The Poisoned Well

by Setcheti

Disclaimer: Don’t own them, not actually trying to either. Carson’s wife and the backstory for him as written here are my own creations, not canon from the show.

Author’s Note: This is a tag for “Remembering in the Dark”, #4 of The Carson Diaries, as well as the episode “Poisoning the Well”.

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Dr. Weir was surprised when Teyla showed up at her office, especially since she had Major Sheppard and Dr. McKay in tow, none of them looking very happy. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

“Perhaps. We have a question to ask you,” Teyla told her. “I was with Dr. Beckett earlier, he was…very upset.” She came in and took the first available chair, sinking down into it with the fluid grace that Weir always envied. “He was asleep when I left him.”

“He cried himself to sleep.” Sheppard had planted himself on one corner of Weir’s desk, disdaining the room’s other chairs. He looked a lot unhappier up close than he had standing in the doorway. “I knew he’d be upset about what happened on Hoff, but apparently there’s more to it than that. Teyla came to Rodney and then to me but we didn’t have any answers for her, so we need to know if you know who ‘Michaela’ is.”

Weir dropped back down into her own chair a little harder than she’d intended to, and from the spot where he was leaning against the wall McKay snorted softly. His arms were folded across his chest. “I’d say that’s a big yes.”

“That’s…that was his wife’s name,” Weir said. “Michaela Beckett. I never got to meet her, but I’ve seen her picture in his lab in Glasgow.”

Teyla nodded. “She is dead, then?”

“She’s been dead for a long time.” Weir wasn’t liking this at all. “The way I understand it, they married young. Carson went to school to become a medical doctor, but when Michaela was diagnosed with cancer he started researching gene therapy to try to save her. She died two months before he found a possible cure, but he kept up his research anyway. He found anomalies in some of the DNA strands he was working with, and when he started asking around about…certain things the Stargate project recruited him and brought him to Antarctica.”

“Recruited?” Sheppard’s eyes had narrowed, and the word came out almost as a growl. “You mean the way General O’Neill ‘recruited’ me into the project, Dr. Weir?”

“All I did was ask him to talk to you about it,” Weir rebutted calmly. She knew O’Neill tended to be a little less than diplomatic sometimes, but she seriously doubted he’d forced anyone to come on the Atlantis mission – although she knew he’d forced a few people not to come. “And no, nobody forced Carson to join the project and nobody threatened him. The university made it abundantly clear that if we stepped out of line with him they’d hang us out to dry in the international press. That’s why they sent me in to talk to him, we couldn’t risk creating an incident.” She sat back in her chair, remembering. “He was in and out a lot between the lab and the work he was doing at the hospital, I think what actually happened was that I convinced his assistants he should join the project and then they convinced him. They even helped him pack up his things and take them to storage. There wasn’t a dry eye in the place the day he left for Antarctica.”

“It sounds as though he was very much loved,” Teyla observed.

“He was. He found a cure for cancer and gave it to the world,” Weir told her. Seeing that the other woman didn’t understand she elaborated. “Cancer is one of the most deadly diseases on our planet. Dr. Beckett could have sold his discovery to the highest bidder, but he wouldn’t do it. Every major pharmaceutical company was trying to get him to work for them so they could have the rights to his research, but he wouldn’t do that either. By the time I got there politics had gotten involved, and about the only place a person could get the treatment was there in Glasgow or in Canada.”

“My country has always been a little more…conscientious than the United States when it comes to the health of our citizens,” McKay put in for Teyla’s benefit from his lean in the corner. He answered the dirty looks he got from Sheppard and Weir with a contemptuous one of his own. “We’re not on Earth now, I don’t have to keep my mouth shut any more. And you know just as well as I do that one of the reasons the powers that be wanted Carson on the project was so he’d be under their control in Antarctica and not up in Scotland threatening to bring down the wrath of half the planet on the U.S. government and all their rich corporate bedfellows in the pharmaceutical industry.”

Sheppard stood up, but to Weir’s surprise his anger was directed at her. “Is that true?”

She’d taken on tougher opponents than him, and she met his angry glare without so much as blinking. “The FDA has to be careful…”

“Or in other words, it’s true,” he cut her off. “So who put the gag on Rodney? Not that I thought it was possible to shut him up, but apparently someone did so it must have been one hell of a threat. Was it us?”

Weir tried again. “Some issues are politically sensitive, so it was suggested to Dr. McKay that he not voice his opinions while he was working on the project. It was a reasonable request, considering the circumstances…”

“If it had been a ‘request’ it might have been.” McKay was looking angrier now, although he still hadn’t moved out of his spot. He switched his attention to Sheppard. “It didn’t come from her, they just left it up to her to enforce it. NID put me on the Stargate project to begin with, they said they needed someone outside of the SGC who knew how the technology worked. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I was working for the bad guys, but by then it was too late for me to do anything about it. I was told that if I didn’t want to be kicked out in the cold – literally as well as figuratively – I’d better keep my opinions to myself.” The arms he had wrapped around his chest tightened, not much but enough that Sheppard noticed. “I think I’d have preferred literally, to be honest. It would have been…quicker and less painful.”

Sheppard gave him a long look, weighing that statement, and then nodded once sharply. “I can understand that,” he said. “Do you know if any NID personnel came with us?”

“The only one I’m sure of is Bates, now that Colonel Sumner is dead.” McKay rolled his eyes at Weir’s sharp intake of breath. “Oh please, like you didn’t know.”

“I didn’t know.” Weir looked sick. She’d prided herself on building this team, her Atlantis team, and now she was finding out that it wasn’t as much her team as she’d thought. Coercion, intimidation, planted personnel…and McKay’s reason for the United States wanting Beckett on the project was ringing too close to true for her. She’d been sent to Glasgow with instructions to do whatever it took to bring the doctor on board, and had settled on persistent, friendly persuasion as the best counterpoint for Beckett’s mild-mannered demeanor. And it had worked, and she’d never questioned why the lab assistants had been so amused every time she’d mentioned how even-tempered their boss was.

Then she’d gotten him to the base in Antarctica, and all hell had broken loose – quietly, Carson Beckett wasn’t a loud man. He completely rearranged his lab, changed his staff assignments four times, and fired six people. When questioned, he’d patiently reminded her that she’d promised him complete control over his part of the project and then folded his arms across his chest, raised one eyebrow and asked if she’d been having him on about that. That was the first week. The second week he’d gone to work refining the research he’d already done, integrating in the new information they’d given him, and every time someone tried to talk to him he’d all but bitten their head off. Weir tabled all the complaints, noting that not one of them came from Beckett’s own staff. Two weeks after that he’d presented her with a report about the ATA gene and submitted a testing schedule for project personnel to determine who had it and who didn’t. He also demanded a weekend off for his entire staff, citing that they’d worked hard and deserved it. She’d approved it without question, and didn’t ask why he hadn’t put himself in for leave at the same time. She’d found out why the following week when he gave her another report, this one detailing the changes he wanted made to the base’s medical facilities and containing a painstakingly specific list of reasons why the current ranking doctor needed to be transferred into a position where he’d have someone supervising him. Weir submitted that up the chain of command and wasn’t at all surprised when Beckett put his staff to work making the proposed changes to the infirmary the minute the other doctor was gone.

By that time, she’d noticed that McKay started snickering every time he saw Beckett heading for her office. She’d been meanly glad when the astrophysicist turned out not to have the much-vaunted ATA gene and had done some snickering of her own when the second test he’d insisted on had confirmed the lack. What she hadn’t realized was that McKay had become friendly with Beckett…until a certain unit of visiting Marines had started hiding in their temporary barracks and had all but run out to the transport sent to move them to their next assignment. No one would tell her what had happened, but she suspected it had something to do with the unit’s very vocal dislike of civilian scientists culminating in an unknown incident that had McKay showing up in his lab one morning so on edge that every time someone walked past his door he jumped. Dr. Weir hadn’t thought much about that at the time, passing it off with some amusement as ‘just Rodney’, but she had a feeling a certain Scottish doctor hadn’t taken the incident so lightly.

By that time, of course, she’d realized that Carson Beckett didn’t take anything lightly. The mild-mannered persona was just that – a persona, one he’d developed for the benefit of his patients. He was quiet, but that was because the force of his personality was such that he usually didn’t need to raise his voice. And she had a feeling that the hand-picked members of his staff would happily take – or possibly even shoot – a bullet for him without a second thought.

Hence the laughter of the Glasgow lab assistants; they’d decided Beckett needed to join the project and had helped her convince him to do it, but they’d also known exactly what the project would be getting once it had him. And it also explained why the government had been so determined to get the doctor to Antarctica in person, even though he’d been more than willing to give them the research he’d already done with no strings attached. Carson Beckett was a tough, determined man. He’d have gotten fed up with the politics holding back his cure after a while and started talking to the press, or posting his findings on the Internet, or calling up the heads of the European Union at home on the weekends.

And by the time he’d gotten that fed up, it was likely he’d have discovered more cures to talk about. It would have been an international coup, it would have ripped the planet apart. But because Weir had done her job so well…just over a year later when the Atlantis team had left Earth it was still only possible to receive Beckett’s safe, highly effective gene therapy in Scotland and in Canada. Most people in the rest of the world didn’t even know a cure for cancer actually existed except as a supermarket tabloid rumor.

Elizabeth Weir had never really thought about that until now.

Teyla was talking to her again, and she forced her attention back into her office. “It appears there are other problems to be dealt with, but we mainly came here to see if there was anything we could do to help Dr. Beckett,” the former Athosian leader was saying. “Knowing what happened to his wife, it is no wonder the deaths on Hoff affected him to such a degree, especially the death of Perna. So, Dr. Weir, what are we going to do about this?”

“I don’t know.” Weir had deflated to the point that she wasn’t even sure she could stand up again. All her training, all her experience, was directed toward negotiating situations that involved large groups of people, entire nations, even entire planets; unless it was important to her goal she was used to dismissing problems on the individual level as unimportant in the larger scheme of things. She didn’t know how to deal with a widower she hadn’t realized was still grieving his loss. But she should have realized it, knew she should have seen it; after all, he’d had the woman’s picture on the wall in his lab in Glasgow – not in his office, in the lab over a desk that no one on the staff would sit at. From what she’d understood, Michaela Beckett had spent every day in that lab with him right up until the week she died, helping wherever she could while her driven, desperate husband searched for the cure that wouldn’t be found until it was too late.

And six hours ago he’d watched another woman he’d worked side by side with for a month and possibly been developing some deeper feelings for die from a cure he’d found too soon. Nowhere in her resume was a skill set that would help her repair the damage done by that kind of cruel irony, nowhere. “I don’t know,” she repeated again with more confidence. “I’m not sure there’s anything we can do. I think we’ll just have to watch and wait for him to come to one of us if he needs to talk.”

It sounded ineffectual even as she said it, a cop-out of major proportions. McKay’s response was to peel himself out of his corner and walk out of the room without a word, but when Weir started to call after him Sheppard’s upraised hand stopped her. “I wouldn’t. You might not like what he has to say – they’re friends, remember?” He headed for the door himself, and Teyla rose from her seat as well. “Thank you for giving us the information you had, Dr. Weir. We’ll take care of it from here.”

The look he gave her as he walked out was somewhere between contemptuous and disappointed, but the one on Teyla’s face was pitying when Weir turned back to her in surprise. “Their friend is hurting and they are upset, they wish to attack his pain as though it were an enemy and subdue it,” the Athosian woman said softly. “But you feel you must focus on larger problems, those that affect your people as a whole rather than individually.” She bowed slightly. “It is difficult to maintain a balance within your heart between the leader and the woman, I know. Sometimes, it seems impossible.”

And then she was gone. Weir didn’t try to call her back, she just sat at her desk, thinking about how very impossible that was – and how jealous she was of Teyla, who seemed to achieve that impossible balance so very naturally. But after five minutes of thinking about it she shook it off and started back in on her other duties, smothering her emotional indecision with the weight of larger, more objective responsibilities. Major Sheppard had said they would take care of it, she’d just have to trust that they would.

Just like she was trusting that by the time they finally got back to Earth, people would no longer be dying from cancer.