fic: upon your belly you shall go (t:scc)
upon your belly you shall go
terminator: the sarah connor chronicles. the machine is fake and it lies; of this derek is certain - and this, it makes them equals. derek; derek/cameron, john/cameron. AU (timeline through s2 premiere). rated pg-13. 1094 words.
note: I started writing this ages ago and it has been sitting on my hard-drive for just as long. That said, show chronology-wise? This has been probably been made AU, but whatever. It carries through the first episode of season two and is supposed to take place then as well.
“In the beginning,” his mother once had said, “there was man.”
The machine winds a strand of hair loosely around its finger, seated still across the room. The spine is held rigid, shoulders back, breasts small and pert and he swallows.
Sometimes he chokes on bile.
Other times he chokes on her.
-
Cameron - it, her, metal, machine, salvation, destruction, harbinger of death, pleasure, mystery, it, her, Derek doesn’t know what the fuck this thing is, what it is supposed to be.
Its fingers fumble over a tube of lip gloss and he watches the smear of a wet sheen across its mouth.
-
Later there will be this:
He had expected her to taste like plastic.
Instead she tastes like pink, like skin, like every other hot piece of female flesh his lips and tongue have ever passed over.
It concerns him.
He bites down and she grunts.
It concerns him how little he understands about how this should work.
She, he thinks. And he wonders when exactly it happened that Cameron became just that.
“From the beginning,” he imagines she would say. The tip of her tongue slides along the flat of his and he will choose to blame curiosity above all else when his hand slips beneath the waistband of her jeans.
Like pink, like skin, like every other hot piece of female flesh he ever took the time to discover.
-
“Do you trust it? Can you trust Cameron?” Derek asks John.
John’s eyes go wide.
The yes is implicit, written there.
-
He is realizing things.
Firstly, his senses are off. Cameron can sneak into the kitchen without him catching her first.
Secondly, it is difficult to prey on metal. There is no smell, no sound of heaving breathing, to ever tip them off.
Thirdly, Cameron is far from a stunning conversationalist. The words she (it?) settles for always resonate as non-sequiturs, too blunt, too truthful, too awkward for what is supposed to pass as natural conversation.
He considers this, and Cameron considers him.
“You remember me,” she says.
He glares at her.
“I don’t remember you,” she adds.
He might glare harder. He doesn’t know. He does know he grips the carton of milk that much tighter and he can feel the cardboard bend with the aching of his fist.
“I don’t remember you and looking at me like that is not going to make me start,” she says. She blinks once, something hollow and porcelain in her wide-eyed expression. “My memory was wiped. I was reprogrammed.”
“I know,” he bites. He swallows some milk straight from the carton. She watches.
She cocks her head to the right.
“Was I bad?” she asks.
“What?”
Her lips purse together and form a pouted line.
“Was I bad?”
He doesn’t know how to answer this. He doesn’t know how to explain things like distant piano melodies that stick, how you can explain the memory of long, dark halls below ground, The Basement, the metal, her. He doesn’t think there are words for it; he sincerely hopes there isn’t.
He places the milk back into the refrigerator and walks away.
Cameron does not follow.
He flexes his hand at his side.
He remembers the way those fingers of hers used to grip, tight.
-
“Then God said, Let us make man in our image,” the priest had said, a Sunday.
“In the image of God He created him - “
Derek had fidgeted, young, a wooden pew beneath him, his knees.
“Male and female He created them.”
-
He tastes dirt, he tastes blood.
There is the smell of jet fuel smothering.
He awakens with a gasp.
There is the flickering light of the television in the next room, the faint crescendo of a musical score and what sounds like Cameron sighing.
There is a thread of tension run straight through him, a live-wire.
He presses sweaty palms flat against the couch’s frayed upholstery and wills himself not to touch, release.
He thinks Cameron sighs again.
One hand slips beneath the blanket and he echoes back in kind.
-
Derek wants to know where the Phillips came from. Where the names came from, who decided that, no parent, no Mom or Dad to look down and say, “she looks like a Cameron, yes, we’ll call her Cameron.”
It is a dangerous game they play with this machine, sharing a spot at the breakfast table and the backseat of the car.
John’s eyes get wide when he looks at it, narrows when its name is mentioned.
Derek wants to call it trouble. He thinks he’s been around long enough to recognize it when he sees it.
When he sees her.
John’s eyes widen.
(It reminds Derek of Kyle, underground, that dog-eared photograph, the only flesh-and-blood woman of this house).
-
Its body can bend in half.
“I love you,” it can shriek.
“Dangerous. Liar,” Derek can scoff.
-
“You don’t know how to love,” he sneers.
His hand clutches at the back of her head, almost cradling it, fingers far too insistent.
“You? You are a fucking liar,” and the heat of his breath refracts off her face, back to him. She doesn’t blink. Her eyes watch his, they watch his mouth; he thinks his own are behaving the same.
She studies him.
“Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” is what she says, her voice steady and calm, offhand and precise.
It is then that he smacks her across the face.
The white enamel of her front tooth cuts into her bottom lip.
It bleeds.
He licks his lips.
-
“It starts with man,” he once said and in the grim, hollowed out light of the tunnel his brother had nodded. The bulbs above had bobbed.
Genesis had its place.
“It starts with man,” he had repeated and machines had howled atop the earth.
-
The eyes remain open, vacant.
“Destroy it,” he said and John did not reply. He had turned to his mother, he turned to Sarah, and it was Derek who stepped forward.
He let his fingers stray across her cheek.
Skin on skin, and he had shuddered.
“Destroy her,” he whispered.
-
The machine blinks.
He wants to kiss her.
He wants to break it.
The machine blinks, and Cameron - there might be a smile.
-
fin.
terminator: the sarah connor chronicles. the machine is fake and it lies; of this derek is certain - and this, it makes them equals. derek; derek/cameron, john/cameron. AU (timeline through s2 premiere). rated pg-13. 1094 words.
note: I started writing this ages ago and it has been sitting on my hard-drive for just as long. That said, show chronology-wise? This has been probably been made AU, but whatever. It carries through the first episode of season two and is supposed to take place then as well.
“In the beginning,” his mother once had said, “there was man.”
The machine winds a strand of hair loosely around its finger, seated still across the room. The spine is held rigid, shoulders back, breasts small and pert and he swallows.
Sometimes he chokes on bile.
Other times he chokes on her.
-
Cameron - it, her, metal, machine, salvation, destruction, harbinger of death, pleasure, mystery, it, her, Derek doesn’t know what the fuck this thing is, what it is supposed to be.
Its fingers fumble over a tube of lip gloss and he watches the smear of a wet sheen across its mouth.
-
Later there will be this:
He had expected her to taste like plastic.
Instead she tastes like pink, like skin, like every other hot piece of female flesh his lips and tongue have ever passed over.
It concerns him.
He bites down and she grunts.
It concerns him how little he understands about how this should work.
She, he thinks. And he wonders when exactly it happened that Cameron became just that.
“From the beginning,” he imagines she would say. The tip of her tongue slides along the flat of his and he will choose to blame curiosity above all else when his hand slips beneath the waistband of her jeans.
Like pink, like skin, like every other hot piece of female flesh he ever took the time to discover.
-
“Do you trust it? Can you trust Cameron?” Derek asks John.
John’s eyes go wide.
The yes is implicit, written there.
-
He is realizing things.
Firstly, his senses are off. Cameron can sneak into the kitchen without him catching her first.
Secondly, it is difficult to prey on metal. There is no smell, no sound of heaving breathing, to ever tip them off.
Thirdly, Cameron is far from a stunning conversationalist. The words she (it?) settles for always resonate as non-sequiturs, too blunt, too truthful, too awkward for what is supposed to pass as natural conversation.
He considers this, and Cameron considers him.
“You remember me,” she says.
He glares at her.
“I don’t remember you,” she adds.
He might glare harder. He doesn’t know. He does know he grips the carton of milk that much tighter and he can feel the cardboard bend with the aching of his fist.
“I don’t remember you and looking at me like that is not going to make me start,” she says. She blinks once, something hollow and porcelain in her wide-eyed expression. “My memory was wiped. I was reprogrammed.”
“I know,” he bites. He swallows some milk straight from the carton. She watches.
She cocks her head to the right.
“Was I bad?” she asks.
“What?”
Her lips purse together and form a pouted line.
“Was I bad?”
He doesn’t know how to answer this. He doesn’t know how to explain things like distant piano melodies that stick, how you can explain the memory of long, dark halls below ground, The Basement, the metal, her. He doesn’t think there are words for it; he sincerely hopes there isn’t.
He places the milk back into the refrigerator and walks away.
Cameron does not follow.
He flexes his hand at his side.
He remembers the way those fingers of hers used to grip, tight.
-
“Then God said, Let us make man in our image,” the priest had said, a Sunday.
“In the image of God He created him - “
Derek had fidgeted, young, a wooden pew beneath him, his knees.
“Male and female He created them.”
-
He tastes dirt, he tastes blood.
There is the smell of jet fuel smothering.
He awakens with a gasp.
There is the flickering light of the television in the next room, the faint crescendo of a musical score and what sounds like Cameron sighing.
There is a thread of tension run straight through him, a live-wire.
He presses sweaty palms flat against the couch’s frayed upholstery and wills himself not to touch, release.
He thinks Cameron sighs again.
One hand slips beneath the blanket and he echoes back in kind.
-
Derek wants to know where the Phillips came from. Where the names came from, who decided that, no parent, no Mom or Dad to look down and say, “she looks like a Cameron, yes, we’ll call her Cameron.”
It is a dangerous game they play with this machine, sharing a spot at the breakfast table and the backseat of the car.
John’s eyes get wide when he looks at it, narrows when its name is mentioned.
Derek wants to call it trouble. He thinks he’s been around long enough to recognize it when he sees it.
When he sees her.
John’s eyes widen.
(It reminds Derek of Kyle, underground, that dog-eared photograph, the only flesh-and-blood woman of this house).
-
Its body can bend in half.
“I love you,” it can shriek.
“Dangerous. Liar,” Derek can scoff.
-
“You don’t know how to love,” he sneers.
His hand clutches at the back of her head, almost cradling it, fingers far too insistent.
“You? You are a fucking liar,” and the heat of his breath refracts off her face, back to him. She doesn’t blink. Her eyes watch his, they watch his mouth; he thinks his own are behaving the same.
She studies him.
“Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” is what she says, her voice steady and calm, offhand and precise.
It is then that he smacks her across the face.
The white enamel of her front tooth cuts into her bottom lip.
It bleeds.
He licks his lips.
-
“It starts with man,” he once said and in the grim, hollowed out light of the tunnel his brother had nodded. The bulbs above had bobbed.
Genesis had its place.
“It starts with man,” he had repeated and machines had howled atop the earth.
-
The eyes remain open, vacant.
“Destroy it,” he said and John did not reply. He had turned to his mother, he turned to Sarah, and it was Derek who stepped forward.
He let his fingers stray across her cheek.
Skin on skin, and he had shuddered.
“Destroy her,” he whispered.
-
The machine blinks.
He wants to kiss her.
He wants to break it.
The machine blinks, and Cameron - there might be a smile.
-
fin.