TSCC Sarah/Cameron "Blending in" - A thank-you fic from 'Bones and Augie
“You never should have let her read Twilight.”
Watching the terminator in question applying the last of the opalescent glitter to her face, Sarah’s lips thinned at the barely contained amusement in John’s voice. He chuckled, leaning against the opposite side of the bathroom doorway.
“Stephanie Meyer sold 29 million books in 2008,” Cameron put in without pausing in her preparations. “I’m blending in.”
Sarah eyed the rest of Cameron’s Halloween costume, taking in the barely-there skirt, platform boots, and nearly transparent white Tee with the words ‘Are you my blood type?’ blazoned across it in dripping red letters. The finishing touch, a pair of pointed teeth caps, was still in a package on the counter. “This is blending in?” she asked skeptically.
“Look at it this way,” John offered with a grin. “No one is going to be looking past that outfit. She could probably walk right in, unplug the computer, take it and walk out again before these nerds picked their jaws up off the floor.”
The comment earned him a glare and a muttered “I’ll be waiting in the car.”
With Sarah gone, Cameron screwed the top back on the glitter and returned it to her makeup bag. Taking a last look at herself in the mirror she nodded and turned her dark-lined eyes on John. They conveyed a surprising amount of reproach for a machine. “You’re not helping.”
He raised his hands in self defense. “Don’t look at me. I’m not the one in full body-glitter. If you didn’t want to tick her off you should have dressed up as a smurf or something.” He paused, looking her up and down thoughtfully. “Something with pants anyway.”
Cameron’s usual blank mask became the different kind of blank that John had learned meant she was feeling particularly stubborn. “Smurfs don’t wear pants.”
“You’re missing the point.”
Cameron shrugged, a pantomime of indifference. “She likes my costume.”
John snorted. “You got that from her ice-queen stance of disapproval, did you?”
“Yes.” As usual, Cameron ignored John’s sarcasm completely, picking up the tooth caps and scanning the instructions.
John watched her for a moment and then shook his head. “I’m not even going to try and decipher that one.”
“That would be advisable,” came the un-illuminating reply.
Feeling like he was standing on the outside of a closed door with a big ‘no boys allows’ sign nailed across it, John resisted the urge to sulk. “I’ll be waiting in the car,” he growled in an almost perfect echo of his mother and retreated from the bathroom.
Busy with the Fixodent and teeth, Cameron didn’t watch him go.
*****
“It’s not Skynet.”
“It’s not even Pong,” John echoed the terminator in disgust, jamming closed the broken exit door that they had used to sneak from the university’s haunted house into the dormitories while everyone was out partying. Cameron could have broken the front door just as easily, but that would have been a little more overt than Sarah was comfortable with.
“You’re sure?” she asked Cameron, stepping out of the shadows behind a cardboard coffin and into the eerie red light of the exit sign. A cheesy Halloween soundtrack and faint over-excited shrieking could be heard down the curtained hallway, but for now they were alone.
“I’m sure,” the machine confirmed, stepping past John to Sarah’s side. “Their blog has exaggerated the program’s abilities. They aren’t a threat.”
“With more time…?” Sarah started, but Cameron shook her head.
“No. The platform is a dead end.”
“Is it just me, or is it really weird to hear a terminator talk about blogging?” John put in, just to feel like he was part of the conversation. Two sets of eyes, one brown and one green, both seemed to be asking ‘are you still here?’ His mother at least looked a little guilty about forgetting.
“Never mind.” John waved them off. “I’ll be waiting in the car when you two are finished deciding whether or not to kill the A.I. club.”
“We’re not killing anyone,” Sarah called after him, turning back to Cameron when he was gone and repeating herself, just to be clear. “We’re not killing anyone.”
“Not right now,” Cameron agreed readily enough. “Right now, we may enjoy the haunted house.”
“Fake blood, strobe lights, and teenagers in bad costumes jumping out at us with plastic chainsaws,” Sarah drawled, setting off down the aisle. “What’s not to enjoy?”
“Teenagers often use scary places, stories and movies as a way to initiate physical contact,” Cameron pointed out, following Sarah between the curtains. “It’s supposed to be very enjoyable.”
“Yeah, well I’m not a teenag- shit-“ Sarah swore as a hooded figure appeared in front of them wielding the aforementioned chainsaw. Expectations aside, Sarah still found herself grabbing for the gun tucked into the back of her jeans, but cool fingers wrapped around her wrist, preventing her from blowing their cover by shooting a college student. Cameron held her there for a breath, until the boy had dodged past them to menace the next unsuspecting guest.
“We’re not killing anyone,” she admonished Sarah, the very picture of rebuke.
Taking a deep breath to sooth her nerves, Sarah ran her other hand unsteadily through her hair. “Right,” she agreed shakily. “This may have been a bad idea…”
“But it worked,” Cameron put in.
Sarah looked down at Cameron’s hand still encircling her wrist and snorted, but she didn’t pull away. “You trying to initiate physical contact with me, girlie?”
“I’m blending in.” Shifting her grip so she was closer to holding Sarah’s hand than restraining her, Cameron affected complete innocence, but Sarah was familiar enough with her now to see the barest hint of amusement lurking at the corners of her lips. She tugged gently and Sarah followed her with a sigh, not up for fighting it tonight. That was happening more and more frequently lately, Sarah not fighting the attraction she felt towards the machine. She had too many wars to fight already…
“That excuse doesn’t work for everything,” she muttered, unable to give in without at least a token resistance. Cameron ignored her, the way she usually ignored Sarah’s protests, as if she hadn’t even heard them. Costumed teenagers ran past them, deeper into the haunted house, but neither of them noticed.
The strobe lights leant the moment a sense of unreality. They flickered over Cameron’s emotionless features, catching on the glitter and the points of her fake teeth. For that moment Sarah could almost believe that it was all a costume. That when they emerged from the haunted house and drove home, Cameron could wash her mechanical nature off along with the face paint and strip her origins away with her platform boots, leaving just a girl… a girl who read bad vampire fiction… a girl who had never heard of terminators, or judgment day…
Was that what she wanted?
Sarah imagined it, and the image left her cold. She didn’t want that girl, she wanted Cameron. Not for the first time, she cursed her twisted libido and it’s persistence in fixating on a machine. A beautiful machine, but a machine nonetheless. It made no damned sense, but then, nothing did anymore, so why not just go with it?
Another crowd of masked revelers streamed past them, pursued by an enthusiastically shrieking apparition in a blood-stained bed sheet, and Sarah used them as a cover to duck behind one of the blackout curtains, pulling Cameron along with her. The space was small, a tiny alcove where two walls met in a V behind the line of curtains, but it was big enough for her purposes.
“Sar-” Cameron’s surprised whisper was cut off by Sarah’s mouth on hers, and she froze, stiffening under Sarah’s touch as if she truly was the tin man Sarah had named her.
Undeterred, Sarah buried her hands in Cameron’s honey-brown mane and deepened the kiss. Months of temptation, teasing, and damned near taunting, had wound her up to a point of no return, and it took her a minute to realize that Cameron wasn’t just nervous and inexperienced, she was completely immobile.
“Cameron?” Sarah hissed in the darkness, pushing lightly on the girl’s shoulders.
There was no response.
Sarah had expected surprise, but not catatonia.
“Shit…” Reaching back, Sarah twitched aside the edge of the curtain, letting in enough flickering light to reveal Cameron’s wide eyed stare, and slightly parted lips. Pressing a hand over the machine’s metal breastplate, she felt the girl’s mechanical heartbeat racing, her simulated breath coming in shallow gasps.
It had occurred to her, while she was evading some of the machine’s more determined but inelegant advances, that Cameron might very well have no idea what she was actually asking for. She had even seriously considered sitting the girl down and trying to find out exactly what her intentions were, but she always chickened out at the last minute, unable to quite believe that a cybernetic killing machine from the future was doing the courtship equivalent of reaching barehanded for an open flame because she thought the colours were pretty.
Apparently, she’d been wrong… and for some reason, while her scruples seemed A-okay with pursuing sexual relations with a machine, they balked at corrupting an innocent. At least while that innocent’s ability to consent -or awareness of what the hell she was consenting to- was in doubt.
“This really isn’t fair…” Sarah muttered, thwarted desire warring with sympathy as Cameron finally swallowed, the tip of her tongue darting out to lick her lips. “Come on, girlie,” she sighed, pulling the machine out from behind the curtain by her wrist, as one might lead a distracted child. “John will be wondering where we’ve gotten to.”
Cameron followed obediently enough, tagging woodenly along behind Sarah though the last twists and turns of the maze, but it wasn’t until they reached the parking lot that she showed any sign of returning to the real world.
“Welcome back,” Sarah deadpanned when Cameron paused under a lamppost, blinking twice in rapid succession before finally seeming to focus on her.
“You kissed me.” It was almost an accusation.
Sarah resisted the urge to role her eyes. “I had thought that was what you were going for,” she drawled, pointedly looking up and down Cameron’s outfit.
“I…” Cameron actually stuttered. “I didn’t… You…”
“Wouldn’t have thought you’d be the one to show up to a test without reading the text book,” Sarah muttered under her breath, trying to find the humour in the situation and failing miserably.
“There’s a text book?” Cameron asked, brightening until Sarah’s withering stare silenced her again.
They covered the rest of the distance to the Jeep in silence, only to find John snoring in the back seat. No hope of distraction there.
“Don’t,” Sarah said through gritted teeth once they were buckled in and Cameron opened her mouth. “Just don’t.”
The ride home was mercifully short.
“What’s wrong with her?” John asked through a yawn as he stumbled through the front door between them, furrowing his brows at Cameron’s rigid carriage and beseeching -for her- expression.
“She’s had a shock,” Sarah explained dryly, ignoring the terminator while she locked the door and set the alarm. “Go to bed.”
John nodded, too tired to protest. “’Night, Mom.” He pressed a quick kiss to her hair and gave Cameron a half wave. “Good… patrolling,” he offered after a moment’s pause, and Cameron nodded once, not relaxing from her impersonation of a worried statue. Shaking his head, John gave it up as beyond his current mental capacity and left them to it.
Once he was gone, Sarah and Cameron stood in awkward silence for a moment before Sarah turned to the machine with an air of determination.
Cameron actually took a step back, near panic -or as near panic as she was capable of expressing- on her face and in the lines of her body.
“Stop it,” Sarah growled. “This is your own damned fault, so stop acting like a kicked puppy.”
Cameron continued to look wary, and Sarah sighed, taking her by the shoulders and steering her towards the living room.
“Sit,” she ordered the terminator, waiting until Cameron complied, perching stiffly on the edge of the couch. “Stay.”
Leaving her there, Sarah went into the other room and grabbed of John’s laptops, pulling the charge cord out of the wall with one swift yank. Snatching up a set of headphones, she carried the whole system back into the living room and dumped it in Cameron’s lap, pausing only to plug the cord back in.
“There,” she said in brittle satisfaction. “Educate yourself. Finals will be this weekend. Come prepared.”
Cameron looked down at the computer in her lap and then up at Sarah. There was a painfully adorable line of bewilderment between her brows and it nearly undid Sarah’s resolve.
“What?” she snapped when Cameron timidly raised a hand.
“Are you mad at me?” the machine asked plaintively.
Sarah sighed, reining in the biting rejoinder that jumped immediately to her lips. Instead she bent and slid a hand under Cameron’s hair, tipping her head back for a kiss that was much softer than the first, almost an apology. When she pulled back, Cameron’s eyes were closed, and her hands had tightened around the laptop.
“I’m not mad,” Sarah reassured her. “Now do your homework.”
“Okay,” Cameron bent diligently to the computer, raising the lid and starting her search even as Sarah slipped from the room.
She paused at the bottom of the stairs with one hand on the light switch and glanced back through the archway. Cameron tucked her feet up underneath her as Sarah watched, slipping the headphones on while the light from the screen bathed her face in a shifting blue glow.
The sight was almost enough to make up for the fact that she was going to bed alone.
“Goodnight, Cameron,” Sarah breathed and shut off the light.
She was almost to the top of the stairs when the reply came from the living room, low and full of unspoken promise.
“Goodnight, Sarah.”
Watching the terminator in question applying the last of the opalescent glitter to her face, Sarah’s lips thinned at the barely contained amusement in John’s voice. He chuckled, leaning against the opposite side of the bathroom doorway.
“Stephanie Meyer sold 29 million books in 2008,” Cameron put in without pausing in her preparations. “I’m blending in.”
Sarah eyed the rest of Cameron’s Halloween costume, taking in the barely-there skirt, platform boots, and nearly transparent white Tee with the words ‘Are you my blood type?’ blazoned across it in dripping red letters. The finishing touch, a pair of pointed teeth caps, was still in a package on the counter. “This is blending in?” she asked skeptically.
“Look at it this way,” John offered with a grin. “No one is going to be looking past that outfit. She could probably walk right in, unplug the computer, take it and walk out again before these nerds picked their jaws up off the floor.”
The comment earned him a glare and a muttered “I’ll be waiting in the car.”
With Sarah gone, Cameron screwed the top back on the glitter and returned it to her makeup bag. Taking a last look at herself in the mirror she nodded and turned her dark-lined eyes on John. They conveyed a surprising amount of reproach for a machine. “You’re not helping.”
He raised his hands in self defense. “Don’t look at me. I’m not the one in full body-glitter. If you didn’t want to tick her off you should have dressed up as a smurf or something.” He paused, looking her up and down thoughtfully. “Something with pants anyway.”
Cameron’s usual blank mask became the different kind of blank that John had learned meant she was feeling particularly stubborn. “Smurfs don’t wear pants.”
“You’re missing the point.”
Cameron shrugged, a pantomime of indifference. “She likes my costume.”
John snorted. “You got that from her ice-queen stance of disapproval, did you?”
“Yes.” As usual, Cameron ignored John’s sarcasm completely, picking up the tooth caps and scanning the instructions.
John watched her for a moment and then shook his head. “I’m not even going to try and decipher that one.”
“That would be advisable,” came the un-illuminating reply.
Feeling like he was standing on the outside of a closed door with a big ‘no boys allows’ sign nailed across it, John resisted the urge to sulk. “I’ll be waiting in the car,” he growled in an almost perfect echo of his mother and retreated from the bathroom.
Busy with the Fixodent and teeth, Cameron didn’t watch him go.
*****
“It’s not Skynet.”
“It’s not even Pong,” John echoed the terminator in disgust, jamming closed the broken exit door that they had used to sneak from the university’s haunted house into the dormitories while everyone was out partying. Cameron could have broken the front door just as easily, but that would have been a little more overt than Sarah was comfortable with.
“You’re sure?” she asked Cameron, stepping out of the shadows behind a cardboard coffin and into the eerie red light of the exit sign. A cheesy Halloween soundtrack and faint over-excited shrieking could be heard down the curtained hallway, but for now they were alone.
“I’m sure,” the machine confirmed, stepping past John to Sarah’s side. “Their blog has exaggerated the program’s abilities. They aren’t a threat.”
“With more time…?” Sarah started, but Cameron shook her head.
“No. The platform is a dead end.”
“Is it just me, or is it really weird to hear a terminator talk about blogging?” John put in, just to feel like he was part of the conversation. Two sets of eyes, one brown and one green, both seemed to be asking ‘are you still here?’ His mother at least looked a little guilty about forgetting.
“Never mind.” John waved them off. “I’ll be waiting in the car when you two are finished deciding whether or not to kill the A.I. club.”
“We’re not killing anyone,” Sarah called after him, turning back to Cameron when he was gone and repeating herself, just to be clear. “We’re not killing anyone.”
“Not right now,” Cameron agreed readily enough. “Right now, we may enjoy the haunted house.”
“Fake blood, strobe lights, and teenagers in bad costumes jumping out at us with plastic chainsaws,” Sarah drawled, setting off down the aisle. “What’s not to enjoy?”
“Teenagers often use scary places, stories and movies as a way to initiate physical contact,” Cameron pointed out, following Sarah between the curtains. “It’s supposed to be very enjoyable.”
“Yeah, well I’m not a teenag- shit-“ Sarah swore as a hooded figure appeared in front of them wielding the aforementioned chainsaw. Expectations aside, Sarah still found herself grabbing for the gun tucked into the back of her jeans, but cool fingers wrapped around her wrist, preventing her from blowing their cover by shooting a college student. Cameron held her there for a breath, until the boy had dodged past them to menace the next unsuspecting guest.
“We’re not killing anyone,” she admonished Sarah, the very picture of rebuke.
Taking a deep breath to sooth her nerves, Sarah ran her other hand unsteadily through her hair. “Right,” she agreed shakily. “This may have been a bad idea…”
“But it worked,” Cameron put in.
Sarah looked down at Cameron’s hand still encircling her wrist and snorted, but she didn’t pull away. “You trying to initiate physical contact with me, girlie?”
“I’m blending in.” Shifting her grip so she was closer to holding Sarah’s hand than restraining her, Cameron affected complete innocence, but Sarah was familiar enough with her now to see the barest hint of amusement lurking at the corners of her lips. She tugged gently and Sarah followed her with a sigh, not up for fighting it tonight. That was happening more and more frequently lately, Sarah not fighting the attraction she felt towards the machine. She had too many wars to fight already…
“That excuse doesn’t work for everything,” she muttered, unable to give in without at least a token resistance. Cameron ignored her, the way she usually ignored Sarah’s protests, as if she hadn’t even heard them. Costumed teenagers ran past them, deeper into the haunted house, but neither of them noticed.
The strobe lights leant the moment a sense of unreality. They flickered over Cameron’s emotionless features, catching on the glitter and the points of her fake teeth. For that moment Sarah could almost believe that it was all a costume. That when they emerged from the haunted house and drove home, Cameron could wash her mechanical nature off along with the face paint and strip her origins away with her platform boots, leaving just a girl… a girl who read bad vampire fiction… a girl who had never heard of terminators, or judgment day…
Was that what she wanted?
Sarah imagined it, and the image left her cold. She didn’t want that girl, she wanted Cameron. Not for the first time, she cursed her twisted libido and it’s persistence in fixating on a machine. A beautiful machine, but a machine nonetheless. It made no damned sense, but then, nothing did anymore, so why not just go with it?
Another crowd of masked revelers streamed past them, pursued by an enthusiastically shrieking apparition in a blood-stained bed sheet, and Sarah used them as a cover to duck behind one of the blackout curtains, pulling Cameron along with her. The space was small, a tiny alcove where two walls met in a V behind the line of curtains, but it was big enough for her purposes.
“Sar-” Cameron’s surprised whisper was cut off by Sarah’s mouth on hers, and she froze, stiffening under Sarah’s touch as if she truly was the tin man Sarah had named her.
Undeterred, Sarah buried her hands in Cameron’s honey-brown mane and deepened the kiss. Months of temptation, teasing, and damned near taunting, had wound her up to a point of no return, and it took her a minute to realize that Cameron wasn’t just nervous and inexperienced, she was completely immobile.
“Cameron?” Sarah hissed in the darkness, pushing lightly on the girl’s shoulders.
There was no response.
Sarah had expected surprise, but not catatonia.
“Shit…” Reaching back, Sarah twitched aside the edge of the curtain, letting in enough flickering light to reveal Cameron’s wide eyed stare, and slightly parted lips. Pressing a hand over the machine’s metal breastplate, she felt the girl’s mechanical heartbeat racing, her simulated breath coming in shallow gasps.
It had occurred to her, while she was evading some of the machine’s more determined but inelegant advances, that Cameron might very well have no idea what she was actually asking for. She had even seriously considered sitting the girl down and trying to find out exactly what her intentions were, but she always chickened out at the last minute, unable to quite believe that a cybernetic killing machine from the future was doing the courtship equivalent of reaching barehanded for an open flame because she thought the colours were pretty.
Apparently, she’d been wrong… and for some reason, while her scruples seemed A-okay with pursuing sexual relations with a machine, they balked at corrupting an innocent. At least while that innocent’s ability to consent -or awareness of what the hell she was consenting to- was in doubt.
“This really isn’t fair…” Sarah muttered, thwarted desire warring with sympathy as Cameron finally swallowed, the tip of her tongue darting out to lick her lips. “Come on, girlie,” she sighed, pulling the machine out from behind the curtain by her wrist, as one might lead a distracted child. “John will be wondering where we’ve gotten to.”
Cameron followed obediently enough, tagging woodenly along behind Sarah though the last twists and turns of the maze, but it wasn’t until they reached the parking lot that she showed any sign of returning to the real world.
“Welcome back,” Sarah deadpanned when Cameron paused under a lamppost, blinking twice in rapid succession before finally seeming to focus on her.
“You kissed me.” It was almost an accusation.
Sarah resisted the urge to role her eyes. “I had thought that was what you were going for,” she drawled, pointedly looking up and down Cameron’s outfit.
“I…” Cameron actually stuttered. “I didn’t… You…”
“Wouldn’t have thought you’d be the one to show up to a test without reading the text book,” Sarah muttered under her breath, trying to find the humour in the situation and failing miserably.
“There’s a text book?” Cameron asked, brightening until Sarah’s withering stare silenced her again.
They covered the rest of the distance to the Jeep in silence, only to find John snoring in the back seat. No hope of distraction there.
“Don’t,” Sarah said through gritted teeth once they were buckled in and Cameron opened her mouth. “Just don’t.”
The ride home was mercifully short.
“What’s wrong with her?” John asked through a yawn as he stumbled through the front door between them, furrowing his brows at Cameron’s rigid carriage and beseeching -for her- expression.
“She’s had a shock,” Sarah explained dryly, ignoring the terminator while she locked the door and set the alarm. “Go to bed.”
John nodded, too tired to protest. “’Night, Mom.” He pressed a quick kiss to her hair and gave Cameron a half wave. “Good… patrolling,” he offered after a moment’s pause, and Cameron nodded once, not relaxing from her impersonation of a worried statue. Shaking his head, John gave it up as beyond his current mental capacity and left them to it.
Once he was gone, Sarah and Cameron stood in awkward silence for a moment before Sarah turned to the machine with an air of determination.
Cameron actually took a step back, near panic -or as near panic as she was capable of expressing- on her face and in the lines of her body.
“Stop it,” Sarah growled. “This is your own damned fault, so stop acting like a kicked puppy.”
Cameron continued to look wary, and Sarah sighed, taking her by the shoulders and steering her towards the living room.
“Sit,” she ordered the terminator, waiting until Cameron complied, perching stiffly on the edge of the couch. “Stay.”
Leaving her there, Sarah went into the other room and grabbed of John’s laptops, pulling the charge cord out of the wall with one swift yank. Snatching up a set of headphones, she carried the whole system back into the living room and dumped it in Cameron’s lap, pausing only to plug the cord back in.
“There,” she said in brittle satisfaction. “Educate yourself. Finals will be this weekend. Come prepared.”
Cameron looked down at the computer in her lap and then up at Sarah. There was a painfully adorable line of bewilderment between her brows and it nearly undid Sarah’s resolve.
“What?” she snapped when Cameron timidly raised a hand.
“Are you mad at me?” the machine asked plaintively.
Sarah sighed, reining in the biting rejoinder that jumped immediately to her lips. Instead she bent and slid a hand under Cameron’s hair, tipping her head back for a kiss that was much softer than the first, almost an apology. When she pulled back, Cameron’s eyes were closed, and her hands had tightened around the laptop.
“I’m not mad,” Sarah reassured her. “Now do your homework.”
“Okay,” Cameron bent diligently to the computer, raising the lid and starting her search even as Sarah slipped from the room.
She paused at the bottom of the stairs with one hand on the light switch and glanced back through the archway. Cameron tucked her feet up underneath her as Sarah watched, slipping the headphones on while the light from the screen bathed her face in a shifting blue glow.
The sight was almost enough to make up for the fact that she was going to bed alone.
“Goodnight, Cameron,” Sarah breathed and shut off the light.
She was almost to the top of the stairs when the reply came from the living room, low and full of unspoken promise.
“Goodnight, Sarah.”