Chapter Text
[Bassett Center Mall , El Paso, Texas – June 6, 1997]
T is standing, still and motionless. He’s not leaning against the large column; instead, strangely standing next to it at full height, with excellent, if unnatural, posture. There’s no doubt he’s scanning every sight and synthesizing every sound –
“Uncle Bob! Look alive!” From the threshold of the store, John snaps his fingers; the quick motion dissipates into a wave back and forth of his hand, to and fro like the crowds bustling around the shopping center. It even snaps you out of your clothes-induced daze from where you’re perusing a few racks over. You look over just in time.
“Tall order.” T remarks shortly and simply. But he does, fittingly, look over.
He seems as if he lets out a huff; learned behavior. An obvious, if imitated, breath every now and then isn’t a bad thing, and he’s a good actor – he’s only gotten better and better.
T leaves it at that, and you hate it (not really): a quip over his arguable lack of life.
Out of all the things that a supercomputer cyborg from the future, designed to target and assassinate humans, could be – he’s funny. (If your memory was half as good as his, you’d remember having almost these exact same thoughts almost a year prior. Alas.) You want to roll your eyes and scoff and be annoyed, but you don’t have it in you.
How could you, anyway? You’ve spent months, now, as discreetly as possible – even if less so, over time, as secret became habit, and you’re almost in the clear, very nearly, since, mere days ago, those documents deeming you man and wife came in – becoming closer with him, in both the physical and nonphysical senses.
Furthermore, it’s been a year and some months since you’ve been assumed into the family – and into the honest truth about the Future War and the Terminators and the Resistance, and nobody knows that truth more intimately than you.
At least, not all of its aspects.
You know the feel of his hands, the rough skin atop them under your soft palm, the feeling beneath that somewhat scaly surface when dry and slightly slicker when wet with sweat – real, true sweat, generated by some hyperadvanced process, the same as his saliva and scent and all of it – that isn’t knobby bones but rods and nubs of metal. The veins are authentic enough, if artificially created, still something human at the genetic level, not made of plastic piping but fibrous filaments. You notice them throb from time to time, not quite simulatedly, as assembly-line blood courses through them at a faster pace, for whatever the reason requiring greater flow to a given part might be. You know the gap in his front teeth, the pattern of pores on his nose. The rush and crash of yourself against him that comes like waves as he holds you against his unmoving chest, still without so much as a heartbeat, on nights you miss your family and your former life, under the kitchen light that spills a low glow like steady tears. The way he held a moment’s span of silence on one of those nights when you, after discussing yours past, asked him what home was to him in the future and he simply stared and said softly, reflectively, in return, “home,” with a near-imperceptible break of visage in the form of a frown before informing you.
Both of you knew in your own way that home can be a person and not a place. Or something like a person. Maybe a person in the spiritual more than the somatic sense. But neither of you said it.
Sighing, you hoist up a shirt, fresh from the rack, just as he begins to turn his head; it stops in its servos’ tracks. “Whaddaya think?”
His eyes say more than words ever could without even a blink’s beat.