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Rating: gen
Words: 330-ish
Summary: John Connor never meant to turn his mother into the Blessed Virgin of the Apocalypse.
John Connor never meant to turn his mother into the Blessed Virgin of the Apocalypse.
Stuck in Century City Work Camp - starving, on the edge of extinction and utterly certain he'd failed Sarah Connor in every way a son could fail his mother - he'd started talking about her just to keep himself sane. To help him remember that she'd known that the apocalypse was coming, that he would survive, and that he would find a way to organize what little was left of the human race and teach them to smash those metal fuckers into scrap.
He'd done it already so John knew it could be done. Everything his mother ever taught him was proof. So John began to talk to anyone who would listen about growing up in the jungle and learning guerilla warfare with his ABCs. About the entire Green Beret cadre she'd "killed" in a School of the Americas wargame in Oaxaca. And at night, he'd sit with the kids, the orphaned and abandoned and plain terrified children of humanity, and tell them how Sarah had chased away the monsters under his bed and read him The Wizard of Oz in Spanish every night for over a year because it was his favourite thing.
With every story John told, he felt his faith in himself grow stronger - she had believed, then so could he. It wasn't about building anyone's morale but his own, which is probably how John missed his stories' effect on the people around him.
It wasn't until after they stormed the wire at Century City and he led his fellow survivors into the sewers of Los Angeles, that he began to get an inkling. When the first baby Sarahs (and Sarah-Johns, Sarah-Michaels, and Sarah-Connors) came to his attention. When Perry called him "el Mago". And most of all when he watched his teen-aged father stare at his mother's picture with what could only be called reverence.
And then it was too late.
Words: 330-ish
Summary: John Connor never meant to turn his mother into the Blessed Virgin of the Apocalypse.
John Connor never meant to turn his mother into the Blessed Virgin of the Apocalypse.
Stuck in Century City Work Camp - starving, on the edge of extinction and utterly certain he'd failed Sarah Connor in every way a son could fail his mother - he'd started talking about her just to keep himself sane. To help him remember that she'd known that the apocalypse was coming, that he would survive, and that he would find a way to organize what little was left of the human race and teach them to smash those metal fuckers into scrap.
He'd done it already so John knew it could be done. Everything his mother ever taught him was proof. So John began to talk to anyone who would listen about growing up in the jungle and learning guerilla warfare with his ABCs. About the entire Green Beret cadre she'd "killed" in a School of the Americas wargame in Oaxaca. And at night, he'd sit with the kids, the orphaned and abandoned and plain terrified children of humanity, and tell them how Sarah had chased away the monsters under his bed and read him The Wizard of Oz in Spanish every night for over a year because it was his favourite thing.
With every story John told, he felt his faith in himself grow stronger - she had believed, then so could he. It wasn't about building anyone's morale but his own, which is probably how John missed his stories' effect on the people around him.
It wasn't until after they stormed the wire at Century City and he led his fellow survivors into the sewers of Los Angeles, that he began to get an inkling. When the first baby Sarahs (and Sarah-Johns, Sarah-Michaels, and Sarah-Connors) came to his attention. When Perry called him "el Mago". And most of all when he watched his teen-aged father stare at his mother's picture with what could only be called reverence.
And then it was too late.