Work Text:
Guilt
by BlackRose
`The funny thing with guilt,' John thought `was that you just didn't know when it was going to hit.'
It could be about something small and insignificant, like the lingering feeling that stayed after stealing the blankets from your partner, eating the last piece of chocolate or hitting the snooze button so you could have the `just five more minutes' that nearly always turned into ten.
Then came the next type, the type that came from something a bit bigger, a bit worse. He still remembered scratching his parents car when he was sixteen, he'd nearly had a heart attack before realising that they had no way of knowing that it was him. That was bad
His parents had assumed that the scratch was from one of the neighbourhood kids bikes, it was, just not the way they thought. The trusting expression when his mother had asked him if he knew anything about it though had nearly broken him then and there.
Then there was something that he'd always assumed would be the worst, the guilt of sending men into battle, suspecting, if not knowing, that some of them weren't going to come back.
But then he experienced the guilt that came with speaking at their funerals, seeing their families. So many faces silently asking him why. And he knew he had a new leader.
Except now he had a new type, the guilt that came from putting that expression on Rodney McKay's face, the guilt that came from being the cause of the broken _expression on the face of a man who had dealt with wraith and losing his people. A man who went out and fought every day even though he was only a scientist. A man who had fought for his and everyone else's life and won time and time again.
He couldn't remember how many times he owed his life to Rodney.
And he had put that _expression there.
And that was worse...
John shook his head, `*how could that be worse*?'
Fin
AN Like I said -shrugs