Jack glanced up at the control room the next day as he, Daniel and Teal'c waited for the kawoosh of the Stargate opening for their trip to pick up this animal of Teal'c's. Captain Samantha Carter stood there in the window, watching them; her face looked strained and pale. He hadn't seen her since that meeting with Hammond. Behind him, he heard the whoosh of the wormhole, and Hammond's voice came over the speakers. "Good luck, SG-1. Godspeed."

Sam sat hunched over her computer; this was the part she hated, loathed, and despised. The reports. Whether it was military reports or scientific reports, it was boring as hell to sit down and type out things she already knew.

"Captain Carter?"

Sam blinked, pulled out of her reverie, and glanced over to the door. Doctor Frasier stood there, backlit by the hall lights. "Doctor Frasier? What can I do for you?"

"I'm going down to the commissary for a coffee—want to come with?"

Sam blinked. Her office was not on the way to the commissary from the infirmary. Still, hadn't she been moaning over her lack of female friends? Besides, given the choice between going for coffee and working on this report, she'd take coffee any day. "Sure," she said as she saved the document.

"Sure you don't want some fruit or something to go with your coffee?"

Sam shot the petite redhead a look as she set her coffee cup down at their table.

"Sorry." Doctor Frasier raised her hands. "I sometimes find it hard to turn the doctor part of my brain off. And you do need to eat healthier, now."

"You're probably right." Sam sighed and got up, heading for the counter where she grabbed a banana. Once back in her seat she began to peel it. "So, was that your ulterior motive for the coffee? Getting me to eat?"

"No, you're a big girl, Captain," Frasier said with a smile. "I think you can take care of yourself. I just moved here, don't have any friends in the area, and there are so few women on base that it's hard to make new ones. Especially considering how much overtime we're putting in due to being short staffed."

"And you figured I could use a friend, as well," Sam said, nodding. She took a bite out of her banana, considering. While Sam didn't like being a charity case, the other woman had a point. She needed a friend, and she liked what she knew of the other woman. "So where are you from?"

Jack stared down at Nefreyu's body, lying on the forest floor. God, it had happened again. Just like Charlie. The boy had come to him, interested in his weapons; Jack had told him to leave it alone; the boy had ignored it and wound up dead. If he were a superstitious man, he'd say that Fate or God or somebody was trying to give him a message. He'd failed as a father, failed as horribly as you possibly could. He knew that. This second chance at fatherhood—maybe the kid would be better off without him around. All he did, it seemed, was draw them into danger.

"O'Neill, could this not be a trap?" Teal'c's bass rumble came from behind him.

Jack tore his gaze from the boy and turned to the forest around them. "Yeah, you're right." Apophis was still out there, and they were on a fairly major trail, with the brightly dressed Nox to draw the eye. He'd had enough practice over the years to keep an eye on his surroundings while thinking of something else. Hell, who was he kidding. There was a good chance the baby wouldn't get born at all. He'd thought that with his offer to take custody, Carter would give up the abortion idea, but clearly that wasn't the case. She was ready to put her career before her child's life, and he didn't like the idea of a woman like that having custody of a child any more than he liked the idea of having another one himself. They were some pair, all right. Hell, she knew about Charlie—that was probably why she'd rather get an abortion than have the kid and give it to him. She probably figured it would save time and effort all around.

Jack knew he was being unfair, but couldn't bring himself to care.

"So, what's it like?" Janet asked. She was on call, but things were quiet in the infirmary and there was no need for her to stay there, so she'd followed Sam to her office to keep her company while she wrote her reports.

"What's what like?" Sam asked, glancing up from the requisition she was filling out. Most of the equipment she really needed was expensive or rare or both, and getting it was taking longer than she'd expected.

"Being pregnant. Getting ready to be a mom." The brunette looked at her seriously, head tilted to the side.

Sam froze, caught off guard. She avoided Janet's eyes for a second. "I don't know," she admitted finally. "There's been so much going on, and I haven't even decided—I mean, I'm pretty sure I'm going to keep the baby. But there's just so much going on, and there's been so little time to get used to it." She shrugged. "I never really had the normal teenage girl fantasies, you know, the ones where you find the man of your dreams and lived in the suburbs with a white picket fence, 2.3 children and a dog. But I always kind of figured that if I ever did end up having kids, I'd at least be married to the father."

"I know what you mean," Janet said. "I've always wanted children, but never found the right guy to have them with." She snorted. "I told you about my ex. For a while, briefly, I thought he might be the one. I've always been relieved, when I thought of it, that we didn't end up having kids together. He would have been a horrible father, and it would have meant we'd have to stay in contact." She smiled wistfully. "But I would like to be a mom, someday."

"Yeah," Sam said. "I just … wish I knew what kind of a father Jack is going to be. I wish I knew more about him. We're going to be raising a baby together, and I hardly know the man!"

"'Jack'?" Janet said with a smile.

"Yeah, he took me to dinner," Sam said. She could feel herself blushing, slightly; that was the curse of fair skin, every little flush showed. "We're not in the same chain of command, any more, there's nothing wrong with it."

"I didn't say there was," the other woman responded mildly. "In fact, it's a good thing. You didn't think the baby was going to grow up calling his daddy 'sir,' did you?"

Sam snickered. "Not really, no."

"So, tell Auntie Janet all about your date."

"Auntie Janet?" Sam raised her eyebrows.

"Well, I'm hoping we'll all be stationed here long enough for me to be an 'auntie,'" Janet returned. "Given the problems they're having finding people for this facility and the clearance level needed to work here I can't imagine they'll be transferring people around and out at the rate most bases go through. And if I'm not going to have kids of my own for the foreseeable future, and if I have absolutely no prospects for a honey at the moment, at least I can live vicariously through you."

"And that way, when the baby is messy or noisy, you can just hand it right back."

"Exactly." Janet smirked. "How else? But you're not getting out of it that easily. The date, Sam!"

Sam cocked her head, thinking. "It was fun," she admitted. "We went to O'Malley's Bar and Grill here in Colorado Springs. We started off with the Simpsons, moved on to Rocky and Bullwinkle, and from there went on to trading funny childhood stories and anecdotes from places we'd been stationed."

"Fun is good, Captain," Janet said with a smile. "But I get the feeling there's a 'but' involved here, somewhere."

"There is," Sam admitted. "We didn't really talk about anything important, like how we're going to handle the child or anything. That's not exactly true," she forced herself to add. "He did say that if I didn't want it, he'd take custody. But that's about it. Everything was just surface stuff, you know? Any time we got close to anything important or serious, he'd veer off into funny stories. It was incredibly frustrating. Fun while it lasted, but I didn't learn much about what really makes the colonel tick. I've learned more about Jack from Daniel than from Jack himself."

"I can imagine," Janet said. "Still, in my experience most guys are like that. Especially in the military, which doesn't exactly encourage sharing of feelings and fears."

"I know that," Sam replied. "My dad's a general; I grew up following him from one base to another. It's just … I know there's got to be something behind Jack's sarcastic façade. And not knowing worries me. You know about Jonas, right? I keep wondering if Jack has a dark side, too."

Janet looked down at her hands, suddenly introspective. Sam frowned. "Janet, do you know something about Jack that I should know?"

"I shouldn't say anything," Janet said. She sighed. "But it doesn't break the letter of doctor-patient confidentiality, I suppose. I was the primary physician for the initial mission to Abydos just over a year ago. The Colonel O'Neill I examined prior to that mission—he wasn't the Jack O'Neill we've all come to know. He was, well, a little scary. He was very focused, no sense of humor, no real personality to him at all. Just the mission. When he came back, it was like he was a different man. Whatever was going on in his mind, whatever issues he had, he'd taken care of them. And he's better now than he was then."

Sam listened carefully, to what she said and what she didn't say. "So you think whatever demons he has, he's taken care of them?" It wasn't what she'd hoped for, but it wasn't what she'd feared, either. And knowing about it, she could deal with it. Far better than her nebulous fears had been.

"I don't know the man well," Janet said, "but I think so, yes."