A/N - Set Post S2 finale.

Allison. Cameron. Different. The same. He studied this girl with her soft eyes, warm smile and gentle hands that sometimes stroked his hair or rested for a moment on his arm or cheek. He tried to figure out what exactly she was thinking on the times when he could tell she had looked past the façade he put up and glimpsed the real him. When he knew she saw how very broken he was.

Sometimes he would wake in the middle of the night and she would be gazing at him from the space next to him on the floor. When this happened John would have to choke off her name before it escaped his lips. It was not her name. She was not Cameron. She was not a metal. She was a real girl. Flesh and blood and bone.

And as her lips pressed to his and her hands slipped under his clothes, as her body moved over him, he remembered. But in the dark, with the dreams and nightmares he would forget and so wake with the wrong name on his lips, choking it back and remembering. Cameron was gone. Allison was here. And he wondered dimly in the other future which had come first.