missmara13

Takes place a few days following After The Fall", so Dean, Faith, and Ryan have had time to get clothes that fit preoperly, and get ahold of guns, and track down the Connors (because they, or Ryan at least, knows the info from John, so once they know the year, it wasn't that hard).

Posting now because I'll be gone from now until sometime tomorrow evening (I'm going down to Denver to meet my new nephew, Liam who is SOOOO adorable! They already sent us a picture int he e-mail! :D) so I won't get another chance until tomorrow. I'll try to get tomorrow's gift posted as soon as I can tomorrow evening, but if I forget or am just too tired, I'll post 2 gifts on Monday.

John Connor had prided himself on knowing when someone was around, but he didn't realize anyone else was in his room until he felt the barrel of a gun press to the base of his skull.

"Don't move, John," an unfamiliar male voice said. "I'm not going to hurt you, I'm just proving a point. And downstairs the other members of my cell are proving the same point."

"What point?" John asked warily.

"Your home security sucks," the voice said. "Anyone who was at any time a member of the resistance could guess the code, and there's some rogues out there who'd love to sneak in and kill you now, because they blame you for everything to come."

"How do I know you're not one of them?"

The barrel of the gun stayed pressed to the base of John's skull as the person behind him shifted, and then a photo dropped to the floor in front of John. "Pick it up, take a look."

John slowly crouched down and grasped the photo, finding a worn picture of him and an unfamiliar boy a few years younger than him, sitting side by side against a concrete wall. The photo was old, but at the same time John knew it was taken sometime in the future simply because he himself looked older. "What's this prove?" John asked.

"Mirror."

John stood again and glanced sideways, seeing that the man... boy really because he looked the same age as John, was the same one from the picture, just a bit older than in it. "What? We're friends?"

"Everyone else in the base was at least a decade older than us, so... we were the only ones that got how bad the loss video games was."

John cracked a small smile, which disappeared as he heard his mom call his name from downstairs, questioning and worried. "Are they gonna hurt her?"

"No," the boy said. "We're just proving a point John, I promise." At that he lowered the gun, turning it around to offer it to John. "Your home security sucks."

~~~

Sarah faced off with the dark haired woman who held a gun pointed in her face, but glanced sideways as she heard footsteps coming down the stairs. She saw John first, looking tense but uninjured, and then registered the boy behind him, gun in his hand, pointed ever so slightly at John. "What do you want?"

"I don't remember her being so dense," the dark haired woman said.

"Faith, we did just..." the boy began, only to cut off as Derek suddenly grabbed him and slammed him into the wall, gun pressing to the base of his skull.

"Drop the guns, both of you," Derek ground out.

"Wait!" John began.

"Yeah, wait," a new man said, pressing his gun to the base of Derek's skull. "We're not here to cause havok, Reese, we're here to make contact, but then we realized your..."

"Home security sucks," John said. "Ryan already filled me in," he added. "They're resistance."

"Ryan?" Derek questioned, slowly shifting to tug the hood back off of the boy, Ryan's, head. "Shit, he does look like Atwood... just... younger."

"From about 5 years from now," the dark haired woman said. "You recognize me, Reese?"

"Faith Lehane, psycho chick who tore up Triple 8s more than once," Derek replied. "I guess that means it's Dean Winchester behind me."

"Good guess," Dean replied. "Lower the gun from my brother's head and I'll let you go. Keep it there, and I don't give a shit that you're my CO, I will kill you."

"He's a little protective," Faith said.

Derek slowly moved his gun, and immediately, Dean followed suit. "Was that so hard?" Dean asked, holstering his pistol. "You alright, Ry?"

"Been worse," Ryan replied, brushing a hand through his hair and having it come bakc bloody. "Damn it, stitches tore," he said.

"What happened?" John asked.

"Shrapnel as Triple 8s overran the base," Ryan said. "Somebody told them where we were, because we wiped out ever one of them for a thousand miles, and they found us within a day."

"First aid kit?" Dean asked.

"In there," John said, pointing. "One of them, anyway."

"We used the time travel mojo to come back to now, see if we can change things further," Faith explained.

"Further?" Derek asked, still suspicious.

"The Derek Reese we know, is the one that you will become," Ryan explained. "The one who travelled back in time and met up with Sarah and John Connor Pre-Judgement day. And that Derek Reese remembered meeting us when I was in my 20's and Dean was an old man of 35," he added.

"That's what I remember," Derek said. "You never talked except one or two words when you had to, but you were the brains of your unit, clearly and definitely."

"I resent that," Dean muttered as he gently pushed Ryan to sit down on the stairs so he could clean up and stitch the cut at the hairline.

"Because you know it's true," Faith said. "We are the brawn, not the brains. It was Ryan's EMP bomb that wiped out the Triple 8s, and if we hadn't been betrayed..."

"It would have worked," Dean agreed. "We might have actually won the war."

"John, why were you so calm, like you know?" Derek asked.

"Because Ryan showed me this," John said, holding out a photo.

Sarah took it, looking down and then up again at first her son, then Ryan. "You were friends?" she asked Ryan.

"No one else fully appreciated the great loss that came with no more video games," Ryan said with a snort, then whinced as Dean pushed the needle through his skin. "Dean was the next youngest until Faith joined up, so... the 3 years between 14 and 17 weren't such a big deal. And I may not have trained my whole life for apocalypse, but I sure as hell knew about not getting to live a normal happy childhood."

The End

There will be more at some point relatively soon, but... I've had the scene between Ryan and john in my head for a while now.