A.N: This is a post-ep tag for 'The Eye'. I've just recently gotten into SGA and when I saw that ep, I had to write something.
Worth it.
By, Rockafella Saint
Mass murderer, it was an unfortunate title, but one he felt he deserved. Over sixty people, all told, all on his hands, and though he knew that it had been necessary it didn't help to make the burden any easier to bear. He couldn't even begin to move past the guilt, the knowledge that he was the very thing he most despised, a monster who could kill without hesitation.
When he was on Earth he'd met men who'd killed so much that the very part of them that made them human had been leeched away leaving them wretched, empty, twisted shells of what they once where. John had known more men like that than he cared to count, and one of his greatest fears was that someday soon he'd look in the mirror and one of them would be staring back from the space where his reflection used to be. That would end him, because whale he had worked with those men he had never trusted them, and he knew that no one in Atlantis would trust him when he reached that point, and losing that trust was worse than losing himself. But as terrifying as that prospect was he preferred it to the other option, that of letting one of his team, one of his friends, become a hollow shell person, no better than the Wraith. He would rather go through the type of hell that turned a good person into a monster himself than let anyone he cared about suffer it.
After their people where home safe and sound and all of the bodies had been disposed of and the mess cleaned up John took a long moment to just watch the members of the expedition as they went about there business, searching for validation for his actions in the familiar faces. Jinto stood off to the side with his father and the rest of the Athosians, waiting for a ride back to the mainland. Behind him in the control tower McKay, Weir, and some of the other scientists operated in a state of organized chaos, repairing the damage done and putting everything to right. Teyla and Ford where standing with Beckett on the stairs, talking and joking, obviously relived to have survived the whole ordeal.
All to easily he could envision these smiling, happy people as corpses, their eyes blank and their blood painting the walls and floors. Or the gate room filled with cold seawater, the magnificent stained glass windows shattered and the city in ruin. Both of these images where fates that could have befallen them today, fates he had helped to avoid, by any means necessary. Sixty odd lives in exchange for a hundred, in exchange for Atlantis.
Suddenly he felt a little better, though he knew that someday he would have to own up to those lives, pay his blood dept, it was all worth it. Atlantis and its citizens were worth it, even if he'd had to sell a peace of his soul so they could weather this storm.