"Enough with the references to Janet and my future children, Jack," Daniel said.
The doorbell rang and Jack stayed put, not needing to move because Daniel sprang into action like he had been goosed. Jack immediately knew that it wasn't Sam because of the timbre of the two male voices in the conversation at the door. He guessed that it was the pizza delivery guy. His supposition was confirmed when Daniel returned carrying two pies. He just pointed wordlessly to the kitchen and Daniel trucked them on into the other room and dropped them off.
"It's now 7:10," Daniel said.
"I really do know what it means when the big hand is just past the 7 and the little hand is on the two without any help, Daniel," Jack said. "Settle." The last was a command.
"I think I hear a car," Daniel said. Jack looked over at his dog who hadn't moved. "I think I'm going wait for the dog to react," he said. Five more minutes went by. Truth be told, Jack actually was getting a bit concerned but it made him feel less so to needle Daniel about Daniel's nervousness so he continued to give Daniel a hard time. Then suddenly the dog raised his head and got tense. "See," Jack said pointing at the dog.
Daniel stood up and went to the door. He came back trailing Sam. She seemed to have trouble meeting either man's eyes and had clearly been crying. Jack hated to see her like this but he also felt more certain of his ground than with the persona she had displayed in his office. "Hi, Sam," he greeted her warmly. "You hungry yet? The pizza's already here. Or would you rather talk first and then eat?"
Sam said, apologetically, "I shouldn't have let you order pizza, at least not for me. I doubt I'm going to feel like eating anything." She dropped on the sofa, almost as if she couldn't stand up any more. Daniel had gone into Mach 5 concern mode, Jack observed. Daniel sat down close to Sam and tried to take her hand. She got up and moved to a chair. Jack puffed his cheeks out and grimaced. This was not starting out at all well.
Sam picked up a throw pillow from the chair, looking at it curiously for a moment. Jack could imagine that she was amazed that he owned a throw pillow. He and Sara had gotten very silly in a Bed, Bath, and Beyond the preceding weekend after she had shamed him into buying less ratty towels. Sara had insisted on buying throw pillows for him and placed them herself. Sam shrugged and started turning the pillow around in her hands. She sighed and at last said, words tumbling out almost incoherently, "I have something really difficult to tell both of you. Understand that, well, that I don't expect anything from either one of you but you need to know. You do have rights here and I would never interfere with your relationship with a child of yours." If she had practiced what she was going to say, nervousness had driven it out of her head.
"A child of mine? Has Jack been saying something to you about Janet and me?" Daniel asked, bemused, and flashing on the teasing from a few moments ago.
"Please don't tell me you got Janet pregnant too?" Sam said, her mouth hanging open. "How could you possibly do it that fast?"
"Too? Who else do you think I got pregnant?" Daniel said rather hotly.
Jack interjected, "He didn't get Janet pregnant, Sam."
"Right," Daniel said. "but what are you talking about?"
Sam squeezed her eyes shut hard a moment. "Let's start over. Daniel, you didn't do anything wrong and you didn't get anybody pregnant. But the aliens, when we were captive, they," she hesitated. Both Daniel and Jack were looking at her utterly without a clue. "They used your … They used you to impregnate me."
She looked so utterly miserable that it didn't occur to either of them for a moment that this was a joke. Jack repeated slowly, as if the act would cause some bolt to come out of the heavens and make this all make some sort of sense, "They used Daniel's sperm to make you pregnant?"
She nodded, "And yours."
"AND MINE?" Calmness had fled from Jack's voice.
'Wait a minute here," Daniel said. "You're carrying a child. Is it mine or is it Jack's?"
"I'm carrying twins, two little boys. DNA testing proved they were mine and one of them is yours and one of them is yours." She looked up quickly at each of them in turn and then ducked her head again.
And that's when it really sunk in. Jack and Daniel sat stupefied. No one said anything. Then Jack and Daniel both spoke at the same time.
"When are you due?" Daniel asked simultaneously with Jack asking, "Are you going to have them?"
She responded to Jack first. "Do you honestly think I would kill your baby or Daniel's? For crying out loud, Jack. You lost Charlie and Sha're miscarred. Do you really think I would do that?"
Daniel tried to speak but she waved him down. "I'm due in about four months."
"Sam," Daniel blurted, "you have to marry me. You can't do this alone."
"No I don't," Sam said. "That's no basis for a marriage." Her tone softened. "It's really good of you to offer, so typical of your caring nature, but I wouldn't want to trap either of us in a marriage of convenience. I'm assuming that I will be able to count on both of you to help me and to act as fathers to the boys after they are born."
Jack said, "Of course. That goes without saying." But Daniel, instead of stating his unconditional support, looked at her mutely with so much hurt on his face it was practically unbearable for Jack. Suddenly Daniel turned and almost ran out the door, slamming it behind him.
Sam looked shocked by Daniel's abrupt exit. Jack looked at her sadly and said, "Sam, you are really a fool."
"What?" she gasped.
"That man loves you as much as he loved Sha're, maybe more, and you just threw it in his face. You think the world of him. He's been your best friend until you started pushing him away after we got back. I'd think long and hard about whether you really believe that couldn't grow into something solid." Jack looked aside, trying to decide whether to say the rest of what was on his mind. There was no way it wasn't going to sound brutal but maybe if he'd had the guts to talk about his feelings earlier, things would be better now.
"Look Sam, this is going to make me sound like a conceited ass but I suspect you have feelings for me and maybe you were really hoping, on some level, I would ask you to marry me the way Daniel did. But I'm that rare bird, a one woman man. I've loved Sara since my teens and I never stopped. I'm very attracted to you and in another life, one without Sara, we could have had something. I can't choose you over Sara now. It wouldn't be fair to any of us."
Sam was absolutely still, her face drained of all color. Jack wanted to stop, even take it back but he'd gotten this far. He had to finish. "Daniel's so full of love, so open with his feelings. He can love and love again. He loved Sha're and he loves you. Sam, heads up. He's falling for Janet hard. You may have just driven him the rest of the way into her arms. Be sure you don't want him because your window of opportunity is almost gone."
Sam stirred to life, stood up, dashing tears from her cheeks and, without looking at him, made her own hasty exit. Jack sat in the chair a long time, hurting. He hurt for Sam. He hurt for his baby and Daniel's who wouldn't have the advantage of having all their parents together as a family. He hurt for Daniel, condemned to be a part time father and rejected so openly by a woman he loved. He hurt for Sara. It would cut her like a knife, having lost Charlie and not able to have another child, to have Sam present him with a son. And, selfishly, he hurt most of all for himself. Of course he hurt for the situation with his son but the number one pain, the one making him break out in a cold sweat, was the fear that he would loose Sara over this, again.
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
Somehow Sam got home. She didn't know what she expected when she made her announcement but that wasn't it. She walked shakily into the house and looked longingly at a bottle of white wine purchased before she had been captured. Unable to drink, she turned to the permissible addiction of a huge bowl of chocolate ice cream. She sat at the counter on a high stool and ate it mechanically. It tasted a little off because of the salty tears that kept falling into it but she ate every bite.
As she thought about her options, or lack of them, she paused a moment to wonder at herself. Had she really fantasized in captivity at a future with Daniel as well as Jack? At the time she had convinced herself that it was because she didn't dare just focus on Jack and perhaps lose her connection to what was real and what wasn't. Now she thought about how jealous she had been in the past few weeks, not only of Sara but also of Janet.
No. It wouldn't work. In her daydreams, it had been romance and passion with Jack. With Daniel she had never visualized anything past making out. It had all been about companionship and sharing. She didn't want to settle for that. She wanted the fierce love her parents had had that kept them together even though her father wasn't around much. It couldn't ever be like that with Daniel, could it?
Her gaze fell on a sketch pad and colored pencils left on the counter since she'd brought them home from Walmart a couple of weeks before. She had picked them up on a whim when she had filled the prescription for prenatal vitamins after her first visit to her ob-gyn. Still sniffing, she pulled the pad toward her and opened it up. Time to draw the house she would like to have with her two little ones, not the houses that could never be that she had drawn over and over in her captivity. First, though, she needed to expunge those other houses from her mind, the way she had physically eliminated them by burning their drawings in the fireplace.
She stands outside the A-frame where she and Jack live. It's a cloudy night outside the dark, still house. Jack and their dogs aren't there. In fact, there is no one at all for probably 50 miles in every direction. The wind is whipping through her hair and what had seemed like natural beauty around her in the past, just looks desolate and lonely. She enters the house and walks from room to room. At first she just looks bleakly at all the things they had enjoyed together but then she begins to knock things over, sweep objects to the floor, and kick them aside. She plucks up a hockey trophy from Jack's youth and starts bashing things with it. The wedding pictures grouped together on one wall have their glass shatter very satisfactorily. She breaks a window. She pockets the fire starter next to the fireplace and, at last, she walks into the garage and picks up a can of gasoline. She walks through the first floor with the gasoline, dousing things liberally. The can has more gas in it than is really believable but this is her fantasy. Throwing the can aside just inside the foyer, she uses the starter and, as the blaze begins to spread, she leaves. It's a beautiful conflagration watched from the distance, a terrible heat that can only keep her warm for a while.
She walks now outside the Victorian that she and Daniel share. But unlike the A-frame, it isn't dark. There's a light on upstairs. She walks in slowly, noticing that all the child type clutter is now baby paraphernalia. Instead of a tricycle, there's a double stroller and the lego construction is replaced by a diaper bag on the front hall table. She picks up a rattle lying on the floor and clutches it as she climbs the stairs. One of the two sets of twins living with them in this house on past visits had always had the bedroom at the end of the hall. This is where the light is coming from. She stands in the doorway and sees Daniel, sitting in the rocker with a 6 or 7 month old baby in his arms. The other child is sleeping peacefully in his crib on his stomach, his little butt sticking up in the air. Daniel is talking softly to the little boy whose sobs are just subsiding as his daddy holds him. Daniel looks up at Sam and says, very quietly to the child, "Mommy's here now." Sam backs up out of the room and then runs down the stairs and out into the street. She can't burn this house but can she live in it?
Sam looked down at the pad of paper. She had written "DAD," in block letters. Suddenly she thought of Jacob. She hadn't even asked General Hammond if Jacob had been informed when SG-1 went missing for 5 months. He started a very difficult long term mission right before she went missing. Damn it. She was going to send a message to Jacob, to her dad. She needed him now more than she had since she was a little girl.
