Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Author's Note: SGA doesn't really give a ton of insight into Carson's history... so this story is a lot about how I see Carson.
When he was a little boy his babysitter would take him outside and tell him stories about faeries. She would tell him that only good little boys got to see them and good little boys sat quietly at the table and ate all their vegetables without a fight.
For his part… Carson made his babysitter realize that she should have changed her stipulations a little. Carson loved vegetables, if he ate them he'd grow up to be big and strong like his Dad, and there were very few things he wanted more in life than to be like his dad.
Unfortunately one of the things that ranked right up there was exploring the vast green forests and fields around his house.
Before long he knew every deer trail, stream, rock, and tree. He marked them all with sixteen scuffed knees, three pairs of ruined boots in one year, thirty-six plain bandages stolen from the medicine cabinet and all carefully applied to anything that he felt warranted "first-aid", more than a hundred bruises, one twisted ankle, one broken right arm, one pair of particularly muddy pants, and exactly fifty-two and half "Look what I found, Can we Keep him/her?" conversations with his mother and/or father.
Yes, Carson Beckett longed for adventure…
It drove his academic father and mother crazy. For one whole month they had locked him inside the house with various books and charts to read. He hadn't minded, learning was as much an adventure to him as exploring outside. His parents were less than thrilled when their month of imposed scholar-hood had yielded nothing more than their son taking books with him on his day long excursions into the woods. More often than not, Carson would hike until the sun was high in the sky, sit down and read for a couple of hours, before rushing to make it home for supper.
Except on school days, when he occupied his time with learning, his second favorite thing in the world.
It wasn't until he was fourteen and his father took him to the Royal Academy of Medicine in Glasgow that Carson truly understood what adventure was and realized what he wanted in life.
He wanted to be a doctor.
He had of course shocked his parents.
Not by saying he wanted to be a doctor, after all his father was a doctor.
No he shocked them by applying to and being accepting into the Royal College of Surgeons in London.
Carson was terrified. He'd never lived in a big city… but Carson never backed down from a challenge.
That was why after graduating at the top of his class and working in Europe for a couple of years. He was recruited into the Stargate Program. A bright young doctor like him could go far they said…
They didn't quiet explain the "far" part well enough.
Sadly, in his first year as a doctor at the Cheyenne Mountain complex, his father died. It was the hardest thing that Carson had ever dealt with in his twenty-five years of life. He'd taken some time off, time to spend with his mother… time to spend going through his father's things and remembering the last time that they'd spent time together.
It was hard, but it taught him a lesson about how frail life was and how important it was that he never give up fighting.
When he returned to the Stargate Program, his position had been filled by another "rising star" in the medical field and he'd been transferred to Antarctica.
Not much to look at, not much to explore, and not much use for a trained surgeon when the only thing you were treating was caffeine addiction, mild hypothermia, paper cuts, and headaches brought on by the aforementioned Caffeine addiction.
Of course there was that pesky ATA gene thing… which to be quiet frank both thrilled and scared the hell of him.
Still… it was in Antarctica that he first met John Sheppard.
Of course, it was after he'd accidentally fired a drone at him… but that was all details.
There are very few people that you meet in this world and in the first moments that you lay eyes on them you know them. Like you understand them to be kindred spirits, someone who you can rely on, trust, be friends with.
John Sheppard was one of those people.
Not that Carson was anything like John; he wasn't rugged or lethal in the way Sheppard was. He didn't ooze cool like him, or have a wicked sense of humor and a smile in the face of sheer unadulterated terror.
Still, Carson knew it from the start.
He was glad he hadn't killed him with the drone and added to that relief every time he was able, by god's own grace and some luck on his part, save the Major when he came in with some strange injury or illness related to this bizarre universe.
John and him may not have been friends like Rodney and him were friends…
But he sensed that John knew the same things he did, that he understood and stood for the same things…
He knew that John would never stop fighting for his friends lives. That Sheppard had a core made of solid steel with a backbone to match. Carson knew that he was the same in that regard. When it came to his patients he was unrelenting, unyielding, and more determined to save souls than the devil was to steal them.
For the most part, John and he didn't fight. There was the time that John had implied that his turtles would make good soup, but all in all they limped along nicely.
At least John limped... and Carson... well he made sure that the Major didn't hurt himself to badly.
Carson would never tell Sheppard, but every time his team left on a mission, Carson would make sure that everyone available knew they were on call, that the infirmary was fully stocked, and that he was on hand and ready when one of them arrived hurt… because it always happened that someone on Atlantis' Away-team one got hurt.
This lead to hours of hand ringing and pacing on his part and the being called a mother hen by his staff… but Carson didn't mind. It's what friends did for one another.
In the end Carson could call John Sheppard his friend, and he was abundantly glad of that.
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