Storytime with Rachel F Hundred

1. 1940

Cam stayed with his Grandparents for too long.

Familiarity.

Family.

He’d had neither for so long that it felt good to be amongst it again but Cam knew he couldn’t stay there forever. There was the future to consider. He would step on a bug and change it irrevocably. Maybe he already had. Cam found himself in his Grandmother’s kitchen weeping on her shoulder as though he was a small boy and not the middle-aged man he had become.

As he finished his story of wormholes, time travel, and his dilemma, he avoided her fierce green eyes. ‘You must think I’m nuts.’

‘I think you’re lost.’ His Grandmother corrected. ‘You were sent here for a reason, Cameron, and I think when you’ve served His purpose, God will show you the way home.’ She laid a hand over his. ‘You just have to have faith.’

He set out for Europe the next day.

2. 1945

Cam had no idea how he survived the War. He’d hoped to join some Resistance movement with the view that he’d end up dead on a battlefield or blown out of the sky; just another unknown casualty. He had seen action; employing the skills he’d learned in the most technically advanced aircraft with small bi-planes and nothing more than a rear mounted machine gun.

As everyone celebrated the end of the War, Cam considered all the people who lived because he had been there including one Elena Ballard. Cam wonders if Jackson ever knew his Grandmother was a war hero.

Perhaps, he mused, his own Grandmother was right: maybe God wanted him alive and in the past for a reason.

3. 1959

Maybe it was the call of home or maybe getting lost in Europe had lost its appeal. Cam travelled back to the US, bought a Chevrolet Corvette and set out on a road trip.

He’d been in Minnesota all of two minutes when he’d seen an elderly woman standing next to a broken down truck with a child playing at her feet. He stopped and offered to help.

‘I just can’t thank you enough.’ The woman said as Cam fixed her fan-belt.

‘No problem, ma’am.’ Cam responded.

‘Oh, call me Eileen.’ She smiled at him. ‘Eileen O’Neill.’ She gestured. ‘And this here is my grandson Jonathan although we call him Jack.’

The shock almost had Cam banging his head on the bonnet as he craned for a closer look at the boy who would one day lead SG1.

4. 1969

He was on his way into a diner in Washington DC when he helped a woman his own age struggling with a pram and a toddler. He joined her for coffee and pie.

‘These are my daughter’s children.’ Jessie Sullivan said with a smile that reminded him of someone but he couldn’t quite place it. ‘Her husband’s leaving for ‘Nam and they wanted some private time. Do you have grandkids yourself?’

Cam shook his head. He’d rarely taken solace in a woman’s arms. It had been a lonely existence.

The next day he stayed in his car when the vivid painted bus he had been impatiently waiting for, pulled up on the other side of the road. SG1 scrambled out. Relief flooded him: it was proof that the future really had been fixed.

Jack leaned over to whisper something to Sam that made her smile, and Cam suddenly knew why Jessie’s had seemed so familiar.

5. 1970

He was old: it was time to stop running and he’d chosen his old hometown craving familiarity again.

The day of his actual birth, seventy-eight year old Cam collapsed. As they carried him through the emergency room, he caught a glimpse of his mother being ushered into a wheelchair, her hand on her rounded belly.

He considered predestination and that his Grandmother had been right. He’d been exactly where he was meant to be all along and now God was showing him the way home.

Have faith.

‘I do, Grandma.’ Cam whispered. He took a final breath.

Up on the maternity floor, a cry broke the silence and Cameron Mitchell opened his newborn eyes.

fin.