Remembering in the Dark

#4 of The Carson Diaries, from the episode “Poisoning the Well”

by Setcheti

I didn’t realize the lights were off in the lab until the door opened. I wasn’t sittin’ here in the dark on purpose.

Not consciously, anyway. But seein’ as how the ATA gene lets some of us trigger certain systems with mental control alone…maybe I turned them off, I don’t know. Don’t really much care, either.

She’s dead. Fifty bloody percent of their population is dead with her, and more to come, more to come. All because of me ‘helpin their research to the next level’.

I’ve got all the research here with me, I know that eventually I can figure out what went wrong…but right now I’d like to shove it all through the bloody wormhole. They’re all dead, or dyin’ – fifty percent of them, anyway. Who knows what’ll happen to the other half of their population, what the long term effects might be. We won’t be goin’ back to find out.

Not that I want to – go back, that is. Those people have no respect for individual human life left, none. Their whole civilization has been all about the good of the many, all about makin’ sure the work they’ve done is saved for the survivors to pick up once the Wraith have come and gone. While I was on Hoff, Perna and I backed up our data not less than every half hour. It’s the procedure there, you see, and they follow it religiously. They never forget that the enemy can be upon them with almost no warnin’ at all.

She wanted to know about Earth. I told her about Scotland, and she apologized for makin’ me homesick. I hadn’t even realized I was homesick until that moment, but at that moment it really didn’t matter so much to me that I was. It mattered to her, though.

It matters to me now. I want to go home. I want to be someplace where we’re not makin’ up the bloody rules as we go along. I want to visit Michaela and tell her what I’ve done, and what they did, and what I’d like to do to them for makin’ me a part of it.

I want to tell her about Sheppard, and McKay, and Weir – and about Perna, so she can laugh at me. She’d think it was quite funny that I fell for someone on another planet the same way I fell for her. Our eyes just met…and it was done, and I only loved Michaela more the more we were together. Maybe it’s a curse. I love them, and they die.

They die smilin’ at me, even though they know I can’t save them – smilin’ as they leave me behind.

I wonder if Michaela knows where I am?

For a minute, just a minute, I think the two arms that wrap around me are hers. But then I remember the door to the lab openin’, and the fact that I’m sittin’ here in the dark on Atlantis in a different galaxy. And that even the Ancients with all their wonders couldn’t bring back the dead – not Perna, not the fifty percent of the Hoffan population bein’ sacrificed for false hope, and certainly not someone long dead back on Earth.

The voice in my ear sounds like it might be Teyla. It would be Teyla, wouldn’t it? She was there on Hoff, she saw, she understood. And right now I need someone to understand, so I just lean into her arms and let her, knowin’ that just right now in the dark it’s all right to cry for thousands or even millions of people I couldn’t save from themselves. And for Perna, who I couldn’t save from herself either – or from myself, and my curse.

And for my Michaela, who’d forgive me anythin’, even this. God, I so want to go home.

I’m just not sure that after this I deserve to.