Fic - Breaking Point 7/8

[cj2017]

Rating: M: violence, sex, harsh language, you probably know the drill by now.

Word Count: 35,000 all told. This part 3,800.

                         

 

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Breaking Point 7/8

~ ~ ~

 

John tapped on the door and pushed it open when Cameron answered. The machine had her back to him as she wrapped thick swathes of bandages around Sarah’s feet. He walked over to the bed, dropping into the chair at Sarah’s side and resting his hand just above her wrist where it seemed safe to touch. Her hands were swollen and mottled blue. Sterile dressings covered the weeping blisters on her fingers.

               “What the hell happened to them?”

Derek’s chest had been livid with bruises, his ribs broken, ligature marks around his wrists. John ran his finger lightly over the gauze on his mother’s wrist and knew it was concealing the same marks.

               “They were tortured,” Cameron said quietly. She saw no reason to dissemble. John wasn’t stupid, and leaving the details to his imagination was probably worse than telling him the truth.

               He paled slightly, but swallowed hard and nodded. “She never tells them.” Leaning forwards, he brushed a strand of sweat-soaked hair from Sarah’s forehead. “They’ve tried so many times and she never tells them anything.” He looked up at Cameron, a flare of anger crossing his face. “I thought you guys were capable of fucking learning.”

               “Some of us are,” Cameron paused with a fresh bandage in her hands, “but these were humans, and it seems that some humans have cruelty built into their nature.”

               Taping the last piece of bandage into place, she watched his shoulders drop as anger faded to weary resignation. She collected the discarded wrappings together and stood up.

“I’ve dressed what I can and sutured the wound in her thigh. None of her injuries is life-threatening, but she’s badly dehydrated. The IV will help with that. You need to try to get her to eat or drink something sweet when she wakes.” She drew the blankets back over Sarah but left her feet uncovered, stilling John with a hand on his arm when he moved to correct her oversight. “Your mother has a lot of damage to her feet.”

He lost a fraction more color from his face and she decided immediately that that was enough detail. She hoped he thought the damage was frostbite. “I’ve given her morphine through the IV. She’s just sleeping, John.”

Cameron chose not to mention that Sarah had passed out, nor that she had woken shortly afterwards barely coherent and writhing in pain. It was then that Cameron had given the morphine. Satisfied that she had told John a fairly accurate version of the truth, she allowed herself one small lie by omission. Placing her hand on Sarah’s cheek, she measured the fever that was gradually taking hold. She selected antibiotics and a packet of acetaminophen from the first aid kit and set them on the bedside table.

“Give her these as soon as you can.” She had to prioritize the IV drugs, and Derek was currently in even worse shape than Sarah.

John nodded, noting the dosages on the sheets of paper that Cameron had tucked into the packets. “I will.”

“Derek?”

“He came around some in the bath. Enough for me to get him back to bed. His chest sounds like crap.”

She scooped up a couple of small IV bags and headed for the door. “It would be more convenient for us to put them in the same bed,” she said thoughtfully.

“Yeah,” John laughed, “but I don’t think my mom would go for that.”

Cameron gave him a very odd look, one that seemed to imply he was an idiot, and then left without further comment. With a confused shrug, he poured a glass of water, set it beside the medication, and sat back to wait.

~ ~ ~

               Derek Reese had a lot of scars. When Cameron had lifted him into the bath, she had counted at least twelve on his torso alone: burns from a pulse blast, badly healed bullet wounds, jagged rents from trying to fight in the twisted debris the machines had left behind. He had more wounds now, further weakening a body that was caught between hypothermia and a raging infection.

               The last of the antibiotics dripped slowly into his arm. He had choked a little on the glucose gel she had squeezed onto his gums, but he had swallowed some and absorbed the rest, so that was another defect corrected.

               As he breathed, she could hear the fluid choking his lungs. It was looser now that the antibiotics were in his system. She cleaned his face when he coughed and held him still when he thrashed against his fever. The sheer bloody-mindedness of human endurance never failed to intrigue her. Derek Reese had survived the end of the world. He had been shot and burned and slashed and had recovered to continue fighting. As the bag of antibiotics ran dry, she wondered whether something as simple as pneumonia would prove to be the death of him.

~ ~ ~

Sarah’s dreams had been full of ice and fire and an endless path marching straight into a freezing wind. The wind had been so strong that she had barely been able to make any headway against it. Tired of trying, she was clawing herself towards waking when she heard her son’s voice. Keeping her eyes closed for a moment longer, she smiled as she listened.

John wasn’t reading, but rather reciting from memory. He was mangling the words and the accent, but she recognized the story all the same and loved him for his effort.

               “I think you skipped a whole chapter there.” Her voice was rough and scratchy, but he smiled broadly at her regardless.

               “Yeah, sorry.” He laughed. “That was the John Connor edited version. Here…” He gave her pills and water in what seemed to be a well-practiced routine, although she couldn’t remember it ever happening before. “How you feeling?”

               “Better.” Mostly she felt numb, and wasn’t sure whether that was due to the frostbite or the morphine. “How long?”

               “Couple of days.”

               Even in the dim light she could see the deep shadows beneath his eyes, and suspected he had been beside her for the duration.

               “Derek?”

               He swapped the water for apple juice while he tried to decide what to tell her.

She took a sip and then pushed it away. “John? How is he?”

               She felt his hand on hers. The pressure of it ached and burned, but she bit her lip and managed to curl her fingers around his.

               “Cameron’s slightly more optimistic than she was.” Less than twenty-four hours earlier, Cameron had held out little hope for his uncle. “She says his fever is down slightly, but she’s used all the IV antibiotics and he’s still unconscious.”

               “He’ll be okay,” Sarah said immediately, hoping that she sounded more confident than she felt. Reaching out with her hand, she knocked her strip of antibiotics onto the bed. There were seven left in it. “Save these for him.”

               John was already shaking his head. “Mom, you need them.”

               “I can probably do without.” She had not dragged Derek Reese’s ass through the snow for hours only for him to die because they didn’t have enough drugs to fix him. She still felt like hammered shit, but at least she was conscious.

There was a creak of plastic as John took hold of the packet, and she closed her eyes, grateful that he wasn’t going to argue with her. “You should get some sleep, John.”

               “Yeah, yeah.” Another creak, this one the wood of the chair’s frame as he leaned back into it. “Isn’t that my line?”

               “Mmm. I don’t know where you get your stubborn streak from,” she muttered, and fell asleep to the sound of his quiet laughter.

~ ~ ~

               The hot water pounded against John’s shoulders and he dropped his head, hoping it would ease some of the tension from his muscles. He had left his mother sleeping comfortably, her fever well-controlled, her IV freshly changed. Cameron hadn’t questioned him when he had handed her the antibiotics. She had just nodded, with that same, strange look on her face, as if she had been expecting them all along.

               It had taken him a further five hours at his mother’s bedside before he had finally deciphered the meaning behind that look.

               The water washed two days’ and three nights’ worth of filth and sweat away. He watched as it swirled down the drain. There were times when he despaired of his destiny as humanity’s future leader, and this was certainly one of those times. Closing his eyes, he ran his hands across the light growth of stubble on his face. The fact that Cameron had worked it out before him only served to make him feel worse. How could he hope to orchestrate and command an uprising against Skynet when he was stupid enough to have been blind to something so glaringly obvious?

~ ~ ~

               The chair at Sarah’s bedside was empty when she woke, and she hoped that meant John was catching up on the sleep he had been neglecting. She felt much clearer, as if the fog that had pinned her down for days had suddenly lifted. With clarity came the urge to get out of bed, and she gingerly experimented with moving her various battered parts.

               Her hands were less swollen, the nerves in her fingertips hyper-sensitive with the slow return of circulation. When she reached for the glass of water on the table, she managed to grip it and raise it to her lips. It was a small sign of progress, but progress all the same. Throwing back the blankets, she dragged her legs around and lowered them to the floor. The pain in her feet instantly soaked her with cold sweat, but she squeezed her eyes shut, sucked in a breath and stood up anyway.

Her first attempt wasn’t entirely successful. Before she could do anything to save herself, she was sitting back on the bed and cursing the Bambi-like wobble that had collapsed her legs from under her. She took more care with her second effort, bracing herself against the chair and clinging on to it until the head-rush eased. The sensation of standing was something akin to balancing on shards of glass, but she could cope with that. As soon as she was confident that she wouldn’t faint, she unhooked her IV and took a step.

She found John on the sofa. Fast asleep, he was barely visible under a pile of blankets. She left him undisturbed, limping around the sofa and pushing open the door to the second bedroom.

“You should not be out of bed.”

Cameron was in the middle of changing Derek’s IV and didn’t sound surprised to see her. Sarah might’ve been able to stumble past her exhausted son, but the machine’s auditory acuity was flawless. Setting the IV down, Cameron crossed the room and wrapped an arm around her. Sarah didn’t even pretend that she could manage. Her legs had started to buckle at the door, and when she was hit by a fit of coughing, Cameron all but carried her over to the chair.

“I don’t think I will ever truly understand humans,” Cameron declared as she hung Sarah’s IV alongside Derek’s.

Sarah nodded, working hard to breathe and not really listening. She was staring at Derek and trying to persuade herself that something in his condition had improved since she had seen him last. Eventually, she gave up. “He looks like crap.”

“Yes.” Cameron couldn’t argue with that. “His fever is lower. His chest…” She didn’t elaborate; the noise of his breathing completed her sentence for her. “He’s been awake on three occasions, but incoherent. The last time he managed to swallow a dose of medication.”

“That’s good.” Leaning forward, Sarah rested her hand on his.

“You really should be in bed.” Cameron paid lip-service to the notion, but placed a bowl of water and a cloth within easy reach of her. “The IV will run for at least two hours. If he wakes, give him another antibiotic. If you need me…”

“I’ll call,” Sarah promised. She dipped the cloth into the water. “Thank you.”

Tilting her head to one side, Cameron watched as Sarah struggled to stand and then used the cloth to bathe Derek’s face. She was obviously hurting, and Cameron waited until she was safely seated again before leaving the room.

Taking the opportunity to step outside, Cameron performed a quick assessment of the immediate perimeter. She stayed close to the cabin, listening for any signs of disturbance within, but keeping her distance from Derek, as Sarah had intended.

 Although human nature – on the whole – remained an enigma to the machine, when Sarah Connor was sick Cameron could read her like an open book.

~ ~ ~

               “We don’t have a turkey. So I made you a bagel.”

               Slouched on the sofa, his eyes still sleep-swollen and his back aching, John blinked twice and tried to remember ever having woken to a statement as random as that. Cameron was holding the plate out to him, looking apologetic.

               “What? Thanks. Why?” He was starving, so he ate the bagel, but the turkey – try as he might, he couldn’t figure the turkey out.

               “The twenty-fifth of December is Christmas Day. Although we have plenty of appropriate trees outside, according to Wikipedia, there should also be turkey. Or perhaps ham.”

               He hesitated mid-chew. “It’s the twenty-fifth today?”

               “Yes. We also failed to put stockings out last night.”

               “Yeah.” He smiled at the thought, but it was a long time since he had hung a Christmas stocking. “I guess we got distracted with manning our field hospital.” The bagel disappeared with one final bite, and he wiped crumbs off his fingers and onto his pants. “How are they?”

               “Derek’s fever is lower and he is clearing his secretions more effectively.”

               John nodded with a slight wince; that was possibly more information than he had required. “My mom?”

               “Your mother is recovering well.” Cameron looked slightly wary.

               “She is?”

               “Yes.” Picking up his empty plate, Cameron took two steps away from the sofa. “She must be feeling better because she got out of bed…”

               “She did what?” He kicked the blankets off, snarling in frustration when they tangled in his feet.

               “She’s sitting with Derek.”

               “Yes, thank you, Cameron. I figured that one out by myself.” It was difficult for him to be effectively sarcastic when his hair was sticking out at all angles and he was still trying to free his feet up.

               She made no attempt to stop him when he stalked towards his bedroom. Although she was moderately concerned about the stability of their impromptu family unit, she wasn’t entirely displeased by the turn of events. She had begun to despair that John would ever figure that one out by himself.

~ ~ ~

The snow fell silently beyond the glass as Sarah sat and watched Derek fighting for his breath. She could hear the rattle as he pulled air in and the awful wheeze as he forced it out again. It was taking all of her strength to stand, to wring the cloth out in the cool water, and to wipe it across his face and down his neck. His skin burned where she touched it, but that came as no relief, even when they had been so cold for so long.

               There was no-one to hear her quiet whimper when she sat back down. The pain from the wound in her thigh bit fiercely and she twisted in an effort to ease the pressure on it. The movement made her take too deep a breath. She started to cough, the noise harsh and brittle, and she couldn’t stop it.

               The bedroom door was flung open within seconds.

               “Jesus, mom!” John ran to her side, pouring water into a glass and holding it for her as she took careful sips. He left a steadying hand on her shoulder, and waited until she had regained control of her breathing before he spoke.

“What the hell are you doing out of bed?” He managed not to raise his voice, the fact that she had actually been able to get out of bed tempering his anger somewhat.

She didn’t have the breath to answer him immediately.

He knelt down and rested his hand on her forehead. “I think your fever broke.”

She was still so tired. She closed her eyes, feeling the tears falling slowly down her cheeks and the gentle touch of her son’s fingers as he wiped them away.

“Cameron let you in here?”

“Yes.” She looked down at him. “I didn’t give her much of a choice.”

“Yeah, I figured.”

“I couldn’t leave him with her.”

“I know.” John didn’t know everything, but he knew enough to understand that it would probably not be a good idea for his uncle to wake up with a machine at his bedside. “Give me a minute, okay?”

She nodded, her eyes heavy with exhaustion.

He startled her when he came back, and she realized she had dozed off as soon as he had left. Pulling a chair up beside her, he draped a blanket over her knees and then handed her a mug of tea.

“Try that. Just take it slowly.”

The tea was fragrant with vanilla and honey, and felt wonderful against the rawness of her throat.

“If you keep that down, Cameron says we can get rid of the IV.”

“Mmhm.” Sarah figured that she would probably be asleep long before she had a chance to feel nauseous. She felt John ease the cloth from her fingers and heard the splash of water as he dipped it into the bowl.

“Hey, mom?”

The fabric of his shirt rustled as he stood to bathe Derek’s face. Fighting to stay awake, she waited for him to finish his question. When he sat back down, he was smiling.

“Merry Christmas,” he said, and then laughed quietly at her expression of utter confusion. “I know. I guess we lost track. Today’s the twenty-fifth.”

“Christmas day,” she said slowly.

“Yeah, Christmas day.” Taking the empty mug from her hand, he leaned her back against the pillows on her chair. “My first white Christmas.”

Her eyes were closing again, and he pulled the blanket up higher to cover her.

“I didn’t buy you anything.” She forced her eyes open, and they were full of half-dazed remorse.

“I’ll take an I.O.U., just this once. You going to sleep now?”

She nodded, already most of the way there, and he watched her until her breathing evened out. Then he leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and buried his face in his hands.

He really had meant to ask her. When he had stepped into the room he had been determined to ask her about Derek, and why she hadn’t told him, and why she hadn’t trusted him. He had been indignant and angry, and that had lasted right up to the point where he had seen her hunched over and fighting for her breath. At that point, his priorities had shifted in an instant.

Sarah mumbled in her sleep, her face creasing with fear as a nightmare gripped her. Bringing his head up, John reached for her hand, stilling it when she twitched and jerked, and murmuring softly to her until she settled. Whatever else he needed to say to her could wait. Shuffling in his seat, he tried to find a position that didn’t make his back ache. With a rueful smile, he realized that Cameron had been right: it was easier to keep an eye on them when they were both in the same room.

He glanced out of the window where the snow was piling up on the sill. It gathered steadily, blocking out the light, as he kept his vigil.

~ ~ ~

               Having waited in the living room until she was confident she would not be required to intervene in any kind of confrontation, Cameron headed back into the kitchen. Sorting through the main cupboard, she found cans of beef stew and meatballs that seemed to involve a very loose definition of meat, but there was nothing resembling the component parts of a Christmas dinner. Her hand closed around a packet of macaroni and cheese. It was one of Sarah’s favorites, being practically impossible to burn, undercook, or otherwise destroy. Cameron didn’t know whether it made for an appropriate Christmas meal, but her research indicated it was a good choice for convalescing patients.

               Satisfied with her selection and by the sense of peace in the cabin, she set the packet to one side and took up her assault rifle and a tool kit. It was too early for dinner, and if they didn’t need her she had maintenance checks on the Jeep to perform. Her last check of the PDA had shown the two dots still blinking steadily in the middle of the forest, but, despite that, she did not intend them to stay at the cabin any longer than was absolutely necessary.

~ ~ ~

               “Derek? Hey. Can you hear me?”

               Derek’s brow was furrowed with confusion, but eventually he peeled his eyes open and focused on his nephew.

               “Here.”

He drank the water greedily and then coughed a good amount down his chin.

“I think you’re supposed to sip it,” John said, not entirely confident in his role as nurse.

Derek gave John a look, but was more careful with his second attempt. He licked his lips and then ran a leaden hand across his face, startled to discover a decent growth of beard.

“Been about three-and-a-half days. You were really sick.” John set the water down and touched his hand to Derek’s forehead. “You’re cooler. That’s good.”

Derek’s gaze was fixed on Sarah, sleeping soundly in the chair beside her son. He nodded distractedly. “How’s she doing?” His voice sounded as if he had been gargling with sand.

With a sympathetic wince, John handed him the water again. “She’s okay. You both took a battering, but she’s okay.”

Reassured, Derek closed his eyes. “She should be in bed, John.”

He heard John’s laugh – short, sharp and hopeless. “Yeah, and when she next wakes up, you can try telling her that.”

~ ~ ~

Sensing that something was different, Sarah awoke with a start. The only light in the room came from the snow and a radiant full moon, but it was enough for her to see that John’s chair was empty and Derek’s eyes were open. He was watching her blearily.

               “You took your time,” she said lightly. “I’ve been up for days.”

               He laughed, his hand moving to splint his ribs. “You’re a rotten liar, Connor.”

               In an attempt to prove her point, she pushed herself out of the chair and perched on the bed. It was a ruse that might have worked had she not immediately pitched forward.

               “Shit.” She gripped the arm he put out to steady her.

               “So, when you say you’ve been up…”

               “I might have been exaggerating slightly,” she admitted with a small smile. “Here.” She placed the antibiotic between his lips and held the water for him as he drank. Her hand lingered on his face, her fingers brushing lightly across his beard. “This will have to go,” she murmured.

               “You don’t like it?” His hand caught hers and he moved her fingers to his lips.

               “No.” She leaned forward to kiss him properly. When she finally let him go, he collapsed back against the pillows, his breathing ragged. She kept her face close to his. “Merry Christmas.”

               “Christmas? Today?”

               “According to John.”

               He licked his lips; she was wearing lip balm and they tasted of strawberries. “Thanks for getting me out of there, Sarah.”

               He felt her hand on his cheek as his eyes closed.

“Yeah, well, I think I might’ve owed you one…”

 

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TBC…

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