They keep telling him it wasn't his fault, as if saying so will make it true. He knows better, of course; it was his weakness, his inability, his mistake. McKay uncharacteristically tried to shoulder some of the blame, but Beckett knows just where the blame lies. He feels it heavy on his shoulders when he tries to sleep at night.

General O'Neill, Commander of Earth's front line of defense, was the lucky one. He died instantly, so close to the exploding drone that there was very little left to recover. Beckett never met O'Neill, but he knows a lot about him, knows how much he sacrificed in seven years as the CO of SG-1, knows how much his people respected him.

When Daniel Jackson came, days later, and told him that it wasn't his fault, Beckett could tell it had taken him that long to suppress the helpless anger that still lay just below the surface. Daniel came to tell him he was forgiven (as if that would help), but he started talking about O'Neill and couldn't seem to stop, the words almost torn from him. He talked about how Jack O'Neill was loyal and sarcastic and annoying, and had a hero complex, and would sacrifice anything for his team. He talked about how Jack was a good friend and a brilliant commander and an all-around great guy even though he could be as stubborn as a mule.

"He wouldn't have held it against you," Daniel said at the end, then smiled a bitter smile that said perhaps he wasn't so forgiving. Daniel tried hard to bury the grief and anger, but Beckett is a doctor; he's seen it a million times and he knows it all too well.

No one came to talk to Beckett about Major John Sheppard, because it seemed that Sheppard had no one. No friends, no family, no ties. The file that Beckett had found had been on a man who should have been married with four kids, not stuck alone in Antarctica. Sheppard was handsome, with black hair and striking green eyes, and he was an amazing pilot. His file said that he was loyal to a fault, to the point of disobeying orders to rescue stranded friends. Beckett thinks he would have liked to know Sheppard.

When Beckett went to the hospital, that once, to visit, what he saw in the hospital bed didn't look anything like the dark-haired green-eyed man in the file. In fact, it didn't look human. It looked cooked, destroyed, taken apart and put back together all wrong. Beckett, as a doctor, had seen such before, but never before had it been his fault, his responsibility, his stupid mistake. He apologized through the massive lump in his throat, and then he fled.

Sheppard died three days later, and Beckett got the feeling that pretty much everyone was relieved. No one deserved that kind of life, if it could even be called a life. Sheppard was better off.

The day after Sheppard's death, Beckett pulls out the file again and looks into the picture's piercing green eyes. "I'm sorry," he says softly, and knows it won't make a difference. "You should have been with your family somewhere. Not here. Anywhere but here. I...I didn't mean for it to happen this way."

His entire life's purpose has been to save lives, to mend the broken, to pull people back from the brink. Now he has destroyed everything he ever meant to do. He took two people who were whole, and he broke them, and he can't fix it, and he doesn't know what to do.

He goes home.

It's dark and raining when he knocks on the door, and he sees the surprise in his mum's eyes when she opens it. She wasn't expecting him back. "Carson!" She says, but the smile on her face fades when she sees his expression. "Are ya all right? Did somethin' happen?"

He stands outside, chilled to the bone, and pretends that the water rolling down his face is all rain. "Mum," he says. "Mum, I--"

"Carson?" She steps forward and reaches for him the way she used to when he was very young and had had a nightmare. Suddenly he's crying, and she's hugging him, making little 'shh' sounds that take him back to his childhood.

"Mum," he says. "There was an accident--it was my fault--and they're dead, and I canna fix them--"

"It's all right, Carson," she says, even though she knows it's not. "It's all right."

She stands there for a long time, in the rain, and holds her son as the world shatters around them.