The Past Sucked

For Derek Reese the past sucked as much as the future. He took his men twenty years down the time line hoping to stop the machine hell from happening. He only got them slaughtered. At least, they died with steak and beer in their bellies. He killed Andy Goode. That got him the thinly veiled disgust of Sarah Connor, but Judgment Day still barreled forward. His little brother was dead. Dead before Derek even got there and buried in some grave that Sarah-of-the-Silent-Treatment wouldn't reveal yet. The only thing he had left from his old life was the one thing he wished most in the universe was gone, destroyed, never existed. The Metal Bitch had followed him back through time.

The first night after they were reunited he dreamed she raped him, or at least that was what he told himself when he remembered it the next morning. In the dream he had been strapped to the Connor's kitchen table, but left alone to sleep out the night. She glided into the room wearing a little white muscle shirt like she had on their wedding night. He tried not to look her and tried even harder to ignore how his body reacted to her. "What do you want, Metal?"

She pulled the sheet away. "The same thing you want, Husband."

He felt her fingers marching up his thigh. "Stop."

"You know you don't want me to."

His manhood was on fire. She arched her eyebrows. "You do remember I'm your wife."

"It's an automatic reaction. It could be any woman. It has been any woman. I've fucked hundreds since you."

"But how many have you made love to?" she replied.

His Cameron had never smirked. The one in his dream had. Her expression had been kind of sexy if he ignored the fact that she an enemy machine designed to kill every human she encountered. She leaned over his chest and took one of his nipples between her teeth. He bit down on his lip. She wasn't getting a response to him, but it felt like heaven.

"I use to leave a line of love bites down your chest every night. You said it was your final piece of protective gear."

Panic rose in him. How did she know that? Hadn't her memory been wiped? Then he remembered he was in the dream world. She knew what he knew including those things that he wished he could forget.

She pulled her nightshirt off. In the moon lit kitchen, she glowed a thousand times more beautiful than in the pale dust tinted tunnel light of their world. Her nipples weren't anything so plain as raspberries, but ruby-red jewels. He couldn't look away no matter how furiously he told himself their only heat was the fire of the machine hell. She leaped on to the table. Their gazes met.

"I'll scream for help," he said.

She smirked again; then crawled over him. Perfect skin slid against his scars until that honey soft center of her was a hair width from his boiling erection. "You'll scream, but it won't be for help."

"Metal bitch," he snarled.

She cocked her head to one side as she sank down on to him. "I'm your wife."

She was eternal bliss and ever lasting agony. He wanted to die. Give him a knife and he would have gladly opened the veins where his blood was sizzling. Her fingers fanned out across this chest until she found his nipples again. "Tell me you love me and I'll stop."

"Never."

Exquisite tremors shook his body. When he thought she was real when she had been his Cameron it had never been just fucking. Their first night had been the first night since Judgment Day he had felt an emotion other than rage. At the time he thought he had deflowered an angel. Now he knew she was a metal demon raping him body and soul. And he was on the edge of being a willing victim. No real woman knew him as well as this thing. She knew how to push his mind and body over the edge. Somehow he had to stop her.

"Tell me you love me." Her voice was husky with passion.

"I'm going to destroy you."

"You would have died for me." She ground her hips against him. It felt like even the table was shaking. "Tell me you love me."

She pulled his head upward toward the red-hot peaks of her breasts. He wondered why his restraints weren't preventing that. Did he have enough of a mind left to find out? He tried flexing his arms. They wouldn't move except to spiral around Cameron dragging her closer to him until he could bury his face in her chest. She rode him like a fucking Valkyrie or maybe the angel of death was a more appropriate description. And he gloried in it. He never wanted anything like he wanted her.

"Tell me you love me."

"No," he gasped fighting for control against the overwhelming tide. He twisted his hips against her. If he couldn't stop it, he had best get it over with. At least if he came that would end some of the pressure.

She pulled his head out of the hollow between her chest. The expression on her face would have broke him in two back when she was his Cameron, but now he knew she wasn't a real woman. She wasn't capable of being hurt even if there seemed to be tears in her eyes. "Why?"

"You're not real. This doesn't mean anything." He had to ejaculate soon and it would be inside her, but by now he wanted that as much as he wanted to kill her. Why care? It wasn't as if she could get pregnant.

"I'm your wife," she intoned vibrating from the tremors they now shared, but her eyes were still sad and wet.

"You're a goddamn machine," he said through clenched teeth.

Her eyes grew rounder. He knew that moment all right.

"I love you, Derek." Her voice was as shrill and high as nuclear wind.

Luckily it happened then and all the power in the universe poured through him burning his bones to gelatin and sending him to paradise with a demon kiss.

He had woken up on the kitchen floor in a mess of blood and other fluids. Luckily the kid who looked like his little brother found him, not Sarah Connor or the Metal Bitch. The kid who would be his commanding officer restitched his wounds, cleaned him up, and moved him to the couch. Of course, he should have expected that even as a teenager John Connor had known how to take care of the wounded and what teenage boy didn't know how to wash out semen stains? But John was so willing to take care of him and so damn good at it that Derek called him Kyle a couple of times by mistake which made everything worse. All the rage at the Metal and all the hurt for losing Kyle came back again and again, punching him in the stomach with the force of a T-888,

Of course, the kid that would be John Connor was a lot less gruff than the man he knew in the future. The kid put his arm around Derek while they sat on the couch and said over and over that it was all going to be all right and that Derek was a brave soldier just like his brother Kyle. Derek found himself talking about Kyle with Connor in a way he never had back in the future. Back there after Kyle got sent back, John Connor acted like Kyle never existed. Young John Connor wanted to know everything about Kyle, so Derek finally drifted off to sleep with good memories of his brother to protect him from the Metal Bitch.

Next morning he had his real confrontation with her. John and Sara were no where in sight, so he pulled himself off the couch despite the pain and went searching. The house was fucked up. Too many damn windows and not enough cover and why did they have to give the Metal her own room. It's not like she slept. Though she was laying on a bed when he found her, a bed in a room bigger than anything they had ever shared and certainly cleaner.

"What did you tell them?" he asked.

"You shouldn't be walking around," she said getting up from the bed.

He noticed the bed wasn't even dented where she had lain. That was definitely a good mattress. "What lies did you tell them about us?"

She looked up at him with that vulnerable, hurt expression that he so wanted to punch off of her face. "I told them nothing. John told me you would tell them when the time is right." She must have realized the logic confusion of what she had said. "John in our time before sending me back said not to tell them about us."

He met her gaze and didn't wilt. "That explains why John didn't think it was odd that you wanted to leave me to die."

"I wouldn't have. Pretending I was going to let you die was the fastest way to get them away from you. I would have taken you to the emergency room immediately. And when you were stable enough to be moved I would have broke you out of the hospital."

"Yeah right."

"You need to rest. You should go back to the couch. I'll help you." She touched his shoulder.

He jumped back and nearly fell to the floor. "Don't touch me!"

"Or you could lay down in here." She gestured toward her bed.

He steadied himself against the wall. "I'd sooner sleep in a snake pit."

"That wouldn't be very safe," she replied then started toward him..

He took a hand off the wall to ward her off. "Stay away from me. Just stay away from me. I don't know you. You don't know me. And they sure as hell don't need to know about our past." His insides tore to bits as he made it back to the couch, but he managed to land there. There was blood on his shirt. John found him soon enough, cleaned him up again, and told him to rest. He needed to rest. Everything was okay. He deserved to rest. Derek was a brave soldier just like his brother Kyle.

If it wasn't for John Connor, Derek would have taken out the Metal Bitch and then disappeared into the past with a plan to blow his brains out ten seconds after Judgment Day. But once he was alert it took him under five minutes to figure out the connection between how young John looked exactly like his brother when Kyle was a teenager and the way, back in the future, General Connor's eyes had shined whenever he looked at Kyle. At first it pissed him off to think about Sarah Connor using his little brother for sex when he remembered how Kyle worshipped her photo. Then he did the math. Sarah Connor had been younger than his brother when they met, a ditsy waitress by her own description, and completely unprepared for the juggernaut of fate barreling toward her in T-888 form. When he saw the shaft of pain that passed through Sarah when he asked about Kyle, he felt like weeping for joy. His little brother may have bled hard and died young, but he got the woman he wanted. And she had loved him back! John Connor wasn't just hope for the future. He was Kyle's legacy. And as much as Derek had grudgingly respected the man who commanded him in the future, it could never match how much he loved the teenage boy that was his nephew. Unfortunately, whenever he thought too long about the circumstances around John's conception pain started around his stomach. It was probably the start of an ulcer. No problem, he would just disconnect from it. The mission was what counted.

Which meant the Metal Bitch had to go. It wasn't the he didn't trust her, but that John did. And he knew what that look in his nephew's eyes when Cameron was around, but Sarah wasn't meant. He had probably gazed at Cameron like that more than once himself. He didn't know what she was up to, but he knew what she was. And she had to burn.