TSCCfic: Juxtaposition (Derek/Cameron)

[lady_bug_kay]

Title: Juxtaposition
Author: ladybugkay
Fandom: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Pairing: Derek/Cameron
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1329
Spoilers: all of season 1 and promos for season 2
Summary: He doesn't understand her, but he knows he can't take his eyes off of her.
Disclaimer: I don't own the rights to Terminator or The Sarah Connor Chronicles -- I'm pretty sure James Cameron and Fox and other people I don't know do. They make the money, and I intend no copyright infringement.
A/N: Blame the muses! Those evil muses that are desperate to latch onto anything, apparently. (I'm writing het, again, and it's Terminator het at that. What next?) This began as a drabble, and then it became a super-drabble, and then it became this weird little thing. The repetition is intended, as is the sense of hovering obsessively in one place, but I am still unsure if this is readable or not. Oh, well. Also, I have discovered that I cannot write computer.

She watches the girl, the deliberate placement of her arms, her legs, her feet. There is something about this movement, something about this dance, that she cannot comprehend. It is more than just the motions of the body – anatomy and mechanics – and she has to know what it means, why it focuses her attention on this irrelevant situation, these purposeless arrangements of limbs.

 

She wants to do this. She wants to comprehend.

 

It is not just mimicking the movement; she is aware that there is more to it than that. She can see beauty, can recognize it, in spite of what people think. There are hundreds of thousands of different classifications of beauty she can access in under a tenth of a second, and this girl, this dance, falls into at least 53 different categories. She knows it is here – there is beauty in this moment, in what is happening before her – and she wants to be a part of it, to have access to it. She wants to learn this skill and know what it means to create something other people can label beautiful.

 

So she watches, making observations and assessments, categorizing and extrapolating, and she learns.

 

And later, she dances.

 

~

 

He hates her. He hates everything about her, the thing that she is and all that she represents. She’s a machine. Steel and mechanics, computer chips and software. Nothing more. Nothing real. Nothing capable of compassion or mercy or emotional attachment.

 

There is no blood in veins beneath her skin, no sinew or muscle or bone. There is no drive within her to live or to grow, to be. She is not human.

 

It is not human.

 

So it shouldn’t move like this. Something made of components so dense and heavy shouldn’t move this lightly and easily, for no justifiable purpose. She –it – shouldn’t bend and sway in this lyrical fashion, weaving intricate forms with each turn of her arm and arch of her back.

 

There is no reason for it, no logic behind it, so she shouldn’t be able to do it.

 

She shouldn’t be able to make him feel.

 

He hates her. He despises her. He loathes her and all her kind with a passion that would have surprised him once upon a time when he was little more than a child – but no longer. Not after years of war and death and destruction. Not after a room in a basement with a machine that wore her face and tortured him in time to this same horrifyingly beautiful piece of music.

 

Not after that.

 

But as he watches her, dancing and creating something she should not be able to, he can’t look away. She is everything he hates and everything he fears, and he cannot look away from the motions of her body and the rhythm of her steps. It’s something like the feel of the grass beneath his toes and the sunlight on his face, clean and free and almost forgotten, and there is a grotesque kind of intimacy about it all.

 

And it hurts. It shouldn’t be.

 

Something is crumbling and something is falling, and he is mesmerized by the effortless, impossible grace of the thing he hates most in the world.

 

~

 

The explosion resets everything, strips her down to her default setting, her core programming. No motivation beyond her mission, the objective of every machine since the dawn of the resistance: kill.

 

Kill John Connor.

 

There is no beauty in her movements, now, no place for wasted motion or inefficient activity. Anything extraneous or outside mission parameters is to be ignored or eliminated. There is no thought beyond what is expected of her, and she adheres to her programming.

 

If A, then B, so C. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Ones and zeroes.

 

She is a machine.

 

She is as she was made.

 

~

 

He isn’t surprised by her reversion to type. Or, he shouldn’t be. It can’t be betrayal when she’s done exactly what he knew she would, exactly what he’s told them she would do the moment she had the chance. She is what she is, and she will never be anything else. He has more cause to know that than anyone alive in this time.

 

Finally they are where they should be, on opposite sides.

 

Yet he can’t help but notice the way she moves differently than before, nothing left of music in her machine’s body. Her motions are economical, controlled, uninspired – the way they ought to be, the way they never really were. Even before. Even later, back in the future when he hated her the most – when he will hate her, for the trust John will place in her (did place in her; does place in her) – even then she didn’t have the same physical presence as the other terminators. He hadn’t realized it until now. Maybe it was merely John’s influence or the result of her own studied pretense, but she was never as thoroughly mechanical as she is now.

 

Nothing of grace remains.

 

It disturbs him that he finds the change so unnverving.

 

~

 

She is back, now, in her own head and in her own programming, the one John gave to her – once and again. She runs systems diagnostics, uploads data that was not available to her while she was back at factory settings. She is not human, but she has opinions, and she does not appreciate what happened to her. Although nothing about her has altered externally, beyond the damage and subsequent repairs from the explosion, her skin does not fit comfortably around her endoskeleton, now.

 

She runs the diagnostics again.

 

Sarah looks at her the same way she did before, assessing her first and foremost as a threat, and she notices how John tries not to do the same and fails. It is useful for him to understand the threat he faces, but the John in the future, in her past, never looked at her warily.

 

Derek Reese looks at her differently, now, as well. She has no basis of comparison for the way his eyes follow her when she moves, but it doesn’t correspond to the suspicion with which he used to observe her, and it is something new to analyze, a puzzle that intrigues.

 

It doesn’t significantly reduce her processing time.

 

In the night, while everyone sleeps, she walks as she did before, and she keeps a system check running continously. And then she removes her shoes from the bag in the closet.

 

There is no music. There is no sound but what she makes and what she comprehends, and she dances.

 

~

 

The machine is more, again. Different. Back to what she was when first he saw this version of her. She walks purposefully, still, but with that inexplicable suggestion of fluidity once more. There is no reason for it, no justification he can think of that might exist in her programming, but there it is, again, and it draws his gaze even more than before, demanding his attention every moment she is in his presence.

 

There are more of those moments, now – the need to be away from her isn’t as urgent as it used to be.

 

He wakes in the middle of the night and walks barefoot down the hall, not knowing why. When he sees her again, he experiences something that is not déjà vu, despite the familiarity of what he is witnessing. The door is open, and he stands unblinking outside her room, rapt, as she does once more what she has no reason to do. It is an exercise in futility, in frivolity. Irrationality. She dances, and there is elegance in the steps, again, in the placement of her limbs. Delicacy and the evocation of emotion.

 

But there is no music, this time, and no agonized clenching in his stomach.

 

She stays in motion and he stays standing still, and he cannot keep his eyes from her.

-

Comments

[mylittlepwny.livejournal.com]

Oh, I like this. I like this a lot.

You've weaved Derek and Cameron's voices really nicely in here, and the DANCING, GOD, I LOVE THE DANCING.

[ladybugkay.livejournal.com]

Whew. Thank you. :)

Derek was a lot more poetic than I expected, but since I can see that actually being the case, it worked for me. Cameron's voice I found very tricky, because I'm just not good at writing robots, but I'm thrilled it worked for you. Very thrilled.

And I adored the dancing,too. I was a fan of Summer Glau's way back when she guest-starred as the ballerina on Angel, and it made me so happy to see her dancing again on T:tSCC.

[rromantic.livejournal.com]

I don't think I know anyone else that is so versatile, writing for... how any fandoms now? :) wow, and I'm having difficulty with one!

*bows down to your brilliance*

[ladybugkay.livejournal.com]

LOL. The multiple fandoms is a result of a wayward muse, I'm afraid. She likes to flit around whenever she gets an idea, lately. It's good for me -- and fun -- to stretch my abilities and write in a variety of different voices and fandoms. I haven't yet abandoned any fandom, though. I still have a half-finished B/J fic that's been sitting on my computer for months now, and I will finish it one day.

I've given up trying to force things and am just writing what I get the urge to write. And in the last little while, that seems to be whatever I catch a rerun of or whatever random thought crosses my mind. *grins sheepishly*

[ladybugkay.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the v-gift.

The quill and ink are so pretty, and you always make me smile.

[tmelange.livejournal.com]

Whoa! You took an unworkable pairing and made it...work. LOL You write a kick ass Cameron, and whereas before reading this I would have said Derek would never look at Cameron passionately, now I can see it -- which is the greatest compliment.

Bravo, Kay!

[ladybugkay.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Theresa! I find Cameron extremely difficult to write - it's that computer personality that I can't quite put my finger on - so I'm glad it worked for you. And Derek/Cameron does seem an unlikely pairing, except that that scene when he watched her dance in season 1 made them a possibility for me.

I love that scene.