Jack paced the length of the control room. First one direction and then the other. His head ached, but he refused to take anything for the pain. The Doc's medications tended to make him fuzzy. He needed to be sharp, he needed to be in command of getting his friends back.

It had taken so much longer than he'd liked to get Teal'c debriefed and ready to make the trip back to the Goa'uld laboratory. Just as they had been ready to dial out, another team had returned through the gate unexpectedly. They had suffered injuries, and the base had been thrown into emergency mode once again taking care of them.

Finally all was ready and the computer was dialing the address where his friends were waiting.

What was happening to them? It had been hours now and anything could have happened to them in that time.

Jack refused to think about it. Just get them home, then worry about their condition. He watched as the gate opened with a whoosh.

Teal'c stepped through and disappeared from his sight. At last.Jack's stomach clenched at the thought of what the jaffa might find on the other side.

The change was complete.

The computer ran scans to ensure that all was well. The twosubjects were sleeping, waiting to be retrieved by their masters.

The gate opened and a jaffa stepped through. The computer powered down the facility, satisfied.

All was as it should be.

The colonel continued to pace while he waited for word from Teal'c. The minutes had ticked by slowly since Teal'c had stepped through the gate and Jack's nerves were stretched tight. The technicians in the room did their jobs quietly and efficiently. They didn't know exactly what was going on, just that two members of SG-1 were missing, but that was enough. This team was the heart of the program. They held their breath with the colonel and waited.

Finally, the gate spun and the signal from Teal'c came. But, instead of simply bringing their missing friends back, he radioed ahead a request. O'Neill didn't think about it's implications, he simply acted; leave the thinking for later.

"You heard the man," he growled to the technicians, "get out."

They left the room at best speed, clearing the hallways to the infirmary in front of them.

Daniel sat on the infirmary bed with his knees drawn up to his chest,arms wrapped around them,head bowed low. He was doing his very best not to see the people moving around him, to not feel the poking and prodding of the doctor or the strangeness of his own body. And he was most definitely trying hard not to think about this most current situation that SG-1 had found itself in. Not hard considering the fact that since he had woken up in the alien lab, his mind had refused to wrap itself around what had happened.

"How are they, Doc?" Daniel heard Jack's voice next to him.

Opening his eyes a little, he slid a glance in Jack's direction. He didn't think he'd ever seen his friend so angry, his fists were clenching and unclenching. Daniel knew how he felt. He really wanted to punch something himself.

Teal'cexplained to them what he knew about the 'place of change' as they were being examined. He told them how he had arrived to find them unconscious. He had been able to revive them and get them back through the gate.

Daniel remembered the nightmare of waking in that place. Of realizing that he had been changed in a way that he hadn't even recognized his own body. Even groggy from the alien sedative, he and Sam had realized the enormity of what had happened to them.

The trip back through the gate had been surreal. Concentrating on watching Teal'c and Teal'c alone, he couldn't even look at Sam because that would have made what had happened to them real, to see that she had been changed, too.

Closing his eyes again, he let the sounds and smells of the infirmary wash over him. He heard the beeps and hums, inhaled the pungent aromas that was always evident in the place. He tried to let that familiarity convince himself that everything was alright. But he knew he would fail. The world had changed irrevocably and nothing would ever be the same again.

"Colonel O'Neill," Daniel heard Fraiser answer, "Daniel and Sam are fine. They check out in perfect health."

"Except...," even with his eyes closed, Daniel could see his friend waving his arms around indicating the condition of his teammates.

"Well, yes," she admitted reluctantly, "except for the obvious of course."

"Of course," was Jack's sarcastic reply.

"I've asked the general to come down here for debriefing. I really don't want Daniel and Sam being paraded through the halls right now." Her tone was curt in response to his.

Jack's voice softened, "I'm sorry, Doc. I know none of ... this is your fault, you're just trying to help."

There were footsteps and Daniel heard the general's voice, "What can you tell us, doctor? How are our kids?"

"Well, general, as I was telling Colonel O'Neill, aside from the obvious, they're in perfect health."

"Can this 'change,' whatever's been done to them, be reversed?"

Now that was the question wasn't it? Daniel waited breathlessly for the answer.

There was silence. Silence was never good.

"That's just it, general," Janet finally spoke, "there's absolutely no evidence that anything's been 'done' to them. I'll need to run more tests, but initial examination shows them be perfectly healthy."

Daniel finally looked up to see his friends standing there. Jack, General Hammond, the doctor, and Teal'c standing quietly to the side. When he spoke his voice broke embarrassingly, "Except..." he cleared his throat and started again, "except when I went through the gate I was a man and now..." he couldn't say it quite yet, "I'm not." His voice trailed off as all the eyes in the room turned to look at him.

Daniel could feel the tears welling up inside of him and he looked away—straight at Sam. Well, Sam as she would have been if she'd been born a man - handsome and blonde with startlingly blue eyes. Daniel knew the pain he saw there was mirrored in his own.

He turned back to the others and just said it, "I mean look at me. I'm a woman."

He buried his head in his arms as he felt the tears start to flow. God he didn't want them to see him like this, crying like a girl. But he didn't seem to be able to stop it as he felt the tears streak down his cheeks to drip onto the blanket below. He didn't look to see who tucked a Kleenex into his clenched fist, but he knew it was Jack.

Jack had been doing his best to avoid thinking the words since Teal'c had brought them through the gate, but it was impossible to avoid now. Daniel was a woman. If Daniel as a man had turned heads, Daniel as a woman was going to cause traffic accidents. And Sam, well Jack had a feeling that Sam had a masculine body the Marines of SG7 would envy.

"Doctor, how could this even happen?" the general asked.

Jack knew how he felt. He needed something he could quantify to help deal with the whole bizarre situation.

"Frankly I don't know. I don't even know what this is. It's like their bodies were born as this gender, all the way down to their DNA. If Daniel had been born a woman, this is what she would look like, this is what she would be." They could all hear the frustration in her voice. Janet took her responsibilities seriously and she didn't like it when something happened to one of her friends that she couldn't fix.

"Hello," Jack couldn't help the snarky tone in his voice, "Daniel wasn't born a woman, Carter was."

"Colonel O'Neill," Carter spoke for the first time and Jack was forced for the first time to really take a look at what had happened to his second in command. The face was so familiar, still Sam, but the lines and angles her face were all masculine, harder somehow. Her body was now athletic and well-muscled. That voice, lower in timber now, wavered, "Jack, it's not Janet's fault that this was done to us. And it's not your fault either."

"Dammit, Sam, if I'd been there..." he began

"You'd be a woman, now, Jack." Daniel finished for him, his voice muffled and tearful. When he raised his head, his eyes were red and swollen, but he seemed to have regained some measure of calm as he spoke. "There was some sort of gas that knocked us out as you were going through the gate. If you'd been there, you wouldn't have had a chance to help us. You'd have been… changed like us. Trust me, you wouldn't like it, at all."

"Hey" Sam said in a strange masculine voice, "this is no picnic either. How do you guys deal with it"

"Kids, this is so not the time." The colonel moved to stand between the two beds where his friends rested. "We'll figure this out." They were SG-1, of course they would figure it out.

"Just keep telling yourself that, Jack."

Jack reached out to lay a reassuring hand on his friend's shoulder. It felt strange under his hand. They were still wearing the strange garments they had been dressed in when Teal'c had found them unconscious in the lab. Daniel's was short and silky with a strap over one shoulder, leaving the other bare, the one under Jack's hand. The skin was soft and smooth and totally foreign to him. Jack snatched his hand away as if burned.

Daniel smiled sadly at him, understanding and forgiving that instinctive reaction. Hesitantly Jack put his hand back and gave a small squeeze.

"Ok, people," the general spoke and the colonel gratefully turned his attention that direction, "let's just calm down. Dr. Jackson, Major Carter, I know this is hard, but we need to ask some questions here. Are you up to it?"

"Yes, sir," came Sam's prompt reply. Jack could see that gleam in her eye that told him her scientific curiosity had been piqued.

"You heard the doctor, we're perfectly healthy." What Daniel may have intended to come out as levity instead sounded sarcastic and bitter. "I'm sorry, sir." He frowned at the sound of his own voice, "I didn't mean that the way it sounded."

"It's alright, son, er... Dr. Jackson, this is hard, I know. Did you find anything in that facility to help us figure this out?"

"No, sir," Sam answered. "Janet and I could go over the video but without years of study onsite I don't think we're going to find anything."

"Absolutely not," declared the general. "From what Teal'c told us earlier, this is going to happen to anyone who goes to that lab. I'm not taking that chance until we know how to turn the machinery off or neutralize it in some fashion."

"Well, let's just not neutralize it until Sam and I have been... I don't know... changed back, cured, whatever..." Daniel spluttered in frustration.

"I think we're going to have to have a whole new vocabulary to talk about this." Janet smiled gently at Daniel. "In the meantime I would recommend that we keep Daniel and Sam on the base until they get some equilibrium over this whole situation."

Daniel, for one, had no problem with that.

To be continued...

Thanks for the feedback ;-)