5 Ways Cameron Mitchell doesn't die
Dec. 21st, 2007 12:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vain_gloriousWord Count: 1457
1. He doesn’t die because they defeated the goa’uld.
That’s Teal’c.
Tretonin doesn’t work forever, it turns out. It just stops working after about 10 years. The timeline varies a little and some Jaffa start getting sick before Teal’c does. For some reason, Mitchell assumes that it won’t happen to Teal’c, that he’s too healthy and strong to be felled by the medical technobabble that half-heartedly explains why the miracle drug has an expiration date.
There aren’t any symbiotes available. The goa’uld truly lost and well; you can’t just find their babies lying around like you used too. Cam never felt weirder than when he sat in on the meeting where deliberately breeding goa’uld spawn was seriously discussed.
He thinks of it like meddling with samples of smallpox or ebola, like trying to genetically recreate Hitler, like self-aware, megalomaniacal anthrax. Cam wasn’t even the one fighting the goa’uld for most of that war, but he sees the horror in the eyes of everyone who was.
Dr. Jackson gets a squad of anthropologists together and says it’s wholly unethical. He argues that breeding snakes to sustain the Jaffa nation is no better than the snakes who enslaved the Jaffa to sustain themselves. Cam had never thought of that, and adds it to the ‘con’ column, still below the part where creating these monsters that they barely defeated in the first place is just dumb.
Then Teal’c stops responding to the Tretonin.
The calls start up for just one symbiote – just one immature goa’uld. There are a some, but fewer every day. Thousands of Jaffa are dying every day. Cam tells Landry to kick start that damn breeding program – they don’t need thousands they just need one. Jackson shuts the fuck up and doesn’t say a word in protest.
But Teal’c won’t take the symbiote, even if they could find one. Cam is floored, but apparently the only one surprised by this. He spends hours by Teal’c’s bedside trying to talk him out of it. No one else does – Sam sobs, Vala gets hyper and desperate, and Daniel bottles everything up inside him and silently kel’no’reems alongside Teal’c and the dozens of candles that have been lit in his dark room. General O’Neill flies in from DC, and though Cam doesn’t stay in the room for their conversation, the pained resignation already etched into O’Neill’s face feels like a kick in the gut.
When Teal’c is too weak to stay awake for long and can no longer stand, they take him on a gurney through the ‘Gate to Chulak. They put him back in his robes and lay his staff weapon next to him.
Jackson babbles how the Jaffa don’t have a ritual for this, for a warrior dying because he won’t take a symbiote, that Teal’c shouldn’t go out like this. O’Neill hooks his elbow around Jackson’s neck, pulling him headfirst into a tight embrace that also forces Jackson to take a mouthful of shoulder fabric or stop talking. He goes silent, folding his arms around the general and just not moving. Cam tries not to look at the patch of wetness spreading across O’Neill’s BDU’s where Jackson’s head is resting, tries not to stare at what’s going on where’s O’Neill’s face is against Jackson’s hair. He’s the only one not crying, and that ends when Vala presses against him, not sultry but soft and shaking. Her fingernails dig into his shoulder blades so hard it hurts, and he hopes she’s going to stay standing because he doesn’t think he can support her. He brushes her left pigtail aside so he can wipe at his eyes, and suddenly he sees Sam in the distance, kneeling next to where they lowered Teal’c on to the ground of his home world. The image makes him shut his eyes hard and bury his face in Vala’s hair. When he dares to look again, Sam is walking back towards them. Her pace is steady, her back straight, and Cam watches as she uses the top of her pant leg to wipe the blood from the blade of the knife in her hand. She tries to sheath it, but he sees her hand is shaking too hard, and it drops to the dirt. He doesn’t say anything, just opens one arm and lets her fly into him.
2. He doesn’t die of cancer.
That’s Sam.
It’s nothing supernatural, nothing alien, nothing even spectacularly mysterious. It’s the same kind that tried to kill her father, and fifteen years later it is equally lethal.
She fights it for three years. There are small victories, because she lives that long. Cam misses her on his wing, on the missions where she would have known what to do, on the missions where her replacements make dumb mistakes, when he wonders if he’s going to have to watch the rest of SG-1 die.
Sam loses her hair, loses thirty pounds of muscle, and becomes this skeletal figure in a green baseball cap increasingly in a wheel chair and then on a gurney in the infirmary. She stops the consulting she was doing, not because she’s any less brilliant but because the drugs make her sleepy and it’s hard to organize her thoughts.
Towards the end, Cam catches Vala sneaking out of Sam’s room, face crestfallen and a goa’uld healing device clenched in her fist.
“It didn’t work,” she whispers.
O’Neill flies in, and it’s horrific déjà vu. Sam leaves them shortly thereafter. She gets the military funeral and they get to go on without her. O’Neill tells Cam he’s arranged to have her ashes go up on the next shuttle mission.
Sam would have liked this, he knows, but Cam stands on the roof of the building, staring up at the stars that have her now, and he just wants her back.
3. He doesn’t die from assassination.
That’s Jack.
The car bomb kills a lot of people, a number of government bigwigs, and very nearly starts WWIII. When the dust clears, no known terrorist organization claims responsibility and Jack is dead.
It’s not fair, because as Jack liked to say, he was practically obsolete at this point. He wasn’t obstructing anything, wasn’t actively or deliberately being a pain in the ass, and the SGC was humming along. He was past the age of retirement and should have been at his cabin by the lake.
Instead they put him in Arlington.
Cam knows how to grab Jackson when he starts losing it, because he saw O’Neill do it. This sends a ripple down his spine, the thought that it’s now his job. He doesn’t want it.
He also doesn’t want what Jack gifts him in his Will – the cabin by the lake and a fishing rod. It seems like a message from the dead, but Cam doesn’t understand.
4. He doesn’t die in a trench collapse.
That’s Daniel.
Daniel, who stopped going on combat missions and then general missions, and now only does archaeological excavations. Because he has a family and he and Vala have agreed that it’s someone else’s turn to fight the next universal baddie.
He hasn’t been shot at in years. Cam liked to tease him about the small beer belly he’s grown, about the 10 pounds of sympathetic pregnancy weight he put on with each kid. Vala’s body sprang back to form, but Daniel’s never did.
It’s Cameron that has to tell them that a rainstorm weakened the walls of the excavation trench, that it was a total and complete accident, that in the end it was just dirt that took the life of the unkillable Daniel Jackson.
He doesn’t say that, although in later years he and Vala are able to joke about it without crying.
5. He doesn’t die of old age.
That’s Vala, or at least he hopes it is.
He hopes she dies an old lady in her bed in the cabin in Minnesota, which he gave to her as it had been given to him. He knows she’ll be a spunky and mischievous senior citizen, and the cabin is secluded enough that whatever she gets up to won’t bother the neighbors.
He likes to imagine that Vala will fill the yard with animatronic gnomes and keep the Christmas lights up year round.
Her grandkids can use the pond where Cam taught their parents to fish and swim.
He hopes she won’t be lonely, that the trinkets she has stolen over the years will remind her of her adventures at the SGC, that her children will remind her of their father, and that her friends will peer down on her from the stars above. And if he’s able, he’d like to be there when she comes to join them.
That’s Teal’c.
Tretonin doesn’t work forever, it turns out. It just stops working after about 10 years. The timeline varies a little and some Jaffa start getting sick before Teal’c does. For some reason, Mitchell assumes that it won’t happen to Teal’c, that he’s too healthy and strong to be felled by the medical technobabble that half-heartedly explains why the miracle drug has an expiration date.
There aren’t any symbiotes available. The goa’uld truly lost and well; you can’t just find their babies lying around like you used too. Cam never felt weirder than when he sat in on the meeting where deliberately breeding goa’uld spawn was seriously discussed.
He thinks of it like meddling with samples of smallpox or ebola, like trying to genetically recreate Hitler, like self-aware, megalomaniacal anthrax. Cam wasn’t even the one fighting the goa’uld for most of that war, but he sees the horror in the eyes of everyone who was.
Dr. Jackson gets a squad of anthropologists together and says it’s wholly unethical. He argues that breeding snakes to sustain the Jaffa nation is no better than the snakes who enslaved the Jaffa to sustain themselves. Cam had never thought of that, and adds it to the ‘con’ column, still below the part where creating these monsters that they barely defeated in the first place is just dumb.
Then Teal’c stops responding to the Tretonin.
The calls start up for just one symbiote – just one immature goa’uld. There are a some, but fewer every day. Thousands of Jaffa are dying every day. Cam tells Landry to kick start that damn breeding program – they don’t need thousands they just need one. Jackson shuts the fuck up and doesn’t say a word in protest.
But Teal’c won’t take the symbiote, even if they could find one. Cam is floored, but apparently the only one surprised by this. He spends hours by Teal’c’s bedside trying to talk him out of it. No one else does – Sam sobs, Vala gets hyper and desperate, and Daniel bottles everything up inside him and silently kel’no’reems alongside Teal’c and the dozens of candles that have been lit in his dark room. General O’Neill flies in from DC, and though Cam doesn’t stay in the room for their conversation, the pained resignation already etched into O’Neill’s face feels like a kick in the gut.
When Teal’c is too weak to stay awake for long and can no longer stand, they take him on a gurney through the ‘Gate to Chulak. They put him back in his robes and lay his staff weapon next to him.
Jackson babbles how the Jaffa don’t have a ritual for this, for a warrior dying because he won’t take a symbiote, that Teal’c shouldn’t go out like this. O’Neill hooks his elbow around Jackson’s neck, pulling him headfirst into a tight embrace that also forces Jackson to take a mouthful of shoulder fabric or stop talking. He goes silent, folding his arms around the general and just not moving. Cam tries not to look at the patch of wetness spreading across O’Neill’s BDU’s where Jackson’s head is resting, tries not to stare at what’s going on where’s O’Neill’s face is against Jackson’s hair. He’s the only one not crying, and that ends when Vala presses against him, not sultry but soft and shaking. Her fingernails dig into his shoulder blades so hard it hurts, and he hopes she’s going to stay standing because he doesn’t think he can support her. He brushes her left pigtail aside so he can wipe at his eyes, and suddenly he sees Sam in the distance, kneeling next to where they lowered Teal’c on to the ground of his home world. The image makes him shut his eyes hard and bury his face in Vala’s hair. When he dares to look again, Sam is walking back towards them. Her pace is steady, her back straight, and Cam watches as she uses the top of her pant leg to wipe the blood from the blade of the knife in her hand. She tries to sheath it, but he sees her hand is shaking too hard, and it drops to the dirt. He doesn’t say anything, just opens one arm and lets her fly into him.
2. He doesn’t die of cancer.
That’s Sam.
It’s nothing supernatural, nothing alien, nothing even spectacularly mysterious. It’s the same kind that tried to kill her father, and fifteen years later it is equally lethal.
She fights it for three years. There are small victories, because she lives that long. Cam misses her on his wing, on the missions where she would have known what to do, on the missions where her replacements make dumb mistakes, when he wonders if he’s going to have to watch the rest of SG-1 die.
Sam loses her hair, loses thirty pounds of muscle, and becomes this skeletal figure in a green baseball cap increasingly in a wheel chair and then on a gurney in the infirmary. She stops the consulting she was doing, not because she’s any less brilliant but because the drugs make her sleepy and it’s hard to organize her thoughts.
Towards the end, Cam catches Vala sneaking out of Sam’s room, face crestfallen and a goa’uld healing device clenched in her fist.
“It didn’t work,” she whispers.
O’Neill flies in, and it’s horrific déjà vu. Sam leaves them shortly thereafter. She gets the military funeral and they get to go on without her. O’Neill tells Cam he’s arranged to have her ashes go up on the next shuttle mission.
Sam would have liked this, he knows, but Cam stands on the roof of the building, staring up at the stars that have her now, and he just wants her back.
3. He doesn’t die from assassination.
That’s Jack.
The car bomb kills a lot of people, a number of government bigwigs, and very nearly starts WWIII. When the dust clears, no known terrorist organization claims responsibility and Jack is dead.
It’s not fair, because as Jack liked to say, he was practically obsolete at this point. He wasn’t obstructing anything, wasn’t actively or deliberately being a pain in the ass, and the SGC was humming along. He was past the age of retirement and should have been at his cabin by the lake.
Instead they put him in Arlington.
Cam knows how to grab Jackson when he starts losing it, because he saw O’Neill do it. This sends a ripple down his spine, the thought that it’s now his job. He doesn’t want it.
He also doesn’t want what Jack gifts him in his Will – the cabin by the lake and a fishing rod. It seems like a message from the dead, but Cam doesn’t understand.
4. He doesn’t die in a trench collapse.
That’s Daniel.
Daniel, who stopped going on combat missions and then general missions, and now only does archaeological excavations. Because he has a family and he and Vala have agreed that it’s someone else’s turn to fight the next universal baddie.
He hasn’t been shot at in years. Cam liked to tease him about the small beer belly he’s grown, about the 10 pounds of sympathetic pregnancy weight he put on with each kid. Vala’s body sprang back to form, but Daniel’s never did.
It’s Cameron that has to tell them that a rainstorm weakened the walls of the excavation trench, that it was a total and complete accident, that in the end it was just dirt that took the life of the unkillable Daniel Jackson.
He doesn’t say that, although in later years he and Vala are able to joke about it without crying.
5. He doesn’t die of old age.
That’s Vala, or at least he hopes it is.
He hopes she dies an old lady in her bed in the cabin in Minnesota, which he gave to her as it had been given to him. He knows she’ll be a spunky and mischievous senior citizen, and the cabin is secluded enough that whatever she gets up to won’t bother the neighbors.
He likes to imagine that Vala will fill the yard with animatronic gnomes and keep the Christmas lights up year round.
Her grandkids can use the pond where Cam taught their parents to fish and swim.
He hopes she won’t be lonely, that the trinkets she has stolen over the years will remind her of her adventures at the SGC, that her children will remind her of their father, and that her friends will peer down on her from the stars above. And if he’s able, he’d like to be there when she comes to join them.
