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Entry tags:
FIC: T:SCC - The Indivisible Reese Boys - Gen - PG
I guess I’m not quite done with T:SCC yet.
SUMMARY: He stays far away from them. A part of him wants to cling, this is his father and his uncle, this is the only family he has left. But the questions that they would ask. The answers they would demand if they knew.
TITLE: The Indivisible Reese Boys
RATING: PG (for language)
PAIRING: Gen
AUTHOR: Melanie
SUMMARY: He stays far away from them. A part of him wants to cling, this is his father and his uncle, this is the only family he has left. But the questions that they would ask. The answers they would demand if they knew.
SPOILERS: For the entire series up to the finale.
DISCLAIMER: I don’t own any of these boys and I’m pretty sure that this has never happened.
The Indivisible Reese Boys
He stays far away from them.
A part of him wants to cling, this is his father and his uncle, this is the only family he has left. But the questions that they would ask. The answers they would demand if they knew.
He doesn’t know them.
They don’t know him.
It’s better this way.
“I’m John, John Connor,” he’d said. There’d been no light of recognition, no ‘we know that name’ or ‘are you related to?’
There’d been nothing and he stood there naked, with just his father’s coat over his shoulders and feigned ignorance of any other knowledge.
******************************************************************************
They test him with the dogs and they draw blood, though he’s not sure what they’re testing for there.
Derek and Kyle and their men have all vanished and he’s left with a doctor and a nurse and has obviously been deemed no threat as there are no guards by the door.
“Borderline anemic,” the doctor, Kate says. “Mild dehydration.”
She’s not talking to him, she’s telling the nurse who has a clean file folder with his name: Connor, John written across the tab. The nurse is making notes; John sits there on a table with a sheet draped over his legs.
“I have clothes for him,” a young man appears in the doorway with a small pile of folded clothing in his hands.
“Just set them there,” Kate says, she jerks towards an empty bed and the young man drops them and leaves.
“Do you know what your blood type is?” she asks and John shakes his head. Even though he knows.
He’s the same blood type as Kyle and Derek, his blood saved Derek’s life.
It doesn’t matter; he says that he ends up in a padded room, so he doesn’t say anything.
“We can test for it,” Kate says, she tries a smile on him; he bites his lip and looks down at the floor. “Don’t say much, do you?” she asks. He peers up at her and she’s got a friendly, sympathetic expression on her face.
He looks away and hunches his shoulders.
******************************************************************************
“Some sort of post-traumatic stress,” Kate says. They’re sitting around the command table and she has the new kids, the one that had appeared from nowhere, medical work up spread out on the table in front of her.
“Bright side is we can use him as a donor for you and Kyle if one of you gets hurt,” she says. He raises an eyebrow at her.
“Same blood type, and before you ask his blood is clean, no gene splices or anything,” she says. It’s the first thing they look for besides checking to make sure they’re not metal.
Metal has figured out a way to booby-trap the blood supply, some of the people they’re rescuing are completely human, but their blood is totally poisoned.
They’ve figured out a way to detect it, but it makes almost 3/4 of the humans they’re rescuing from the camps worthless as anything other than cannon fodder.
“You don’t think he was in the one of the camps then?” Derek asks.
“No gene splices, no bar code,” Kate shakes her head. “I think it’s safe to say no.”
He knew that already though; the kid had been naked when they’d left him in the room doubling as an infirmary, Kyle having re-appropriated his coat from the kid; there’d been a few scars marring his skin and he’d been a little too skinny; there’d been no barcode visible.
“Kind of young to be wandering around on his own,” Kyle comments, he says exactly what Derek is thinking.
The kid is sixteen, maybe seventeen if they’re being generous. Kids grow up fast nowadays or they get killed, they normally still have someone with them. Family, friend, someone to look out for them.
They don’t leave them to completely fend for themselves.
Its law of the jungle, the strong will survive; but the kids are also their future.
******************************************************************************
He’s in the barracks, sharing a room with four others. He tries to keep to himself, keep quiet and he watches the people around him.
He rarely sees Derek or Kyle or Allison, he’s not in the inner circle here. Not even close to being on the outskirts of it.
He’s okay with that, he’d not ever really wanted to be the savior of humanity, he’d wanted to be a kid. Now that’s what he is.
He does what they tell him to, taking shifts in the infirmary and the kitchen and watching some of the younger kids.
Two weeks after he gets there they put a gun in his hand and it fits like an old glove, a trusted friend. They take a group of them out to the outskirts of the camp, and have them practice shooting at rusted cans. He has to force himself to not be perfect, to not knock the cans down every time he pulls the trigger.
He’s been shooting ever since he was old enough to actually grip the gun.
For every shot he makes he misses two others.
He hasn’t seen Weaver since they came through and he wonders sometimes, lying alone in his bunk at night, turned to face the wall, what she’s doing, if she rejoined the metal and is even now selling him out.
Or if she’s working systematically through whatever plan she put together.
He doesn’t know why she brought him; she doesn’t seem to actually need him for anything that she’s doing.
******************************************************************************
Derek stops him on his way back to his bunk, hand wrapping around his arm to stop him.
“How you doing kid? Settling in okay?” he looks at him with raised eyebrows and John bites his lip and nods his head.
“We’ve got people, you know, that you could talk to…” Derek waves a hand.
“I’m okay,” he says, he tries to look like he is but Derek’s eyebrows don’t go back down and he knows that the other man doesn’t believe him.
******************************************************************************
The kid is quiet, there’s nothing about him that screams metal or grey or this kid is going to get you all killed if you don’t watch your step.
Derek still doesn’t feel comfortable putting a gun in his hand and sending him out with the others.
He almost tears Towner’s face off when he finds out that he took him out with a bunch of the new canon fodder for target practice.
It’s only Towner’s, “he was okay, though I think he’s actually a better shot then he was letting on,” that leaves him alive.
“You don’t take him out again,” Derek says, Kyle looks at him with a quizzical expression on his face and Derek doesn’t say anything.
There’s just… the kid is familiar, Derek looks at him and all he can think is ‘I should know this kid’ and he doesn’t have the first clue how or why. He thinks it’s his eyes and his face, there’s just something… familiar about them.
Eventually he’ll figure it out.
******************************************************************************
The dogs go nuts one night, barking at everything and nothing, straining at leashes and chains as they move up and down hallways systematically searching.
Derek’s got his team; Kyle at one shoulder, Allison at the other and Morel is fighting to keep his dog from running off on his own in the front of them.
He’s almost gratified that the dog passes right by John Connor without even a moments hesitation, Connor’s got two young kids by the hand, leading them toward where there sequestering the youngsters.
It’s just a reaffirmation that John’s not metal, that whatever else is going on he’s human at least.
******************************************************************************
The metal they capture is female, red hair and an accent when it deigns to speak.
It looks at them one at a time and the way that it looks at them, the way it’s eyes hesitate as they scan over him and Allison, it almost seems like it knows them.
******************************************************************************
“It had this on it,” Allison says, there’s a chip in her hand, a small one, probably from a female model or the metals new and improved child model.
Fucking metal.
“It still not saying anything?” Derek says, he takes the chip out of her hand, stares at it for a long minute before he drops it to the ground and brings his heel down on it hard.
He looks over at there the metal is sitting, it raises an eyebrow at him, lips quirking into something like a smirk. He’s never wanted to hit something more then he wants to hit it.
“This would go a lot faster if you’d just say something,” Derek says.
“What would you like me to say Mr. Reese?” it says and Derek can feel Kyle jolt next to him, Allison takes a step back.
“How ‘bought what you want,” Derek says, he ignores the fact that the metal knows who he is; he can worry about that later. “Why don’t we try that for starters?”
“I won’t speak to you,” it says dismissively.
Derek opens his mouth and it says, “I won’t speak to any of them either, there is one person with whom I’ll converse.”
Derek glares, lips pursed in a narrow line. It’ll be someone dead, or someone out on a long term mission that they’ll have no hope of getting back in time.
“Bring me John Connor and I’ll speak with him,” the metal says and Derek feels a pit open up in his stomach.
And here he’d been so sure that the kid hadn’t been a gray.
******************************************************************************
There’s stuff going on but it seems to be confined to the areas that John’s not allowed in so he goes about his normal day, though he’s got two shadows.
Two kids that he’d found hiding in an old storage cabinet and led to the safe room.
He’s working on fixing a leaking pipe, the kids on the ground by his feet. They’ve found a pack of cards and they’re playing some sort of slapping game with them.
He hears the murmurs before he realizes they’re not alone and when he stands and turns, wiping the back of his hand, smearing dirt and grime along his forehead, he sees Derek standing there, Kyle on one side, Allison on the other, two others behind them.
They’re all armed and he doesn’t have to fake the fear in his eyes.
“What…?” he starts and Derek doesn’t say anything, just makes a gesture with the hand not pointing a gun at him, the two standing behind them come forward and he knows that there’s something very wrong when they take his arms.
******************************************************************************
There’s a gun in the kids back and this still feels off, wrong, and it only has very little to do with whatever the reason is for why Derek thinks he should know this kid.
But the metal had asked for Connor by name, and Connor himself had shown up in the middle of their camp naked as the day he was born.
There’s something going on and if putting the kid and the metal in the same room gives them some answers then it’ll be worth it.
******************************************************************************
They stop in front of a closed door; John can feel the barrel of a gun pressing into the middle of his back. Beside him Derek makes a hand motion and the door opens and gun prods him into moving.
The room is bare, save for a light hanging from the ceiling and a familiar form in restraints in the center of the room.
He stumbles, “Weaver?” falling from his lips unbidden. Beside him he can hear Derek snort and in front of him Weaver’s face changes. Lips curving into a thin smile.
This isn’t right, there’s something wrong here and he shudders and tries to take a step back except he can’t, because there’s a gun in his back.
“John Connor,” she says, her voice is soft, lyrical, familiar. It’s not Weaver’s voice though and he can feel Derek start, can feel Kyle on the other side of him wrap a hand around his wrist and Allison making a noise of disbelief behind him.
He watches with wide eyes as Cameron, wearing Weaver’s body waves off her restraints.
She stands smoothly, ignores the guns being leveled at her and the shouting voices and he can feel Kyle’s hands on his arms pulling him back, trying to get him out of the room.
They don’t make it.
******************************************************************************
It’s like it’s happening far away and the minute that they open the door and the kid walks in Derek knows they’ve made a mistake.
This was what the metal wanted, it wanted the boy for some reason and they’ve just given it the boy.
The metal is up, out of the chair, chains falling to the ground around its feet and it’s walking forward eyes never wavering from John’s face.
He’s shooting and the guards are shooting and Kyle is pulling on John’s arm trying to get him out of the room, Allison is yelling something, maybe for help, maybe denials because the voice that came out of the metal’s mouth had been hers.
He sees the metal spike extending from its arm and there’s really no time to react, he just shoots like he can stop it in time, but deep inside that part of him that knew this was a mistake the second they opened the door, that part of him knows that they’re already about 30 seconds too late.
John makes a noise, not a scream or a yell, it’ll be a noise that Derek will hear in his nightmares for months to come; the metal finally falls back, down on the ground and it’s not moving, but by the door John is down and he’s not moving either.
Kyle is dragging him out by his arms, yelling for Kate, for help and Derek keeps shooting at the metal until there’s just the click, click, click of his empty gun and the metals not moving and the only thing he can hear over the sound of the empty gun is the sound of his brother screaming for help for a kid they just got killed.
******************************************************************************
They have one clean room for surgeries, there’s only the one because Kate’s their only surgeon and she’s a fucking miracle worker but even she can only operate on one person at a time.
There’s glass in the door and Derek stands there, hand pressing a clean cloth to his arm, staring at Kate and her nurses and the still figure that is John Connor on the bed dying on a gurney because Derek’s a fucking idiot who listened to metal instead of his instincts.
“We pulled it’s chip,” Morel says off to his left, Kyle is on his right, hand pressed to his arm just like Derek, it’s fortuitous that there’s three of them with the same blood type now, because in that room John Connor is bleeding to death.
He’d known the boy wasn’t metal or a grey.
He’d known that, he’d still marched the kid in there, with guns pointed at his back and given the metal what it wanted.
He wonders what’s important about the kid, because there has to be something if the metal was willing to come in here, sit in chains in a room waiting for the opportunity to assassinate him.
Because that’s what that was, an assassination attempt against a seventeen year old kid.
For what purpose he doesn’t know, maybe if John survives he’ll be able to tell him.
******************************************************************************
There’s pain, an aching pain and he’s so nauseous he’s really considering how much more pain it would cause him to turn to his side and throw up.
He takes a shuddering breath, gags and there’s hands turning him to his side as his body goes into dry heaves. He shakes and pants and wants his mom desperately.
There’s a cool hand against his forehead and the soft murmuring from a voice he doesn’t recognize of “It’s okay, shh, just relax,” he tries to bite back the whining, pathetic noise and just barely manages, he takes a slow shallow breath, then another.
He’s alive, the pain and the drugs means it’s probably by the skin of his nails and teeth though.
******************************************************************************
The boy wakes in stages, the first time he gets so violently ill that he pulls his stitches and Kate cuts almost all his medications, painkillers, antibiotics, everything until she can determine what caused it.
It’s an allergic reaction to something she says and she slowly starts everything back up, antibiotics first, then the painkillers.
She has to cut his morphine dose in half because that’s what appears to be causing his nausea.
The nurses have a rotating shift stationed by his bed, checking his levels and keeping him calm when the nightmares come, he doesn’t ever wake screaming from them, just thrashes around on the bed making noises that hurt something inside Derek.
Derek is there as well, hovering in the corner out of the way; watching, waiting.
Kyle joins him periodically, standing next to him with arms crossed, intent eyes.
“We destroyed the chip,” he says once and Derek nods. Kyle lays a hand on his arm until Derek looks at him.
“This isn’t your fault,” he says and Derek just stares at him. The camp and the people in it are his responsibility, John lying in that bed, in what Kate assures him isn’t a coma but sure as hell looks like one since he’s not waking up from it, is his fault.
“We walked him into that room, so it could attempt to execute him.”
“But it didn’t succeed, he’s still alive and it’s gone and…” Kyle shakes his head and doesn’t continue.
“He’s just a kid,” Derek says. “What could be so important about a kid that metal would come here just to try and kill him?”
“Well when he wakes up maybe he’ll be able to enlighten us.”
******************************************************************************
There’s always pain when he wakes, the first time he really wakes and is able to open his eyes and keep them open he realizes that his arms are strapped down and he struggles, panicked and scared until Kyle appears right in front of him.
“It’s okay,” Kyle says, voice soothing and soft, hand on his arm and he glances to the right and John shifts his head slightly and sees Kate there fussing with something.
There’s pressure on his wrists and he can feel Kyle unfastening the restraints on one arm, Kate doing the other. Kyle presses his fingers into his skin and John makes a noise and closes his eyes.
His chest hurts and his stomach is churning and he feels small and weak and scared.
“You were having nightmares,” Derek says and he opens his eyes and sees him standing at the end of the bed. “Kept flailing and knocking all your…” Derek waves a hand. “They were to keep you from knocking something that was keeping you alive loose, not to actually keep you detained.”
“Not…” he doesn’t know what he means to say. If he means to tell him that it wasn’t his fault, if he’s wondering why he’s not being restrained when the last thing he remembered was being marched down a hallway with guns pointed at his back.
Derek pats his leg, “Metals gone, destroyed. Morel and Kyle pulled it’s chip and destroyed it, then we burned the remains of that one and the chip that it brought with it.”
“Good,” John asks. He doesn’t have energy to ask what type of chip it was; if Cameron was in Weaver’s shell, then the chip it had on it was most likely Weaver’s.
And his mom had been right the whole time, Cameron couldn’t be trusted.
“Good,” he says again, his eyes close, he can feel Kate’s fingers on his wrist, taking his pulse, Kyle’s hand is wrapped around his other wrist and he can feel the weight of Derek’s hand next to his leg.
He wonders if they know, or if they just feel a type of remorse because he almost died on their watch.
******************************************************************************
He wakes again and Kyle is sitting by his bed, book open in his lap. He wonders what he did to garner the attention of the Reese boys after having spent almost two months flying under their radar, other than have something that he thought he could trust try and kill him.
“You have any family?” Kyle asks not looking up from his book, John doesn’t answer, isn’t sure how he’s supposed to answer that question… when John doesn’t answer Kyle looks over at him.
There’s a weird expression on his face that John can’t place.
“My dad died before I was born,” he says finally, half-truth, his dad did die, he’s also sitting next to his bed.
“My mom,” he closes his eyes. Cameron had told him how his mom died, and he hadn’t been there for that. He hopes that she didn’t die alone, but he knows his mom so he knows that she did.
If she had the choice she wouldn’t allow anyone to bear witness to that.
“When I was in the camps,” Kyle says, his attention goes back to the book in his lap. “There was a woman that shared the cell with me when they first captured me, older woman early sixties or so, she was delirious for most of the time, camps aren’t really a great place and once you got sick there, well you pretty much stayed sick until you died,” his mouth twists into a rueful grin.
“There were times,” he says. “That she would think I was an old boyfriend, his name was Kyle too,” he laughs a little and looks back at John, eyes soft. “She’d talk about the kid they had, how this kid was supposed to save the world but how she’d let him go off on a suicide mission.”
“I…” John starts, doesn’t go on. He’s not sure what to say, he can’t tell if Kyle knows, the way he’s looking at him he thinks he does.
But it’s also probably crazy, because there’s no time travel here; there isn’t a John Connor in charge to send Kyle Reese back in time so he can be born. The only John Connor here is the kid that’s trying his damnedest to keep his head above water and not drowned.
Or get killed.
“Her name was Sarah,” Kyle says, his fingers grip on something in his book and it takes a second for John to realize that it’s a picture. “She died before I managed to escape.”
John closes his eyes, bites his lip, opens them again when he feels the ghosting touch of Kyle setting something on his chest.
There’s a picture there, of his mom, looking old and worn and tired.
“She was your mom?” Kyle asks and John nods.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“She was sick,” John says softly. “I knew she was dying, I shouldn’t have gone.”
She’d lasted longer than Cameron had said she would and John wonders if it was hope that she’d see him again that kept her marching on until she just couldn’t march any further.
******************************************************************************
They move the kid in with Kyle. Derek would take him but Jessie stays with him when she’s in camp and she can be kind of loud and the sex kind of acrobatic, the kid just doesn’t need to see that.
Kyle’s got his own room, and he doesn’t share with anyone, doesn’t actually sleep with anyone either and that’s half because he’s a picky son-of-a-bitch and half because Derek standing in the corner with his gun tends to make the girls (and one guy, Kyle was going through a very quick experimental phase Derek always tells himself) nervous.
The kid sleeps a lot, that’s what Kyle tells him.
“He was Sarah’s kid,” Derek looks at him sharply at that. Kyle had never told him that he knew Sarah’s last name, she’d just been ‘Sarah’ the crazy woman that Kyle had shared a cell with for three months until they managed to get him out.
“You told him she was dead,” Derek says, he doesn’t ask because he knows that Kyle did.
“She is.”
“We think she is,” Derek says. “But she also supposedly died on the day that the Generals made their assault on the camp, so she also could have been rescued.”
“Or she could have been buried in the rubble, the kid’s been through enough, I’m not going to give him false hope that his mom might still be alive.”
“Even false hope is hope,” Derek says.
“Since when do you even believe in hope?”
“Since you told me that John Connor is Sarah’s kid,” Derek says. He remembers the rest of what Sarah had told his brother, his brother had repeated the stories when they’d gotten him back.
This kid is supposed to be important to the resistance, and if he’s important to resistance he’s probably important enough that metal would let itself be captured in an attempt to kill him.
“She also told me that he was my kid,” Kyle says, he shakes his head, Derek purses his lips, because okay, yeah, that part of it doesn’t make any sense.
Sarah had been an old sick woman in the process of dying, he knows his baby brother well enough to know that he wouldn’t take advantage like that, besides the fact that John had already been born and old enough to be sent off on missions by himself.
“You didn’t tell him that part, right?” Derek asks, the rest of it he can maybe get behind, the Kyle being his dad thing is just nuts and not possible. Kyle rolls his eyes at him like he’s an idiot.
“We all have the same blood type though,” Kyle reminds him.
“That could mean that he’s a half-brother, or a cousin four times removed, that doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s your kid,” Derek mutters. “I mean the kid is seventeen, you would have had to have been like five when you had him.”
******************************************************************************
It kind of freaks him out, how attentive Kyle is being. He’s there in the morning to help him hobble his way to the makeshift bathroom, he’s there to help him change his bandages, he’s there when he has a nightmare and screams himself awake.
His voice is always soft, hands gentle on his forehead and arms like he’s a skittish animal that Kyle is bound and determined is going to either break under his hand or love him, or both.
There’s a little voice in his head (it sounds an awful lot like his mom) that screams ‘he knows, he knows, oh fuck, he knows’ and he waits for the moment when Kyle asks questions that he can’t answer.
There’s been no mention of time travel or anything even alluding to that. He’s got no clue how he would explain it away.
And since Weaver is gone and Cameron is gone and he doesn’t even have the first clue if John Henry had been on their side or the other he’s effectively stuck where he is.
Because pretty much only one of those three has any clue that time travel exists, and of them only Weaver knew that he had jumped forward.
******************************************************************************
Kate pushes at the wound and though John winces he doesn’t make a sound; Derek still keeps a hand wrapped around Kyle’s arm to keep him right where he is.
“It’s healing well, no sign of infection,” Kate says softly to them while John is muttering to himself and scowling darkly in the direction of the floor while he pulls his clothes back on.
Derek breathes a sigh of relief, they don’t exactly live in the cleanest of environments, 92% of the time most of the wounded die of infections that couldn’t be kept clean of dirt and grime. Only those with hardy immune systems and the knowledge of how to care for any wound they sustain survive.
Either Kyle is a better nurse maid then Derek gave him credit for or John has some knowledge of basic first aid.
He lets go of Kyle’s arm and watches as his brother crosses the room, Kate takes his position next to him, mirroring Derek’s crossed arms and slouching posture.
“Should I be offering condoms or a safe sex lecture or something?” she asks, Derek blanches because Kyle is acting like a dad, not like John is someone he’s trying to pick up. He watches Kyle and John and tries to see them the way that someone who doesn’t have any knowledge of what Kyle insists he doesn’t believe but pretty obviously does.
Their heads are bent close together as they talk quietly to each other, Kyle’s hand is on John’s back and Derek can’t see or hear but he’s pretty sure that the hand is rubbing in a semi-circle motion and his voice is probably calm and soothing. He can kind of understand why someone who doesn’t know what Kyle thinks he knows would think that Kyle was trying to sleep with the kid.
It still kind of makes him sick to his stomach, the thought that people are thinking that Kyle is fucking John, when Kyle is just trying to be a dad, to be someone that John can trust without telling him why.
“How about a DNA test?” Derek says quietly, Kate looks over at him and her brow is furrowed in confusion.
“It would take me some time,” Kate says, she looks back over at the two of them, Kyle is ruffling John’s hair and John is shying away though he’s smiling.
Derek nods and watches his brother and the kid that might somehow be his nephew walk out of the infirmary.
******************************************************************************
“Is he your boyfriend?” Miranda asks, she has bright, wide eyes and it takes John a second to realize that she’s talking to him and she’s referring to him and Kyle.
He makes a noise.
“He’s just a friend,” John says, he pulls Miranda into his lap, lets her curl her body into his and tries to ignore the twinge of pain from sitting the way he is. There’s another four days before Kate will even contemplate taking the stitches out, if he busts them before then it’ll be another week.
“Do you want him to be your boyfriend?” Miranda asks, she peers up at him, blinking innocently. He would think she’s playing him but she’s like seven, he’s pretty sure she wouldn’t know how.
“No,” John shakes his head, ‘I want him to be my dad, to want to be my dad’ he thinks. He says, “I want him to be my friend,” instead, it sounds less insane.
******************************************************************************
Kate is making a face at him and he’s trying to decipher the meaning behind it without actually asking her.
He dismisses everyone and she hangs back, waiting until Kyle walks out of the room, then she closes the door. He arches a brow at her and she leans against it, biting her lip, staring at him.
“So?” he asks, she pushes herself off the door and walks back over to the table, sorts through the folders that she’d brought with her until she evidently finds the one she’s looking for.
She taps her fingers against it, “I’m not sure what kind of answer you want me to give you, what you were hoping to find by having me do this.”
“The truth,” Derek shrugs. “I’ll settle for the truth and we’ll figure the rest out later.”
“The truth,” Kate repeats slowly, she flips the folder open. “The truth is, I don’t know how, I haven’t got the foggiest idea of how it’s possible…”
Derek looks at her.
“John is Kyle’s son,” she says, the pointer finger of her right hand draws a straight line down the page. It’s a lot of points on a sheet of paper, Derek doesn’t have a clue how it translates.
Except…
He sits down, hard, in his chair.
“You’re sure?” he asks.
“Like I said, I don’t know how,” Derek looks at her and Kate just looks bewildered. He wishes he had answers to give her, as it is it just gives him more questions.
“I have a nephew,” Derek says. The reality of the situation is pushing its way into his head. And he…
He laughs harshly.
“I almost got my nephew killed.”
******************************************************************************
Now that he knows he can see how John looks like Kyle, it’s his build and bone structure, but mostly it’s his eyes.
He’s not sure how he missed it before, but those are Kyle’s eyes in John Connor’s face and Derek doesn’t have the first clue how they got there but he’s sure that it’s a story that the kid is dying to share if he thought anyone would believe him.
The kid is still quiet and he seems receptive to Kyle’s attention, almost soaks it up, watching him with eyes that are big and wide and when Kyle’s not looking at him to see, filled with awe.
The kid knows who Kyle is to him; of that Derek has no doubt. Which means that he knows who Derek is too.
“You trust me kid?” he asks one day, Kyle is off getting food or books or something for the kid to tinker with. The kid likes to tinker with things; he’s pretty good at it too. The women and most of the guys (the ones that aren’t completely suspicious by nature) love him because he got one of the showers working on more than an intermittent basis and it even has hot water almost all the time to boot.
There’s only one, so they have a schedule of times set up for when the females can use it and when the males can use it.
John looks at him and Derek sees nothing but trust in his eyes, even after he almost got him killed. He’s too trusting; this kid grew up completely sheltered somewhere that wasn’t a hole in the ground.
“Come on,” he jerks his head and starts walking, the kid, his nephew, what the fuck, follows behind him like a little duck.
******************************************************************************
He can see what Towner means.
The kid holds the gun like he’s been holding guns his entire life, Derek can pretty much see the moment that his posture stiffens and his grip becomes something not natural to him.
He’s faking, he makes a shot, misses two more, misses two, makes three.
There’s moments when Derek can see him forgetting to be bad at firing a gun, and those are the shots that hit the target.
When the clip is empty he points it at the ground and turns to face Derek, expression sheepish.
“Towner was going to work with me, but…” he shrugs.
Derek looks at him appraisingly, then pulls another clip from his pocket, holds out his hand. John hands the gun to him, then watches him with an inscrutable expression as Derek pulls out the empty clip, snaps the full one in place.
“Why don’t you try again,” Derek suggests. “This time how ‘bout you fire it like we both know you can.”
He holds the gun out and John stares at it, then back up at him.
******************************************************************************
The kid makes ten shots in a row before Derek stops him, he’s seen what he needs to see.
“You’re Sarah’s kid,” Derek says, the kid still has the gun in his hand but it’s pointed at the ground and Derek’s counting on the fact that the kid knows who he is to him to keep him from pointing the gun at him and pulling the trigger.
“Sarah Connor’s my mom,” John agrees. Derek can see the faint trembling in his shoulders.
“And Kyle’s your dad,” Derek says, the kid stiffens but doesn’t deny it, not right away anyway.
“Kyle’s only a couple of years older than me how would…”
“I don’t know, but Kate’s not in the habit of lying to me and I tell her to do a DNA test, she does a DNA test and her DNA test tells me that however improbable it is, Kyle is your dad.”
“It’s a really long story,” John says, his voice is quiet, soft; Derek has to strain to hear it.
Derek sits down on a partially destroyed barrel that is lying on its side. “We’ve got all the time in the world,” he looks at the kid meaningfully. “So tell me a story, John Connor.”
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“There’s no such thing as time travel,” Derek says. He sounds disbelieving and John shrugs.
He knows what he knows and he knows where and when he came from.
“Weaver and I came through looking for a metal calling himself John Henry, he’d taken Cameron’s chip and…” John still doesn’t know if Cameron had betrayed him, if John Henry had done something to her chip to cause her to betray him or if it had all been one big, giant trap that he’d let himself be led into.
“Weaver was the metal that attacked you?”
John shakes his head. “Weaver’s skin, Cameron’s chip, or a chip from a model like Cameron anyway, though since Allison is still alive I think it was more Cameron’s chip.”
“You guys trusted metal, after everything…”
“Not really,” John shakes his head. “I’d sent a reprogrammed terminator back to protect me once; maybe that’s how they figured they could slip Cameron in. Precedence and all.”
“We don’t trust metal here,” Derek says, he looks at John. “Not any metal, not even metal professing to be on our side, because they’re not.”
“I know.”
He’d known that then… it was just… precedence and all.
******************************************************************************
Kyle is waiting for them when they get back and he visually searches John for injuries, Derek scowls at him.
“Target practice,” Derek says.
“I thought you told Towner that you would tear his spine out through his toes if he took John out again,” Kyle says.
“Well I’m not Towner, am I?”
Kyle rolls his eyes at him. Lays an arm over John’s shoulder in a half hug, there’s a quirking lip on John’s face which means that he’s biting back a smile.
And when he looks over at Kyle, Derek wonders how his brother keeps missing the awestruck ‘holy fuck, that’s my dad’ eyes that the kid makes at him.
Of course Kyle’s already mostly adopted John as his kid, age difference be damned. He wonders if it’s something hardwired into parents to know their offspring even without knowing they’re their offspring.
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“Were you going to tell me?” Kyle asks, Derek stops right inside his room, Kyle is sitting on his bunk, knees drawn up to his chest.
“Tell you what?”
Kyle looks at him with a look that says ‘you can’t possibly think I’m that stupid.”
“Tell me that you had Kate do a DNA test on John Connor and myself.”
“Who told you about that?” Derek frowns. Kate had been sworn to secrecy.
“You had to know that Kate couldn’t keep something like that completely to herself,” Kyle rolls his eyes at him.
Derek shrugs off his jacket, stands there staring at his brother, waiting.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what the results were?” he asks finally, when Kyle just sits there, looking at him with an inscrutable expression on his face.
“No,” Kyle says, shakes his head. He stands, walking over and stopping right in front of him. Derek arches a brow at him and Kyle smirks at him, then hugs him. A quick one, a blink and you’ll miss it hug.
“Are you going to tell him you know?” Derek asks.
“No,” Kyle says. When Derek looks at him, he just smiles wryly. “It’s pretty fantastical right, and if you think about it he shouldn’t even really exist, the minute he got here he changed everything and he should have,” Kyle waves a hand. Derek’s not sure what it’s supposed to signify but he goes with it.
“If he wants to tell me, wants to actually say the words then he will,” Kyle says. “But he already knows that I know, and I think it’s easier if we leave things the way they are.”
Derek nods, plus if they start saying the words then people will start hearing them and John becomes an oddity, instead of a kid that just had the bad luck to be targeted by metal for some as of yet still unknown to the general public reason.
“Not going to let anything happen to him,” Derek says. Not again, is unspoken but understood.
“I think he’ll only take being coddled while there’s still stitches and Kate to deal with,” Kyle says. “After that I think you’ll find that he’s going to want to be just as involved as anyone else.”
“And you’re going to be okay with that?” Derek asks. “Sending your kid off into some firefight that he might or might not come back from.”
“No, but he’s not a kid,” Kyle says and he’s staring at Derek with the same expression on his face that he had the first time he told Derek rather then asked him to go out on a job.
“You guys are going to drive me to drink,” Derek mutters.
All he wants to do is keep his family safe. Now that’s not just Kyle, now there’s John Connor too. He just wants to keep them somewhere safe so when this is over, when the war is won, they get to have lives.
“We’re the indivisible Reese boys,” Kyle says, smirk on his lips. “So I know that you’ll be sharing that bottle when you find one.”
Derek rolls his eyes but doesn’t say anything, Kyle’s not lying.
They’re the Reese boys, inseparable, indivisible; and now there’s one more of them, neither of them thought kids would ever be a possibility for either of them, not during war when they’re just fighting to survive. But now there’s a kid, a grown one at that and he’s strong and capable and he might be a Connor by name; but he’s really just another Reese boy.
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SUMMARY: He stays far away from them. A part of him wants to cling, this is his father and his uncle, this is the only family he has left. But the questions that they would ask. The answers they would demand if they knew.
TITLE: The Indivisible Reese Boys
RATING: PG (for language)
PAIRING: Gen
AUTHOR: Melanie
SUMMARY: He stays far away from them. A part of him wants to cling, this is his father and his uncle, this is the only family he has left. But the questions that they would ask. The answers they would demand if they knew.
SPOILERS: For the entire series up to the finale.
DISCLAIMER: I don’t own any of these boys and I’m pretty sure that this has never happened.
The Indivisible Reese Boys
He stays far away from them.
A part of him wants to cling, this is his father and his uncle, this is the only family he has left. But the questions that they would ask. The answers they would demand if they knew.
He doesn’t know them.
They don’t know him.
It’s better this way.
“I’m John, John Connor,” he’d said. There’d been no light of recognition, no ‘we know that name’ or ‘are you related to?’
There’d been nothing and he stood there naked, with just his father’s coat over his shoulders and feigned ignorance of any other knowledge.
They test him with the dogs and they draw blood, though he’s not sure what they’re testing for there.
Derek and Kyle and their men have all vanished and he’s left with a doctor and a nurse and has obviously been deemed no threat as there are no guards by the door.
“Borderline anemic,” the doctor, Kate says. “Mild dehydration.”
She’s not talking to him, she’s telling the nurse who has a clean file folder with his name: Connor, John written across the tab. The nurse is making notes; John sits there on a table with a sheet draped over his legs.
“I have clothes for him,” a young man appears in the doorway with a small pile of folded clothing in his hands.
“Just set them there,” Kate says, she jerks towards an empty bed and the young man drops them and leaves.
“Do you know what your blood type is?” she asks and John shakes his head. Even though he knows.
He’s the same blood type as Kyle and Derek, his blood saved Derek’s life.
It doesn’t matter; he says that he ends up in a padded room, so he doesn’t say anything.
“We can test for it,” Kate says, she tries a smile on him; he bites his lip and looks down at the floor. “Don’t say much, do you?” she asks. He peers up at her and she’s got a friendly, sympathetic expression on her face.
He looks away and hunches his shoulders.
“Some sort of post-traumatic stress,” Kate says. They’re sitting around the command table and she has the new kids, the one that had appeared from nowhere, medical work up spread out on the table in front of her.
“Bright side is we can use him as a donor for you and Kyle if one of you gets hurt,” she says. He raises an eyebrow at her.
“Same blood type, and before you ask his blood is clean, no gene splices or anything,” she says. It’s the first thing they look for besides checking to make sure they’re not metal.
Metal has figured out a way to booby-trap the blood supply, some of the people they’re rescuing are completely human, but their blood is totally poisoned.
They’ve figured out a way to detect it, but it makes almost 3/4 of the humans they’re rescuing from the camps worthless as anything other than cannon fodder.
“You don’t think he was in the one of the camps then?” Derek asks.
“No gene splices, no bar code,” Kate shakes her head. “I think it’s safe to say no.”
He knew that already though; the kid had been naked when they’d left him in the room doubling as an infirmary, Kyle having re-appropriated his coat from the kid; there’d been a few scars marring his skin and he’d been a little too skinny; there’d been no barcode visible.
“Kind of young to be wandering around on his own,” Kyle comments, he says exactly what Derek is thinking.
The kid is sixteen, maybe seventeen if they’re being generous. Kids grow up fast nowadays or they get killed, they normally still have someone with them. Family, friend, someone to look out for them.
They don’t leave them to completely fend for themselves.
Its law of the jungle, the strong will survive; but the kids are also their future.
He’s in the barracks, sharing a room with four others. He tries to keep to himself, keep quiet and he watches the people around him.
He rarely sees Derek or Kyle or Allison, he’s not in the inner circle here. Not even close to being on the outskirts of it.
He’s okay with that, he’d not ever really wanted to be the savior of humanity, he’d wanted to be a kid. Now that’s what he is.
He does what they tell him to, taking shifts in the infirmary and the kitchen and watching some of the younger kids.
Two weeks after he gets there they put a gun in his hand and it fits like an old glove, a trusted friend. They take a group of them out to the outskirts of the camp, and have them practice shooting at rusted cans. He has to force himself to not be perfect, to not knock the cans down every time he pulls the trigger.
He’s been shooting ever since he was old enough to actually grip the gun.
For every shot he makes he misses two others.
He hasn’t seen Weaver since they came through and he wonders sometimes, lying alone in his bunk at night, turned to face the wall, what she’s doing, if she rejoined the metal and is even now selling him out.
Or if she’s working systematically through whatever plan she put together.
He doesn’t know why she brought him; she doesn’t seem to actually need him for anything that she’s doing.
Derek stops him on his way back to his bunk, hand wrapping around his arm to stop him.
“How you doing kid? Settling in okay?” he looks at him with raised eyebrows and John bites his lip and nods his head.
“We’ve got people, you know, that you could talk to…” Derek waves a hand.
“I’m okay,” he says, he tries to look like he is but Derek’s eyebrows don’t go back down and he knows that the other man doesn’t believe him.
The kid is quiet, there’s nothing about him that screams metal or grey or this kid is going to get you all killed if you don’t watch your step.
Derek still doesn’t feel comfortable putting a gun in his hand and sending him out with the others.
He almost tears Towner’s face off when he finds out that he took him out with a bunch of the new canon fodder for target practice.
It’s only Towner’s, “he was okay, though I think he’s actually a better shot then he was letting on,” that leaves him alive.
“You don’t take him out again,” Derek says, Kyle looks at him with a quizzical expression on his face and Derek doesn’t say anything.
There’s just… the kid is familiar, Derek looks at him and all he can think is ‘I should know this kid’ and he doesn’t have the first clue how or why. He thinks it’s his eyes and his face, there’s just something… familiar about them.
Eventually he’ll figure it out.
The dogs go nuts one night, barking at everything and nothing, straining at leashes and chains as they move up and down hallways systematically searching.
Derek’s got his team; Kyle at one shoulder, Allison at the other and Morel is fighting to keep his dog from running off on his own in the front of them.
He’s almost gratified that the dog passes right by John Connor without even a moments hesitation, Connor’s got two young kids by the hand, leading them toward where there sequestering the youngsters.
It’s just a reaffirmation that John’s not metal, that whatever else is going on he’s human at least.
The metal they capture is female, red hair and an accent when it deigns to speak.
It looks at them one at a time and the way that it looks at them, the way it’s eyes hesitate as they scan over him and Allison, it almost seems like it knows them.
“It had this on it,” Allison says, there’s a chip in her hand, a small one, probably from a female model or the metals new and improved child model.
Fucking metal.
“It still not saying anything?” Derek says, he takes the chip out of her hand, stares at it for a long minute before he drops it to the ground and brings his heel down on it hard.
He looks over at there the metal is sitting, it raises an eyebrow at him, lips quirking into something like a smirk. He’s never wanted to hit something more then he wants to hit it.
“This would go a lot faster if you’d just say something,” Derek says.
“What would you like me to say Mr. Reese?” it says and Derek can feel Kyle jolt next to him, Allison takes a step back.
“How ‘bought what you want,” Derek says, he ignores the fact that the metal knows who he is; he can worry about that later. “Why don’t we try that for starters?”
“I won’t speak to you,” it says dismissively.
Derek opens his mouth and it says, “I won’t speak to any of them either, there is one person with whom I’ll converse.”
Derek glares, lips pursed in a narrow line. It’ll be someone dead, or someone out on a long term mission that they’ll have no hope of getting back in time.
“Bring me John Connor and I’ll speak with him,” the metal says and Derek feels a pit open up in his stomach.
And here he’d been so sure that the kid hadn’t been a gray.
There’s stuff going on but it seems to be confined to the areas that John’s not allowed in so he goes about his normal day, though he’s got two shadows.
Two kids that he’d found hiding in an old storage cabinet and led to the safe room.
He’s working on fixing a leaking pipe, the kids on the ground by his feet. They’ve found a pack of cards and they’re playing some sort of slapping game with them.
He hears the murmurs before he realizes they’re not alone and when he stands and turns, wiping the back of his hand, smearing dirt and grime along his forehead, he sees Derek standing there, Kyle on one side, Allison on the other, two others behind them.
They’re all armed and he doesn’t have to fake the fear in his eyes.
“What…?” he starts and Derek doesn’t say anything, just makes a gesture with the hand not pointing a gun at him, the two standing behind them come forward and he knows that there’s something very wrong when they take his arms.
There’s a gun in the kids back and this still feels off, wrong, and it only has very little to do with whatever the reason is for why Derek thinks he should know this kid.
But the metal had asked for Connor by name, and Connor himself had shown up in the middle of their camp naked as the day he was born.
There’s something going on and if putting the kid and the metal in the same room gives them some answers then it’ll be worth it.
They stop in front of a closed door; John can feel the barrel of a gun pressing into the middle of his back. Beside him Derek makes a hand motion and the door opens and gun prods him into moving.
The room is bare, save for a light hanging from the ceiling and a familiar form in restraints in the center of the room.
He stumbles, “Weaver?” falling from his lips unbidden. Beside him he can hear Derek snort and in front of him Weaver’s face changes. Lips curving into a thin smile.
This isn’t right, there’s something wrong here and he shudders and tries to take a step back except he can’t, because there’s a gun in his back.
“John Connor,” she says, her voice is soft, lyrical, familiar. It’s not Weaver’s voice though and he can feel Derek start, can feel Kyle on the other side of him wrap a hand around his wrist and Allison making a noise of disbelief behind him.
He watches with wide eyes as Cameron, wearing Weaver’s body waves off her restraints.
She stands smoothly, ignores the guns being leveled at her and the shouting voices and he can feel Kyle’s hands on his arms pulling him back, trying to get him out of the room.
They don’t make it.
It’s like it’s happening far away and the minute that they open the door and the kid walks in Derek knows they’ve made a mistake.
This was what the metal wanted, it wanted the boy for some reason and they’ve just given it the boy.
The metal is up, out of the chair, chains falling to the ground around its feet and it’s walking forward eyes never wavering from John’s face.
He’s shooting and the guards are shooting and Kyle is pulling on John’s arm trying to get him out of the room, Allison is yelling something, maybe for help, maybe denials because the voice that came out of the metal’s mouth had been hers.
He sees the metal spike extending from its arm and there’s really no time to react, he just shoots like he can stop it in time, but deep inside that part of him that knew this was a mistake the second they opened the door, that part of him knows that they’re already about 30 seconds too late.
John makes a noise, not a scream or a yell, it’ll be a noise that Derek will hear in his nightmares for months to come; the metal finally falls back, down on the ground and it’s not moving, but by the door John is down and he’s not moving either.
Kyle is dragging him out by his arms, yelling for Kate, for help and Derek keeps shooting at the metal until there’s just the click, click, click of his empty gun and the metals not moving and the only thing he can hear over the sound of the empty gun is the sound of his brother screaming for help for a kid they just got killed.
They have one clean room for surgeries, there’s only the one because Kate’s their only surgeon and she’s a fucking miracle worker but even she can only operate on one person at a time.
There’s glass in the door and Derek stands there, hand pressing a clean cloth to his arm, staring at Kate and her nurses and the still figure that is John Connor on the bed dying on a gurney because Derek’s a fucking idiot who listened to metal instead of his instincts.
“We pulled it’s chip,” Morel says off to his left, Kyle is on his right, hand pressed to his arm just like Derek, it’s fortuitous that there’s three of them with the same blood type now, because in that room John Connor is bleeding to death.
He’d known the boy wasn’t metal or a grey.
He’d known that, he’d still marched the kid in there, with guns pointed at his back and given the metal what it wanted.
He wonders what’s important about the kid, because there has to be something if the metal was willing to come in here, sit in chains in a room waiting for the opportunity to assassinate him.
Because that’s what that was, an assassination attempt against a seventeen year old kid.
For what purpose he doesn’t know, maybe if John survives he’ll be able to tell him.
There’s pain, an aching pain and he’s so nauseous he’s really considering how much more pain it would cause him to turn to his side and throw up.
He takes a shuddering breath, gags and there’s hands turning him to his side as his body goes into dry heaves. He shakes and pants and wants his mom desperately.
There’s a cool hand against his forehead and the soft murmuring from a voice he doesn’t recognize of “It’s okay, shh, just relax,” he tries to bite back the whining, pathetic noise and just barely manages, he takes a slow shallow breath, then another.
He’s alive, the pain and the drugs means it’s probably by the skin of his nails and teeth though.
The boy wakes in stages, the first time he gets so violently ill that he pulls his stitches and Kate cuts almost all his medications, painkillers, antibiotics, everything until she can determine what caused it.
It’s an allergic reaction to something she says and she slowly starts everything back up, antibiotics first, then the painkillers.
She has to cut his morphine dose in half because that’s what appears to be causing his nausea.
The nurses have a rotating shift stationed by his bed, checking his levels and keeping him calm when the nightmares come, he doesn’t ever wake screaming from them, just thrashes around on the bed making noises that hurt something inside Derek.
Derek is there as well, hovering in the corner out of the way; watching, waiting.
Kyle joins him periodically, standing next to him with arms crossed, intent eyes.
“We destroyed the chip,” he says once and Derek nods. Kyle lays a hand on his arm until Derek looks at him.
“This isn’t your fault,” he says and Derek just stares at him. The camp and the people in it are his responsibility, John lying in that bed, in what Kate assures him isn’t a coma but sure as hell looks like one since he’s not waking up from it, is his fault.
“We walked him into that room, so it could attempt to execute him.”
“But it didn’t succeed, he’s still alive and it’s gone and…” Kyle shakes his head and doesn’t continue.
“He’s just a kid,” Derek says. “What could be so important about a kid that metal would come here just to try and kill him?”
“Well when he wakes up maybe he’ll be able to enlighten us.”
There’s always pain when he wakes, the first time he really wakes and is able to open his eyes and keep them open he realizes that his arms are strapped down and he struggles, panicked and scared until Kyle appears right in front of him.
“It’s okay,” Kyle says, voice soothing and soft, hand on his arm and he glances to the right and John shifts his head slightly and sees Kate there fussing with something.
There’s pressure on his wrists and he can feel Kyle unfastening the restraints on one arm, Kate doing the other. Kyle presses his fingers into his skin and John makes a noise and closes his eyes.
His chest hurts and his stomach is churning and he feels small and weak and scared.
“You were having nightmares,” Derek says and he opens his eyes and sees him standing at the end of the bed. “Kept flailing and knocking all your…” Derek waves a hand. “They were to keep you from knocking something that was keeping you alive loose, not to actually keep you detained.”
“Not…” he doesn’t know what he means to say. If he means to tell him that it wasn’t his fault, if he’s wondering why he’s not being restrained when the last thing he remembered was being marched down a hallway with guns pointed at his back.
Derek pats his leg, “Metals gone, destroyed. Morel and Kyle pulled it’s chip and destroyed it, then we burned the remains of that one and the chip that it brought with it.”
“Good,” John asks. He doesn’t have energy to ask what type of chip it was; if Cameron was in Weaver’s shell, then the chip it had on it was most likely Weaver’s.
And his mom had been right the whole time, Cameron couldn’t be trusted.
“Good,” he says again, his eyes close, he can feel Kate’s fingers on his wrist, taking his pulse, Kyle’s hand is wrapped around his other wrist and he can feel the weight of Derek’s hand next to his leg.
He wonders if they know, or if they just feel a type of remorse because he almost died on their watch.
He wakes again and Kyle is sitting by his bed, book open in his lap. He wonders what he did to garner the attention of the Reese boys after having spent almost two months flying under their radar, other than have something that he thought he could trust try and kill him.
“You have any family?” Kyle asks not looking up from his book, John doesn’t answer, isn’t sure how he’s supposed to answer that question… when John doesn’t answer Kyle looks over at him.
There’s a weird expression on his face that John can’t place.
“My dad died before I was born,” he says finally, half-truth, his dad did die, he’s also sitting next to his bed.
“My mom,” he closes his eyes. Cameron had told him how his mom died, and he hadn’t been there for that. He hopes that she didn’t die alone, but he knows his mom so he knows that she did.
If she had the choice she wouldn’t allow anyone to bear witness to that.
“When I was in the camps,” Kyle says, his attention goes back to the book in his lap. “There was a woman that shared the cell with me when they first captured me, older woman early sixties or so, she was delirious for most of the time, camps aren’t really a great place and once you got sick there, well you pretty much stayed sick until you died,” his mouth twists into a rueful grin.
“There were times,” he says. “That she would think I was an old boyfriend, his name was Kyle too,” he laughs a little and looks back at John, eyes soft. “She’d talk about the kid they had, how this kid was supposed to save the world but how she’d let him go off on a suicide mission.”
“I…” John starts, doesn’t go on. He’s not sure what to say, he can’t tell if Kyle knows, the way he’s looking at him he thinks he does.
But it’s also probably crazy, because there’s no time travel here; there isn’t a John Connor in charge to send Kyle Reese back in time so he can be born. The only John Connor here is the kid that’s trying his damnedest to keep his head above water and not drowned.
Or get killed.
“Her name was Sarah,” Kyle says, his fingers grip on something in his book and it takes a second for John to realize that it’s a picture. “She died before I managed to escape.”
John closes his eyes, bites his lip, opens them again when he feels the ghosting touch of Kyle setting something on his chest.
There’s a picture there, of his mom, looking old and worn and tired.
“She was your mom?” Kyle asks and John nods.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“She was sick,” John says softly. “I knew she was dying, I shouldn’t have gone.”
She’d lasted longer than Cameron had said she would and John wonders if it was hope that she’d see him again that kept her marching on until she just couldn’t march any further.
They move the kid in with Kyle. Derek would take him but Jessie stays with him when she’s in camp and she can be kind of loud and the sex kind of acrobatic, the kid just doesn’t need to see that.
Kyle’s got his own room, and he doesn’t share with anyone, doesn’t actually sleep with anyone either and that’s half because he’s a picky son-of-a-bitch and half because Derek standing in the corner with his gun tends to make the girls (and one guy, Kyle was going through a very quick experimental phase Derek always tells himself) nervous.
The kid sleeps a lot, that’s what Kyle tells him.
“He was Sarah’s kid,” Derek looks at him sharply at that. Kyle had never told him that he knew Sarah’s last name, she’d just been ‘Sarah’ the crazy woman that Kyle had shared a cell with for three months until they managed to get him out.
“You told him she was dead,” Derek says, he doesn’t ask because he knows that Kyle did.
“She is.”
“We think she is,” Derek says. “But she also supposedly died on the day that the Generals made their assault on the camp, so she also could have been rescued.”
“Or she could have been buried in the rubble, the kid’s been through enough, I’m not going to give him false hope that his mom might still be alive.”
“Even false hope is hope,” Derek says.
“Since when do you even believe in hope?”
“Since you told me that John Connor is Sarah’s kid,” Derek says. He remembers the rest of what Sarah had told his brother, his brother had repeated the stories when they’d gotten him back.
This kid is supposed to be important to the resistance, and if he’s important to resistance he’s probably important enough that metal would let itself be captured in an attempt to kill him.
“She also told me that he was my kid,” Kyle says, he shakes his head, Derek purses his lips, because okay, yeah, that part of it doesn’t make any sense.
Sarah had been an old sick woman in the process of dying, he knows his baby brother well enough to know that he wouldn’t take advantage like that, besides the fact that John had already been born and old enough to be sent off on missions by himself.
“You didn’t tell him that part, right?” Derek asks, the rest of it he can maybe get behind, the Kyle being his dad thing is just nuts and not possible. Kyle rolls his eyes at him like he’s an idiot.
“We all have the same blood type though,” Kyle reminds him.
“That could mean that he’s a half-brother, or a cousin four times removed, that doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s your kid,” Derek mutters. “I mean the kid is seventeen, you would have had to have been like five when you had him.”
It kind of freaks him out, how attentive Kyle is being. He’s there in the morning to help him hobble his way to the makeshift bathroom, he’s there to help him change his bandages, he’s there when he has a nightmare and screams himself awake.
His voice is always soft, hands gentle on his forehead and arms like he’s a skittish animal that Kyle is bound and determined is going to either break under his hand or love him, or both.
There’s a little voice in his head (it sounds an awful lot like his mom) that screams ‘he knows, he knows, oh fuck, he knows’ and he waits for the moment when Kyle asks questions that he can’t answer.
There’s been no mention of time travel or anything even alluding to that. He’s got no clue how he would explain it away.
And since Weaver is gone and Cameron is gone and he doesn’t even have the first clue if John Henry had been on their side or the other he’s effectively stuck where he is.
Because pretty much only one of those three has any clue that time travel exists, and of them only Weaver knew that he had jumped forward.
Kate pushes at the wound and though John winces he doesn’t make a sound; Derek still keeps a hand wrapped around Kyle’s arm to keep him right where he is.
“It’s healing well, no sign of infection,” Kate says softly to them while John is muttering to himself and scowling darkly in the direction of the floor while he pulls his clothes back on.
Derek breathes a sigh of relief, they don’t exactly live in the cleanest of environments, 92% of the time most of the wounded die of infections that couldn’t be kept clean of dirt and grime. Only those with hardy immune systems and the knowledge of how to care for any wound they sustain survive.
Either Kyle is a better nurse maid then Derek gave him credit for or John has some knowledge of basic first aid.
He lets go of Kyle’s arm and watches as his brother crosses the room, Kate takes his position next to him, mirroring Derek’s crossed arms and slouching posture.
“Should I be offering condoms or a safe sex lecture or something?” she asks, Derek blanches because Kyle is acting like a dad, not like John is someone he’s trying to pick up. He watches Kyle and John and tries to see them the way that someone who doesn’t have any knowledge of what Kyle insists he doesn’t believe but pretty obviously does.
Their heads are bent close together as they talk quietly to each other, Kyle’s hand is on John’s back and Derek can’t see or hear but he’s pretty sure that the hand is rubbing in a semi-circle motion and his voice is probably calm and soothing. He can kind of understand why someone who doesn’t know what Kyle thinks he knows would think that Kyle was trying to sleep with the kid.
It still kind of makes him sick to his stomach, the thought that people are thinking that Kyle is fucking John, when Kyle is just trying to be a dad, to be someone that John can trust without telling him why.
“How about a DNA test?” Derek says quietly, Kate looks over at him and her brow is furrowed in confusion.
“It would take me some time,” Kate says, she looks back over at the two of them, Kyle is ruffling John’s hair and John is shying away though he’s smiling.
Derek nods and watches his brother and the kid that might somehow be his nephew walk out of the infirmary.
“Is he your boyfriend?” Miranda asks, she has bright, wide eyes and it takes John a second to realize that she’s talking to him and she’s referring to him and Kyle.
He makes a noise.
“He’s just a friend,” John says, he pulls Miranda into his lap, lets her curl her body into his and tries to ignore the twinge of pain from sitting the way he is. There’s another four days before Kate will even contemplate taking the stitches out, if he busts them before then it’ll be another week.
“Do you want him to be your boyfriend?” Miranda asks, she peers up at him, blinking innocently. He would think she’s playing him but she’s like seven, he’s pretty sure she wouldn’t know how.
“No,” John shakes his head, ‘I want him to be my dad, to want to be my dad’ he thinks. He says, “I want him to be my friend,” instead, it sounds less insane.
Kate is making a face at him and he’s trying to decipher the meaning behind it without actually asking her.
He dismisses everyone and she hangs back, waiting until Kyle walks out of the room, then she closes the door. He arches a brow at her and she leans against it, biting her lip, staring at him.
“So?” he asks, she pushes herself off the door and walks back over to the table, sorts through the folders that she’d brought with her until she evidently finds the one she’s looking for.
She taps her fingers against it, “I’m not sure what kind of answer you want me to give you, what you were hoping to find by having me do this.”
“The truth,” Derek shrugs. “I’ll settle for the truth and we’ll figure the rest out later.”
“The truth,” Kate repeats slowly, she flips the folder open. “The truth is, I don’t know how, I haven’t got the foggiest idea of how it’s possible…”
Derek looks at her.
“John is Kyle’s son,” she says, the pointer finger of her right hand draws a straight line down the page. It’s a lot of points on a sheet of paper, Derek doesn’t have a clue how it translates.
Except…
He sits down, hard, in his chair.
“You’re sure?” he asks.
“Like I said, I don’t know how,” Derek looks at her and Kate just looks bewildered. He wishes he had answers to give her, as it is it just gives him more questions.
“I have a nephew,” Derek says. The reality of the situation is pushing its way into his head. And he…
He laughs harshly.
“I almost got my nephew killed.”
Now that he knows he can see how John looks like Kyle, it’s his build and bone structure, but mostly it’s his eyes.
He’s not sure how he missed it before, but those are Kyle’s eyes in John Connor’s face and Derek doesn’t have the first clue how they got there but he’s sure that it’s a story that the kid is dying to share if he thought anyone would believe him.
The kid is still quiet and he seems receptive to Kyle’s attention, almost soaks it up, watching him with eyes that are big and wide and when Kyle’s not looking at him to see, filled with awe.
The kid knows who Kyle is to him; of that Derek has no doubt. Which means that he knows who Derek is too.
“You trust me kid?” he asks one day, Kyle is off getting food or books or something for the kid to tinker with. The kid likes to tinker with things; he’s pretty good at it too. The women and most of the guys (the ones that aren’t completely suspicious by nature) love him because he got one of the showers working on more than an intermittent basis and it even has hot water almost all the time to boot.
There’s only one, so they have a schedule of times set up for when the females can use it and when the males can use it.
John looks at him and Derek sees nothing but trust in his eyes, even after he almost got him killed. He’s too trusting; this kid grew up completely sheltered somewhere that wasn’t a hole in the ground.
“Come on,” he jerks his head and starts walking, the kid, his nephew, what the fuck, follows behind him like a little duck.
He can see what Towner means.
The kid holds the gun like he’s been holding guns his entire life, Derek can pretty much see the moment that his posture stiffens and his grip becomes something not natural to him.
He’s faking, he makes a shot, misses two more, misses two, makes three.
There’s moments when Derek can see him forgetting to be bad at firing a gun, and those are the shots that hit the target.
When the clip is empty he points it at the ground and turns to face Derek, expression sheepish.
“Towner was going to work with me, but…” he shrugs.
Derek looks at him appraisingly, then pulls another clip from his pocket, holds out his hand. John hands the gun to him, then watches him with an inscrutable expression as Derek pulls out the empty clip, snaps the full one in place.
“Why don’t you try again,” Derek suggests. “This time how ‘bout you fire it like we both know you can.”
He holds the gun out and John stares at it, then back up at him.
The kid makes ten shots in a row before Derek stops him, he’s seen what he needs to see.
“You’re Sarah’s kid,” Derek says, the kid still has the gun in his hand but it’s pointed at the ground and Derek’s counting on the fact that the kid knows who he is to him to keep him from pointing the gun at him and pulling the trigger.
“Sarah Connor’s my mom,” John agrees. Derek can see the faint trembling in his shoulders.
“And Kyle’s your dad,” Derek says, the kid stiffens but doesn’t deny it, not right away anyway.
“Kyle’s only a couple of years older than me how would…”
“I don’t know, but Kate’s not in the habit of lying to me and I tell her to do a DNA test, she does a DNA test and her DNA test tells me that however improbable it is, Kyle is your dad.”
“It’s a really long story,” John says, his voice is quiet, soft; Derek has to strain to hear it.
Derek sits down on a partially destroyed barrel that is lying on its side. “We’ve got all the time in the world,” he looks at the kid meaningfully. “So tell me a story, John Connor.”
“There’s no such thing as time travel,” Derek says. He sounds disbelieving and John shrugs.
He knows what he knows and he knows where and when he came from.
“Weaver and I came through looking for a metal calling himself John Henry, he’d taken Cameron’s chip and…” John still doesn’t know if Cameron had betrayed him, if John Henry had done something to her chip to cause her to betray him or if it had all been one big, giant trap that he’d let himself be led into.
“Weaver was the metal that attacked you?”
John shakes his head. “Weaver’s skin, Cameron’s chip, or a chip from a model like Cameron anyway, though since Allison is still alive I think it was more Cameron’s chip.”
“You guys trusted metal, after everything…”
“Not really,” John shakes his head. “I’d sent a reprogrammed terminator back to protect me once; maybe that’s how they figured they could slip Cameron in. Precedence and all.”
“We don’t trust metal here,” Derek says, he looks at John. “Not any metal, not even metal professing to be on our side, because they’re not.”
“I know.”
He’d known that then… it was just… precedence and all.
Kyle is waiting for them when they get back and he visually searches John for injuries, Derek scowls at him.
“Target practice,” Derek says.
“I thought you told Towner that you would tear his spine out through his toes if he took John out again,” Kyle says.
“Well I’m not Towner, am I?”
Kyle rolls his eyes at him. Lays an arm over John’s shoulder in a half hug, there’s a quirking lip on John’s face which means that he’s biting back a smile.
And when he looks over at Kyle, Derek wonders how his brother keeps missing the awestruck ‘holy fuck, that’s my dad’ eyes that the kid makes at him.
Of course Kyle’s already mostly adopted John as his kid, age difference be damned. He wonders if it’s something hardwired into parents to know their offspring even without knowing they’re their offspring.
“Were you going to tell me?” Kyle asks, Derek stops right inside his room, Kyle is sitting on his bunk, knees drawn up to his chest.
“Tell you what?”
Kyle looks at him with a look that says ‘you can’t possibly think I’m that stupid.”
“Tell me that you had Kate do a DNA test on John Connor and myself.”
“Who told you about that?” Derek frowns. Kate had been sworn to secrecy.
“You had to know that Kate couldn’t keep something like that completely to herself,” Kyle rolls his eyes at him.
Derek shrugs off his jacket, stands there staring at his brother, waiting.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what the results were?” he asks finally, when Kyle just sits there, looking at him with an inscrutable expression on his face.
“No,” Kyle says, shakes his head. He stands, walking over and stopping right in front of him. Derek arches a brow at him and Kyle smirks at him, then hugs him. A quick one, a blink and you’ll miss it hug.
“Are you going to tell him you know?” Derek asks.
“No,” Kyle says. When Derek looks at him, he just smiles wryly. “It’s pretty fantastical right, and if you think about it he shouldn’t even really exist, the minute he got here he changed everything and he should have,” Kyle waves a hand. Derek’s not sure what it’s supposed to signify but he goes with it.
“If he wants to tell me, wants to actually say the words then he will,” Kyle says. “But he already knows that I know, and I think it’s easier if we leave things the way they are.”
Derek nods, plus if they start saying the words then people will start hearing them and John becomes an oddity, instead of a kid that just had the bad luck to be targeted by metal for some as of yet still unknown to the general public reason.
“Not going to let anything happen to him,” Derek says. Not again, is unspoken but understood.
“I think he’ll only take being coddled while there’s still stitches and Kate to deal with,” Kyle says. “After that I think you’ll find that he’s going to want to be just as involved as anyone else.”
“And you’re going to be okay with that?” Derek asks. “Sending your kid off into some firefight that he might or might not come back from.”
“No, but he’s not a kid,” Kyle says and he’s staring at Derek with the same expression on his face that he had the first time he told Derek rather then asked him to go out on a job.
“You guys are going to drive me to drink,” Derek mutters.
All he wants to do is keep his family safe. Now that’s not just Kyle, now there’s John Connor too. He just wants to keep them somewhere safe so when this is over, when the war is won, they get to have lives.
“We’re the indivisible Reese boys,” Kyle says, smirk on his lips. “So I know that you’ll be sharing that bottle when you find one.”
Derek rolls his eyes but doesn’t say anything, Kyle’s not lying.
They’re the Reese boys, inseparable, indivisible; and now there’s one more of them, neither of them thought kids would ever be a possibility for either of them, not during war when they’re just fighting to survive. But now there’s a kid, a grown one at that and he’s strong and capable and he might be a Connor by name; but he’s really just another Reese boy.
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(I did have trouble getting to the fic from the scc comm though, had to click on your lj)
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Also, I fixed the link in the SCC comm. I'm not sure what happened there.
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