A/N: Haha! Take THAT Real Life!
The knowing looks from the rest of the group were a little disconcerting for Eliot to handle when he and Cassie finally emerged from the bedroom a mere five minutes later. They were closely followed by a bleary-eyed Sophie a moment later.
Cassie sent a cool look toward Vala, who was eyeing her with mischief and glee. She looked down at the sweater she had pulled from the back of the closet Cassie could see why: it was the sheer, bordering-on-obseene black one that Jack had taken one look at and refused to let her wear. She had thought he had burned it instead of throwing into the closet of extra clothes. It was a good thing she had a camisole on under it or there was no doubt heads would roll before Jack let her leave the cabin wearing it.
"I thought I burned that thing," Jack commented as he walked into the living space from the kitchen, handing his "niece" a cup of coffee. He offered the other one in his hand to Eliot but the hitter waved it off. "Not a coffee person?" he inquired wryly.
"Not when I'm not working," Eliot replied with his no nonsense face in place. "When are we leaving?"
"Better question," Hardison put in from where he sat on the sofa, nursing his own cup of java in place of a bottle of orange soda, "how are we leaving?"
"The hovercraft, of course," Daniel replied with a straight face. The effect lasted all of five seconds before half of the room burst out laughing.
The geeky hacker looked at the others with wide eyes, "Y'all got a hovercraft? Jesus, man, y'all can't fix a car to get better than 45 mpg, but you got a hovercraft?"
"No," Vala burst his bubble, "Hover technology hasn't been fully developed on this planet."
"But I do have a car that gets upwards of 80 miles per gallon," Jack added, dangling a set of keys in one hand.
"Is it a clown car?" Nate asked snidely, sipping his coffee gingerly before pointing out, "Because I don't think ten people are going to fit in your average sized government issue black sedan."
Jack nodded and tossed the set of keys to Teal'c, who caught them like a barn owl catches a wayward mouse. "But two nondescript Volvo's will."
"And where did you find a Volvo that can go 80 miles per gallon?" Sophie asked, the novelty making her genuinely curious, even in her sleepy state. "Mars?"
"Colorado Springs, actually," Daniel put in from his spot beside Teal'c. "One of Sam's hobbies is working with cars. And motorcycles."
Eliot turned to look at Cassie, "She made a car designed to go 35 max go 80?"
The baker shrugged, "All it needed was some replacement parts and a little tweaking."
Jack snorted, "A little tweaking?" he tossed the other set of keys to Cassie, "You crash that thing and you'll have a very angry pregnant woman coming after you. It took her four months of late nights to pull that thing off."
Cassie raised an eyebrow in a very Teal'c-like fashion as she felt the keys in her hand, "Time was she could do it in half that."
Jack shrugged unapologetically, "I made her stop to sleep and eat regularly. And take walks out in the sun."
The younger woman grinned at that and set down her half empty coffee mug on the table before moving to hug Jack fiercely. "I'm glad you found each other," she whispered before pulling back.
"Time to go," Jack ordered, moving around to check that his cabin was in order before leaving it again for an indefinite amount of time.
"Hey, wait a minute!" Hardison groused as Cassie took the bedding from him and put it in the linen closet. "Why does Eliot get clean clothes and I don't?"
"Are we driving all the way to Washington?" Parker asked as she bounced in the back seat of the car Cassie was driving, squished between a still half asleep Sophie and a still grumbling Hardison (even though he, too, had been given clean clothes ... a bland grey tee shirt and olive green kakis ... apparently it was a little less color than he was used to).
"No," Cassie replied as Daniel got into the passenger seat. "We're driving to Chicago. From there we'll catch a flight to D.C. Less conspicuous."
"Why are Nate an Eliot riding in the other car?" Parker kept up the questioning as Cassie pulled out onto the dirt road behind Teal'c. "Are they getting questioned?"
"Not exactly," Daniel replied as he leaned back in the seat and tried to get comfortable. "Vala wants to play 20 questions, but Jack and Teal'c don't want to play along. She's roped the other two into answering some questions she has about Earth."
"She doesn't look like an alien," Sophie mumbled into the side window she had her head against.
Cassie glanced into the rearview mirror at the other passengers as Daniel asked, "Do you really want the history breakdown of what exactly happened to deposit humans on other planets?"
"Yes," Hardison eagerly jumped on the chance to prove some of the theories he'd had since he was ten.
"No," Sophie mumbled against the door as she tried to fall back to sleep.
"Sure, why not?" Parker shrugged, not seaming to care one way or another.
Daniel cleared his throat in the way Cassie knew all too well. "The short version, please, Daniel," she practically begged him. "Too many specifics might confuse them."
"And take too long, right, Cas?" he asked with a grin before turning around in his seat and looking at the two eager to learn. "I'll try and be concise," he promised.
WIth a serious look in his eye he began, "We are not the first evolution of humans that this planet has seen. Humans originally evolved eons ago ... in a galaxy far, far away, but there was a great plague and most of them were wiped out. Those that weren't left on space ships to other galaxies in the hopes of carrying on their race and way of living. Some of them landed here. They are called the Alterans ..."
Cassie smiled slightly as Daniel delved into the history of the universe. Skipping over the boring and/or unimportant bits, and moving along to how thousands of years ago the Goa'uld came to Earth to find slaves and had started carting off humans by the shipload to other planets for labor, hosts, and to become Jaffa. All the while posing as gods ... or demons, as the case may be.
Her mind wandered while Daniel spoke. Her thoughts took her back to the memory she'd had the night before about Nirrti.
She had been ten years old when that visit had happened. The only reason she was certain of her age was because the visitors from Earth had arrived three days after Nirrti had injected her with the unknown substance and mentioned something about her children.
Cassie remembered asking her mother about children and babies when she was finally allowed to go home that night. She had curled up into her mother's lap as the middle aged woman rocked back and forth in a comforting motion that usually lulled the child to sleep.
"Mommy?" she had asked timidly. "Where do babies come from?"
"The Goddess will provide a child for you to care for when it is your time, dearest," her mother had replied.
"I thought you had to be with a man to have a child?" Cassie questioned again as she tried to burrow closer to her mother's warmth and away from the cold, metallic feel her visits to Nirrti always left her with.
Her mother gazed down at her with a look of love on her face. Peace and love. "When it is your time, it won't matter, Cassandra. If your time comes, the Goddess's will be done."
"The Goddess's will be done," Cassie mumbled under her breath as she followed Teal'c's speeding car down the deserted high way.
"What was that?" Daniel asked, turning to her as he broke off from his history lesson (that had worked better than Ambien CR in putting Sophie back to sleep).
Cassie blinked, coming back to herself with a bang. Her eyes flickered over to Daniel's before realizing what she had just said. Her heart started to race as she used her turning lights to signal to the other car that she was pulling over as soon as they came to the turn out.
By the time she was finally able to stop the car, Cassie was nearly hyperventilating with the knowledge she had just unearthed in her own mind.
It was all she could do to unbuckle her seatbelt, open the car door, and run a few yards from the vehicle before coming face to face with the previous contents of her stomach.
She leaned back on her heels as soon as she was sure she wasn't going to be throwing up again, unable to restrain the tears that felt so hot against her skin.
"Cassie?" Daniel questioned as he put an arm over her shoulders and sat down beside her. "Are you sick?"
She shook her head wordlessly, letting the tears run down her face and onto her pants without notice.
After a while a water bottle entered her field of vision and the blurry eyed woman looked up at a very worried Jack and Teal'c. A few feet away she was sure stood the rest of the group, worriedly looking on.
"Thank you," she whispered as she took the water and rinsed her mouth of the bile sticking to her teeth and tongue. As she focused on the coolness of the water, her tears stopped and her brain began to kick in.
She'd taken a few biology classes in college before deciding on becoming a chef. THere was a name for what Nirrti had done to her -- forced on her. Is forced evolution still evolution?
"I know why they're after me," Cassie finally said loud enough for the three men around her to hear. The tears were now long gone, replaced by a determination that reminded the men of the woman who had raised her for seven years.
Her eyes locked with Jack's as she whispered, "They want my baby."
Jack looked at her blankly for a moment as the news sunk in. "What do you mean 'baby'? You're not pregnant. You can't be!" His mind started to go to a very dark place as he thought about the implications of Cassie's last serious relationship ending over a year before and her insistence that she was carrying a child.
"Jack!" Daniel's shout brought him back to the present as Cassie got up and started pacing, the water bottle still in her shaking hands.
"It's nothing like that," Cassie was shaking her head. "No. You're right. I haven't had sex in almost a year. No ... it's parthenogenesis." She spouted off the big word as if it came second nature to her.
"Partheno-what?" Jack asked, his brow furrowed in confusion at the odd sight of Cassie's distressed figure using words as big as the ones Sam used on a regular basis.
"Parthenogenesis," Parker replied as she took a step closer to Cassie and the unfamiliar men that reminded her so much of the men she'd come to trust with her life. "It's when an egg fertilizes itself without the help of sperm."
"How do you know that, Parker?" Hardison asked for the group of now thoroughly confused menfolk.
The thief shrugged, "Some people do crosswords."
Hardison just shook his head and sighed. "There's somethin' wrong with you," he said in a clearly joking manner.
Nate frowned as he mulled over the information in his mind. There they were, standing on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere and talking about things he was pretty sure were impossible.
"Parthenogenesis hasn't been proven in humans," he said as he too started to pace. "This is incredible. Just think what the medical community would do --"
"Stop right there, Mr. Ford," Cassie said with a glare as a car whizzed past them on the freeway, obviously going at least twenty miles over the speed limit. She put a hand on her hip as she pointed a finger at him accusingly to punctuate her statement, "You're forgetting one very important thing here: I'm not human. Not in the way you mean. There are minerals in my blood that haven't been found on this planet in 10,000 years. Try explaining that to the medical community."
Vala studied the younger alien with keen eyes that had seen too much. There was something else. She was sure of it. "What else is bothering you, Cassie? How do you know you're pregnant?"
Cassie stopped pacing and her arms dropped. She took a few deep breaths, as if fortifying herself before she confessed, "Nirrti told me." Before the original members of SG-1 could irrupt at that news she continued, "I had a dream last night," her eyes held Jack's gaze as she continued, "About three days before SG-7 arrived on Hanka I was in Nirrti's lab and she did something to my eggs ..." her voice dropped to a whisper, "I think she added Goa'uld DNA to them."
Daniel reacted first, as he remembered when she had been a teenager and Nirrti had shown up at the SGC, "And ... when you were a teenager and had to ... go into the forest?"
Cassie's eyes dropped and she studied her shoes, "That's when the girls are ... programmed to reproduce, I guess you could say."
"We have to take you back to the SGC for observation," Jack declared with all the authority his two stars gave him.
"No."
"No?" he parroted with a raised eyebrow. "That's the safest place for you to be, Cassie."
Her head came up and her eyes held as much stubbornness in them as the middle-aged man before her, "You know as well as I do that they'll be expecting that."
"It's the safest place for you to be," Jack argued, his arms gesturing wildly in a manner he'd somehow picked up from Daniel through the years. "At least if you're there the doctors can make sure everything's normal."
"Normal for who?" Cassie shot back, her eyes wide and almost desperate. "Dr. Lam may be good, but she's never dealt with something like this and she is not a trained midwife."
The team of thieves attempted to back up a few steps so as not to witness another blowout between the young woman and the man who had been her guardian. Daniel and Vala attempted to do the same, but one long look from Teal'c had everyones' feet planted to the ground.
"The mountain is the last place I should be right now," Cassie argued. She shook her head as she reminded him, "It may be more interesting for the president and the NID, but it's also not as secure as it could be, Jack." Her voice dropped to a normal level as she added, "I'm not going to do anything to risk this baby, Jack. If that means going to ground until it's born, then so be it."
Jack sighed almost inaudibly, but it was clear to all who were watching that the fight had gone out of him. "I don't like it," he told her firmly, holding onto his last complaint. "But you're old enough now to decide for yourself." He jerked his head in the direction of the thieves, "Do you still want to go with them?"
Cassie shrugged one shoulder as she searched out Eliot's eyes. In them, she was pleased to find a look of acceptance instead of abhorrence. "It's as good a place as any to start."
Jack's shoulders slumped before he took the few steps necessary to reach out and envelop Cassie in one of the tightest hugs she's ever received. "Keep in touch," he whispered into her ear, "Even if it's little things. Let us know you're alive and safe."
She nodded into his shoulder, "I will. ... I love you Jack."
"Love you, too, Cas."
Next was Daniel, whose hug was just as fierce, "Please don't name the baby after any mythological creature."
Cassie snorted as she pulled back, "And here I was planning on Persephone."
Teal'c did not hug her when he came to stand in front of her. He bowed his head and clasped her arm in his. "Live free."
"And die well," Cassie finished as she bowed her head in return. Her eyes were glistening with unshed tears as she met Teal'c's eyes again. There was a soft look in them that most rarely saw. She attempted a smile as she added, "I'll make sure nothing happens to the baby, Teal'c. You have my word on that."
"And mine," Eliot said, cutting into the farewells. He met Teal'c's look of steel and added, "I'll keep her safe."
Jack wanted to snort at the incredibility of the idea that an earth-bound thief could keep Cassie safer than the SGC could. He refrained when the little voice inside his head (that sounded remarkably like his wife) told him to give the man a chance. "How do you plan to do that when you don't know what you're keeping her safe from?"
Eliot's gaze shifted to the older man as he explained with a few words as possible, "I have over a hundred and five safe-houses around the world."
Hardison's head snapped up at that. He frowned as he looked between Eliot and the others, "I could only find fifteen when I went lookin'."
Eliot's look turned grim and dangerous, "That's because I'm very good at hiding my tracks, Hardison. Otherwise I'd be dead." He furrowed his brow as he added, "We'll have to talk about the ones you were able to find."
Vala was still frowning when she embraced Cassie in the fiercest hug she could manage. "If you need us ..."
Cassie nodded as she pulled back, "I'll call."
She let go of Vala and took a step away from the group she trusted more than anyone. She bit her lip worriedly as she watched their stoic figures under the burden of her news. There was nothing else to be done. WIth a heavy heart she turned around, but Jack's voice called her back to herself.
"I want you to tell Teal'c where you're taking her," the general said with a clear command. "And don't forget to take out your transmitter before getting there, Cassandra."
Cassie didn't turn around, although she did nod at his reminder of the chip in her arm that let the SGC keep track of not only her, but every other high profile individual involved with the program.
After Eliot went with Teal'c a few yards away, safely out of hearing/lip reading distance, Cassie willed her body forward, toward the car parked a few yards away. She strapped herself into the passenger seat of the car and looked blankly at the dashboard in front of her.
It took a few minutes, but soon the band of thieves joined her, with Parker managing to wiggle her way between the driver's seat and the passenger seat to make the packed car seem slightly safer.
Parker patted Cassie's hand comfortingly as Nate pulled back onto the freeway. "Want to jump off a building with me when we get to Boston?"
A/N: Parthenogenesis is a real occurrence that is well documented in the animal kingdom, but unproven in humans. ... I got it off House.
Oh, and Parker's comment at the end ... they'd be wearing one of her specialty rigs, don't worry.