Fic: First Times, 3/?
Fic: First Times, 3/? (G)
Chapter Title: Dr. Carson Beckett, Chief Medical Officer
Author: shaych
Pairings: none
Rating: G
Warnings: possible spoilers, AU for the events of episode 3x17 “Sunday"
Summary: The “First Times” series chronicles the pre-Atlantis lives of the expedition members, how they wound up in the Pegasus Galaxy, and some of the things they learned there. In this part, Dr. Carson Beckett.
Disclaimer: Don’t own, don’t sue, don’t ask, don’t tell.
Author’s Notes: See story index page for notes.
Dr. Carson Beckett, Chief Medical Officer, Atlantis Expedition, Pegasus Galaxy
When Carson Beckett was six years old, in 1975, the glam rock era had just ended in Britain. Carson knows this because his mum stops making huffing noises at all the teenagers she sees. They (Carson’s mum and da, and his older sister Moira and his older brother Peter and his younger brother Robert and soon, any week now, his youngest sibling, whatever it’ll turn out to be) live in a little house in a little mining town somewhere along the Scottish coast, near the Isle of Skye. Carson’s da is a miner and his mum taught at the primary school until she had children, and they’re not rich but they get by. Carson’s da is a huge bearded bear of a man, and he laughs loudly and frequently as he tosses Carson and his siblings up in the air and dances their mum around the kitchen, and he plays a cheerful fiddle and Carson thinks he’s brilliant. Carson’s mum is a bit quieter, but she’s lovely and cheerful and an amazing cook, and she’s the sweetest, purest, most wonderful woman in the entire world as far as her husband and children are concerned.
Carson’s mum and da want better for their children than a miner’s life, and they’re all bright children. Carson especially so, and he’s kind and gentle and courteous, if a bit shyer than his boisterous brothers, and their parents have no doubt that all of them will succeed at whatever they set their minds to. When Carson finds a dying baby bird in the yard, knocked from its nest by one of his brother’s games, he brings it home and nurses it with so much care that his mum thinks it could heal the whole world. The bird gets better, and it’s the first time Carson grins at her with his front teeth missing and his blue eyes sparkling and tells her he’s going to be a doctor. Watching how gently he handles the little bird, Mary Beckett believes him.
~~~
Carson’s a polite, cheerful, adorable little boy, and school is easy for him. Some of the tougher boys in his class like to pick on him a little, but they stop when Peter gives them a sound thrashing. His teachers love him because he never causes any trouble, and the little girls love him because he’s so sweet and gentle and sometimes brings them playground flowers if they’ve had a rough day, and most of the boys like him because he can always be counted on to join up if they need an extra man for whatever the game of the day is. He’s particularly good as keeper during recess football, actually, and he joins the local boys’ team. They really aren’t all that good, and they never play anybody who lives more than two or three towns away, but they have a lot of fun and they make some good friends. Mum and da and Moira and Peter and Robert and little baby Aislinn, who Carson thinks is the most adorable little girl ever (he dotes on her ridiculously, to the amusement of their parents) all come and watch, and Carson couldn’t be happier with his world.
~~~
When Carson is eight years old, his da and his grandda decide he’s old enough to join them and Peter and all of his uncles and cousins on their annual week-long fishing expedition. Carson’s been looking forward to this moment for his entire life; every year in the middle of August the men of the extended family pack up and go somewhere to camp out and fish and tell stories, teaching the boys how to be men and to do for themselves and their eventual families, while the women descend on whichever house is most convenient (or most necessary, like when mum was heavily pregnant and couldn’t travel) and share recipes and gossip and knitting. Carson knows he’s lucky to be part of such a big, loving family with such strong traditions - grandda tells them all how he remembers his grandda telling stories about this same trip from when he was a boy, so Carson knows the family’s been doing this for at least seven generations now, and probably more. When he looks at some of his classmates, who never see their extended family, or whose families are splitting up and don’t care for each other, he goes home and hugs his parents and says a little prayer of thanks for all his blessings.
~~~
Carson’s family is fairly active in the local Presbyterian church. Most of them are in the choir, and everyone’s been married on the church steps. This part of Scotland is imprinted on the bones and in the souls of the Becketts, and Carson wouldn’t have it any other way. He’s twelve years old when he decides he’s old enough to join as a member of the church, so he has a long talk with the minister about God and life and then that Sunday there’s a huge party after the service, with his entire family showing up and bringing food and fiddles and dancing and laughter. There’s a lot of laughter in Carson’s life when he’s young.
After, he has a long talk with his da, about what it means for him to be a man of the church. Carson might only be twelve, and he might have some queer notions sometimes, but he’s a solid lad. He understands more clearly now that he will at many points later in his life, because at twelve it’s very easy to look around at the bright sunshine and the emerald fields and the endless blue sky, and believe with all his heart in a god of creation. His da doesn’t have too many worries about Carson, so long as he keeps that faith in the wonders of the world. Carson wants more than ever now to do his bit to help all the little miracles that surround him grow and thrive, to heal them when they’re sick and comfort them when they’re in pain.
~~~
When Carson is fifteen, he starts studying seriously. He knows the Highers are coming up quickly, and he’s determined to score well so he can go on to his Advanced Highers in his final year of secondary school. He’s taking mostly sciences, with literature and history thrown in because he knows they’re useful, and he’s aiming to be a doctor. Of course, every student in the British Isles puts that down on their exams, because they have to put something and the Universities will look at the ones that say ‘doctor’ and ‘lawyer’ first. Few of those students who mark it down will last through the intense six-year University program. Carson knows this, but he also knows that he can make it. He has the brains, and he has the calling, and most importantly of all he has the compassion.
His family supports him, of course; mum and da stay awake late into the night with him quizzing him on different things, reading from his textbooks because some of them go beyond what they know themselves. Moira, who never got beyond her Highers and instead got married to her school sweetheart and set up house not too far away (after the young man in question had been properly instructed by Moira’s brothers, of course) always has time to tell him what sorts of questions they’ll ask, and how they’ll ask them, and she bakes excellent shortbread. Peter is no help at all; he’s studying for his own Advanced Highers, and between the two of them the stress level sometimes rises to intolerable levels, driving Robert and little Aislinn outside to find something else to do with their time.
~~~
Carson passes all of his exams over the next few years with top marks, giving him the option of nearly any University in the UK. He chooses the University of Glasgow, because it’s not very far away (he can drive home weekends, as soon as he buys himself a little clunky old car and fixes it up) and it has a good department for medicine and biomedical research. They’re doing some good work, helping people, and Carson thinks he’ll be happy there. It’s farther from home than he’s ever been on his own, and on the last night before he drives off, mum makes his favourite pot roast and the entire family descends on their house to wish him well and offer him advice. Carson’s not ashamed of blubbering a bit, because he’s going to miss them, and he doesn’t care who knows it. But then, even Carson’s tough old bear of a da is a bit teary, so that’s all right.
The next day, as they’re loading the car, it feels like the entire town comes out to wish him well and give him advice as he heads off. His mum’s smile outshines the sun, and his da’s puffed up farther than any peacock ever managed, both so proud of their son who’s smarter and gentler and kinder than anyone else in the entire world, as far as they’re concerned. And as far as the world of their little town is concerned, it’s probably true; he’s set school records the last couple of years, and if he weren’t such a genuinely kind, selfless boy, he’d probably have made enemies. But just like when he was tiny, everyone somehow can’t help but like him.
~~~
Carson loves University, even though he misses home terribly, and he manages to stay near the top of his class. The work is fascinating and enjoyable, and his professors all comment about what a cheerful, bright young man he is. He’s got loads of friends, as well, because people just can’t help but like Carson. He’s the sort of young man that all the blokes can share a drink and a laugh with, and all the girls can take home to their mothers because he’s so polite that they always approve. Carson thinks that life can’t get much better. He isn’t particularly serious about any of the girls, and he isn’t particularly close with any of the blokes, but that’s what his family is for. None of the students he takes classes with are family, and he’s perfectly fine keeping that distinction.
He goes home most weekends, even though he knows he’s missing out on some of the better parties, and helps his mum around the house. The second year, he helps Moira as well because she’s pregnant with twins and as big as a whale. Carson doesn’t tell her so, though. He tells her she looks wonderful and blooming and all those compliments men throughout the ages have perfected to keep pregnant women from killing them. It works well on his sister, and it helps that it’s also the truth. Pregnancy agrees with her, and after helping to raise four younger siblings motherhood probably will as well. Carson worries over her when he’s at school, but he knows her doctor and he’s a kind old man who knows his medicine backwards and forwards, so Carson’s sure she’s in good hands.
He’s just finished his second year of University when Moira presents the family with little Hamish (named after her husband’s father) and Mary (named after their own dear mum) and the family, as usual, descends to celebrate. Carson’s so very glad that it’s summer recess and he can be there to give his sister a hand, and play with the dear wee bairns, because they’re adorable and he loves them on sight. Carson’s a natural caretaker, and everyone smiles to see him so taken with the wee ones, thinking that someday he’s going to make some lucky woman the happiest wife in the world while his own children idolize their da. Carson doesn’t think it’ll happen anytime soon, but he doesn’t burst their hopes. He’s got quite enough to do finishing medical school.
~~~
The next couple of years pass pretty much the same as the past couple had, with harder and more rewarding coursework and the addition of Carson’s niece and nephew of course. Towards the end of his fourth year, Carson’s da takes ill, and the whole family worries. Da assures them it’s nothing, but Carson makes him go get a check-up anyway, and glad he did. They all knew they were lucky that da had never caught the miner’s disease, black lung. They were so very lucky, but all luck runs out eventually. Carson’s da’s got a few years left in him, longer if he stays out of the mines, and they’re grateful for that once they stop being angry and shocked at the bad luck suddenly come their way.
Carson does all the research he can in his spare moments, which are rare enough now that he’s trying to help out around home more than ever while moving into his final two years of study, but there’s no cure, and he knows it. He turns his attention to genetics research, determined that if he can’t save his da, he might eventually save someone from something, and he decides he’s going to specialize in it when he finishes his residency and has the option of going on to take his Ph.D. on top of the M.D. he’s already earning.
He studies even harder, determined to succeed, and he ends up coming second in his class for their last year of studies. He requests, and is given, a residency position at the hospital back home, and it’s with some relief that Carson moves back into his room in his mum’s house. He’s six years older and six years wiser, but in most ways it’s as if he never left, although the house is a bit emptier now that Moira’s gone and Peter’s set up housekeeping one town over working at a bank and Robert’s off at University studying engineering. It’s only Aislinn left at home now, finishing her last year of secondary, but at least she has no plans to leave immediately. She’s been taken on as an apprentice at the local bakery, and Carson loves the days when she brings home treats for him, especially if he’s been working long hours and has to get up to do so again tomorrow. Sometimes, when she has a long break at lunch, she even brings him crusty rolls hot from the oven, or butter tarts made just the way he likes them, and all the other residents at the hospital turn green with envy.
~~~
Life settles into a routine for Carson. He’s twenty-four now, gaining a solid reputation around the hospital and with a caring-no-nonsense manner that’s developed out of his former gregariousness. He still makes friends easily, and the girls around the hospital and at the church still sigh every time he walks by, but his time’s mostly spent helping mum out now da can’t do quite so much, and helping Moira out with her growing brood - she’s got three and another on the way - and giving sage advice to Robert and Aislinn whenever they look to him for it. He’s happy with his life, couldn’t be happier, and although he still plans on going back to the University and pursuing further study in genetics, he really thinks that after he finishes that he’d like to come back to this little hospital and continue on as a doctor here, doing research in his off hours and when the patient load is light.
However, first he needs to get through his residency, and some days that proves a challenge. Not intellectually; it’s a small hospital, and most of the things coming through are easily diagnosed and he knows what to do for each patient under his care. But emotionally, that’s a different matter. Carson’s always taken his patients too much to heart, always wanted to give them the moon when all he can give them is a kind word and a soothing touch, and school never really prepared him for watching people die before his eyes of things that he can’t cure. Because despite being second in his class, despite everything, Carson’s not God and he can’t fix everything, no matter how much he wants to. Sometimes it’s hard for Carson to remember what it felt like to believe so strongly in the goodness of God, when He keeps taking Carson’s patients despite Carson’s best efforts.
~~~
The first time Carson really gets attached to one of his patients, he’s doing rounds in the cancer ward. Diseases like cancer were the closest he could come to the kind of genetic research he wanted to do, so he focused on them his last years in school. He thinks, some days, that he should’ve focused on bone-setting or something, because the cancer ward can be awfully depressing. But that just makes it more important that he be there, with a kind word and a smile and a willingness to listen, because for some of these people he can’t do anything but and he’s all they have.
His third week of rounds there, he meets Morag. Morag’s nineteen with a year of University under her belt, studying archaeology and determined to go off and see the world and all its fascinating ruins. When Carson pokes his head into her room, she’s hooked up to tubes and wires and her head is completely shaved, sections of it covered by white gauze bandages. Her eyes are tired, but lively, and they twinkle up at him while she jokes about his being the cutest doctor she’s had yet. She knows, of course, that she’ll never be able to travel the way she wanted to. She’ll have to stay close to home, close to a hospital, because the cancer in her brain is particularly tenacious. They’d removed the tumours, but they can’t stop it spreading, and they don’t know how long she’ll have left. Maybe years, if it goes into remission. Maybe days, if it bounces back stronger than before.
Carson learns a lot from Morag, about taking what life throws at you and making something out of it. She gets out of the hospital and proceeds to take a couple of years off from University to travel around Scotland, since she can’t go anywhere more exotic. She writes marvellous books about the beauty of the isles and the people she meets, most of them in the form of letters home. Some of those letters are even addressed to Carson, still working away at the hospital even though his residency is long since finished. He just can’t leave, not while there are people to be tended to. Not while da’s getting worse, and mum’s getting on in years, and Robert’s wife is expecting their first wee one.
The books are published just three weeks before Morag is re-admitted to the hospital, and this time when she smiles at Carson and teases him, he smiles back and gives her a kiss on the cheek, the same as he would any of his sisters. They chat about inconsequential things, like how their families are doing, in between talking about her treatment and what she can expect afterwards. Her parents are there frequently, and they thank him with tearful eyes for taking such good, kind care of their daughter. It’s humbling for Carson to see what his treatment actually means to the family of his patient. It isn’t something he sees as often as he probably needs to. It helps him believe that he’s doing good, and some days he needs that belief more than others.
Morag’s funeral a month later is simple, and touching, and Carson lays a dozen bouquets of blooming heather on the grave, and he’s been grateful ever since that he knew her because he doesn’t think he’d have survived Atlantis without what she taught him about seizing life and living it no matter what. She was a light and an inspiration, despite being younger than his baby sister, and he’s never forgotten her, nor neglected to say a prayer for her spirit every year on the day she died. He has so many he prays for, now, but she’s always been special in some way.
~~~
Carson’s twenty-seven when they bury Morag, and after that he gets his affairs in order at the hospital in preparation for his return to the halls of academia. Da’s still not doing so well, but Peter’s come home to help mum, and Robert’s not far away working with computers and loving his new son to pieces, and the girls are still close, so he figures there’s no better time. He leaves before he can change his mind. The coursework is hard, harder than any he’s ever had before, and the research is mind-boggling and sometimes frustrating in the extreme.
Carson wants to cure black lung, and cancer, and every other disease that they can’t cure so that he never has to watch a bright young spark of life wink out in pain again, but he just can’t find the links. He can’t figure out how, and his advisors tell him more than once that he needs to get out of the lab, get some perspective on his life. They worry about him, such a nice young man bottled up in the labs all hours of the day and night, working hard on problems that’ve stumped the medical profession for centuries. But he’s determined not to give up, and just like when patients needed him at the hospital, he shorts himself on sleep and food and all other necessary aspects of life until he’s existing on strong coffee and granola bars more often than not.
It can’t go on forever, and eventually Carson’s body refuses to obey him any more. His advisor, who has been watching him closely and waiting for this, picks him up off the lab floor and takes him to the attached hospital, getting him into a room and having one of the on-call doctors examine him. He’s malnourished and sleep deprived, but they knew that already, and it’s easily treatable. They thank any god who’s listening that Carson was never one of the students prone to abusing stimulants or any other drugs during his studies, because this could have been so much worse, and had been more than once in different years with different students.
Carson wakes up in the hospital with his worried parents standing over him, da looking older and more worn than ever, and Carson and his mum are both in tears while they apologize to each other, she for not taking better care of him and he for not taking care of himself and worrying her. Everyone eventually calms down, and they have a long talk with Carson’s advisor that results in him changing his program so he can work part-time treating patients and part-time on his research. Carson doesn’t do well shut away from the people he’s working to help, and now they all know that. It’s something to keep in mind for the future, that he needs someone to worry over and care for, or he loses himself in the research and the problems before him, and he’ll work himself to madness or death before he takes care of himself. With patients to care for, he’s forced to stop, because however little care he takes of himself, he’ll always care for others to the best of his ability.
~~~
They’ve only just started to bounce back from that episode when da takes a turn for the worse, and this time they’re fairly sure it’s permanent. The entire family is called home, all the aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and everyone who can claim some relation to the Becketts descending on the place like a whirlwind. It’s both a joyful and sorrowful occasion, joyful because there aren’t that many events that call the whole family together, sorrowful because of the event that’s made it necessary. But at least Carson’s da gets to die surrounded by the love of family and friends, with all five of his children’s smiling faces looking down on him, and really that isn’t a bad way to go, in anyone’s book.
The wake they hold for him is long and loud and celebrates the kind of man he was, with fiddling and dancing and food and drink, and if there are a number of teary faces, well, that’s only to be expected. Carson’s glad they’re celebrating his life this way before the funeral, because he knows that occasion will be as sombre and serious as this one is bright. But he’s determined to step up and be strong for his mum; he’s the man of the house now, because Peter’s just gotten married six months ago. Carson’s sure they rushed the wedding through for da’s sake, and he’s more glad than he can say that his da saw four out of his five children married and settled before he went, and that he went knowing Mary would be looked after by the only one left at home. Carson swears it on his da’s grave, as he tosses a handful of earth down to cover the simple coffin; as long as he lives, he’ll take good care of his mum, as much as he knows how. And Carson knows an awful lot about caring.
~~~
The next few years settle into a routine for Carson. It’s one he’s happy with; he lives at home to take care of mum, and commutes to the local hospital three or four days a week for his shifts. He’s long since completed his Ph.D., and when he’s not doing rounds at the hospital, he’s buried in its lab doing research. The things he’s uncovering aren’t going to win any Nobel prizes, but they’re going to save lives, and that’s all he cares about. His family continues to grow, especially now that Aislinn and Peter have gotten married and started adding to it, and Carson’s nearly buried under piles of nieces and nephews whenever they all descend. The children are a joy for him, and a reminder of what he spends every day fighting for. He treats their scrapes and dries their tears, and if any of them were asked for an opinion, the only relative they would claim to like better than Uncle Carson is their Grandma.
~~~
Carson’s thirty-two when he starts researching an odd gene sequence that shows up in the blood tests for one of his cancer patients. He’s never seen anything like it before, and he latches onto it with an enthusiasm and a dedication that worries his mum slightly, after what happened the last time he buried himself too deeply in research. But the entire family knows this time, and they all conspire to keep him grounded, and so far as anyone can tell Carson thrives on the exciting research and his work with his patients and his time with his family.
Mary Beckett worries about her son quietly, though. He’s getting on, older than any of his siblings were when they got married, and he doesn’t show any signs of settling down. He doesn’t even show any signs of interest; given his gentle nature and some of the things he’s said over the years, she’d almost suspect he was queer, only he hasn’t looked at any of the lads any more than he’s looked at the lasses. She watches him, but he seems content with his work and staying close to home, and she admits that a part of her is glad of that, although a part of her worries about what will happen when she’s gone.
~~~
Carson is thirty-four when he has a major breakthrough in his research on the odd genetic sequence he’s been playing with, and quicker than he can comprehend his research is classified ten times over by what feels like every government in the world, and he’s signing secrecy papers and being interviewed for a position at a top-secret research base in Antarctica of all places. Carson doesn’t want to go and leave mum alone, but the entire family gangs up on him, thrilled that he’s being given such a huge and important job. They don’t really know what he’ll be doing, and he can’t tell them because of the paperwork, but he thinks it’s important. They can tell he does, and they keep pushing him until he agrees to go. Aislinn and her husband and their little girl are going to come stay with mum and help her out. Her husband’s just been made the new minister at their church, so they’re moving back to town anyway, and everything works out splendidly.
It’s a cold, rainy February morning when Carson Beckett extracts himself from the pile-up of proud and teary relatives who’ve come to see him off, and gets into his car for the drive into Glasgow. His mum’s coming with him, to see him off at the airport and bring the car back so he won’t be charged for parking it for however long he’ll be gone. They’ve agreed that if it doesn’t look like he’ll be home soon, the car’s to be sold for cheap to the twins as soon as they’re old enough to drive.
The airport is noisy and unfamiliar. It’s the first time Carson’s ever been in one. It’s the first time he’ll be going farther from home than Glasgow, and all of a sudden, that hits him like a brick to the head. He clings to his mum, and he doesn’t care who sees him do it. His entire life has been lived within a few hours’ drive of a tiny little town in Scotland, and suddenly the world is very large and very unfriendly and he’s not quite sure when his life took this turn, but if it was a carnival ride he’d make them stop it so he could get off. He doesn’t belong in Antarctica; he belongs in a little hospital in Scotland and in his mum’s house and in the church his family’s been going to ever since they helped build it. He’s the first Beckett ever to get on a plane and leave Scotland.
His flight is called, and for a minute he almost decides not to get on. Then his mum leans up and kisses him and tells him how proud she is, how proud they all are. How proud his da would have been, and that’s what does it. Carson squares his shoulders, picks up his carryall, and gets on the plane. He wishes he could say he did it with his head held high and without looking back, but the truth is that he nearly walks into a number of walls craning his neck around for the last glimpse of his mum and the country he’ll always call home.
~~~
Antarctica is cold, and foreign, and a little bit scary. So far Carson’s the only real medical person on staff, brought in because of his genetic research, and he feels a little bit on the outside of all of the anthropologists and physicists. He doesn’t even rightly understand what they’re researching most of the time; he’s boggled enough by the thought of alien technology. He’s boggled further when his research, helped along by the new machines he has access to, lets them know that he has whatever gene activates all of the crazy things buried deep in the ice. All of a sudden his job description changes from geneticist to human torchlighter, and Carson wants more than ever to go home and never touch anything like research ever again.
He gets used to the place slowly, though. It helps that, although they’re all rather eccentric, the people he’s working with are good people. He forms a good working relationship with his boss, Dr. Weir; they don’t really understand each other most of the time, since she knows nothing about medicine and he knows less about the world outside his little chunk of Scotland, but they get on well. He’s closer to the other European on the team, an odd little Czech with a fondness for pigeons Carson finds surprisingly endearing. They have late chess games and laugh about the things their American colleagues like to pull.
And then there’s the head of the science team, Dr. Rodney McKay. Carson, who has access to everyone’s files because he’s the closest thing they have to a doctor on base, doesn’t like to abuse this privilege. But when Rodney starts spending more and more of his time wandering through Carson’s day in a seemingly random fashion, complaining of every paper cut and moment of idiocy performed by members of his team, Carson pulls his file. What he finds is a surprise, but Carson keeps it to himself and just smiles and chats quietly to Rodney when he shows up. Sometimes he thinks the other man is going to break down and tell Carson how much the Scot reminds him of his dead fiancée, but he never does, so Carson never brings it up either.
Despite the strangeness, and the loneliness - it would be impossible not to be lonely, no matter how nice his colleagues are, when he’s so far from home and family - Carson grows to enjoy his time in the Antarctica Outpost. He’s doing good work, and his colleagues are eccentric and inventive enough that there’s no danger of any of them getting lost in their research, the way Carson has once before. There are too many new discoveries being made, too many moments when someone goes bursting through the halls shouting in a mix of languages from all over the planet, thrilled beyond description at discovering what later turns out to be a can opener.
Carson writes long letters home, and he gets long letters back full of quiet Scottish news, and photos of his family and the town, and articles clipped and sent by old friends at the hospital that he shares with his new friends who tear into them in a variety of cheerful ways, and really, he thinks that this is the most fun he’s ever had. If only the base was in Glasgow, he would be the happiest man on the planet.
~~~
That all changes when Carson is shoved into the control chair again, and this time Peter Grodin hits exactly the wrong circuit at exactly the wrong time, and they almost shoot down General O’Neill’s helicopter. Then there’s another American military officer sitting in the chair, and things are lighting up like never before, and Atlantis isn’t a distant dream. It’s a reality, one that’s creeping closer by the day. Carson point blank does. Not. Want. To. Go. But he’s the only one who understands the Ancient medical equipment, the only one who understands his own research on their genetic structure, and he’s been the only doctor for this isolated community for a couple of years now, barring the odd holiday break at home. He can’t not go. He's never believed that a doctor shouldn't treat those he loves; he believes that a doctor should treat them most of all, because even if he can't save them, he'll know he did everything he possibly could, and that he cared for them until the end.
So he packs up just like everyone else, and heads back home to Scotland to sort through his life. His family doesn’t really understand, when he tells them he’s going someplace dangerous, because they need doctors. They think he means the middle east, and how can he explain to them that he means an alien planet in another galaxy? He manages to explain, somehow, that he probably won’t be able to contact them when he gets where he’s going, and he doesn’t know how long he’ll be gone. They’re tense, and worried, but they ask him if it’s good work he’s doing, if he’s helping people. The glow in his eyes when he tells them that it’s the best work he’s ever done, and that it could save more lives than he’s ever imagined being able to save, convinces them that he’s right to go.
It’s still a wrench, trying to decide what to box up and what to take. He doesn’t have that much space, and there are a lot of things that are important to him. The photos are going, that’s no question; he’s spent a lot of time scanning hundreds of them into his computer and then storing them on USB drives. He puts some music that didn’t make it into the media pool on another; mostly folk songs, local bar groups and the like. He takes his da’s favourite fishing lure, and his nieces and nephews press little candies and trinkets into the cracks of his bag. Finally, mum brings out a colourful quilt, sewn out of scraps of cloth that marked important occasions in all their lives, and Carson shifts his pack around until he can make that fit, and he just hugs his mum and cries. He tosses in a tin of gingerbread, some tea, and as many bottles of aspirin and boxes of plasters as will fit, because if he knows anything about military expeditions after the last several years, it’s that they always overlook the tiny things.
~~~
Carson is thirty-six years old when he looks into the event horizon of a wormhole for the first time. It’s big and blue and beautiful, and Carson wants nothing more than to step through it and have it take him back to his mum’s kitchen in Scotland. The family had thrown him the biggest party they’d ever thrown anyone the day before he left, but the day of his departure it’d been just him and mum, and she’d done his favourite pot-roast for dinner, and he’d had the hardest time not blubbering like a child.
But the wormhole and the Pegasus Galaxy are waiting for him, and he’s the doctor in charge, and so he hitches up his pack and steps through with the rest of the expedition’s leaders, into the unknown. He can tell right off that it’s going to be a more exciting existence than he wants, a different kind of exciting than the research base at Antarctica; the chaos as they struggle to find someplace to go as the shields holding the ocean out fail is enough to give him heart failure. But they get through it, and life settles a bit. He has a new group of people to care for in the Athosians, and he’s busy with his gene research and the scrapes the soldiers get into off-world and the things the scientists manage to injure themselves with in the labs.
Soon he’s even busier, as his gene research finally stabilises. It’s not legal on earth, but he’s certain of his skills and they’re not exactly on earth, so he starts inoculating the Atlantis personnel with the ATA gene. It’s a bigger success than he hopes for, even though more than half of those he tries it on fail to respond, and his spirits rise. If this is what his life in Atlantis is going to be like, he thinks he can get used to it. Even if he spends every night wrapped tightly in his mum’s quilt. It’s good work he’s doing, and the advanced technology means he can start digging further into his disease research, and patching up the gate teams drags him out of his research often enough to keep him engaged in the world around him. It’s not exactly what he always dreamed of doing, but in some ways it’s more than he could ever have hoped for.
~~~
Soon, though, Carson gets his first indication that life in Pegasus isn’t going to be at all like what it first appears. He’s taken off-world to help medical researchers on an alien planet, and despite his objections, he loves the work. The lass he’s working with reminds him a lot of himself as a graduate student, and he feels a bit like he’s back home with his sisters, they get on so well. But then it goes to hell, and his research is being tested before it’s ready, and half a planet’s dying and it’s all his fault. He swore oaths that he would prolong life, and he’s destroyed so many people he can scarcely wrap his head around the numbers. His friends assure him that it isn’t his fault, that he warned them and warned them and they didn’t listen.
Carson quotes Winston Churchill at them, and for the first time disagrees with the famous Prime Minister. Privately, he’s also thinking about Alfred Nobel, and wondering why things that are invented for good, to help and to heal, are so often turned to evil. The incident kills a lot of the joy Carson originally took in his appointment to the Atlantis expedition, and when he returns to work, it’s with a bit of a harder edge than he’s had in years. He spends a bit more time in his lab, and a bit less in the infirmary, but nobody really notices. For Rodney, and John, and Elizabeth, and even Radek - his closest friends here, he thinks possibly the closest friends he's ever had - Atlantis is a dream come true; they're flourishing here, with the danger and the challenge to their abilities and the amazing discoveries they're making. Since Carson's right in the middle of the same danger, and making the same amazing discoveries in his own field, it's easy for the fact that he decidedly isn't flourishing to slip through the cracks.
Life goes on, in Atlantis. There’s always some crisis brewing - nuclear weapons, and storms, and suddenly Carson’s piloting Puddlejumpers and carrying weapons, and he thinks that his da would be more disappointed in him than Carson even knows how to express, even though da would’ve been proud of him at the same time, for defending those who were attacked without provocation. Carson can feel little bits of himself dying, as he learns to use the weapons against other people, and he’s not sure he’ll ever be the same again, even though he’s already determined that he’ll die before he actually goes through with shooting anyone.
Life goes on, in the strange and panicked way it seems to enjoy in Atlantis. Carson starts becoming as much of an engineer as he is a geneticist, in some ways, even more so when he loses people not to the actions of hostile aliens, but to tiny little robots that he can’t even really understand, much less try to heal. He can’t do anything but watch as Rodney and Radek prepare to die, and he’s equally terrified when John comes up with a crazy plan to detonate a nuclear warhead above the city. Carson spent too much time in the cancer wards; he knows perfectly well what kind of damage nuclear radiation can do to the human body. But it all works out, and if Carson’s a bit more reserved after, a bit less likely to make friends with those he has to patch up when they come to him in pieces, well, there are Wraith to fight and discoveries to make, and no one really notices.
Carson’s more grateful than he can ever express the first time Rodney gives them a chance at communicating with home. He gets set to send his mum a message, only to start blubbering halfway through. He’s rather grateful to young Aiden for interrupting him with inane criticism - as if Carson’s own mum didn’t know he was from bloody earth! It was hardly a secret! - because it means that he can redo the message without the tears. Not that he’s ashamed of the emotion, because he’s bloody scared out of his mind over what they’re facing. But it would worry his mum, and he never wants to do that. He sends his love to all the family, and he hopes they’ll forgive him for such a short message after such a long time.
He doesn’t have much chance to worry about it, though, because soon there is an influx of American military personnel into the city, and soon after that they’re at full-on war with the Wraith. Carson knows there are outrageous plans being hatched and barmy schemes being carried out in an attempt to keep them all safe and drive the Wraith back, but Carson doesn’t have time to worry about it. The wounded and the dying are piling up faster than he and his team can get to them, and Carson is getting his first shot at the life of a battlefield medic. He loathes it, and it kills him to watch so many people he’s patched up over the year they’ve been in Atlantis as they die before his eyes. He can’t fight or heal what the Wraith do to people, and for the first time in his entire life, he looks at his hands - the hands of a healer - and thinks that they’re worthless.
He feels the breathe of relief that flows through Atlantis when the Wraith are driven back, but he can’t share in it. The battle may be over for them, but not for him; he and his team are still fighting, and their opponent is the hardest and most merciless of all. They’re fighting a front-line team of death, and pain, and despair, and they’re fighting with everything they have. Gradually, as they start to drop from exhaustion and even Carson starts to think about giving up, they look up and realize that everyone who can be tended to has been, and that all that are left are bumps and bruises and cuts, and clearing away the dead. Carson doesn’t have time for more than a single deep breath, though, before Aiden’s through the door with the Wraith enzyme and there are more emergencies cropping up, and he’s off to deal with them. Carson’s never abused the drugs he has access to in his life, not even when he was a grad student and worked himself into the hospital, but today is the first time he thinks about it.
~~~
The first time Carson looks down at the fields of Scotland with eyes that have seen another planet, he knows that however much he has come to feel his life is tied to Atlantis and the people who call it home, for him, his heart will always rest in this sleepy little country. He’s got a long few weeks ahead of him, choosing replacement personnel and filing more reports than he wants to think about, but for this one moment he is nothing more than Carson Beckett, returned to the town the Becketts have always lived in, and the world rights itself for the first time in years.
Mary Beckett is older, and his siblings and nieces and nephews have all changed, but looking at him, they all think that he’s altered the most during his absence. There’s a brittle feel to him when they hug him, as if he’s holding himself together through sheer willpower, and they treat him more gently than they’ve ever treated him before. It helps, and being home helps more, and when he returns to the SGC after a week spent with his family, he’s almost like the old Carson again. Almost.
Carson doesn’t get much of a rest once they return to Atlantis, so he’s more grateful than ever for the brief stopover at home. Suddenly he’s part of off-world activities, even though he doesn’t want to be. He’s performing field surgery under conditions he’d never even have imagined before coming here, and finding himself in situations he never dreamed of. Like trying to keep Rodney alive while his body hosts the consciousness of an attractive, lively lass from the Marines. Carson’s more shocked than anyone when she kisses him through Rodney, but it drives back a little of the brittleness, and he thinks it might be rather nice to have someone to share downtime with. She’ll be transferred home when her tour of duty in Atlantis is over, of course, but while she’s there, nothing stops him from getting to know her a bit better.
Nothing except his research, that is, and Carson finds himself slipping more and more into his old habits, neglecting himself in favour of searching out the mysteries of biology. He thinks he’s on to something with a Wraith retrovirus, really believes that he might have something. Until he meets a Wraith girl, who desperately wants to be anything but what she is, and once again it is his research that causes death. Never mind that she was an immature Wraith Queen, and that there was no hope of turning her human again. Never mind that, once again, he had warned against the research being used. It’s his fault, because it’s his work. Just like the Hoffans, and a little bit more of Carson turns hard and cold and threatens to shatter. He fires a gun at a living being for the first time in his life, and later he shakes apart alone, wrapped in his mum’s quilt.
For the first time, even the memory of home isn’t enough to warm him up.
He doesn’t really have time to adjust to what’s happening, though, because his mistakes keep piling up and now John is paying for them, slowly turning into a Wraith. Carson swears, as he does everything he can think of to save the American, that he’ll destroy his notes and never touch anything like them again. Somehow, though, when it’s all over, he ends up buried back in the microscopes, and only a tiny little voice, easily ignored, warns him about the path he’s treading down. None of his staff know to stop him, and none of his friends, who have thrived beyond their wildest dreams here, are unchanged enough to notice. Atlantis has molded them all, but Carson thinks that he's the only one it's altered for the worse.
He’s dragged out of the spiralling pit of his research for real emergencies, like watching Rodney try to detox from the Wraith enzyme. If that wasn’t enough to convince Carson that he made the right decision about using the drugs in the infirmary for personal reasons, nothing ever will be, he thinks. But it’s one more situation where he can’t be a doctor, can’t do anything at all to help a friend in pain, and it eats up a little more of the dwindling store of compassion he’s still got. Even the greatest bonfires go out eventually, he thinks, as he cups metaphorical hands around the small blaze that’s all that remains of his drive to heal and his belief in the wonder and goodness of the universe.
It would be easy enough, he sometimes thinks, to believe that nothing good or wonderful ever happens in Atlantis. But Teyla reminds him soon after of something the inhabitants of the Pegasus galaxy have always known; that good and wonder can come even in the midst of darkness and strife. He thinks that if he can just save Teyla’s old friend, just keep one person alive, maybe it’ll help heal something within him. Fortunately, Teyla convinces him differently, and the simple Athosian funeral reminds him so much of the little community church back home, and the Athosian’s sense of friendship and common purpose bolsters him a bit. Not a lot, but he thinks maybe he can see enough good still in the world to make it through whatever life throws at him next.
Then again, perhaps not. Carson knows that he should never be allowed to bury himself in research and forget the human cost, both to himself and to others. He knows, but he’s never been able to stop himself, and no one here will stop him. They are soldiers, even the scientists are soldiers now, and to them the ends justify the means. He is a healer, and they will never breach that fundamental wall. But he’s determined to make up for Ellia, and he really thinks he’s got the formula for the retrovirus worked out, so he goes ahead with testing it even though the little voice that sounds suspiciously like his mum is screaming at him not to. One trial, he thinks. One trial, and if it fails, then he'll forget the whole idea. But the trial is on a living being, and for the first time in his life, Carson fails to put the well-being of his patient - mental or physical - before his research.
Even given that, Michael is, in some senses, his greatest success. As a geneticist, the ability to completely transform another being’s genetic code is the height of accomplishment. But as a doctor, what he’s done to the young man is sick and wrong on more levels than he has words for, and it’s like having a bucket of ice water thrown in his face. Looking at Michael, he is forced to look at what he has become, what he has allowed life in Atlantis to make him into, and he is disgusted. For the first time in his life, Carson Beckett honestly and truly loathes himself to the core of his being. He vows again to destroy the research, but somehow in all of the emergencies that keep piling up, he never does.
~~~
The first time he truly thinks he’s lost all faith in humanity, Elizabeth Weir has offered Carson's research to a faction of the Wraith, to aid in a tentative alliance. Carson knows that the old Elizabeth would never have done it - or so he tells himself, because acknowledging that the old Elizabeth was just as ruthless a negotiator as this one, would have given just as much to gain peace, would mean taking a good hard look at the fact that he’s one of the few who have truly been changed for the worse by Atlantis. The others have grown perhaps a bit darker, a bit more likely to shoot first and question the wounded, but they have flourished in so many other ways this is insignificant.
Carson has no choice, then, but to face what his research has been used for. Maybe if he stays with the converted Wraith, maybe if something good can come of what he’s done, maybe then it’ll give him back a little of what he was, a little bit of the sense that he’s healing rather than destroying. It doesn’t, but in some ways he supposes being tortured by the things he’s created has the same effect. Sometimes, now, he feels a bit like Dr. Frankenstein, who created life with the best intentions only to have it turn out all wrong.
It is almost a relief when they meet Lucius Levin, and Carson doesn’t have to think about anything except making his new friend happy. He resents John for taking that away from him, for forcing him back into a state of mind where he has to deal with what he’s turned himself into. But for the first time in a long time, he’s using his abilities for good. He’s actually able to heal his friends, even if the illness is both improbable and frankly a bit mad.
But soon that little glow of the old Carson is buried, and Carson’s back to shooting drones at living creatures. Yes, it’s a Wraith, and yes, it’s trying to kill Ronon. But he took an oath to do no harm, and he has just deliberately struck a killing blow. Ronon is grateful, and Carson is as well, but he thinks he can feel his already heavily blackened soul tarnishing a little bit more.
For Carson, more so than for anyone else among the command staff, it is almost a relief when the Ancients come back and toss them out of Atlantis. He’s going to miss the friends he’s made, but he’ll still be able to see them all continually, and maybe now he can get started on putting himself back together. He barely even knows where to start, but as he packs up his life on Atlantis, he starts to feel a little bit of optimism trickling back in. He isn’t ready to go home to Scotland yet; he doesn’t think he can face his family, doesn’t think he can stand on the soil his ancestors have walked on until he feels a little bit more like himself. But no one will be shooting at him, no one will be expecting him to shoot back, and no one’s life will depend on his ability to put aside every last scrap of ethics he possesses. The only thing about this place he'll miss is the people, who've come to be as close to him as family, and he vows they'll stay in touch no matter what he has to do.
He gets some wee baby turtles. Start small, he thinks. See if you can raise them right, and keep them alive. Feel a little bit of boyish wonder as they grow up and explore the world of their terrarium. Let them soothe a bit of the ache that’s probably a permanent part of him now. Of course, like everything else recently, despite his good intentions it goes straight to hell, and somehow he’s on a Puddlejumper between galaxies before he remembers about them, and by then of course it’s too late. He knows that, in comparison to what they’re facing, the lives of a few baby turtles are insignificant. The others, especially Rodney, are appropriately sarcastic. But to Carson, it isn’t so much about the turtles as it is about everything they represent.
Carson kind of drifts through the next little while; he’s lost so much of who he was and what he defined himself by, it’s hard some days to figure out what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. The interesting and completely alien ways in which the expedition members - and especially Carson’s closest friends - can find themselves in mortal danger continue to multiply, and the methods Carson can use to diminish those dangers continue to decline. He can’t even save Rodney from accidental Ascension; the astrophysicist saves himself, in the end, while Carson stands back and watches.
When Kate Heightmeyer orders a day off for all personnel, Carson is determined to go fishing on the mainland. He’s got it all set up with Rodney; he’s even going to tell the Canadian some of the old stories that his da and his grandda used to tell him, when they went fishing in the old spots the Becketts had always fished in. But Rodney has a date, and John is getting his arse handed to him by Ronon, and then a panel near the mess hall suffers a technical glitch and Carson gives up his ruined day off to deal with the injured. He’s tired, tired of being the doctor, tired of putting a face on that doesn’t even feel like his own anymore. So very tired, and when the last cut is bandaged and he retreats to his empty quarters to read through a backlog of mail and discovers the letter from Aislinn, it takes him two or three times through before the words sink in.
Once they have, he’s off to Elizabeth without a moment to spare. She understands completely, and gives him a leave of absence to go home and tend to his mum. Aislinn didn’t say what was wrong, only that he should come as soon as he could get away. She’d sent the letter a week and a half ago, but Carson should be able to leave that evening, and he thinks he’ll be in time, even if something has gone terribly wrong. He packs quickly, a little bit saddened to see that in three years, he hasn’t really accumulated much more than what he came with. When his quarters are completely bare again, he seizes the pack and hauls it down to the infirmary. He throws in the few personal items he keeps in his office and sits staring at his laptop, as the cursor blinks away in the field for him to enter his password.
Finally he does, and just as he presses the button that will delete all of his confidential research files, Rodney comes in. The explanations are short, and the conversation is awkward, but Carson’s learned to read Rodney’s eyes for what he’s really thinking. He knows the other man is going to miss him terribly, and is going to count on his coming back soon. Carson doesn’t know how to tell Rodney that he’s never coming back; that as soon as he gets out of the SGC in Colorado, he’s going home for good.
~~~
The last time Carson Beckett ever steps through a wormhole, the entire expedition team is gathered to send him off. In front are all those he’s come to think of as family; the command team, part of his medical staff, and Teyla and Ronon. His eyes are teary as they wish him well, and he clings a little tighter to them than perhaps he needs to, but he loves these people despite everything, and he’s going to miss them terribly. But he can’t come back; even if he hadn’t just destroyed all his work, he can’t face what this place made him into. He’s not even sure he can go on being a doctor.
His return home is quieter than his leaving was. Carson’s thirty-nine now, pushing forty, and he feels twice that in the mornings when his bones ache with reminders of everything he’s survived. The little town is quiet, after Atlantis, and his family seem like alien lifeforms after the people he’s known in the past few years. They can see the toll those years have taken on him, even though they don’t ask why, and when he says he’s not going back, they smile quietly and help him settle back into the house. Mum’s not quite so bad as they originally thought, and between caring for her as she recovers and putting what bits of himself are left back together, Carson has his hands full. It’ll be a long time, maybe years, before he’ll be able to go back to working as a doctor. He still has the drive to heal, but he’s seen too much and done to much to believe in himself, that he'll be any good influence on anyone anymore. But as he laughs at the antics of his nephews and holds his nieces through their first heartbreaks and lifts down the big roasting pan for his mum, he thinks that even if it takes a bit of time, maybe he really is still Carson Beckett after all.
He has time now, anyway, to find out. And maybe, if his friends ever make it back to earth, it will be the old Carson who’s there to greet them and patch up whatever wounds they come home with - home for Carson, because he knows that to them, home lies far out in another galaxy.
Posted To:sgaauwtptbdfu, my LJ
Chapter Title: Dr. Carson Beckett, Chief Medical Officer
Author: shaych
Pairings: none
Rating: G
Warnings: possible spoilers, AU for the events of episode 3x17 “Sunday"
Summary: The “First Times” series chronicles the pre-Atlantis lives of the expedition members, how they wound up in the Pegasus Galaxy, and some of the things they learned there. In this part, Dr. Carson Beckett.
Disclaimer: Don’t own, don’t sue, don’t ask, don’t tell.
Author’s Notes: See story index page for notes.
Dr. Carson Beckett, Chief Medical Officer, Atlantis Expedition, Pegasus Galaxy
When Carson Beckett was six years old, in 1975, the glam rock era had just ended in Britain. Carson knows this because his mum stops making huffing noises at all the teenagers she sees. They (Carson’s mum and da, and his older sister Moira and his older brother Peter and his younger brother Robert and soon, any week now, his youngest sibling, whatever it’ll turn out to be) live in a little house in a little mining town somewhere along the Scottish coast, near the Isle of Skye. Carson’s da is a miner and his mum taught at the primary school until she had children, and they’re not rich but they get by. Carson’s da is a huge bearded bear of a man, and he laughs loudly and frequently as he tosses Carson and his siblings up in the air and dances their mum around the kitchen, and he plays a cheerful fiddle and Carson thinks he’s brilliant. Carson’s mum is a bit quieter, but she’s lovely and cheerful and an amazing cook, and she’s the sweetest, purest, most wonderful woman in the entire world as far as her husband and children are concerned.
Carson’s mum and da want better for their children than a miner’s life, and they’re all bright children. Carson especially so, and he’s kind and gentle and courteous, if a bit shyer than his boisterous brothers, and their parents have no doubt that all of them will succeed at whatever they set their minds to. When Carson finds a dying baby bird in the yard, knocked from its nest by one of his brother’s games, he brings it home and nurses it with so much care that his mum thinks it could heal the whole world. The bird gets better, and it’s the first time Carson grins at her with his front teeth missing and his blue eyes sparkling and tells her he’s going to be a doctor. Watching how gently he handles the little bird, Mary Beckett believes him.
~~~
Carson’s a polite, cheerful, adorable little boy, and school is easy for him. Some of the tougher boys in his class like to pick on him a little, but they stop when Peter gives them a sound thrashing. His teachers love him because he never causes any trouble, and the little girls love him because he’s so sweet and gentle and sometimes brings them playground flowers if they’ve had a rough day, and most of the boys like him because he can always be counted on to join up if they need an extra man for whatever the game of the day is. He’s particularly good as keeper during recess football, actually, and he joins the local boys’ team. They really aren’t all that good, and they never play anybody who lives more than two or three towns away, but they have a lot of fun and they make some good friends. Mum and da and Moira and Peter and Robert and little baby Aislinn, who Carson thinks is the most adorable little girl ever (he dotes on her ridiculously, to the amusement of their parents) all come and watch, and Carson couldn’t be happier with his world.
~~~
When Carson is eight years old, his da and his grandda decide he’s old enough to join them and Peter and all of his uncles and cousins on their annual week-long fishing expedition. Carson’s been looking forward to this moment for his entire life; every year in the middle of August the men of the extended family pack up and go somewhere to camp out and fish and tell stories, teaching the boys how to be men and to do for themselves and their eventual families, while the women descend on whichever house is most convenient (or most necessary, like when mum was heavily pregnant and couldn’t travel) and share recipes and gossip and knitting. Carson knows he’s lucky to be part of such a big, loving family with such strong traditions - grandda tells them all how he remembers his grandda telling stories about this same trip from when he was a boy, so Carson knows the family’s been doing this for at least seven generations now, and probably more. When he looks at some of his classmates, who never see their extended family, or whose families are splitting up and don’t care for each other, he goes home and hugs his parents and says a little prayer of thanks for all his blessings.
~~~
Carson’s family is fairly active in the local Presbyterian church. Most of them are in the choir, and everyone’s been married on the church steps. This part of Scotland is imprinted on the bones and in the souls of the Becketts, and Carson wouldn’t have it any other way. He’s twelve years old when he decides he’s old enough to join as a member of the church, so he has a long talk with the minister about God and life and then that Sunday there’s a huge party after the service, with his entire family showing up and bringing food and fiddles and dancing and laughter. There’s a lot of laughter in Carson’s life when he’s young.
After, he has a long talk with his da, about what it means for him to be a man of the church. Carson might only be twelve, and he might have some queer notions sometimes, but he’s a solid lad. He understands more clearly now that he will at many points later in his life, because at twelve it’s very easy to look around at the bright sunshine and the emerald fields and the endless blue sky, and believe with all his heart in a god of creation. His da doesn’t have too many worries about Carson, so long as he keeps that faith in the wonders of the world. Carson wants more than ever now to do his bit to help all the little miracles that surround him grow and thrive, to heal them when they’re sick and comfort them when they’re in pain.
~~~
When Carson is fifteen, he starts studying seriously. He knows the Highers are coming up quickly, and he’s determined to score well so he can go on to his Advanced Highers in his final year of secondary school. He’s taking mostly sciences, with literature and history thrown in because he knows they’re useful, and he’s aiming to be a doctor. Of course, every student in the British Isles puts that down on their exams, because they have to put something and the Universities will look at the ones that say ‘doctor’ and ‘lawyer’ first. Few of those students who mark it down will last through the intense six-year University program. Carson knows this, but he also knows that he can make it. He has the brains, and he has the calling, and most importantly of all he has the compassion.
His family supports him, of course; mum and da stay awake late into the night with him quizzing him on different things, reading from his textbooks because some of them go beyond what they know themselves. Moira, who never got beyond her Highers and instead got married to her school sweetheart and set up house not too far away (after the young man in question had been properly instructed by Moira’s brothers, of course) always has time to tell him what sorts of questions they’ll ask, and how they’ll ask them, and she bakes excellent shortbread. Peter is no help at all; he’s studying for his own Advanced Highers, and between the two of them the stress level sometimes rises to intolerable levels, driving Robert and little Aislinn outside to find something else to do with their time.
~~~
Carson passes all of his exams over the next few years with top marks, giving him the option of nearly any University in the UK. He chooses the University of Glasgow, because it’s not very far away (he can drive home weekends, as soon as he buys himself a little clunky old car and fixes it up) and it has a good department for medicine and biomedical research. They’re doing some good work, helping people, and Carson thinks he’ll be happy there. It’s farther from home than he’s ever been on his own, and on the last night before he drives off, mum makes his favourite pot roast and the entire family descends on their house to wish him well and offer him advice. Carson’s not ashamed of blubbering a bit, because he’s going to miss them, and he doesn’t care who knows it. But then, even Carson’s tough old bear of a da is a bit teary, so that’s all right.
The next day, as they’re loading the car, it feels like the entire town comes out to wish him well and give him advice as he heads off. His mum’s smile outshines the sun, and his da’s puffed up farther than any peacock ever managed, both so proud of their son who’s smarter and gentler and kinder than anyone else in the entire world, as far as they’re concerned. And as far as the world of their little town is concerned, it’s probably true; he’s set school records the last couple of years, and if he weren’t such a genuinely kind, selfless boy, he’d probably have made enemies. But just like when he was tiny, everyone somehow can’t help but like him.
~~~
Carson loves University, even though he misses home terribly, and he manages to stay near the top of his class. The work is fascinating and enjoyable, and his professors all comment about what a cheerful, bright young man he is. He’s got loads of friends, as well, because people just can’t help but like Carson. He’s the sort of young man that all the blokes can share a drink and a laugh with, and all the girls can take home to their mothers because he’s so polite that they always approve. Carson thinks that life can’t get much better. He isn’t particularly serious about any of the girls, and he isn’t particularly close with any of the blokes, but that’s what his family is for. None of the students he takes classes with are family, and he’s perfectly fine keeping that distinction.
He goes home most weekends, even though he knows he’s missing out on some of the better parties, and helps his mum around the house. The second year, he helps Moira as well because she’s pregnant with twins and as big as a whale. Carson doesn’t tell her so, though. He tells her she looks wonderful and blooming and all those compliments men throughout the ages have perfected to keep pregnant women from killing them. It works well on his sister, and it helps that it’s also the truth. Pregnancy agrees with her, and after helping to raise four younger siblings motherhood probably will as well. Carson worries over her when he’s at school, but he knows her doctor and he’s a kind old man who knows his medicine backwards and forwards, so Carson’s sure she’s in good hands.
He’s just finished his second year of University when Moira presents the family with little Hamish (named after her husband’s father) and Mary (named after their own dear mum) and the family, as usual, descends to celebrate. Carson’s so very glad that it’s summer recess and he can be there to give his sister a hand, and play with the dear wee bairns, because they’re adorable and he loves them on sight. Carson’s a natural caretaker, and everyone smiles to see him so taken with the wee ones, thinking that someday he’s going to make some lucky woman the happiest wife in the world while his own children idolize their da. Carson doesn’t think it’ll happen anytime soon, but he doesn’t burst their hopes. He’s got quite enough to do finishing medical school.
~~~
The next couple of years pass pretty much the same as the past couple had, with harder and more rewarding coursework and the addition of Carson’s niece and nephew of course. Towards the end of his fourth year, Carson’s da takes ill, and the whole family worries. Da assures them it’s nothing, but Carson makes him go get a check-up anyway, and glad he did. They all knew they were lucky that da had never caught the miner’s disease, black lung. They were so very lucky, but all luck runs out eventually. Carson’s da’s got a few years left in him, longer if he stays out of the mines, and they’re grateful for that once they stop being angry and shocked at the bad luck suddenly come their way.
Carson does all the research he can in his spare moments, which are rare enough now that he’s trying to help out around home more than ever while moving into his final two years of study, but there’s no cure, and he knows it. He turns his attention to genetics research, determined that if he can’t save his da, he might eventually save someone from something, and he decides he’s going to specialize in it when he finishes his residency and has the option of going on to take his Ph.D. on top of the M.D. he’s already earning.
He studies even harder, determined to succeed, and he ends up coming second in his class for their last year of studies. He requests, and is given, a residency position at the hospital back home, and it’s with some relief that Carson moves back into his room in his mum’s house. He’s six years older and six years wiser, but in most ways it’s as if he never left, although the house is a bit emptier now that Moira’s gone and Peter’s set up housekeeping one town over working at a bank and Robert’s off at University studying engineering. It’s only Aislinn left at home now, finishing her last year of secondary, but at least she has no plans to leave immediately. She’s been taken on as an apprentice at the local bakery, and Carson loves the days when she brings home treats for him, especially if he’s been working long hours and has to get up to do so again tomorrow. Sometimes, when she has a long break at lunch, she even brings him crusty rolls hot from the oven, or butter tarts made just the way he likes them, and all the other residents at the hospital turn green with envy.
~~~
Life settles into a routine for Carson. He’s twenty-four now, gaining a solid reputation around the hospital and with a caring-no-nonsense manner that’s developed out of his former gregariousness. He still makes friends easily, and the girls around the hospital and at the church still sigh every time he walks by, but his time’s mostly spent helping mum out now da can’t do quite so much, and helping Moira out with her growing brood - she’s got three and another on the way - and giving sage advice to Robert and Aislinn whenever they look to him for it. He’s happy with his life, couldn’t be happier, and although he still plans on going back to the University and pursuing further study in genetics, he really thinks that after he finishes that he’d like to come back to this little hospital and continue on as a doctor here, doing research in his off hours and when the patient load is light.
However, first he needs to get through his residency, and some days that proves a challenge. Not intellectually; it’s a small hospital, and most of the things coming through are easily diagnosed and he knows what to do for each patient under his care. But emotionally, that’s a different matter. Carson’s always taken his patients too much to heart, always wanted to give them the moon when all he can give them is a kind word and a soothing touch, and school never really prepared him for watching people die before his eyes of things that he can’t cure. Because despite being second in his class, despite everything, Carson’s not God and he can’t fix everything, no matter how much he wants to. Sometimes it’s hard for Carson to remember what it felt like to believe so strongly in the goodness of God, when He keeps taking Carson’s patients despite Carson’s best efforts.
~~~
The first time Carson really gets attached to one of his patients, he’s doing rounds in the cancer ward. Diseases like cancer were the closest he could come to the kind of genetic research he wanted to do, so he focused on them his last years in school. He thinks, some days, that he should’ve focused on bone-setting or something, because the cancer ward can be awfully depressing. But that just makes it more important that he be there, with a kind word and a smile and a willingness to listen, because for some of these people he can’t do anything but and he’s all they have.
His third week of rounds there, he meets Morag. Morag’s nineteen with a year of University under her belt, studying archaeology and determined to go off and see the world and all its fascinating ruins. When Carson pokes his head into her room, she’s hooked up to tubes and wires and her head is completely shaved, sections of it covered by white gauze bandages. Her eyes are tired, but lively, and they twinkle up at him while she jokes about his being the cutest doctor she’s had yet. She knows, of course, that she’ll never be able to travel the way she wanted to. She’ll have to stay close to home, close to a hospital, because the cancer in her brain is particularly tenacious. They’d removed the tumours, but they can’t stop it spreading, and they don’t know how long she’ll have left. Maybe years, if it goes into remission. Maybe days, if it bounces back stronger than before.
Carson learns a lot from Morag, about taking what life throws at you and making something out of it. She gets out of the hospital and proceeds to take a couple of years off from University to travel around Scotland, since she can’t go anywhere more exotic. She writes marvellous books about the beauty of the isles and the people she meets, most of them in the form of letters home. Some of those letters are even addressed to Carson, still working away at the hospital even though his residency is long since finished. He just can’t leave, not while there are people to be tended to. Not while da’s getting worse, and mum’s getting on in years, and Robert’s wife is expecting their first wee one.
The books are published just three weeks before Morag is re-admitted to the hospital, and this time when she smiles at Carson and teases him, he smiles back and gives her a kiss on the cheek, the same as he would any of his sisters. They chat about inconsequential things, like how their families are doing, in between talking about her treatment and what she can expect afterwards. Her parents are there frequently, and they thank him with tearful eyes for taking such good, kind care of their daughter. It’s humbling for Carson to see what his treatment actually means to the family of his patient. It isn’t something he sees as often as he probably needs to. It helps him believe that he’s doing good, and some days he needs that belief more than others.
Morag’s funeral a month later is simple, and touching, and Carson lays a dozen bouquets of blooming heather on the grave, and he’s been grateful ever since that he knew her because he doesn’t think he’d have survived Atlantis without what she taught him about seizing life and living it no matter what. She was a light and an inspiration, despite being younger than his baby sister, and he’s never forgotten her, nor neglected to say a prayer for her spirit every year on the day she died. He has so many he prays for, now, but she’s always been special in some way.
~~~
Carson’s twenty-seven when they bury Morag, and after that he gets his affairs in order at the hospital in preparation for his return to the halls of academia. Da’s still not doing so well, but Peter’s come home to help mum, and Robert’s not far away working with computers and loving his new son to pieces, and the girls are still close, so he figures there’s no better time. He leaves before he can change his mind. The coursework is hard, harder than any he’s ever had before, and the research is mind-boggling and sometimes frustrating in the extreme.
Carson wants to cure black lung, and cancer, and every other disease that they can’t cure so that he never has to watch a bright young spark of life wink out in pain again, but he just can’t find the links. He can’t figure out how, and his advisors tell him more than once that he needs to get out of the lab, get some perspective on his life. They worry about him, such a nice young man bottled up in the labs all hours of the day and night, working hard on problems that’ve stumped the medical profession for centuries. But he’s determined not to give up, and just like when patients needed him at the hospital, he shorts himself on sleep and food and all other necessary aspects of life until he’s existing on strong coffee and granola bars more often than not.
It can’t go on forever, and eventually Carson’s body refuses to obey him any more. His advisor, who has been watching him closely and waiting for this, picks him up off the lab floor and takes him to the attached hospital, getting him into a room and having one of the on-call doctors examine him. He’s malnourished and sleep deprived, but they knew that already, and it’s easily treatable. They thank any god who’s listening that Carson was never one of the students prone to abusing stimulants or any other drugs during his studies, because this could have been so much worse, and had been more than once in different years with different students.
Carson wakes up in the hospital with his worried parents standing over him, da looking older and more worn than ever, and Carson and his mum are both in tears while they apologize to each other, she for not taking better care of him and he for not taking care of himself and worrying her. Everyone eventually calms down, and they have a long talk with Carson’s advisor that results in him changing his program so he can work part-time treating patients and part-time on his research. Carson doesn’t do well shut away from the people he’s working to help, and now they all know that. It’s something to keep in mind for the future, that he needs someone to worry over and care for, or he loses himself in the research and the problems before him, and he’ll work himself to madness or death before he takes care of himself. With patients to care for, he’s forced to stop, because however little care he takes of himself, he’ll always care for others to the best of his ability.
~~~
They’ve only just started to bounce back from that episode when da takes a turn for the worse, and this time they’re fairly sure it’s permanent. The entire family is called home, all the aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and everyone who can claim some relation to the Becketts descending on the place like a whirlwind. It’s both a joyful and sorrowful occasion, joyful because there aren’t that many events that call the whole family together, sorrowful because of the event that’s made it necessary. But at least Carson’s da gets to die surrounded by the love of family and friends, with all five of his children’s smiling faces looking down on him, and really that isn’t a bad way to go, in anyone’s book.
The wake they hold for him is long and loud and celebrates the kind of man he was, with fiddling and dancing and food and drink, and if there are a number of teary faces, well, that’s only to be expected. Carson’s glad they’re celebrating his life this way before the funeral, because he knows that occasion will be as sombre and serious as this one is bright. But he’s determined to step up and be strong for his mum; he’s the man of the house now, because Peter’s just gotten married six months ago. Carson’s sure they rushed the wedding through for da’s sake, and he’s more glad than he can say that his da saw four out of his five children married and settled before he went, and that he went knowing Mary would be looked after by the only one left at home. Carson swears it on his da’s grave, as he tosses a handful of earth down to cover the simple coffin; as long as he lives, he’ll take good care of his mum, as much as he knows how. And Carson knows an awful lot about caring.
~~~
The next few years settle into a routine for Carson. It’s one he’s happy with; he lives at home to take care of mum, and commutes to the local hospital three or four days a week for his shifts. He’s long since completed his Ph.D., and when he’s not doing rounds at the hospital, he’s buried in its lab doing research. The things he’s uncovering aren’t going to win any Nobel prizes, but they’re going to save lives, and that’s all he cares about. His family continues to grow, especially now that Aislinn and Peter have gotten married and started adding to it, and Carson’s nearly buried under piles of nieces and nephews whenever they all descend. The children are a joy for him, and a reminder of what he spends every day fighting for. He treats their scrapes and dries their tears, and if any of them were asked for an opinion, the only relative they would claim to like better than Uncle Carson is their Grandma.
~~~
Carson’s thirty-two when he starts researching an odd gene sequence that shows up in the blood tests for one of his cancer patients. He’s never seen anything like it before, and he latches onto it with an enthusiasm and a dedication that worries his mum slightly, after what happened the last time he buried himself too deeply in research. But the entire family knows this time, and they all conspire to keep him grounded, and so far as anyone can tell Carson thrives on the exciting research and his work with his patients and his time with his family.
Mary Beckett worries about her son quietly, though. He’s getting on, older than any of his siblings were when they got married, and he doesn’t show any signs of settling down. He doesn’t even show any signs of interest; given his gentle nature and some of the things he’s said over the years, she’d almost suspect he was queer, only he hasn’t looked at any of the lads any more than he’s looked at the lasses. She watches him, but he seems content with his work and staying close to home, and she admits that a part of her is glad of that, although a part of her worries about what will happen when she’s gone.
~~~
Carson is thirty-four when he has a major breakthrough in his research on the odd genetic sequence he’s been playing with, and quicker than he can comprehend his research is classified ten times over by what feels like every government in the world, and he’s signing secrecy papers and being interviewed for a position at a top-secret research base in Antarctica of all places. Carson doesn’t want to go and leave mum alone, but the entire family gangs up on him, thrilled that he’s being given such a huge and important job. They don’t really know what he’ll be doing, and he can’t tell them because of the paperwork, but he thinks it’s important. They can tell he does, and they keep pushing him until he agrees to go. Aislinn and her husband and their little girl are going to come stay with mum and help her out. Her husband’s just been made the new minister at their church, so they’re moving back to town anyway, and everything works out splendidly.
It’s a cold, rainy February morning when Carson Beckett extracts himself from the pile-up of proud and teary relatives who’ve come to see him off, and gets into his car for the drive into Glasgow. His mum’s coming with him, to see him off at the airport and bring the car back so he won’t be charged for parking it for however long he’ll be gone. They’ve agreed that if it doesn’t look like he’ll be home soon, the car’s to be sold for cheap to the twins as soon as they’re old enough to drive.
The airport is noisy and unfamiliar. It’s the first time Carson’s ever been in one. It’s the first time he’ll be going farther from home than Glasgow, and all of a sudden, that hits him like a brick to the head. He clings to his mum, and he doesn’t care who sees him do it. His entire life has been lived within a few hours’ drive of a tiny little town in Scotland, and suddenly the world is very large and very unfriendly and he’s not quite sure when his life took this turn, but if it was a carnival ride he’d make them stop it so he could get off. He doesn’t belong in Antarctica; he belongs in a little hospital in Scotland and in his mum’s house and in the church his family’s been going to ever since they helped build it. He’s the first Beckett ever to get on a plane and leave Scotland.
His flight is called, and for a minute he almost decides not to get on. Then his mum leans up and kisses him and tells him how proud she is, how proud they all are. How proud his da would have been, and that’s what does it. Carson squares his shoulders, picks up his carryall, and gets on the plane. He wishes he could say he did it with his head held high and without looking back, but the truth is that he nearly walks into a number of walls craning his neck around for the last glimpse of his mum and the country he’ll always call home.
~~~
Antarctica is cold, and foreign, and a little bit scary. So far Carson’s the only real medical person on staff, brought in because of his genetic research, and he feels a little bit on the outside of all of the anthropologists and physicists. He doesn’t even rightly understand what they’re researching most of the time; he’s boggled enough by the thought of alien technology. He’s boggled further when his research, helped along by the new machines he has access to, lets them know that he has whatever gene activates all of the crazy things buried deep in the ice. All of a sudden his job description changes from geneticist to human torchlighter, and Carson wants more than ever to go home and never touch anything like research ever again.
He gets used to the place slowly, though. It helps that, although they’re all rather eccentric, the people he’s working with are good people. He forms a good working relationship with his boss, Dr. Weir; they don’t really understand each other most of the time, since she knows nothing about medicine and he knows less about the world outside his little chunk of Scotland, but they get on well. He’s closer to the other European on the team, an odd little Czech with a fondness for pigeons Carson finds surprisingly endearing. They have late chess games and laugh about the things their American colleagues like to pull.
And then there’s the head of the science team, Dr. Rodney McKay. Carson, who has access to everyone’s files because he’s the closest thing they have to a doctor on base, doesn’t like to abuse this privilege. But when Rodney starts spending more and more of his time wandering through Carson’s day in a seemingly random fashion, complaining of every paper cut and moment of idiocy performed by members of his team, Carson pulls his file. What he finds is a surprise, but Carson keeps it to himself and just smiles and chats quietly to Rodney when he shows up. Sometimes he thinks the other man is going to break down and tell Carson how much the Scot reminds him of his dead fiancée, but he never does, so Carson never brings it up either.
Despite the strangeness, and the loneliness - it would be impossible not to be lonely, no matter how nice his colleagues are, when he’s so far from home and family - Carson grows to enjoy his time in the Antarctica Outpost. He’s doing good work, and his colleagues are eccentric and inventive enough that there’s no danger of any of them getting lost in their research, the way Carson has once before. There are too many new discoveries being made, too many moments when someone goes bursting through the halls shouting in a mix of languages from all over the planet, thrilled beyond description at discovering what later turns out to be a can opener.
Carson writes long letters home, and he gets long letters back full of quiet Scottish news, and photos of his family and the town, and articles clipped and sent by old friends at the hospital that he shares with his new friends who tear into them in a variety of cheerful ways, and really, he thinks that this is the most fun he’s ever had. If only the base was in Glasgow, he would be the happiest man on the planet.
~~~
That all changes when Carson is shoved into the control chair again, and this time Peter Grodin hits exactly the wrong circuit at exactly the wrong time, and they almost shoot down General O’Neill’s helicopter. Then there’s another American military officer sitting in the chair, and things are lighting up like never before, and Atlantis isn’t a distant dream. It’s a reality, one that’s creeping closer by the day. Carson point blank does. Not. Want. To. Go. But he’s the only one who understands the Ancient medical equipment, the only one who understands his own research on their genetic structure, and he’s been the only doctor for this isolated community for a couple of years now, barring the odd holiday break at home. He can’t not go. He's never believed that a doctor shouldn't treat those he loves; he believes that a doctor should treat them most of all, because even if he can't save them, he'll know he did everything he possibly could, and that he cared for them until the end.
So he packs up just like everyone else, and heads back home to Scotland to sort through his life. His family doesn’t really understand, when he tells them he’s going someplace dangerous, because they need doctors. They think he means the middle east, and how can he explain to them that he means an alien planet in another galaxy? He manages to explain, somehow, that he probably won’t be able to contact them when he gets where he’s going, and he doesn’t know how long he’ll be gone. They’re tense, and worried, but they ask him if it’s good work he’s doing, if he’s helping people. The glow in his eyes when he tells them that it’s the best work he’s ever done, and that it could save more lives than he’s ever imagined being able to save, convinces them that he’s right to go.
It’s still a wrench, trying to decide what to box up and what to take. He doesn’t have that much space, and there are a lot of things that are important to him. The photos are going, that’s no question; he’s spent a lot of time scanning hundreds of them into his computer and then storing them on USB drives. He puts some music that didn’t make it into the media pool on another; mostly folk songs, local bar groups and the like. He takes his da’s favourite fishing lure, and his nieces and nephews press little candies and trinkets into the cracks of his bag. Finally, mum brings out a colourful quilt, sewn out of scraps of cloth that marked important occasions in all their lives, and Carson shifts his pack around until he can make that fit, and he just hugs his mum and cries. He tosses in a tin of gingerbread, some tea, and as many bottles of aspirin and boxes of plasters as will fit, because if he knows anything about military expeditions after the last several years, it’s that they always overlook the tiny things.
~~~
Carson is thirty-six years old when he looks into the event horizon of a wormhole for the first time. It’s big and blue and beautiful, and Carson wants nothing more than to step through it and have it take him back to his mum’s kitchen in Scotland. The family had thrown him the biggest party they’d ever thrown anyone the day before he left, but the day of his departure it’d been just him and mum, and she’d done his favourite pot-roast for dinner, and he’d had the hardest time not blubbering like a child.
But the wormhole and the Pegasus Galaxy are waiting for him, and he’s the doctor in charge, and so he hitches up his pack and steps through with the rest of the expedition’s leaders, into the unknown. He can tell right off that it’s going to be a more exciting existence than he wants, a different kind of exciting than the research base at Antarctica; the chaos as they struggle to find someplace to go as the shields holding the ocean out fail is enough to give him heart failure. But they get through it, and life settles a bit. He has a new group of people to care for in the Athosians, and he’s busy with his gene research and the scrapes the soldiers get into off-world and the things the scientists manage to injure themselves with in the labs.
Soon he’s even busier, as his gene research finally stabilises. It’s not legal on earth, but he’s certain of his skills and they’re not exactly on earth, so he starts inoculating the Atlantis personnel with the ATA gene. It’s a bigger success than he hopes for, even though more than half of those he tries it on fail to respond, and his spirits rise. If this is what his life in Atlantis is going to be like, he thinks he can get used to it. Even if he spends every night wrapped tightly in his mum’s quilt. It’s good work he’s doing, and the advanced technology means he can start digging further into his disease research, and patching up the gate teams drags him out of his research often enough to keep him engaged in the world around him. It’s not exactly what he always dreamed of doing, but in some ways it’s more than he could ever have hoped for.
~~~
Soon, though, Carson gets his first indication that life in Pegasus isn’t going to be at all like what it first appears. He’s taken off-world to help medical researchers on an alien planet, and despite his objections, he loves the work. The lass he’s working with reminds him a lot of himself as a graduate student, and he feels a bit like he’s back home with his sisters, they get on so well. But then it goes to hell, and his research is being tested before it’s ready, and half a planet’s dying and it’s all his fault. He swore oaths that he would prolong life, and he’s destroyed so many people he can scarcely wrap his head around the numbers. His friends assure him that it isn’t his fault, that he warned them and warned them and they didn’t listen.
Carson quotes Winston Churchill at them, and for the first time disagrees with the famous Prime Minister. Privately, he’s also thinking about Alfred Nobel, and wondering why things that are invented for good, to help and to heal, are so often turned to evil. The incident kills a lot of the joy Carson originally took in his appointment to the Atlantis expedition, and when he returns to work, it’s with a bit of a harder edge than he’s had in years. He spends a bit more time in his lab, and a bit less in the infirmary, but nobody really notices. For Rodney, and John, and Elizabeth, and even Radek - his closest friends here, he thinks possibly the closest friends he's ever had - Atlantis is a dream come true; they're flourishing here, with the danger and the challenge to their abilities and the amazing discoveries they're making. Since Carson's right in the middle of the same danger, and making the same amazing discoveries in his own field, it's easy for the fact that he decidedly isn't flourishing to slip through the cracks.
Life goes on, in Atlantis. There’s always some crisis brewing - nuclear weapons, and storms, and suddenly Carson’s piloting Puddlejumpers and carrying weapons, and he thinks that his da would be more disappointed in him than Carson even knows how to express, even though da would’ve been proud of him at the same time, for defending those who were attacked without provocation. Carson can feel little bits of himself dying, as he learns to use the weapons against other people, and he’s not sure he’ll ever be the same again, even though he’s already determined that he’ll die before he actually goes through with shooting anyone.
Life goes on, in the strange and panicked way it seems to enjoy in Atlantis. Carson starts becoming as much of an engineer as he is a geneticist, in some ways, even more so when he loses people not to the actions of hostile aliens, but to tiny little robots that he can’t even really understand, much less try to heal. He can’t do anything but watch as Rodney and Radek prepare to die, and he’s equally terrified when John comes up with a crazy plan to detonate a nuclear warhead above the city. Carson spent too much time in the cancer wards; he knows perfectly well what kind of damage nuclear radiation can do to the human body. But it all works out, and if Carson’s a bit more reserved after, a bit less likely to make friends with those he has to patch up when they come to him in pieces, well, there are Wraith to fight and discoveries to make, and no one really notices.
Carson’s more grateful than he can ever express the first time Rodney gives them a chance at communicating with home. He gets set to send his mum a message, only to start blubbering halfway through. He’s rather grateful to young Aiden for interrupting him with inane criticism - as if Carson’s own mum didn’t know he was from bloody earth! It was hardly a secret! - because it means that he can redo the message without the tears. Not that he’s ashamed of the emotion, because he’s bloody scared out of his mind over what they’re facing. But it would worry his mum, and he never wants to do that. He sends his love to all the family, and he hopes they’ll forgive him for such a short message after such a long time.
He doesn’t have much chance to worry about it, though, because soon there is an influx of American military personnel into the city, and soon after that they’re at full-on war with the Wraith. Carson knows there are outrageous plans being hatched and barmy schemes being carried out in an attempt to keep them all safe and drive the Wraith back, but Carson doesn’t have time to worry about it. The wounded and the dying are piling up faster than he and his team can get to them, and Carson is getting his first shot at the life of a battlefield medic. He loathes it, and it kills him to watch so many people he’s patched up over the year they’ve been in Atlantis as they die before his eyes. He can’t fight or heal what the Wraith do to people, and for the first time in his entire life, he looks at his hands - the hands of a healer - and thinks that they’re worthless.
He feels the breathe of relief that flows through Atlantis when the Wraith are driven back, but he can’t share in it. The battle may be over for them, but not for him; he and his team are still fighting, and their opponent is the hardest and most merciless of all. They’re fighting a front-line team of death, and pain, and despair, and they’re fighting with everything they have. Gradually, as they start to drop from exhaustion and even Carson starts to think about giving up, they look up and realize that everyone who can be tended to has been, and that all that are left are bumps and bruises and cuts, and clearing away the dead. Carson doesn’t have time for more than a single deep breath, though, before Aiden’s through the door with the Wraith enzyme and there are more emergencies cropping up, and he’s off to deal with them. Carson’s never abused the drugs he has access to in his life, not even when he was a grad student and worked himself into the hospital, but today is the first time he thinks about it.
~~~
The first time Carson looks down at the fields of Scotland with eyes that have seen another planet, he knows that however much he has come to feel his life is tied to Atlantis and the people who call it home, for him, his heart will always rest in this sleepy little country. He’s got a long few weeks ahead of him, choosing replacement personnel and filing more reports than he wants to think about, but for this one moment he is nothing more than Carson Beckett, returned to the town the Becketts have always lived in, and the world rights itself for the first time in years.
Mary Beckett is older, and his siblings and nieces and nephews have all changed, but looking at him, they all think that he’s altered the most during his absence. There’s a brittle feel to him when they hug him, as if he’s holding himself together through sheer willpower, and they treat him more gently than they’ve ever treated him before. It helps, and being home helps more, and when he returns to the SGC after a week spent with his family, he’s almost like the old Carson again. Almost.
Carson doesn’t get much of a rest once they return to Atlantis, so he’s more grateful than ever for the brief stopover at home. Suddenly he’s part of off-world activities, even though he doesn’t want to be. He’s performing field surgery under conditions he’d never even have imagined before coming here, and finding himself in situations he never dreamed of. Like trying to keep Rodney alive while his body hosts the consciousness of an attractive, lively lass from the Marines. Carson’s more shocked than anyone when she kisses him through Rodney, but it drives back a little of the brittleness, and he thinks it might be rather nice to have someone to share downtime with. She’ll be transferred home when her tour of duty in Atlantis is over, of course, but while she’s there, nothing stops him from getting to know her a bit better.
Nothing except his research, that is, and Carson finds himself slipping more and more into his old habits, neglecting himself in favour of searching out the mysteries of biology. He thinks he’s on to something with a Wraith retrovirus, really believes that he might have something. Until he meets a Wraith girl, who desperately wants to be anything but what she is, and once again it is his research that causes death. Never mind that she was an immature Wraith Queen, and that there was no hope of turning her human again. Never mind that, once again, he had warned against the research being used. It’s his fault, because it’s his work. Just like the Hoffans, and a little bit more of Carson turns hard and cold and threatens to shatter. He fires a gun at a living being for the first time in his life, and later he shakes apart alone, wrapped in his mum’s quilt.
For the first time, even the memory of home isn’t enough to warm him up.
He doesn’t really have time to adjust to what’s happening, though, because his mistakes keep piling up and now John is paying for them, slowly turning into a Wraith. Carson swears, as he does everything he can think of to save the American, that he’ll destroy his notes and never touch anything like them again. Somehow, though, when it’s all over, he ends up buried back in the microscopes, and only a tiny little voice, easily ignored, warns him about the path he’s treading down. None of his staff know to stop him, and none of his friends, who have thrived beyond their wildest dreams here, are unchanged enough to notice. Atlantis has molded them all, but Carson thinks that he's the only one it's altered for the worse.
He’s dragged out of the spiralling pit of his research for real emergencies, like watching Rodney try to detox from the Wraith enzyme. If that wasn’t enough to convince Carson that he made the right decision about using the drugs in the infirmary for personal reasons, nothing ever will be, he thinks. But it’s one more situation where he can’t be a doctor, can’t do anything at all to help a friend in pain, and it eats up a little more of the dwindling store of compassion he’s still got. Even the greatest bonfires go out eventually, he thinks, as he cups metaphorical hands around the small blaze that’s all that remains of his drive to heal and his belief in the wonder and goodness of the universe.
It would be easy enough, he sometimes thinks, to believe that nothing good or wonderful ever happens in Atlantis. But Teyla reminds him soon after of something the inhabitants of the Pegasus galaxy have always known; that good and wonder can come even in the midst of darkness and strife. He thinks that if he can just save Teyla’s old friend, just keep one person alive, maybe it’ll help heal something within him. Fortunately, Teyla convinces him differently, and the simple Athosian funeral reminds him so much of the little community church back home, and the Athosian’s sense of friendship and common purpose bolsters him a bit. Not a lot, but he thinks maybe he can see enough good still in the world to make it through whatever life throws at him next.
Then again, perhaps not. Carson knows that he should never be allowed to bury himself in research and forget the human cost, both to himself and to others. He knows, but he’s never been able to stop himself, and no one here will stop him. They are soldiers, even the scientists are soldiers now, and to them the ends justify the means. He is a healer, and they will never breach that fundamental wall. But he’s determined to make up for Ellia, and he really thinks he’s got the formula for the retrovirus worked out, so he goes ahead with testing it even though the little voice that sounds suspiciously like his mum is screaming at him not to. One trial, he thinks. One trial, and if it fails, then he'll forget the whole idea. But the trial is on a living being, and for the first time in his life, Carson fails to put the well-being of his patient - mental or physical - before his research.
Even given that, Michael is, in some senses, his greatest success. As a geneticist, the ability to completely transform another being’s genetic code is the height of accomplishment. But as a doctor, what he’s done to the young man is sick and wrong on more levels than he has words for, and it’s like having a bucket of ice water thrown in his face. Looking at Michael, he is forced to look at what he has become, what he has allowed life in Atlantis to make him into, and he is disgusted. For the first time in his life, Carson Beckett honestly and truly loathes himself to the core of his being. He vows again to destroy the research, but somehow in all of the emergencies that keep piling up, he never does.
~~~
The first time he truly thinks he’s lost all faith in humanity, Elizabeth Weir has offered Carson's research to a faction of the Wraith, to aid in a tentative alliance. Carson knows that the old Elizabeth would never have done it - or so he tells himself, because acknowledging that the old Elizabeth was just as ruthless a negotiator as this one, would have given just as much to gain peace, would mean taking a good hard look at the fact that he’s one of the few who have truly been changed for the worse by Atlantis. The others have grown perhaps a bit darker, a bit more likely to shoot first and question the wounded, but they have flourished in so many other ways this is insignificant.
Carson has no choice, then, but to face what his research has been used for. Maybe if he stays with the converted Wraith, maybe if something good can come of what he’s done, maybe then it’ll give him back a little of what he was, a little bit of the sense that he’s healing rather than destroying. It doesn’t, but in some ways he supposes being tortured by the things he’s created has the same effect. Sometimes, now, he feels a bit like Dr. Frankenstein, who created life with the best intentions only to have it turn out all wrong.
It is almost a relief when they meet Lucius Levin, and Carson doesn’t have to think about anything except making his new friend happy. He resents John for taking that away from him, for forcing him back into a state of mind where he has to deal with what he’s turned himself into. But for the first time in a long time, he’s using his abilities for good. He’s actually able to heal his friends, even if the illness is both improbable and frankly a bit mad.
But soon that little glow of the old Carson is buried, and Carson’s back to shooting drones at living creatures. Yes, it’s a Wraith, and yes, it’s trying to kill Ronon. But he took an oath to do no harm, and he has just deliberately struck a killing blow. Ronon is grateful, and Carson is as well, but he thinks he can feel his already heavily blackened soul tarnishing a little bit more.
For Carson, more so than for anyone else among the command staff, it is almost a relief when the Ancients come back and toss them out of Atlantis. He’s going to miss the friends he’s made, but he’ll still be able to see them all continually, and maybe now he can get started on putting himself back together. He barely even knows where to start, but as he packs up his life on Atlantis, he starts to feel a little bit of optimism trickling back in. He isn’t ready to go home to Scotland yet; he doesn’t think he can face his family, doesn’t think he can stand on the soil his ancestors have walked on until he feels a little bit more like himself. But no one will be shooting at him, no one will be expecting him to shoot back, and no one’s life will depend on his ability to put aside every last scrap of ethics he possesses. The only thing about this place he'll miss is the people, who've come to be as close to him as family, and he vows they'll stay in touch no matter what he has to do.
He gets some wee baby turtles. Start small, he thinks. See if you can raise them right, and keep them alive. Feel a little bit of boyish wonder as they grow up and explore the world of their terrarium. Let them soothe a bit of the ache that’s probably a permanent part of him now. Of course, like everything else recently, despite his good intentions it goes straight to hell, and somehow he’s on a Puddlejumper between galaxies before he remembers about them, and by then of course it’s too late. He knows that, in comparison to what they’re facing, the lives of a few baby turtles are insignificant. The others, especially Rodney, are appropriately sarcastic. But to Carson, it isn’t so much about the turtles as it is about everything they represent.
Carson kind of drifts through the next little while; he’s lost so much of who he was and what he defined himself by, it’s hard some days to figure out what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. The interesting and completely alien ways in which the expedition members - and especially Carson’s closest friends - can find themselves in mortal danger continue to multiply, and the methods Carson can use to diminish those dangers continue to decline. He can’t even save Rodney from accidental Ascension; the astrophysicist saves himself, in the end, while Carson stands back and watches.
When Kate Heightmeyer orders a day off for all personnel, Carson is determined to go fishing on the mainland. He’s got it all set up with Rodney; he’s even going to tell the Canadian some of the old stories that his da and his grandda used to tell him, when they went fishing in the old spots the Becketts had always fished in. But Rodney has a date, and John is getting his arse handed to him by Ronon, and then a panel near the mess hall suffers a technical glitch and Carson gives up his ruined day off to deal with the injured. He’s tired, tired of being the doctor, tired of putting a face on that doesn’t even feel like his own anymore. So very tired, and when the last cut is bandaged and he retreats to his empty quarters to read through a backlog of mail and discovers the letter from Aislinn, it takes him two or three times through before the words sink in.
Once they have, he’s off to Elizabeth without a moment to spare. She understands completely, and gives him a leave of absence to go home and tend to his mum. Aislinn didn’t say what was wrong, only that he should come as soon as he could get away. She’d sent the letter a week and a half ago, but Carson should be able to leave that evening, and he thinks he’ll be in time, even if something has gone terribly wrong. He packs quickly, a little bit saddened to see that in three years, he hasn’t really accumulated much more than what he came with. When his quarters are completely bare again, he seizes the pack and hauls it down to the infirmary. He throws in the few personal items he keeps in his office and sits staring at his laptop, as the cursor blinks away in the field for him to enter his password.
Finally he does, and just as he presses the button that will delete all of his confidential research files, Rodney comes in. The explanations are short, and the conversation is awkward, but Carson’s learned to read Rodney’s eyes for what he’s really thinking. He knows the other man is going to miss him terribly, and is going to count on his coming back soon. Carson doesn’t know how to tell Rodney that he’s never coming back; that as soon as he gets out of the SGC in Colorado, he’s going home for good.
~~~
The last time Carson Beckett ever steps through a wormhole, the entire expedition team is gathered to send him off. In front are all those he’s come to think of as family; the command team, part of his medical staff, and Teyla and Ronon. His eyes are teary as they wish him well, and he clings a little tighter to them than perhaps he needs to, but he loves these people despite everything, and he’s going to miss them terribly. But he can’t come back; even if he hadn’t just destroyed all his work, he can’t face what this place made him into. He’s not even sure he can go on being a doctor.
His return home is quieter than his leaving was. Carson’s thirty-nine now, pushing forty, and he feels twice that in the mornings when his bones ache with reminders of everything he’s survived. The little town is quiet, after Atlantis, and his family seem like alien lifeforms after the people he’s known in the past few years. They can see the toll those years have taken on him, even though they don’t ask why, and when he says he’s not going back, they smile quietly and help him settle back into the house. Mum’s not quite so bad as they originally thought, and between caring for her as she recovers and putting what bits of himself are left back together, Carson has his hands full. It’ll be a long time, maybe years, before he’ll be able to go back to working as a doctor. He still has the drive to heal, but he’s seen too much and done to much to believe in himself, that he'll be any good influence on anyone anymore. But as he laughs at the antics of his nephews and holds his nieces through their first heartbreaks and lifts down the big roasting pan for his mum, he thinks that even if it takes a bit of time, maybe he really is still Carson Beckett after all.
He has time now, anyway, to find out. And maybe, if his friends ever make it back to earth, it will be the old Carson who’s there to greet them and patch up whatever wounds they come home with - home for Carson, because he knows that to them, home lies far out in another galaxy.
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