Between The Powers That Be and Beachhead. This is a mirror chapter. It also appears in Sunshine and Shadow chapter 212. These stories often overlap. This is more Cam-centric but Midnight and Dawn is his story as well.

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Cameron had become kind of fond of First Thursdays at O'Malley's, the once-a-month takeover of the bar and grill by the SGC personnel. It was a way of bonding, of starting to fit in. He no longer got the brief flashes of resentment from the men and women on the Base. The resentment had always been softened instantly by the respect he earned over Antarctica. But there was still a wall between him and a lot of the SGC. It was built on the appearance that because he was taking over SG1 he was somehow trying to take the place of Jack O'Neill. His insistence on wanting the original team back together wasn't helping his cause.

No one could take the place of Jack O'Neill and after the weeks Mitchell had been here they had gradually gotten the idea that Mitchell knew that. He had gone on a crusade to get to know everyone on the base, which was easy for him, really. He had a natural affinity for people. He haunted the infirmary. The staff no longer even remarked when he came by at odd hours with donuts and homemade cookies. He sat and ate and swapped stories about home and the SGC, Iraq and Afghanistan with the personnel who were stuck in there, recovering from one thing or another suffered off world.

When he was asked why one night, he said that hospital nights were long and hospital food was awful. He had never forgotten that.

When asked about the Ori and what happened on P8X-412 he didn't pull any punches. He told them the truth – that it hadn't been any kind of picnic and it was probably going to get worse. But he also told them that the people of the SGC had won two wars already by giving it every damned thing they had and that was how they were going to get through this.

It was what he would have needed to hear and he saw it in their faces. Gradually they had stopped thinking of him as a Jack O'Neill wannabe and started seeing Cam Mitchell.

In the end, he learned more about life in the program from those who had been wounded by it than he had from the stacks of SG1 reports he had read from cover to cover.

He thought now it might be time to start reading reports from SG8. Maybe then he could get a handle on Jackson's wife. In some ways she was more enigmatic than Jackson himself, but Cam had discovered that she would talk to him about Daniel. He had a feeling that Daniel was starting to waver in his determination not to join Mitchell on the frontlines again. It was just damned hard to get a read on the guy. He seemed to always have his heart on his sleeve, yet live in a cautious, guarded state all at the same time.

Daniel had closed up tighter than a boot-camp bed sheet when they got back from the plague planet. Cam had shared a quarantined room with Jackson for 24 hours, and while Daniel had been willing to listen, he himself had hardly made a sound. The only time Daniel had been animated at all was talking on the phone with Jillian.

He went looking for Jillian the afternoon of the Thursday after they had gotten back from P8X-412, and found her in the base library. There was an entire section unofficially known as the Jackson Wing, made up of books Daniel had filed and catalogued and put there when he had run out of space in his office. At the moment, the room's only occupant was Jillian.

She smiled when he came in and he registered in some part of his brain how beautiful she was when she smiled – the way she tilted her head slightly to the left and looked straight at a man with those dark green eyes. Cam thought, not for the first time, that Jackson was a lucky man.

"Hi, Cameron," she said. "How are you feeling?"

"Just fine, thanks," he answered. "I was wondering if I could talk to you."

Jillian sat down at the wooden table, which was strewn with papers, notes, pencils, open books and her laptop. She looked like a college student cramming for finals.

"About what?"

"Daniel."

The answer caught her off guard. He saw it in the confused flicker that haunted her eyes for a moment.

"Daniel," she repeated. It wasn't a question. There was hardly any inflection in her voice at all.

"Yeah," Cam sat down across from her and slouched, trying to look less threatening. "I guess I want to ask you the same thing you asked me. Is he all right?"

"As well as can be expected under the circumstances," she answered, hesitantly.

"Circumstances," Cam repeated, trying to draw her out. "You mean the way we left P8X-412?"

"Yes," she said.

Cam sat and waited quietly. Eventually it worked.

"He's shaken up, Cameron," Jillian said.

"Because he couldn't talk them around?" He guessed.

"Not just that," she paused and shuffled some things around on the desk. It looked to Cameron like she was building a line of defense between them, a bulwark against what he was asking. "Daniel has failed to talk his way out of things before. Not every mission ended without shots being fired."

"Like when he rescued the Unas Chaka from slavery?" Cameron asked.

"Yes," she agreed. "But in the past when his peaceful solutions didn't work he would accept the more violent alternative. Now….. now it seems that talking isn't going to work and there is no alternative. Even when talking works now, the people he convinces to reject the Ori will be punished."

"So he's feeling frustrated?" Cam said.

"Yes," Jillian said, "and more, probably. Daniel is…complicated, Cameron. Put a problem in front of him and he'll try to solve it. Put a world in front of him and he'll try to save it. Until those problems are solved and that world is saved, don't get in his way. He's like the tide. You shouldn't try to swim against the tide."

Cameron nodded and stood up. "Thank you. Are you guys coming tonight? To O'Malley's?"

Jillian's nose wrinkled. "We'll have to bring Vala."

Which was exactly what Mitchell was hoping but he didn't say as much. He shrugged instead and tried not to think about Vala with anything but a peripheral awareness. Something about Vala hurt and felt good all at the same time.

"Could be interesting," he commented. "It might wear her out. It would be nice to spend a few hours not listening to her complain about being bored."

"Who listens?" Jillian asked.

Cameron laughed. "Right now she's in her quarters watching season three of 'Star Trek: the Next Generation'. So at least she isn't complaining about anything at the moment."

"'Star Trek: the Next Generation'?"

"She likes it. She thinks we should be working on building a hyperlight drive like theirs and she wants to meet Riker. I think she also wants to get back out into the galaxy to look for dilithium."

"She knows this is fiction?"

Cameron shrugged. "I tried to explain that."

"It will be hard to get clearance for her to leave the base for something like First Thursday," Jillian pointed out. "They'll be worried about her going AWOL."

"But you'd like to get Daniel out of here for a while," Cameron finished the thought for her. When it came to her feelings for Daniel, Jillian wasn't as opaque as she was about other things.

"Yes, I would."

"And she wants to get out of here too. It might make her act for once like something other than a colossal, epic, huge, alien pain in the ass."

Jillian laughed. "You never know."

He grinned back at her, feeling almost as if they'd made a connection. It helped him stop thinking about Vala, about what she might wear if he could take her to O'Malley's and if she would dance with him.

"I'll go see about getting her cleared," Mitchell said.

She stopped him before he walked out the door.

"Cameron?"

"Yes?"

"I'm very glad you didn't die," she said, sincerely.

It touched him for some reason. It was almost like something she would say to one of Daniel's real teammates.

"Thanks," he said.

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