I heard what you said to Derek," she says. "It isn’t true.
Everyone doesn’t die for you, John."
"Yeah, there might still be a few people left standing by the
time this is done."
"I don’t mean that. They don’t die for John Connor. They die
for the hope of a better future. They don’t think any one person
will fix it, but they think if enough of them changes things,
even if they die in the process, then things will get better.
John Connor is just the doorway to the past where they can fix it
and the future where it gets better. They think he’s what they’re
fighting for, but he isn’t really. He’s a window between places
and times. They’re fighting for what’s through the window. They’d
do it even if John Connor wasn’t there – they just wouldn’t
achieve anything by doing it."
He thinks about it. He’s been told his whole life that he’s
important. Crucial. And he is, but he is also smaller than they
think he is. It’s what he’s been saying all along.
And yet that field of blood just keeps on growing right before
his eyes.
"I was wrong," he says at last. "They are making an afterlife
for themselves. It’s through the window – right?"
Cameron evaluates his statement for logic errors, apparently
finds none, and agrees. "Yes. The better future is their
afterlife."
"The field of blood that grows something because they were
there."
"Sacrifice is the verb to make sacred," she says. "Does that
mean that the better future is sacred ground?"
Those warm salty tears rise again, but this time only as far as
his throat. "Yes," he says. "Yes, I think it is."
END
Notes:
1. Despite everyone’s insistence on the show that Sarah
died/jumped eight years ago, it’s been two years since then, so I
say ten. Could someone please teach James Ellison to count?
2. It isn’t a key issue in the story, but I have not followed
the widespread assumption that Jesse is necessarily dead. I won’t
go into the reasons here, but suffice it to say that I think the
writers are hedging their bets on this one.