Sam wanted to try to bring Jake out of his shell a little that night, so she decided that they could all make dinner together instead of going to a restaurant or ordering something in like they'd been doing for the past few days.

"There's my junior chef," she said when Jake came into the kitchen. Jack was right behind him, holding Abbie. "You think you could help cook?"

He shrugged. "Maybe."

"Do you like spaghetti?" He nodded. "Good. I'm not the best cook, but I thought making dinner would be fun. What do you think?"

"Okay," he agreed.

Jake got to break the noodles and drop them into the pot. Jack had Abbie 'help' him with putting together a salad – she could pull ingredients out of the vegetable bin at the bottom of the fridge. It was nice to have a very normal night with everyone all together.

"Can I stir?" Jake asked as Sam poured the spaghetti sauce into a second pot.

She smiled. "Sure, buddy," she told him as she handed him the spoon. "Be careful, okay?"

"I will," he promised. She pulled a stool over for him to stand on and helped him climb up. "Thanks," he quietly told her as he started stirring. That was one of the longest conversations he'd voluntarily had with her since arriving.

"You're welcome," Sam replied as she went back to the pasta.

Jake stayed mostly quiet through the meal, carefully twirling his pasta with a surprising amount of skill. Abbie mainly played with her noodles, ignoring her fork in favor of using her fingers. She had tomato sauce all over her face and shirt by the time that she'd finished. "Yay, 'ghetti," she said as Sam picked her up.

She laughed. "Okay, that's one vote of confidence. How about you, Jake? Did you like it?"

He nodded. "Can I go read in my room?"

"How about you bring your book out here and we can all read together?"

Jake shook his head. "I want to go to my room."

She gave in. "Okay. We'll be here if you want to come join us, all right?" He didn't answer before he headed down the hall.

Abbie needed a bath so that she could be de-tomato-sauced. Sam got her to bed, and then went to check on Jake. He had fallen asleep with a book on his chest, still in his clothes. She just watched him from the doorway for a long minute; in sleep he looked so little and innocent. The steel walls that he'd erected around himself fell away. What would it take for those walls to come down when he was awake?

After carefully getting him tucked in, Sam headed back out to the kitchen. Jack was trying to get things cleaned up and she joined in.

"Did you put the leftovers in the fridge already?" she asked him when she realized that the bowl which had once held a serving of pasta was now empty.

Jack shook his head. "I think the little man got hungry again; I got a phone call from work and noticed that the bowl was empty after I was done."

She frowned. "Did he take it back to his room?"

"Must have."

"Well, he's done with it now, because he's asleep. I'll be right back." Sam went back to Jake's room, and looked around for what he'd done with his plate. She finally found it sitting on the floor under his desk. Why would he leave it there? she wondered as she walked to the kitchen. "Looks like he wasn't as hungry as he thought," she told Jack; the plate was still mostly full.

"I guess 'no food in bedrooms' is going to have to be a house rule."

"Yeah."

They lapsed into a comfortable silence as they shared the task of washing and drying pots, plates, cups, and utensils. "I was thinking…" Sam finally spoke up, "You said before that if Jake and Abbie were from this reality, you would have been my commanding officer when Jake was born. We don't know for sure that that WASN'T true in their reality."

Jack shrugged. He hadn't thought about it, but she was right. "You could ask Janet if you want to know," he suggested.

"Well, yeah, but…it's not just about that. There's A LOT that we don't know about them, Jack. We're creating fake pasts for them, but we barely know anything about their real ones. I mean… even something as simple as the significance of their names."

Jack raised an eyebrow. "You can't figure out who Jacob Daniel is named after?"

"My father and Daniel, I know, but…why? Are there stories we would have told Jake as he got older? Maybe in their reality, my father was never bonded with Selmak and he died before Jake was born. Or maybe…maybe my mother was still alive and my father and I were really close."

"Maybe."

"And Abigail Charlotte? Her middle name seems obvious, but…"

Jack just nodded. "Point taken."

"As much as they need to move on, I don't want them to forget, either. I think we do need to talk to Janet, and maybe we can write some stuff down for them, for once they get older. I think we owe them that."

Jack smiled a little. Considering she'd only had a couple days to adjust, she was settling into the role of 'mom' very well and very quickly. "You're going to be really good for them, Sam."

"What about you?"

"What do you mean?"

Sam sighed. She had seen him interacting with Jake and Abbie over the past few days, and knew that he was starting to build relationships with them, but he didn't seem to have interest in being a parent to them. She had no idea where that left them as far as their personal relationship. It wasn't as if that construct had ever been very well defined, but now everything was so different.

She realized that Jack was watching her, still waiting for an answer that she had no idea how to phrase. She wasn't even sure if she really wanted an answer to her concerns; she couldn't turn her back on Jake and Abbie, but she didn't want to lose Jack, either. "Nevermind," she finally said.

"You sure?"

"Yeah. It's not important.

Around 3AM, the silence in Sam's house was shattered by the sound of a child screaming. Both Jack and Sam hurriedly got out of bed and ran to Jake's room. He was tossing back and forth, caught in the grip of a horrible nightmare.

"Jake? Jake, wake up," Sam told him as she gently shook his shoulder.

He suddenly sat straight up in bed, eyes wild and heart racing. "Abbie?" he called, still not fully aware of where he was and what was happening. "Abbie!"

"She's okay," Jack told him. "She's sleeping in her room. Calm down, pal. You're both safe."

Jake seemed skeptical, still concernedly looking around at his surroundings. However, he started breathing more normally after a moment as he remembered the events of the past few days. "You all right?" Sam asked him. Jake nodded.

"You want to talk about your dream?" Jack wondered. He vigorously shook his head no. "You sure? It might make you feel a little better."

"It was nothing," he said as he laid back down.

"It didn't sound like nothing," Sam tried, but Jake wasn't ready yet. He refused to say anything else and closed his eyes as if he was going back to sleep. As much as they didn't like it, they knew they had to wait for him to be ready. They'd spoken with a psychiatrist at the SGC who had warned against forcing Jake into dealing with things before he was ready. Having patience wouldn't be easy, but it was what they needed to do.

"I hope you have some good dreams, buddy," Sam quietly told him before she tucked his blanket back around him. They turned out the light and left. "I hate this," Sam quietly stated as they stood together in the hall.

Jack nodded. "I know."

Sam lingered in the hallway for a little bit, listening for any sign that Jake wasn't actually going back to sleep. Once she could hear him softly snoring, she went back to her bedroom. Jack was still awake, waiting for her. "Is he okay?"

"Yeah, he's asleep," she replied as she sat on the bed next to him. "I wish there was more we could do for him."

"Just let him know he's not alone."

"Yeah." They both laid down, and Jack turned out the light, but Sam still had a few things on her mind. "Jack? There's something else I've been thinking about that I'd like your opinion on."

"At three-twenty-three in the morning?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. Just warning you about my mental abilities at this hour. What's wrong?"

Sam sighed. "My job."

Jack frowned. "What?"

"We had a conversation once, about whether we thought a family and the Stargate program could go together."

"If I remember correctly, the hypothetical parents in that conversation were you and Pete."

"So the situation's changed – a lot – but the problem hasn't. Is it fair to them for me to drop them off in the morning and head out to some unexplored world light-years away?"

"You were still exploring the world in their reality," Jack pointed out.

"Yeah, and look where that got them," she somewhat-bitterly shot back. "If their mother hadn't decided to be the hero, they'd still be with her." In her mind, the situation that the kids were in – the pain that they were dealing with – was directly caused by the decisions that their parents had made. They'd taken a gamble and lost big. And they weren't the ones paying for it.

Jack sighed. "If their parents hadn't still been in the Stargate program, then Jake and Abbie would probably be dead right along beside them and everyone else on whatever's left of their Earth."

Sam looked away. It was a logical argument, but that didn't mean that she had to like it. She was secretly harboring a fear that Jake's current issues were being caused or exacerbated by HER inadequacies as a guardian. Janet trusted her to be able to take care of the children, but what exactly was that trust based on?

Jack watched as several different emotions flickered across her face, and wondered if he'd put his foot in his mouth. Who the hell am I to be handing out parenting advice? "Look…I'm not going to try to tell you what you should and shouldn't do. If you think it's too dangerous or too difficult to stay with SG-1, then that's your call. But you've worked really hard to get where you are, and I know that you enjoy what you do. I think you can find a balance."

Sam was quiet for a long moment before finally nodding. "Okay. I won't decide anything now. We'll see how it goes."

TBC...