Dang it, I ship this like hard but I have not written anything for it, what is wrong with me?!
Disclaimer: I do not own Total Drama Island, any related series or copyright materials.
Sierra scared Cameron, more than a little. And he honestly wasn't sure what it meant that he was… compelled by her, attracted by her, just as much as she intimidated the living daylights out of him.
It wasn't anything she did, to scare him. Sierra was in her own way… well, nice. Nicer than a lot of the people who had competed, nicer than she needed to be. And Cameron thought about that a lot, breathing a little quicker than normal and not understanding why, and it was just that her niceness was oddly forceful on his mind. The fact of her existence and behavior pulled at him like some fascinating engineering data, a fact demanding attention and analysis by its very existence.
His hands twiddled as he thought. Fingers crossed, came together, clasped. They squeezed, until he thought his knuckles almost turned a faded shade, tense and hurting. He relaxed, trying to still his breathing, trying to understand these feelings…
Things were simpler in the bubble. Cameron considered that he had been shielded then from more than bacteria. These were spooky and weird paths he lived through now, and he didn't understand what he was feeling. Didn't understand why she influenced him so.
Sierra was scary. Not scary like approaching death or the looming threat of failure and screwing up in front of the whole freaking world or Izzy (and he shivers a little at that, Izzy still spooks him bad). She was… intimidating, and she was intimidating in a way that was also… well…
Hrm.
He swallowed. The word that came to mind, and it was not one he'd ever thought he'd have cause to use (because never mind the idea of a girl having interest in him or mistaking him for someone else, he never thought he'd ever have feelings for someone else like that), was alluring.
She fascinated. She attracted. he felt like a tiny moonlet, orbiting a vastly larger world akin to the gas giants of the outer solar system. It was weird, that she scared him and intrigued him at once. And she was scary not in the sense of danger or threatening (not like how he got the impression of barely withheld bullying instinct from Duncan, or Courtney's volatile moments, or even Izzy's sheer unpredictability), but that it was something integral to who she was.
Sierra was just so… big. Bigger than any girl he'd ever seen except for a mutated Dakota, and that drew its own curious parallels to the two girls that distracted his stormy mind for a time. She was larger than most people she'd seen, and she was his age. He wondered, vaguely, how big she'd be as an adult. IT was an oddly intriguing thought.
Cameron supposed it was a good thing the island had been scrubbed completely of mutagenic materials. He had no idea what would happen to Sierra if she came into contact with it. His mind entertained a scenario of Sierra, becoming a mutant like Dakota and otherwise having absolutely no reaction to it, and was disturbed by how realistic and plausible that seemed.
He wiggled a bit more, increasingly lost in thought, and decided eventually that Sierra was scary to him because she was so big, and she was so strong, and driven almost completely by impulse and desire and need, and those things combined for a sort of… potential of mildly spooky threat. She could be so much more dangerous than she was. Sierra was one of the most inhumanly strong and tough people that had ever competed on the show, and the extensiveness of it baffled Cameron; that no one else seemed to notice bothered him.
Sierra had survived a sheer drop right into a flat Australian canyon, baked metal-hard by the sun, and suffered little more than a concussion. No broken bones or serious injuries, she shouldn't have just been hospitalized but splattered by the impact. She shouldn't have survived, let alone got little more than such a mild injury.
Sierra had been at at the epicenter of an exploding plane. And she'd had little lasting damage but for needing to be in a wheelchair, and that just because it was too painful to walk. Also, she had lost her hair. (Cameron had noted, before, that Sierra had some pretty hair.)
She had, with sheer brute strength alone, brutalized virtually everything in her way (except for a mutant rat that one time): a troop of baboons was a terrifying threat for anyone, and she had taken them down in minutes. A bunch of sharks, many times, and once she had clobbered one many times her size while she was stuck in a wheelchair. And the times she had one-shotted Owen and DJ for being unfortunate enough to be in her way (And they were very touch and big people to boot).
And that sheer potential of almost superhuman strength and resilience… it was spooky to have that walking around in his proximity. She intimidated, just by being so tough. There was a thought, that if she decided to turn that strength on him, there really wasn't anything he could do to stop her.
And yet, she probably never would. She was just too nice. Too… sweet. It was an odd thing, for such brutality coupled with polite niceness.
And, he had to admit, in the quiet times when he was quite alone and no one could bother his thoughts, it was intriguing. Sometimes…
Well. Sometimes he wondered if maybe she'd have an interest in him if there wasn't Cody to mistake him with, if she could ever have liked or wanted him for who he was.
It was a dumb thought, not one he bothered with much. Still. It was intriguing. There were dreams.
A footstep. He yelped, fell off the log, and looked up.
Another step, as delicate as a tree falling in the forest and with the same sense of impact. Sierra didn't so much walk as smash around, from place to place, and she was humming a faint musical sound too discordant and grating to really be a tune. It still sounded nice to him. Her shoulders, round and wide with muscle, rolled smoothly under the short bob of her ponytail.
"Hi-hi," she said, leaning into view. His view of the sky and the trees and distant mountain peeks was quickly overwhelmed by Sierra, leaning inwards to see him better with her hands on her knees. It was a curiously impressive sight; her legs long and thick, her large frame not so much muscular as just having the suggestion of enormous strength owing to her bulk, and she was just so darn big he couldn't see anything else right now. It occurred to him that the best words for Sierra were largely in terms reserved for architecture.
His throat was so dry he couldn't find words for a long moment. Eventually, the cracked out: "Um, uh! Um. Hi?"
She leaned in, extremely close to him, and he instinctively pulled back into he rolled over into the rock. She kept approaching, and she sat down so that her legs enfolded around him, and there was nothing for him but the ground and the rock and Sierra everywhere else.
Her expression was, at worst, polite interest. It didn't seem to occur to her that this situation might be slightly suspect.
She leaned in, blinking slightly slower than normal, and she said, "Whatcha doing down there?"
He considered a way to say that he had been thinking about her and she'd scared him into the ground. There was not many ways to say that without sounding dumb or like he had a hopeless crush. He flushed at that second one, mumbling something.
She giggled. Cameron chuckled nervously, suddenly aware of how big she was. Encompassing, even.
It didn't seem threatening, right now. It felt weirdly nice, that someone so big and strong thought him a friend.
"It's dark," she said, suddenly keen. "We should get going."
And she rose up, legs swinging around and feet on the ground and then suddenly rising up like the echoes of tectonic plates crashing together and mountains shooting upwards. The fact of her enormous frame stunned him into silence again, and he wondered if Cody even considered the fact of her cuteness.
Because, though he'd never considered or even thought about that word in reference to another person before, Sierra was the cutest person he knew. It was usually applied to small things, but… she was just plain cute. Cute because, not in spite of, her bigness. Her presence, her enthusiasm… it was endearing. He wondered suddenly why she wasn't more popular.
She moved, and then suddenly Cameron was held up, and he saw the ground, and Sierra's powerfully wide legs moving like trees in sudden motion, and then the log was gone. Her strides moved fast.
Cameron realized, Sierra had picked him up with about the same ease as a discarded bit of laundry, and carrying him in her arm, was going off wherever she deemed it necessary to go.
Even as his brain basically shut down from being in such close contact to proximity to the girl he had an unspoken crush on and his hormones got to have their own say in the matter, a passing thought reflected that it was a little bit like being in the bubble again, and the thought warmed him.
"Come on, little buddy," Sierra said, playful or flirting, and he didn't know which it was but he smiled anyway.