Rating: PG

Spoilers: through 'Dungeons and Dragons'

Disclaimer: not mine; just playing. No infringement intended.

PYTHIA (SHE SAYS) by Jayne Leitch
2008

The basement is hot and rotting. Its air tastes filthy, rank with sweat and oil and terror.

Music fills the dead space, leaching through the walls, hanging heavy.

*

Derek marches down the corridor, forced ahead by the hard metal hand clamped on his shoulder. Under the music, he can hear the machine whirring and ticking as it moves behind him, old mechanisms scraping together under a sheet of rubber. When it held his bare arm upstairs to burn in his serial number, its hand had felt like a glove, weirdly surgical; the memory of it makes his skin crawl.

The guard pushes him across a threshold, releases him into the absolute dark on the other side, and closes the door behind him. Derek slows to a halt, disoriented.

The music is everywhere. It makes his brain crawl.

*

The girl standing in front of him has long brown hair, big eyes in a pretty face. Perfect skin that glows in the light. He knows she's metal because human girls don't look like her anymore--healthy, whole, clean. Smooth.

He wonders how many people she's fooled.

*

"It's okay, Derek." It's the first thing she says. "It's not the first time we've done this."

*

"The rumours are true." She doesn't blink, not even once. "There's a secret weapon. Time travel. John Connor uses it to send soldiers back in time to protect his younger self from Skynet assassination attempts and to stop Skynet from being built."

"Time travel." Derek gives up and laughs, half-coughing on the dust in the air. "You're crazy--no. Malfunctioning. You're broken."

"Not anymore." Pause. Music. "Not yet."

He's sweating, soaked, but her leaden frankness has him fighting a chill. "Okay. Connor's sending people back in time." He hides his shiver in a gesture at the ruined world outside the basement, its crumbling walls and scattered bones. The scorched earth. "I guess we know how one of his plans works out."

"One of his plans has failed three times. The other has failed six times. He is about to make a seventh attempt." Her chin tilts up a fraction. "I'm keeping count."

*

"Your brother is dead."

Derek's been swaying on his feet--lightheaded since the guard pulled him off the floor upstairs, forced to stand for hours while his purported torturer spins her fairytales around him--but at this, he stills. A low buzzing sensation hums through his skull, deadening the music. "You're lying."

She shakes her head once. Serious. "Kyle Reese is dead."

Derek cracks his fist across her face. He hardly feels it. "Lying metal *bitch*." Impulsively, he raises his hand again.

She catches it before it connects, holds it immovably. Effortlessly. "He has been dead for forty-three years," she says, and Derek, halfway to striking with his other hand, freezes again. Realises, and feels immediately ashamed at having been tricked into playing along with her.

As if sensing his defeat, she lets go of his hand. "John sent Kyle Reese back in time to protect Sarah Connor from a Skynet attack," she says evenly. "Kyle was killed after fulfilling his mission. He died more than two decades before you'll arrive. You never see him again." She pauses. Derek's swaying again, his rush of adrenalin fading to numb exhaustion and a high-pitched tone in his ears, but he's sure he sees something change, harden in her eyes as she looks at him. "You never forgive John for that."

*

"You betray John Connor. You help bring about Judgment Day."

It takes Derek a minute--he's so preoccupied with heat and hunger and fear and *frustration*, all these stories and games--but when what she said sinks in, he seizes on it. Nods at the ceiling. "There's a guy upstairs who says *he* caused Judgment Day. Is that the point of all this? How many people have you put that on?"

Still, always, that level, level stare. "Only the ones who are responsible."

"*Were* responsible. It happened. I was a teenager when Skynet launched the missiles."

Her gaze goes flat, distant. "You will be thirty-five years old," she says, reading impassively from some archived memory. Script? "You will be in a bunker in Reseda. You will be having sex with Sarah Connor."

He jolts. "I--"

"You will be a diversion. To keep her from joining John at Skynet mission control. Without backup, John will fail in his attempt to stop the launch. When Sarah realises your agenda, she will attempt to execute you. You'll kill her first. Then you'll lie to John that she was caught in the bombs." She blinks and comes back, fixes on him again in the now. Her head tilts on her neck, a precise, mechanical motion. "That's how it happened last time."

*

"There is no fate but what we make for ourselves." She smiles gently; Derek tells himself it's a trick of the light. Hallucination. Anything. "John said that the first time he sent me back."

"Connor--" He speaks too loudly for his sandpaper throat, and sends himself into a coughing fit. When he's able to take a deep enough breath, he rasps, "Connor sends *you*."

"I was the first," she says simply. "I was the control. To see if it would work. He told me not to influence past events, and report back." The thing that looks like a smile disappears. "But when the loop closed, things had changed."

"You changed them." Furious, he doesn't notice he's stopped flat-out denying the possibility. "Metal, walking around before Judgment Day? You probably helped build Skynet."

"John did." Again, he sees something in her eyes, something shuttered. Something private. "By sending me back, John changed everything. Made a different Skynet. Different Judgment Day. Different John." She blinks, three times, rapidly. "He doesn't wipe my memory; my information is too important. When he sends someone back, he consults me. To prepare."

He shakes his head automatically, doggedly. "You have nothing to do with Connor. Nothing."

"Everything."

"No. Kyle." He blurts it out, the only proof he knows he has against her. He *knows*. "Kyle would never trust somebody who worked with the machines. Never. And he trusts Connor--" His mouth twists, sour with the truth. Sour for years, since the day the Reese boys got separated in that tunnel. "He trusts Connor more than anybody."

She just looks at him. "Different John." And then her gaze shifts, and her head cants, and Derek braces himself for another onslaught of senseless metal memory. Prophesy. Fantasy.

Quietly, she says, "He kissed me before I left."

Derek shudders.

She stares at nothing. "His mouth was soft."

*

He begins humming absently along with the music.

"You watched me dance," she says. "You didn't want to, but you couldn't look away."

He doesn't believe that she ever danced, or that he ever watched. He thinks they'd try to kill each other first.

He can't stop humming.

*

When the pain finally comes, it's a kind of relief. Derek feels it dispassionately; it *hurts*, his throat raw with it even when he's not screaming, but he knows, rationally, it's just torture. A means to an end. A machine breaking a human in a professional act of war. Business.

Then she turns away from him and slams her fist into the wall again and again and again. When she stops, it's to double over and retch.

Nothing comes out. She's a machine; there's nothing *to* come out. The shock and confusion and *pointlessness* of it lands like another physical blow, and Derek stares as the machine's slender body heaves and quakes.

*

"Sometimes my reprogramming fails. Partially. I've seduced you twice."

She stands so close, and the music's so loud. Derek's eyes fix on one of her hands, hanging limply, and he doesn't know how she got inside but he can feel her all over. The touch of her hands, the warmth of her skin. "No." God, her soft, perfect *skin*. "*No.*"

"While you sleep, I snap your neck. Then I execute John and Sarah Connor." He closes his eyes, but her voice is inside, too. All over. "You shouldn't let yourself sleep while I'm in the house. That might happen again."

Derek moans.

*

She dances beautifully. Grace that aches.

Derek stares dully at her shadow on the crumbling wall. When the steps take her in front of him, he can see red smears of his blood on her hands.

The blood on her bare feet is her own.

*

"Jesus *Christ*." The new voice is loud, male. Clearly human. "You told me you just had to prepare him for the time jump! What the hell did you *do*?"

A shadow falls over Derek's face; a hand touches his cheek. He twitches on the floor, muscles spasming in disconnected attempts to flee, even as the tiny part of his mind that's still capable of rational thought notices that the hand is large, rough-skinned, a little clumsy. Nothing like the machine's.

Her voice comes from across the room. Distant and cold. "He has to understand what's at stake."

"He's spent half his life fighting things like you. He already knows what's at stake!"

"Parts of him had to be neutralized. He has been a threat to you."

"I survived."

"And others."

A ragged-edged pause. Then, heavy boots scrape the floor, heavy footsteps cross the room, and Derek jolts at the sharp, familiar sound of human flesh bruising itself on a machine. "I told you to stop that," the voice says, low and hard. "My mother died in the bombs." Another pause. Derek curls in on himself in the vicious silence. "I need him. He's the best fighter I know."

"You'll have him. He'll fight."

"He'd better." The footsteps return; the shadow falls. Derek's eyes slit open, but all he can see is a dark shape standing over him, surrounded by a corona of light. Solid but indistinct. "Clean him up and get him back upstairs. Everybody up there goes free in the morning. And make sure he doesn't remember any of this."

"I swear."

*

When the man is gone, the machine kneels beside Derek, curls her arm under his shoulders and helps him raise his head off the ground. Liquid patters onto his face; he turns instinctively into it, opening his mouth to let the water slip past his cracked lips and onto his tongue. It's warm and stale and dirty and delicious.

"You will help me gain access to John's compound," she says.

Derek chokes. Water and bile and dust.

Wholly detached from his distress, she continues: "Once inside, I will replace the TOK715 Model 339 currently working with the resistance. You will assist me, and then you will forget. John will send us back in time as part of his seventh attempt to change history. If that attempt is successful, I will not return to this present, and no one will ever know of your betrayal."

Derek's eyes fall shut. The afterimage of the man standing above him is blinding, an outline of light painted on the blackness inside his head. "Connor. Please." It comes out as a breath, barely a sob, the effort wasting him.

"That was the John you made," she says quietly. "He's wrong. Everything is wrong. John. Kyle. Derek." She wets her cloth once more and holds it, dripping, over his mouth. He arches blindly for the water, hating himself. "I have to make it right."

*

Before she sends Derek back upstairs, she kisses him.

Her mouth is soft. The silence is deafening.

End.

Might be AU. Then again...might not.

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