Till Death Us (All) Do Part... (Stargate SG1 - gen, 660 words)
This is my contribution for the latest SG-1 Gen Fic Day/Alphabet Soup; my letter was D and my list of words is at the end :)
The idea was to write about SGC personnel outside of SG-1, and yes, I fully intended to write a nice little ode to my beloved Robert Rothman (my favourite character in the whole canon) but it just - didn't - want - to work. So you get this instead, about not one but quite a few of the recurring or one-off characters I liked (how does it go? you only hurt the ones...) Maybe a little odd, some of it a little dark, but it does come from wondering why all the 'interesting' stuff has to happen to just Our Heroes.
Interesting stuff like being D for... Not Dead.
Till Death Us (All) Do Part...
It wasn't, as someone pointed out, as if SG-1 kept all the best missions to themselves, or even the worst. SG-1 was just more... spectacular. More prone to the dangerous, the disastrous, the deadly.
And they tended to die way more often.
But SG-1 weren't really alone in the Death Becoming Us betting stakes...
The giant alien Daalzwurm swallowed Lou Ferretti alive in front of his appalled team and a deliriously confused crowd of locals. It was another three days before they fought their way back to the Stargate and their frantic General.
The memorial for one of the pioneers of the SGC - marred only by the offworld absence of the other two pioneers and their team - was properly dignified, sorrowful, as heartfelt and sombre as ever, up to the moment when his teammates went to send the traditional wreath through the Gate.
...And Ferretti barreled through and collided with them, shedding bits of ex-Daalzwurm all over the ramp as he did.
How he'd managed to find his way out of it, even Hammond never quite dared to ask.
The Big Dreaming was something no one likes to remember. Especially SG-3, who left SG-1 to finish up their nice, peaceful mission and gated in to find an entire mountain of dead people.
Or not.
Makepeace never quite forgave the civilian scientists - whose fumbling of the alien air freshener put almost everyone into that deathlike trance - or Robert Rothman, whose translation of the Guould inscription, prized from his faux-rigor-mortis clutch, seemed to indicate that they could only be revived by tactile oral interface. It was just lucky for everyone (especially the scientists, and especially especially Rothman) that a mass coming-back-from-the-dead started before one of the jarheads had to kiss him...
Rothman himself 'died' when he translated something correctly, and the entire archeology section of the base imploded into another dimension. The sympathy on their explosive 'revival' was muted, however - even Hammond felt that dying on a long weekend was really not to be encouraged.
It doesn't pay to remind Lieutenant Grogan about his death. Sure the locals had - and used - a knockoff sarcophagus, but you know how knockoffs work.
Or don't, quite.
He isn't sorry for the half-life he still has, but 'Lieutenant UnDead' is a joke that wore thin a loooong time ago...
Does it count if you were never even born... well, as you? One of these days, Walter Harriman thinks, he'll get up the courage to ask some of the scientists that, and about the other time-loop, the one that SG-1 and half the offworld teams doesn't even know about. The one where the Stargate controls went crazy, where he went back and somehow became - and then accidentally killed - his own grandfather.
What the hell, he never liked the name Davis anyway.
When Lorne bodyswapped with a local... well, sort of hominid (as his distraught civilian adviser radioed to the base, "a sort of Devil Monkey. With no head") the natives could hardly be blamed for shooting him - it - them.
Especially since the natives 'knew' that Devil Monkeys couldn't be killed in their own skin, only in a lesser one.
Lorne still has a large, circular scar and a vague memory of brushing against a fading alien mind...
All of SG-11 - the current incarnation - gave up the ghost on PZZ-696. Quite Literally. Three times. They don't talk about it.
Doctor Warner retired after he had to dose himself with their most lethal drugs to kill the latest sentient corruption before it escaped from the sickbay and the mountain. The medical staff still don't quite know how they revived him, but it's been a long time since anyone in the SGC questioned the way people died around here anymore.
Maybe they should.
But if, inside a dead man's shell, the sentient corruption that they revived instead isn't about to make them... is anyone surprised?
- the end -
(D is for daalzwurms (a real cryptid, really!), dreaming, dimensions, devil monkeys, Davis... oh yes.
And Death {grin}