(no subject)

[bluflamingo]

My brain's slowly turning to mush thanks to a weekend with my parents and a two hour train journey home, so:

Inspired by Doctor Who's "Turn Left:" Pick one of my stories and tell me a point in the tale that you'd change -- something tiny or big -- and I'll tell you how that one difference would have altered the course of the entire story. (stolen from kazbaby

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Not a change I'd want to make, but one I'm curious about, if that's ok - Two Week's Leave - Evan decides not to go with Cam to the cabin.

[ocea]

erm, that was me. No idea why I'm not logged in.

[bluflamingo]

I think Cam would have stuck around instead, partly because John asked him to keep an eye out for Evan, and that's a pretty bug thing for John to do, so he feels like he owes John, and partly because Evan looks exhausted and depressed, and Cam's worried about him.

And then it could go two ways. Either Cam eventually manages to get through to Evan and shake him out of it a bit (possibly with help from Laura, because she'd call back to make sure Evan was okay, and he'd mention that Cam kept coming by, and she'd bully him into actually interacting with another person). Or Evan hides away and stops answering the door to him, and ends up either not going back to Atlantis or going back and getting into something destructive, depending on how far you want to go into actual depression or post traumatic streess, and how much you think John would be able to fix things without Cam to help.

[skieswideopen]

Party Time. What if Cam had managed to find John again later that evening?

[bluflamingo]

Hmm...I think Cam would have stayed over, and they would have stayed in touch, and kind-of together, after John left. John wouldn't have married Nancy, and wouldn't have requested really dangerous postings (my idea in r'verse being that at some point he decides he really dislikes his life, and so he tries to get dangerous, risky postings as a way of not having to deal with any of it). And then eventually he and Cam would have ended up getting assigned to the 302s together, because John would have been around enough for Sam to recommend both of them.

And then from that, it could go any way, really, from one or both of them being shot down and killed in Antarctica to them winding up together at the SGC/Atlantis. Obviously, I prefer to imagine something closer to the latter than the former :o)

[skieswideopen]

Obviously, I prefer to imagine something closer to the latter than the former.

Absolutely! (Though I will confess to a secret love for the right kind of self-sacrificing tragic story...just as long as I can find happy!fic to read afterward.)

This is a nicer future to imagine for John than the one he got. Though I wonder what effect it would have had on his relationship with his father...earlier estrangement, maybe? Or would Cam have managed to head that off altogether? (I tend to assume that the estrangement owed more to John's decision to pursue a military career than questions about John's sexual orientation--he did marry Nancy, after all--but Cam might have changed that. Either John would have cut himself off so they didn't find out, or his father would have found out, which probably wouldn't have had good results. And now I kind of want to read the story where John and Cam get together early in their careers (very quietly, of course, pre-DADT), and John doesn't tell his father, and then one day Patrick Sheppard shows up at John's apartment--or the hospital after John's been injured--and runs into Cam....)

oh, man!

[peachville]

(Cam & Patrick meet) And it's not just that his son has a gentleman friend AND thwarts his plans by going into and remaining in the Air Force, but his "partner" (insert sneer) isn't even one of them!
(Also known as: John isn't just rejecting everything Patrick has ever stood for, but now he knows that when John refuses to show up on holidays that he's going to some hovel with this man's enormous family!)


Although, I've always wondered if Patrick could meet Cam's family (if they were "clan mitchell"-crazy, Patriotic to the core, and ultimately accepting) if he would have reconciled (or maybe headded of the disaster that was their big fight) with John. A world where he isn't happy with John's life, but has accepted his son and let him know he loves him would be awesome. But considering how hard headded John is, I'm guessing the apple didn't fall far from the tree.

Re: oh, man!

[skieswideopen]

Although, I've always wondered if Patrick could meet Cam's family (if they were "clan mitchell"-crazy, Patriotic to the core, and ultimately accepting) if he would have reconciled (or maybe headded of the disaster that was their big fight) with John.

I'm not entirely sure that patriotic to the core would really have appealed to Patrick. Maybe the ultimately accepting would have won him over, but as you say, I think John gets his stubbornness from somewhere, so maybe not. And I'm really not sure he would have given them the chance.

[bluflamingo]

Though I wonder what effect it would have had on his relationship with his father...earlier estrangement, maybe?

I don't know. Because, I mean, clearly his father was still around more when John was getting married, which I assume happened some time after he joined the AF, and then things went downhill more when the divorce happened. I don't think they'd ever have been close, because eventually Patrick would probably have figured out what it meant that John never brought a girl home and I can't imagine him being any good at dealing with his mostly-gay son. But maybe it would have been this thing that they just never spoke of, and the estrangement wouldn't have happened.

Plus, possibly there would have been less pressure on the relationship because John had Cam's family as well-like, eventually he would have drifted out of his father's life because he didn't need to keep pushing for a better relationship because he had others that were better.

Re: oh, man!

[bluflamingo]

I love the idea of John and his father and brother having a good relationship, I just have a really hard time imagining it if he's with Cam. I can see the big fight and serious estrangement never happening, because John doesn't have that need to push against his father to get any kind of reaction, because he has Cam's family instead, who love him a lot, and so they drift apart rather than having a serious fight. Trouble is, we only really know John's dad through the very little John says about him, and given that my sister and I have wildly divergent views of what our father's like, it's probably debatable how accurate that is, and maybe he actually would have got along fine with Cam's parents and everything would have been ok. Which, actually, I would love to see someone write *well*.

[camshaft22]

I was wondering about 'What happens Next?' How would you have changed that?

[bluflamingo]

I don't know. Are you thinking of a particular thing, if x had been different, how would the story have changed?

[camshaft22]

I suppose... If you'd changed X, what would've happened? Like if John hadn't come to Cam immediately or something...

[bluflamingo]

If John hadn't gone to Cam pretty much immediately, I think things would have been a lot harder for them when he did, because John going to him immediately is basically saying, look, I love you, I want to be with you, I want a family with you, and this way of bringing up my unexpected son is my first choice, enough for me to give up Atlantis. So if he doesn't go to Cam first, there's always the question of - is Cam second choice? What was John planning to have happen to their relationship if he stayed in Atlantis to raise Alex? And I think that with both of them being that insecure about where things stood - because, basically, in WHN, Cam's pretty sure and John's not - they wouldn't have been able to do a lot of the hard stuff, like giving up jobs they loved and coming out to their families, or at least not easily. I don't know if I think they'd split in the end, but I think everything would have been much harder, and probably not gone as well as it did.

And I kind of think, maybe, in the end, John would have taken Alex and gone back to Atlantis, and they wouldn't have called it a break-up, would have treated it like the start of a long-distance relationship, but it would have been the end, because it would have killed Cam to not be able to see his son any more, and John wouldn't have been able to handle the guilt.