Author's notes: my first story in this fandom! I figured I should start easy, so I responded to the Soul-Challenge on the SGAHC list. You're supposed to start the fic with 'I sell my soul a little more each day'.

Spoilers for and up to 'Sunday.'
Main characters: Becket and McKay.

Betaed by my good friend Starsky's Strut.

Reviews: yes, please. They might encourage me to post more in this fandom.


Hippocrates
By Kreek©December2007

I sell my soul a little more each day, piece by piece at night, because I'm not happy with who I am now.

'Never to do deliberate harm to anyone for anyone else's interest' That's the Hippocrates oath I took so many years ago. When I didn't know what it felt like to watch them go, watch them fight battles I sometimes know they cannot win.

I should keep my distance and cloaked in professionalism I mostly succeed. But when life and death are part of every day life in this community, when you make friends and they come home soaked in blood or doped up with an enzyme I cannot fight, do I blame myself for caring too much then?

Aye, I do.

Still, the call always comes. Emergency medical team to the gate room. Just a few little words that make my heart sink to my stomach every time they ring in my ear.

Watching them becomes a difficult thing, it grows, like cancer. Even with all this technology at hand, they keep coming back with those words ringing in my ear. And you want to do something, anything to stop that from happening.

So I took on Michael.

I have to live with it, day after day. There's no beating around the bush. Every way you look at it, I broke my oath and instigated a sickness spreading through my soul. At night its blackness chokes me, during the day its cold heartedness terrifies me. The wound is deep. But better me than John, better me than Ronon or Teyla.

Better me than Rodney.

Lowering the journal, Rodney blinked as a choked feeling of grief threatened to overwhelm him. Unable to deal the few little words that Carson thought needed a paragraph of their own, visual proof of just how much Beckett thought of him, he stood up.

Those few little words.

He kept seeing them, even behind closed eyes. They burned, they hurt, they widened the empty fissure in his heart, opening up long closed scars and hidden emotions. Tearing down the walls of his soul.

Those few little words.

He couldn't deal with them. Not yet.

But they were beautiful.

End