Chapter 1: The News

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Jack O'Neill was a worried man. It had been a full ten days since he had found his lover –one Dr. Daniel Jackson – huddled up on their bathroom floor puking his guts out. The same routine had been repeated every day since, often intermingled with the linguist falling asleep over his work or bursting into tears at the slightest of provocations. Finally, when Daniel had fainted just SG-1 was about to go off world, enough was enough. Now Jack paced nervously outside the infirmary while Janet Fraiser ran a battery of tests on the ever-ailing Daniel.

"Sir." Sam Carter offered tentatively. "I'm sure Daniel will be fine. He's pretty resilient for all the trouble he gets in. Dr. Fraiser has taken care of him every time something has happened. If there's anyone you can trust with him, it's Janet."

In the infirmary, Dr. Fraiser watched cringing as she handed Daniel a vomit pan. "It's been ten days?" she asked him, marking information on a clipboard. "It can't be food poisoning, Daniel."

Daniel gave her as best a glare as he could while heaving up what he believed was the last little bit of his stomach lining. "What else could it be? We've not been off world in over a week and I haven't messed with anything brought back from off world. I haven't had the time since I've been trying to catch up on the translations I keep falling asleep over." He mentally cursed in every language he knew as he went back to dry-heaving.

"How has your home life been?" Janet asked. She produced a syringe of a clear liquid and injected it into the IV to combat the nausea. "How are you and Jack doing?" She ran a friendly hand up and down his back, inwardly cringing at her helplessness to ease his illness. One of the techs was running blood and urine analyses while she attempted to stall the symptoms. Poor Daniel just seemed to get more miserable.

Daniel groaned as he lay back on the bed, a wave of tiredness washing over him as the meds kicked in. "There has to be something wrong with me. And I want to know what so we can fix it and I can get on with my life." He yawned.

"Daniel…how is your sex life?" The voice was that of Dr. Eva Chance Pratt, Fraiser's protégé. The petite strawberry-blonde was clutching a sheath of papers, looking perplexed. "I –I mean…Dr. Jackson…are you and Colonel O'Neill…active?"

Fraiser frowned and took the papers. Eva Chance rarely asked sensitive questions; Fraiser sometimes had to force her to ask when a concerned airman's last period was. As the chief medical officer began to read the results provided by her tech, Eva Chance emptied the kidney-shaped pan. "I-It might explain some of my findings," added the younger woman.

Daniel blinked. "Excuse me? Jack and I's sex life is our private business, thank you. We're both clean so I don't see what it has to do with anything involving me being sick." He looked between the two women.

Eva Chance colored visibly as Fraiser gasped, the reality sinking in. The elder looked up from the papers with eyes wide. "Daniel, I'm afraid it does involve you being sick."

The younger spoke to her shoes. "Dr. Jackson, the urine and blood test both found an elevated hormone level which is only found in…in pregnant women. Your estrogen levels are also elevated, and there was trace amounts of blood in a sample I took from your vomit. I…I think…"

"Eva Chance's findings say you're pregnant, Daniel," Fraiser said to her subordinate's relief.

Daniel sputtered. "But that's…I can't…I'm MALE for Heaven's sake! There's no possible way I can be pregnant. I don't…I'm not made to conceive and carry and deliver children!"

Eva Chance coughed. "Dr. Jackson, in your career in the Stargate Program, you've died sixteen times and Ascended and Descended twice. Nothing about you is impossible."

Fraiser chuckled, amused by her young tech. "We want to do a CAT scan and a sonogram to be sure. Dr. Pratt is right; you've been exposed to a lot of strange things since you've been here. We want to clear the findings as false positives. It's standard procedure." She nodded to Eva Chance, signaling her to prep the equipment.

Daniel took his glasses off and rubbed his face with both hands. He dropped them with a sigh. "Alright. But I want Jack present just in case." He had no idea what he, let alone JACK, was going to do if he was indeed pregnant.

"I'll let Colonel O'Neill in," added Eva Chance, scampering to the door.

Jack half-ran to Daniel's beside and took the archaeologist's hand. "They figure out what was wrong?" he asked, though he wanted to kiss Daniel better. However, he reminded himself that Daniel had been vomiting not ten minutes before, so that may have been gross.

Daniel swallowed sharply. "Well they have a theory. Janet wants to run a couple tests to confirm it. I just wanted you here." He closed his eyes and squeezed Jack's hand. "They…they think I'm pregnant." He waited for Jack's reaction.

Having been Daniel's lover for almost two years, not much really surprised Jack O'Neill. Today, however, that pronouncement had him floored. He looked at the two attending medical women as if they had sprouted two extra heads. "I think they may have spent too much time on-base. That's impossible. I know from intimate experience that you're male, Daniel."

Eva Chance shuddered where she stood across the room. "Way too much information, Colonel," she muttered.

Daniel opened his eyes and gestured at the two women. "That's what I told them. But as Dr. Pratt pointed out, I've died sixteen times and Ascended twice. And that was supposed to be impossible."

"…She has a point," he admitted, glancing at Fraiser. "How you feeling?" Immediately he regretted it. Unbidden, an image of Sara when she was pregnant with Charlie sprang to mind. When he had asked her the same, it had not been pretty.

Daniel gave Jack a small smile. "Well I'm not throwing up anymore. Though I'm not completely sold on their theory. You okay?"

In a rare show of public affection, Jack lifted the hand he held and kissed it. "Just worried about you." His free hand rose to tousle the already unruly hair. "Listen to Fraiser for once, okay? Don't rush off to work again."

Eva Chance rolled over a portable sonogram and handed her supervisor a clear bottle of gel before taking up station to take notes. Fraiser turned her attention to her patient. "Let me see your stomach, Daniel."

With a huge sigh, Daniel pulled up his shirt. "I still think your idea is impossible. And I do not rush off to work Jack. I just happen to like my job."

"You do too, Space Monkey." Jack pointed out, distracting Daniel from the cool gel being spread on his stomach. "Remember when you tore up your shoulder and went back to work as soon as the drugs wore off?"

Fraiser's eyes moved to the black-and-white display screen, moving first over the top of Daniel's stomach and then down, scanning intestines. She didn't want to think that he was pregnant, but Dr. Pratt's record of diagnosis and treatment was impeccable. Being a younger woman, she was more familiar with newer medical conditions and genetic defects than Fraiser was. Eva Chance may have been shy, but she was a good doctor. She wouldn't have brought back the result without checking and triple-checking the analysis. With luck, if the archaeologist really was pregnant, she would have an answer as to how.

"There were very important translations I had to do. No one else could read them," Daniel replied.

"They weren't so important that you had a reason to risk your health, Dan-" Jack broke off as a new sound started throbbing in the room. It was a sound he hadn't heard in nearly twenty years, but he knew it well: the sonogram distortion of a fetus's beating heart.

"Holy shit," he breathed.

Daniel stared at the sonogram screen where something fluttering, obviously the fetus's heart, was pictured. "That's…It's…I'm…" His eyes rolled back into his head and he dropped back further on the bed in a dead faint.