Written in 20 minutes. Alternate Universe.  No revisions or typos fixed.

Elizabeth Webber stepped out of the hospital room and leaned her head against the soft blue plaster of the wall next to it. She took a deep breath, counted to ten, and tried to hold back the tears that burned behind her eyes.

“Elizabeth?”

She tried to paste a smile on her face and turned to face the concerned face of one of her closest friends, swiping at the few few stray tears that had escaped her eyes. “J-Jason. Hey, um…what are you—”

“Are you kidding me?” Jason Morgan asked, his light blue eyes darting past her, towards the room. “Emily called me. She said that Jake was here.”

“Right.” Elizabeth exhaled slowly, cupping her face in her hands, dipping her chin down towards her chest, and taking another deep breath. Jason had always been there for her three-year-old son even though the paternity tests they’d taken before his birth showed Jason wasn’t his father.

“Right,” she repeated. “I guess I should have called. Um…” Her hands fluttered to her sides and she swallowed hard. “Um, the tests aren’t back yet.” She paused, forcing the words out. “We don’t know if it’s…spread. They don’t know what type it is. They’re already starting the search for a marrow donor because—” Her voice broke.

Cancer. Her beautiful, precious baby was sick with childhood leukemia. God. How was she going to deal with this?

“Okay. What can I do?” Jason stepped towards her, his voice dropping down an octave. “Do you need someone to stay with Cameron? Is he with Emily? Let me do something—” She saw the muscles in his cheek twitch. “There has to be something—”

“Um, I guess…” She tried to think, pressing a hand to her head. “You could get tested for a bone marrow match, but, um, I don’t…I don’t think you’ll match. I mean…blood relatives—” Why couldn’t she think? “”Lucky…Emily managed to convince him to come in and get tested as a donor. We’re tested Cameron—” Her voice broke. “He wasn’t—”

“Why didn’t you call me?” Jason asked as he took her by the elbow and led her to a nearby sofa in a lounge area of the General Hospital Pediatric wing. “Emily said she’s been running around collecting donors so you could sit with Jake. Elizabeth…”

“I don’t want to be that—” She sucked in a deep breath. “I didn’t want to admit it. I didn’t want to say it outloud. It would be real, and that’s so goddamn stupid. I know it’s real. Dr. Clay said maybe we caught it in time, but it doesn’t always—” She pressed the heels of her hand to her eyes. “I’m sorry. Of course you’d want to be here. I know how much you love him.”

“I want to be here for you, Elizabeth.” He took his hand in hers. “C’mon, you know me better than that.”

She managed a half smile. “I know, I just—after what happened with Sam, I just figured it’d be better to keep…” She shook her head. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m just…Jake is sleeping right now, but I know he’ll want to see you. Do you—do you have to go to work?”

“No, I talked to Anna,” he said, referring to the commissioner of the Port Charles Police Department. “She asked Dante to cover for me. He didn’t mind—he said if anything happened to Rocco—”

She shouldn’t feel relieved that Jason would able to stay here with her, to maybe even sit with Jake and be here when he woke up. Their friendship had only strayed over the line once, almost four years earlier when she’d been trying to save a wreckage of her marriage, and he’d been drifting away from his girlfriend at the time.

Since then, they’d remained close—closer than was probably wise. A few men had come and gone in her life who didn’t appreciate their close friendship and Jason had just ended another rocky relationship over his role in Jake and Cam’s life.

It was selfish of her to cling to Jason—he wasn’t the father of either of her children, though Lucky Spencer had never been much of a role model and could barely relied upon to pay child support much less spend time with either Jake or Cameron.

But right now, she needed him in her life and she wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

She frowned when she saw Dr. Silas Clay striding up the hallway, followed by a technician she knew worked in the lab—Brad Cooper. They were murmuring to each other over some paperwork.

Oh, God. Elizabeth got to her feet as they approached her. “Are those Jake’s results?” she asked, her voice trembling. Jason stood, his hand hovering over her lower back as if to brace her if she fell. “Silas—”

“No, these—” Silas glanced at Brad who cleared his throat. “These are the results of Jake’s father’s test. Lucky Spencer…he’s not a match for Jake.”

“Oh.” Her heart sank. “But—but I thought he and Cam would be our best bet. Should I start calling my parents or my brother—”

“No, Elizabeth, actually…” Brad shifted his weight from one foot to another, his eyes darting back and forth between the doctor and Elizabeth. “Actually, the results—I thought something was wrong, so I ran a couple of further tests.”

Elizabeth furrowed her brow, traded a confused and worried look with Jason before focusing on Silas. “What are you trying to say? Just spit it out, Silas.”

“Lucky Spencer isn’t your son’s biological father. We’re testing the wrong man.”

+2

Three years and six months ago, Jason Morgan had stood in this hospital—a few floors down on the surgical floor where Elizabeth had worked as a nurse—and watched her open a thin white envelope with the results of their paternity test.

He’d wanted the baby she’d been carrying to be his—even though it would have complicated everything. Elizabeth was in the middle of a difficult divorce and Jason had still technically been dating someone else—but from the moment she’d told him that she was pregnant and unsure about the paternity, Jason wanted the baby.

She’d looked at him and he’d seen it in her eyes even before her lips formed the words. This baby—who turned out to be a boy—was not his. Paternity belonged to the jackass she was trying to get rid of.

They’d both been disappointed—and the truth seemed to have closed the door they had cracked open the night they’d found each other at a local dive bar, shared a few too many shots of tequila and ended up stairs.

He’d promised to remain her friend, and she’d sworn the same. Her ex-husband had never been much of an active father figure and Jason made sure he was the first call when Elizabeth needed someone to pick her boys up from day care. He was Cameron’s emergency contact at school, had already agreed to be Jake’s when he started pre-school in the fall.

He knew what it was like to grow up without a father—his own biological father hadn’t been around until Jason was almost a teenager and nearly made a ward of the state when his mother had died from cancer.

He didn’t have the title of father—didn’t have the blood—but in his heart, those paternity tests hadn’t meant anything. He was the only father that Jake or Cam really knew.

And now…he saw the doctor tell Elizabeth that Lucky Spencer wasn’t Jake’s biological father—he heard the words—but he couldn’t seem to take them in.

“I don’t—” Elizabeth’s voice rose in pitch. “I don’t understand. What do you mean? We—” Unconsciously, her fingers dug into Jason’s arm and she looked at him, her eyes wide with shock, with confusion. “We had tests—”

Silas Clay squinted and looked back at the lab technician. “Brad, are you sure—”

“I ran the test three times, Liz. I wouldn’t tell you this otherwise.” Brad hesitated. “Did…you had a test here?”

“Before Jake was born—three—” She shook her head. “Jason, you have to get tested. You have to get tested right now, and we need to call everyone in your family—”

“Hey—” Jason put a hand on her shoulders because her words were starting to tumble over one another, making her difficult to understand. “Take a deep breath—”

“All this time! All this time, Jake didn’t—” She choked back a sob. “All this time, Jason—how did this happen—”

“We’ll find out, but Jake comes first.” He drew her to him, pressing her cheek to his chest, tangling his hands in her chestnut curls. “I promise you. But let me go get tested. You call Emily and tell her to stop tracking down Spencers, okay?”

“Okay.” He heard her take in a deep, shuddering breath. “Okay. I’ll go have her paged—she’s around here somewhere.”

Elizabeth wiped her eyes and started down the hallway towards the nurse’s hub where she’d have a colleague page Jason’s sister and her best friend.

Jason looked at the doctor and the tech. “We had tests done here. At General Hospital. What the hell happened?”

“I—” Brad shook his head. “I only took over as the director of the lab last year.” He looked at Silas. “I could look into it, but—”

“Do that,” Silas said with a heavy dose of irritation and impatience. “We’ve been wasting time and resources testing the wrong people because of this screw-up.” He hissed under his breath and jerked his thumb in the other direction. “Let’s go set up a test for you.”

Jason stared at the lab tech another moment. “I want to know what happened,” he said evenly. “And who screwed it up.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Brad murmured, and watched the son of the Chief of Staff follow Silas down the hall. Who the hell fucked up the paternity test of a cop and nurse? He growled as he headed for the elevator.

Once back in the lab, he bypassed the computer files and went straight for the archived paper files in the back room. He fished out a file for Elizabeth Webber and flicked through the paperwork—she’d had the usual lab tests done during both her pregnancies, and it took him a moment to find the single piece of paper with the paternity results.

Sure enough, Jason Morgan had been eliminated as the father of the fetus, but Brad knew that couldn’t be true. He made a copy of the test and then punched in the number of the result into the computer system.

The computer spit back not only the original results—but the file history. Jason Morgan had been given a 99.999996% percentage match with the fetus, but a lab tech had manually changed those results.

“Someone is going to get fired today,” Brad told Ellie Trout, an employee working at the station next to him. She rolled her eyes at him—still smarting over the fact that General Hospital had brought in an outside director of the lab. Well, if this was the kind of screw-ups occurring under the last director—

“I don’t recognize these initials,” Brad said. “This employee id isn’t in use anymore.” He looked to Ellie. “Do you know who MG is?”

“Can’t you just ask personnel?” Ellie said with a smirk. “She doesn’t work here anymore. She quit, like, two years ago. Michelle Glenn.”

“Michelle Glenn—” Brad wrinkled his nose. “Why would she manually change paternity test results?”

Ellie perked up at that. “What? Whose results?” When Brad told her the situation, the redhead’s eyes widened. “Oh…well, that’s simple. Michelle was also Courtney Matthew’s best friend. She happened to be dating Jason Morgan then. I bet she did it for her.”

+2

Jason left the surly oncologist behind in his office after having been tested for a bone marrow match and went to find Elizabeth or his sister.

He found the latter in the nurse’s hub, clicking furiously at a computer station. When he cleared his throat, she jerked her head up and Jason frowned at her reddened eyes and tear stained cheeks.

“Em—”

“Elizabeth told me—” Emily threw her arms around his neck and held him tight. “I can’t believe this! I wasted hours convincing Lucky to come in, trying to get Laura to fly in from Paris—”

“I know.” Jason drew back. “I just got tested—”

“I wish I weren’t adopted,” Emily muttered. “But I called Dad, and he’s getting the grapevine going. Grandfather is excited for another—don’t give me that look, Jase—under normal circumstances, we could have held off telling anyone but—”

“I know, I know. I guess…” Jason shook his head. “I haven’t really taken it in. Where did—”

“She’s meeting with Alexis. Apparently, the hospital is trying to head off a law suit.” Emily bit her lip. “But Jason…I don’t think it was just a mistake.”

Jason tipped his head. “What do you mean? Did that lab tech—”

“No, listen…” Emily bit her lip. “When this all happened, you know Elizabeth told me. I think I was the only other person who knew, right? So when the results came back, I was so disappointed, I sent the results to the lab again—”

Jason frowned. “Then maybe this time it’s a mistake—”

“No, Brad ran it three times—Liz told me—and he’s good at his job. The paternity tests are always run twice as a matter of a policy. So if Brad ran it three times, he actually ran it six times.”

“So if you sent the test back again—” Jason exhaled slowly. “Someone in the lab had to have changed it manually. I don’t understand why anyone would do that—” Something clicked in his head, but he couldn’t quite make it work. Couldn’t figure out why he thought he knew what had happened. It was if he couldn’t quite remember something.

“The only people who knew Elizabeth was pregnant were you and me—we were the only one who knew about the test—” Jason stopped. “Are the lab samples tagged with names?”

“No, but it’s not hard to find out—” Emily twisted a screen to show something to him. “I still have access to the lab mainframe because I did a course there during my intern year. I didn’t have access then or I would have—” She grimaced. “Look—”

Jason shook his head. “What am I—it just looks like a test—”

“You can see where lab results were modified after being created. See this date here? This employee code and initials?” Emily tapped the screen. “Before Brad took over and increased security, a lot of the lab techs used to look up the files of any test marked urgent or given priority.” She sighed. “And your test was given priority because—”

“Because Elizabeth asked her doctor to get the test back as soon as possible because of the divorce, and Kelly is her friend.” Jason exhaled slowly. “So anyone who looked up the names involved—but—” He closed his eyes. “Courtney.”

“Her best friend was Michelle Glenn. She quit like three months later, remember? She and Courtney both moved to Buffalo after you guys broke up. Probably because she knew if this ever came to light, she’d be fired. All she had to do was see your name—”

“And she told Courtney.” Jason scowled. “And that’s why she called me after we got the tests back. We were arguing because she didn’t want kids, and I did. She—” He hesitated. “Anyway, she said she’d changed her mind.”

“But you turned her down, thank God.” Emily sighed. “You know that Dad is going to file charges.”

“Charges?” Jason shook his head. “Look, if it wasn’t a hospital screw up, then I don’t think—”

“Jase, this woman cost you three years with you Jake—and the hospital is going to go after her anyway. They have to, to make an example of her.” Emily blanked out the screen. “Jason—”

“I didn’t lose—” Jason waited a moment, tried to collect himself. “I’ve been there for Jake. For both of them—”

“You know it’s not the same. You’ve been amazing for them, but I’ve watched you get agitated when Elizabeth dated anyone longer than five minutes. If she married again—”

“I get it, Em. But that’s over now.” He shook his head. “And we’ve got bigger problems. Jake is sick. That comes first. If Dad wants to go after Michelle for any of this, then I guess that’d be his right. She was his employee. But I have to worry about Jake right now.”

“I know, Jase. And you know if you need anything from any of us—the Quartermaines are insane, but we stick together. Dad said that he’d collect all the blood relatives in the city limits within twenty-four hours, and you know how he gets.”

“Yeah.” Jason saw Elizabeth stepping off the elevator, followed by the hospital’s lawyer, Alexis Davis. “Hey—”

“Hey.” Elizabeth sighed, shoving her hair out of her face. Wordlessly, Emily handed her a hair tie from her pocket, and the brunette shoved her hair into a messy ponytail piled on top of her head. “Alexis talked to the lab, and—”

“My ex-girlfriend had a friend working in the lab,” Jason said with some bitterness.

“She broke protocol,” Alexis murmured. “Lab technicians shouldn’t be able to access any private information about the samples, but—”

“Well, she did,” Elizabeth said flatly. “They’re going to press charges, and I told them it was fine with me,” She lifted her chin. “And I bet when Lucky finds out that he was on the hook for child support he didn’t have to pay, he’ll probably go after her for theft.”

Emily snorted. “He’d have to pay the child support for it to be theft,” she muttered.

“So what’s next?” Jason asked, but before any of them could answer the question, the elevator doors slid open again and Silas Clay stepped out, paperwork in his hands.

Elizabeth took Jason’s arm, the color leeching from her face. “He must have Jake’s test results. It’s too soon to know if you’re a match.”

Jason put an arm around her shoulder and they waited for the doctor to join them.

+2