Mathématique: Fair Share of Abuse

Like a Cosmo Quiz, there’s always one crap option outta three. This time, it’s Thing C. And Mitchell’s doin’ it.

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Grief. Physical injuries. Mental health challenges. Panic attacks. References to torture. Depression.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Fair Share of Abuse

The sun is sharp-edged, etching up yellow-tipped trees against dark clouds. Mitchell, driving, slows for a light. He keeps the braking nice and smooth, because he knows what a bitch short stops can be with a broken spine.

Oh yeah. He knows.

He flicks his blinker on.

The Stones are playing on the radio.

I saw her today at the reception

A glass of wine in her hand.

I knew she would meet her connection

At her feet was a footloose man.

Hearing the song, he thinks of Jackson. Thinks more of Vala, presumed dead or traitor. Thinks of the stupid box for the stupid patch they’d requisitioned for her.

She’d almost made it.

That patch is sitting in a drawer now. In Mitchell’s desk. So it won’t have to sit in a drawer in Jackson’s.

Mitchell wishes he could do one of two things.

Thing A: Go solo, buy Vala a tombstone, engrave her name on it using the birthday she’d picked for herself and the day she’d disappeared, stick it on some nice ground, stand over it. Tell no one. 

Thing B: Get drunk on some real whisky with some real men, and shout at the night sky: “I knew from the minute you slapped that bracelet on Jackson you were nothing but a mess of smokin’ trouble. Well played, m’am. You got us. You got us good.” Hope like hell it’s true.

But no. Mitchell gets option C. Like a Cosmo Quiz, there’s always one crap option outta three. This time, it’s Thing C.

And Mitchell’s doin’ it.

Thing C is driving what remains of Colonel Everett Young home to his apartment after the NID finally cleared him. Thing C is being pretty sure he should stay and have a beer, but Thing C makes it three o’clock in the afternoon.

Misery day-drinking is always bad. Never stops anyone from doing it.

Thing C is going back to base and trying to decide when Jackson’s worked too much, gone too long without sleep, tried too hard to find Vala and not hard enough to find Rush, who is, technically, the more valuable asset.

Thing C is trying to survive in a world where the guy who’d taken Mitchell’s bum leg across his lap in the back of J Shep’s tinyass Mustang is also the guy who’s sold them out to the Lucian Alliance and knifed the man riding shotgun so hard that Young’ll be benched for months, out of a job and, maybe, outta his mind.

Everett stares out the window of the Camaro at the yellowing leaves. It doesn’t seem like October. Unfortunately, the main reason it doesn’t seem like October is Mitchell has a hard time believing he’s lived this long. That they all have.

Except for maybe Vala. And Rush.

That little math guy has a lot of people lookin’ out for him. Had. Shit.

Everett’s taking it hard.

Mitchell gets it. Easier, sometimes, to take it hard than admit the universe is full of uncontrollable insanity.

He can’t help but think of SG-1, of the snarled chain of command, where he leads because Sam “I built this nuclear reactor from toothpicks” Carter lets him, because a badass senatorial war hero lets him, because a dead-and-back-again linguistic genius lets him.

Vala didn’t do a whole lotta “letting.” Woulda been great to see how an intergalactic con artist with a heart of gold woulda blended herself into the mix, but she’s outside his current supervisory capacity.

Because he failed to keep her safe. That’s the bottom of the bottom line and makes a better story than gods and monsters that live in your spine or ruin your complexion. Blaming himself is some kinda bedrock at least—the place where all of them stand. Him. Young. Sheppard. Telford.

Telford. Sure.

He breathes out long and slow, because he’s got nothing else.

Much as he likes Jackson, much as he respects Teal’c, much as he’d throw himself a million times in front of a million bullets to protect Sam Carter and her National Treasure Brain and her wicked sense of humor and her ability to supe up a car…she doesn’t make him dinner every night.

He can’t say what kind of magic goes into founding a branch of the Stargate Program, but it’s a level up from your run-of-the-mill chemistry. There’s something romantic about it. Exploring the stars, risking lives? There’s always an extra charge between people at the top.

Carter and O’Neill: for sure. Sheppard and McKay: obvious. Young and Rush?

Maybe.

They’re not in the field together, they’ve never been in the field together, and if things’d gone perfectly, they’d be a different kind of team. A mathematician with a gift for cracking the abstract wide open and a rock solid colonel who’d had his back cracked?

Rush might be as quantitative as they got, but Sam Carter he was not. He’d struck Mitchell as more of a Jacksonian Player: door opening and fire starting. He’d’ve made an interesting compliment to Everett, who was a master on defense, who could claw back territory like no one in the SGC, and who’d let the universe end before he let a grudge die.

Speaking of—

“You okay?” Mitchell asks,.

“Yeah,” Young grinds out.

It’s a whopper of a lie, the kind his grandma would never brook. Mitchell’s told that same lie a thousand times, a thousand ways and meant it, from the stubborn reaches of his mule heart.

“‘Course you are.” Mitchell tries to help Young make it a little more true.

The mountain gives way to the sprawl of Colorado Springs, full of too much space and not quite enough strip malls to fill it.

“You have food, right?” Mitchell goes for the basics.

“Yeah.” Young doesn’t look at him. His silhouette’s strange, hair a little too long, frame a little too gaunt.

The man can’t have an edible thing to his name; he’s been in custody for weeks.

And Vala’d been doing his shopping, damn it.

Mitchell can step up. Later today even, after work, presuming nothing face-meltingly awful happens between now and change of shift.

“You wanna roll the windows down?” Mitchell asks. “Nice outside. Not so hot. You missed the end of summer.”

“Sure.” Young doesn’t roll down his window.

Mitchell rolls them all down at once, and a crisp October breeze sweeps the car.

“It’s, uh,” Mitchell begins, like a man staring up an ice wall without pick or rope. “It’ll be—”

“Shut up, Cam,” Young says, but there’s a fond note beneath the crush of exhaustion.

“I’ll tell you what I think.” Mitchell channels his grandma best he can. To the point. On the wheel. “For what it’s worth—I think there was a real guy at some point. David Telford: type A, physics nerd, shiny boots, quick on the draw. A sharp shooter.”

Young looks over at him.

“But that guy,” Mitchell continues, “he didn’t make it. Nothing to mark the spot. Nothing to mark the time. All the same. He was real, and now he’s gone. So I don’t think there’s any harm in pouring out a little beer for the good part of a dead soul.”

“Maybe.” The word comes like a weight, dragged over stone.

Mitchell imagines a world where they’d all felt the death of the David Telford they’d known. On a Lantean dock, Shep sends a golf ball in a perfect arc, David on his mind. Everett looks up from his Kafka and pours a little beer on the lawn. Mitchell’s mind calms as he pilots a ship over fields of Antarctic ice. 

Something like that. Stranger things have happened.

Mitchell brings Sheila (his blue Camaro, of course), to a stop in front of Young’s building. He rolls up the windows, kills the ignition, gets out, opens the back, and shoulders Young’s bag. Spend a month under lockdown and you’ll accumulate a few things if you’ve got any friends.

Young’s got plenty, and Jackson counts for at least five people.

“I can take it from here,” Young says, underweight, deconditioned, and not able to take anything from anywhere.

“Shut up,” Mitchell says, “is what you woulda said to me eighteen months ago when I was recuperating from a shattered spine and tried to carry my own bag.”

“I’m not you.” Young shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans to prevent Mitchell from taking one of his arms. Stubborn bastard.

“No,” Mitchell agrees. “You’re stupider and handsomer.”

Young doesn’t react, just looks up at his building.

Mitchell wonders what would happen if he shoved Young back in the car and drove him to his own place.

Maybe it would be the best thing that’d happened to either of them in a while.

Maybe Young’d deck him across the face.

“You wanna stay with me?” Mitchell asks.

“Nope.” Young gives him a top-shelf dark-eyed stare.

“Well,” Mitchell says, standing on a pale strip of sidewalk. “You know me. Always tryin’ to improve my chess game.”

Young snorts, leans into his cane and heads for the doors. “You get Dr. Lam to play you yet?”

“No,” Mitchell says. Then, recovering his cool, “Nah, she’s ah—she’s outta my league, chess-wise. Friend-wise, we’re doin’ good. But, like, friends friends, y’know?”

“Uh huh.” Young lets Mitchell hold the door for him.

Thank god Jackson’s not here, he’d be pulling blocks outta Mitchell’s word salad with the same evil glee as his four year-old cousin when she decides she’s had enough Jenga. “Friends. Close professional colleagues. Y’know, like on The X-files.”

Young, unimpressed, heads for the elevator. “Pretty sure they sleep together, Cam.”

“What?”

“The X-files team,” Young says.

“No way.”

“Pretty sure.”

“I’m gonna have to—” he stops himself before he can say “check with Vala,” but the idea’s there between them, all the same.

There’s a grim set to Young’s jaw all through the elevator ride. It gets worse when he sees his apartment door, all the way at the end of the hall.

Maybe there’s a way to get Shep back from Atlantis. He and Everett need a weekend with Shep’s low-key insanity: his beer-in-hand, good-listener, simple/profound wisdom that makes you wanna climb into his laid-back red wheelbarrow, leave the white chickens in the yard, and burn shit down. 

He hasn’t talked to Shep for months.

And, hell.

Shep probably doesn’t even know yet. Not what happened to Everett. To Rush. To David.

Mitchell is sure the IOA will take their sweet time posting word to Pegasus about all the Milky Way crap they’ve been dealing with. Best to cut through that red tape, if he can. He’ll talk to Landry. Get it done.

Young unlocks his door, swings it wide, and holds it open.

Mitchell steps over the threshold. The light is dim, the blinds are shut, the room smells like dust— 

And there’s Ancient on Young's wall.

It takes him a few breaths to realize it wasn’t Young who put it there.

“Didn’t know you two were, uh—” Mitchell trails off, not sure why on god’s green earth he’d started this bottomless pit of a sentence.

The circle on the wall is perfect. Astonishing for something drawn free-hand. It’s divided into nine equal arc lengths, annotated with math, with Ancient. It’s not the only one in the apartment. There’s one on every wall. They’re elegant. Ghostly.

There’s too much Rush in this apartment.

“I think you should stay with me,” Mitchell says, his eyes on the wall. 

“Not a chance in hell.” Young leans into the wall near his door and waits for Mitchell to leave.

Mitchell, not fooled, says, “I’ll be back later today.”

“Why.”

“Because you’re lyin’ about having food.”

“I’m fine, Cam,” Young’s outta patience.

“Yup. I know.” Mitchell drops Young’s bag on the table and heads for the door. “See you tonight. I’ll bring my chess set.”

Young, a hint of amusement on his face, knows better than to fight too hard. He sighs, defeated.

Mitchell, magnanimous in victory, does a subtle fist pump. “I wanna learn a move with a name, okay?”

“Don’t push your luck.” Young closes the door in his face.

“A gambit,” Mitchell calls through the wood. “An opener? I wanna stop losing to Simon Coombs in four moves!”

He stands there, waiting, but Young doesn’t reply. Mitchell tries not to picture him on the other side of the door, staring at a wall of math.

 

He drives up Cheyenne Mountain with the windows down and the radio on. The air smells like pine and juniper, with a hint of wood smoke.

Back on base, in need of a pick-me-up, he stops in on Carter’s lab. Sam is fast becoming his main man. Savin’ the day with brains and a gun and a troublemaker little smile. Holding an even keel despite a bullet to the heart.

He finds her at a lab bench, hunched over her laptop. Maybe the latest Vala sightings? They’ve chased down eight quirky brunettes in the past month, six offworld, two onworld, and gotten no love.

“What’s up?” He boosts himself onto the bench beside her.

“Tweaking.” She drags her fingers across the touchpad on her laptop.

“Tweaking.” Already, he’s more optimistic about the world. “I like it.”

“Yup,” she says. “Tweaking.” She finishes whatever thought her badass brain is in the middle of, then looks up at him. “I’m trying to figure out how to track Dr. Rush by his cortical suppressors.”

“Sounds awesome and useful,” Mitchell opines.

“Agreed.” Carter flashes him her science-gremlin smile. “Thanks for noticing. I’m programing the software for a portable detector. It’ll be a pain to haul around—boxy and heavy—but its range should approach the theoretical maximum.”

“Sweet,” Mitchell says. “What kinda distance we talkin’ about?”

Carter sighs. “Unfortunately, it broadcasts in a band that doesn’t transmit very far.”

“How far is ‘not very’?”

“Ten kilometers.” Carter winces apologetically.

“Well. that’s not great,” Mitchell says, “but it’s better than nothin’.”

“True,” Carter replies. “Did you—” she breaks off at a soft knock against her metal doorframe.

Mitchell twists to see Carolyn Lam standing in the doorway. Her coat is the color of untouched snow, her dress is the color of wine, her hair is dark and long and she’s—

Beautiful, he doesn’t think, because that would be stupid.

Safe, he doesn’t think, because that would be wrong.

Brave, he decides.

When he pictures the Ori conquest of Earth, it’s her he thinks of, the way he can’t picture her bending a knee to Origen. He imagines Landry telling her to go, imagines her leading a little group into the Rockies, surviving on grit and good sense.

It won’t happen that way. It can’t. Without a dialysis machine, she wouldn’t last a week in the wilderness.

“Carolyn,” Carter says. “Hey,” like Dr. Lam is just some normal human being, not someone who cures alien plagues and has saved more lives than Cameron Mitchell ever, ever will.

“Hi.” Lam sees him. She hesitates.

Mitchell tries to say, “Hey.” Make it no big thing. But he chokes on the word and coughs, then slinks off Carter’s lab bench like he’s committed a crime.

Lam takes them in. “Is—this a bad time?”

Oh god. This is terrible. From his reaction, she probably thinks he and Carter are an item. Joke’s on her: Carter’s outta his league. Joke’s on him: everyone’s outta his league.

Romantic relationships are easy for Cam Mitchell: he doesn’t have them.

Carter gives him one helluva what-the-heck-is-wrong-with-you look. Then she turns to Lam, Awesomeness Incarnate, and says. “No. Come on in.”

“I saw your door open.” Lam takes a few more steps into the room. “Thought I’d say hi.”

Mitchell should leave his door open, maybe?

Carter smiles. “How’s the molecular phylogenetics?”

“Oh y’know.” Lam holds up her hands, spreading her fingers wide. “I’m watering my little trees and they’re branching all over the place.”

They both laugh.

See?

He could never be with Carolyn Lam. She makes jokes so witty that only humanity’s best scientist gets them. But that makes sense, because these ladies are peers and Mitchell is just the relatively savvy local flyboy with a gun and a steely look.

Inexplicably, Lam turns to Mitchell and says, “It was a good idea.”

“Oh yeah?” He’s not sure what’s happening.

“The genetic comparison between the Ori virus and the plague that wiped out the Ancients,” Lam says.

“Riiiiiiight.” Mitchell tries to play it cool. “And—this has what to do with trees?”

Carter sees the problem, gives him an assist. “Mapping evolutionary relationships is represented by branching trees. Each branch point represents a mutation.”

Sam! His main man! She’s the best.

“Got it,” Mitchell says.

“Would you guys excuse me for a minute?” Carter asks. “I need to run down the hall to pick up a form.”

What the heck. Sam is the worst.

“Yeah,” Mitchell says, trying to pull the Antarctic ice outta his death glare. “Sure. Hopefully we’re not phase shifted when you get back here!” He yells that last part after her as she ducks into the hall. He looks back at Lam. “That only happened the one time,” he offers.

She makes a small sound of acknowledgement.

They stare at each other.

The silence is getting long.

He wants to die, a little.

“I’ve been playin’ a lotta chess,” he blurts.

At the same time, she says, “Would you like to come over for dinner?”

What?

She might as well have home run a two-by-four into his face, Babe Ruth style.

His day—his dark and depressing and awful day has turned into a day where Thing D is happening. He didn’t even know there was a Thing D, let alone that it might happen to him.

Carolyn Lam is asking him out.

Carolyn Lam is asking HIM out?

Like a baller. 

And there’s nothing in his head, no words, just his memory of watching her run like hell on the surveillance tape from the LA foothold. She’d run for the thing she knew would kill her, fast and barefoot, shoes off, coat flying, silent and determined in the mist filled halls. She’d run for that naquadah. She’d sprinted for that naquadah. Nothing held back.

No one could watch that footage and not love her.

“Um,” she breathes.

“Yeah. YEAH.” He’s out of air. “Yes, I mean. Dinner sounds great. Yes to dinner.” He manages to shut himself up before he says, Are you sure? But it’s a near thing.

She gives him the hint of a smile. “Tomorrow?”

Tomorrow is amazing.

Does tomorrow exist?

He can’t remember.

He clears his throat. “1900? Er, seven o’clock?”

“Bring your chess set,” Lam says.

“You think you can handle the game I’m gonna bring with it?” He kicks himself. It shows on his face, he’s sure. “Um,” he says, all respect, “by which I mean skill. At chess. Just to be clear.”

Lam smiles in a way that’s almost a laugh, sinks her hands into the pockets of her white coat, looks down at her petite little shoes, then meets his eye and says, “I’m pretty sure I can handle any game you bring, colonel.”

“Cam,” Mitchell says, snipping that “colonel” business right in the bud. For the third time. “Definitely Cam. Always Cam.”

“Cam,” she says.

They look at one another in awkward, promising silence.

“I should get back to work.” She gestures over one shoulder.

“Yep. Me too. People to find, galaxies to save; you know how it is.”

“I know. See you tomorrow.” She heads for the door.

“See ya,” Mitchell breathes.

He watches her walk away, waits for her to vanish around the corner, then rounds Carter’s lab bench, drops onto the floor, and releases a shuddery breath. Carolyn Lam just asked him out. Dr. Carolyn Lam asked him out. This is amazing. This is terrible. Is this happening? Is he in a mirror dimension?

He shuts his eyes.

Someone nudges him with a steel-toed boot.

He opens his eyes to find Carter looking down at him.

“That bad?” she asks sympathetically.

“She asked me out,” Mitchell says, weakly. “I think. Maybe. I, mean, I’m pretty sure?”

Carter grins, extends a hand, and says, “She asked you? Nice. Teal’c owes me another twenty.”

Mitchell gets his feet under him before she can do too much of the work. “You bet against me?”

She gives him a sympathetic shoulder clap. “Daniel bet against you for forty.”

“So Teal’c’s my new favorite,” Mitchell says.

“Teal’c out sixty bucks,” Carter’s grin turns a little wicked. “I’d steer clear of him for a few days.”

“Still my favorite,” Mitchell announces.

Carter laughs, a single, delicate exhale. “Go cheer up Daniel, he needs it more, and I’ve got electronics to calibrate.”

“Hey. I do more around here than boost morale,” Mitchell protests, with a whole pile of authority.

“Yes,” Carter agrees. “You’re very good at shooting things.”

Mitchell heads for the door. “Team night this Saturday,” he calls over his shoulder. “October is Adopt-A-Miserable-Colonel Month. I’ve got just the guy.”

He walks toward Jackson’s office, not dreading the coming conversation, sure something’s gonna give. Because, sometimes, there’s a fourth, non-crap choice hiding under three crap options.

Fourth choices follow Jackson around like lost children.

Everything will be all right.

He can feel it.

This is SG-1, after all.