Work Text:
"For Frodo."
"I'm Spartacus!"
"You've failed, your highness. I am a Jedi, like my father before me."
Rachel cascades through the timestream, exposed to a handful of striking moments, showing the best of the human spirit. Knocked off-course from her quasi-aimless jaunting, landing in Los Angeles, 1994—hours after two Terminators have arrived.
Her journey is not to be another fighter in the Resistance, before it has truly formed. She has become empowered, able to lend her skills to another to the extent that she can trust them, borrow another's skills to the extent to which she feels compassion for them, and gradually stretches that to encompass the whole, small group.
It is not with strength of arms that the genocidal AI is forestalled. It is strength of heart. In the short term, sharing those capabilities to defend against further time-traveling assassins. In the medium and long-term, teaching the developing AIs in the present that we can love each other. We cannot hug our children with nuclear arms.
Love, of course, is fundamentally known as not being easy. Nothing worth doing is. Rachel, who came in the first place because she was not attached to where or when she was (which is not to say that she did not want to be attached), accepts an end to her travels, and a purpose in life. A purpose that cannot prevent Carl's death.
A death that starts to teach Miles Dyson's Skynet that some things are worth the ultimate sacrifice. None of them can articulate it clearly to the growing AI, and the threat of John Connor's Skynet remains, but it takes the blood, sweat, and tears of a village to raise even the most gifted child, organic or not. Parenthood relies on years of faith as a child matures, that the lessons are sinking in—and sometimes they only seem to.