we, the tortured few

I held onto my glass of scotch malt whiskey in one hand and the frame containing my diploma in the other. One was a source of relief, the other, guilt. First, do no harm…

Setting the frame before for me on the desk, I tossed back the remnants in my glass, and closed my eyes against the disgust I felt. I was playing a bloody game with lives out here. With everyone's lives and doing things I had no business doing. It didn't matter that I'd begun work on the retrovirus for the right reasons: To find a solution to our problem with the wraith that would save lives.

Instead of having to commit genocide in order to live, everyone would have won. The wraith would've been turned back to what they should've been. They were humans, before the Iratus bug had changed them irrevocably into the monsters they are now. I'd told myself over and over again, I was only fixing a mistake of nature.

Michael.

When he was a wraith prisoner, with no name, and no voice except the mindless threats he'd uttered at us, it'd been easier to tell myself I was doing this for the right reasons. He'd have murdered me, Colonel Sheppard, Teyla, Rodney…any of us, and he wouldn't have thought twice about it, or considered the lives he'd taken. We were food.

But when I'd converted him a second time, he wasn't just a wraith. He was a being that had saved Sheppard, Rodney and Ronon. Had helped them escape, then helped them live by flying the hive ship to Atlantis. He'd turned on his people, had learned to consider us as more than food. He'd learned. Michael was more than just another wraith, even if his intentions had always been far from altruistic.

It was unfortunate that he was also the worst security risk we'd faced yet. He knew more about us than any wraith ever had. He'd lived amongst us, escaped, allied with us, and then we'd kept him prisoner again, changing him without his agreement. He'd fought off the effects of the memory loss, and I still didn't know if it was something to do with him in particular, an aberration in his physiology, or if others would have as well, if he hadn't been there to interfere.

I didn't know what bothered me more; the thought that if we'd kept Michael separate, all those lives might have been saved, or the thought that my mind still returned time and time again to focusing on where the error in the retrovirus was, rather than the horrific outcome.

Tiredness washed over me, both physical and mental. It was late, and I had no patients even if Janet would've allowed me to be on call tonight. The effects of the mind probe didn't seem to linger, but I knew I was more shaken than I'd ever been before, and considering what had happened in the last two years, that was saying a great deal. I'd had to face some terrible truths while strapped to that gurney, and they hadn't disappeared in the rescue.

As I poured another glass, I realized they wouldn't ever disappear.

"Doc?"

His voice slid over me and I jerked, accidentally spilling a small amount of the expensive Glenmorangie. "Colonel," I greeted as evenly as possible.

The man in me didn't want to deal with him right now. He'd argued with me about trying to save the wraith we'd turned human. He'd been okay with leaving those turned men to revert back into wraith, and turn cannibals, feeding off each other. What none of us had known at the time was their ability to connect and send a call through space. And then he'd murdered a hundred, without trying to save any. I wanted to hate Sheppard, to blame everything on his shoulders because it was so much easier than looking in a mirror and knowing how much of this burden I bore.

I'd created the retrovirus, and it'd almost killed Sheppard.

"Care to talk about it?"

He was still hanging in the doorway, lazy and unconcerned, but he wasn't fooling me. I'd been his doctor for too long. Sheppard was feeling a lot of things, and least of all was anger…at me, at Elizabeth…the wraith, himself. More than anything, he was feeling the weight of what he'd done. As his friend, I gestured to the chair in front of me. "I'm not sure how much talking I'd be interested in, Colonel, but care to share a drink?"

The relief was strong. Some people might've missed it, but I didn't. Looking at those hollow eyes made me thankful I hadn't sent him away. Maybe what I needed to restore my own sense of empathy was to see the pain in everyone else around me, instead of focusing on my own.

I had an extra glass in the drawer where I kept the bottle, and took one out now, hoping the man had enough sense to have eaten when we got back. Sheppard was all ready running on empty before this, his concussion not the least of his problems. We'd had a lot to cope with; before and after Elizabeth had returned.

Rodney had asked Sheppard to try and pilot the hive ship, thinking perhaps the traces of Iratus DNA would make a difference. It hadn't, and I hadn't admitted how much relief that brought me. The thought that I might have left him irretrievably changed to the degree that the wraith technology responded to him almost made me ill.

Pouring him half a glass, I watched as he sat. He took it gratefully, and smiled half-heartedly, raising it towards me. "Here's to living another day."

"At what cost?" I replied bitterly. My glass stayed firmly on my desk.

His lips thinned. "At whatever cost we have to pay, Carson." He looked like he wanted to say more, but he took a sip instead, staring at me over the rim of his glass.

I smiled grimly, afraid the cost was going to be too high for our souls in the end. We might wind up saving the galaxy, but there wouldn't be anyone to save us. We'd be damaged irretrievably in the process; how could we live with the burdens we were accruing against our consciences?

Raised on morality, taught that there were lines in the sand worth dying for, and maybe, if it had been only our own lives, we would've stayed true to those ethics, but it wasn't our lives, it was a galaxy, stunted and fed upon. An entire galaxy. We were selling our souls to the devil so that thousands, maybe millions, might live.

Yet this…it went beyond the pall of wrong. I'd chastised the Hoffans for far less than what I'd done with the retrovirus. I met his gaze, and we held it, for long enough to exchange things that can't be said. He knew I was hurting, suffering. Knew I hated what I'd done, what he'd done. And I knew he'd believed there was never any choice in the outcome. He'd understood long before I had that the retrovirus was a bad idea. You don't try to turn your enemy into 'one of us' because no matter how much they might seem changed on the outside, they could still put a knife in your back when you weren't looking.

You can bring a sheep into the house. Put clothes on its back, pretend that there isn't anything different between you and it, but when you have nothing to eat and your choice is to starve or kill that sheep you've made into a friend…the clothes, the companionship wouldn't matter, because in the end, that sheep is still food.

We drank in quiet after that, my emotions drained, leaving me feeling incredibly empty. I saw the same emptiness in Sheppard's eyes, and felt the odd impulse to hold him close; something I couldn't, and wouldn't do.

The bottle grew emptier, and I know we were both drunk.

Sheppard had grown tipsy fast. I saw it in his uncoordinated drinks, the tumbler hitting the table sooner than he'd expected on the return trip, the glassy look in his eyes. I'm not sure what prodded me into what I did next. Maybe the fact that I was drunk myself, and wanted to hear him admit to feeling what I felt.

"Does it eat at you, Colonel…what we did?"

He pulled the glass away from his lips, and narrowed his eyes sloppily at me. When he spoke, his voice was husky with scotch, rough and tired. "I think," he said solemnly, "that it's going to devour me before we win, Doc."

TBC…after Irresistible