Campfirelight, Campfire Stories, by Minxy (G)

[sg-fignewton.livejournal.com]

Rec Category: Cameron Mitchell

Pairing: none
Categories: Cameron Mitchell, gen, character study, team
Warnings: none
Author on LJ: _minxy_
Author's Website: Fanfic Archive post
Link: Campfirelight, Campfire Stories

Why This Must Be Read: Minxy gives us a wonderful look at Mitchell, off-world with the team, watching Daniel and Teal’c and Sam… but mostly Teal’c.

This is how I most like reading Mitchell fic – the man who is still a bit of an outsider, considering these people that we know and love so well. I love how Mitchell thinks of Daniel as a “pretzel,” and considers him even more alien than Teal’c. And Sam, with her efficiency and practicality, is someone that he at least thinks he can comprehend.

The team still surprises Mitchell, of course; but it’s the good kind of surprising, and Mitchell is quite pleased to be part of it… and by the end of the story, so will the reader.

“What’s up?” Sam asked easily as she segued gracefully to a seat next to her pack and searched out some purification tablets for the water she’d just brought.

“I forget sometimes that you guys didn’t have a cheatsheet on Jaffa cultural relations when you started.” Cam said, thinking of the Sodan and half wondering if he could have done it cold, with no intel on the Jaffa in general and their honor systems; if they’d seemed truly alien and not just plain folk.

If he were meeting them for the first time in history, trying to convince a Jaffa to turn against everything he knew to help strangers and aliens. That was much more impressive than convincing them to protect themselves, Cam thought; he wished he knew what O’Neill had done to move Teal’c like that.

“Nothing like being the first to make all the mistakes.” Sam said with the hint of a smile under it. He appreciated it, the way she kept reminding him of her fallibility; he wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t for her own benefit as well.

“People only remember the first and the best.” Cam said, sitting back off his haunches and relaxing against a pleasant enough rock. “Everyone else is just marking time.”

“Everyone else is the hero of their own story,” Sam said, hands working, organizing, fixing, sorting. “It may not get its own chapter in a history book but stepping on a cricket has profound implications for the cricket.”

“How very Buddhist of you.” Daniel smiled sideways at her, still mostly only showing Cameron the top of his head where he sat.

“I hang out with amateur philosophers,” Sam said, grinning, tongue poised right behind her teeth like she was repressing the urge to stick her tongue out like a kid.

A kid on an alien planet discussing the galactic implications of squashing bugs. Maybe it’s how they stay sane.