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It's shortly after New Years that Skipper and Spencer are summarily transferred to a new posting. Technically, they volunteer; on the other hand, when a two-star general personally calls you up while on home leave and says that he suggests that you sign a set of documents you'll be getting shortly, there's only so much you can do to say no without shooting your career in the gut.
They aren't stupid, of course; they do a bit of digging first, and with their kind of jobs they are very, very good at digging. It turns out that Major General Jack O'Neill - and isn't his career path just interesting, breezing his way up two stars in as many years, seniority or no - is in charge of that nebulous black hole they think of as Aunt Sam's People. Supposedly they do deep space radar telemetry, but that's either the worse cover story ever or one that's absolutely brilliant. Everyone in the more shadowy side of the service knows that whatever is operating out of Colorado Springs isn't deep space anything, not with the way it chews up airmen, marines, soldiers, and even the odd sailor; especially not with the way people go in and never come out. The military isn't like that - you never stay in one posting for that long, and damned certain not for ten years. Whatever they are doing is so hush-hush, so specialized that they can't let people out. When you see that sort of thing, bad cover or not, you don't ask questions if you know what is good for you.
It's almost enough to scare them off, because you don't make that kind of commitment without even a clue of what you're getting in to. On the other hand, if it was good enough for Aunt Sam and Uncle Cam and even, by all appearances, Uncle John, well, it's probably good enough for Skip and Spence. (Insert self-deprecating jokes about how any unit that wants them isn't one they want to be part of.)
There's a lot that they learn in the first few days of orientation and processing. Yeah, there's all the stuff about aliens and snakes and the space crusaders who may very well be the ones who finally do the planet in; none of that is half so interesting as what Uncle Cam has been getting up to and why he suddenly failed to show up at Thanksgiving and Christmas, transferred to some distant post, and now takes weeks to answer emails. It's a very hard story to miss, because the only people who aren't talking about it are the other Fucking New Guys and anyone within earshot of General Landry.
It goes something like this: recently, the people of the Atlantis (!) expedition had been kicked out of their city in another galaxy (!) by the original inhabitants, but after said inhabitants got killed by Evil Space Robots the expedition's leaders had gone back and retaken the city. That's apparently not too interesting to most people. What is interesting is that the leader of SG-1, one Cameron Mitchell, had accompanied them in doing so. Up until a couple weeks ago Uncle Cam was apparently the golden boy of Stargate Command and generally thought able to do no wrong; thus, it had come as quite a surprise when he deliberately deceived a general, participated in several kinds of grand theft and sabotage, shot Chief Master Sergeant Siler, and disobeyed some direct orders from the aforementioned general. Speculation on why he had done so is rampant and varied, with no two people in agreement on anything except how it had almost certainly had something to do with his new roommate and old war buddy, John Sheppard.
Skipper and his brother have a slightly different perspective on the matter. For one thing, it all confirms the suspicions that certain people had voiced over the holidays about how That Boy was responsible for Cam's sudden disappearance, coming as it had just after That Boy had returned from Antarctica or whatever hole he had been hiding in the last couple years.
Uncle John has long been a fixture of family gossip, in no small part because he's such an easy and interesting target. Oh, no one questions his position as family - even if Aunt Sassy and Gran'ma Mitchell hadn't made their opinions completely clear on the matter long ago, his reputation for taking care of his men would have seen to that. It's the rest of his reputation that gets people's hackles up, that and his attitude. He's so completely laid back and lackadaisical about everything that about half the family is of the opinion that being in the military is just something he does for fun, not because of any serious commitment or feelings of duty. After so many years the disagreement is mostly habit, although it flared up again with renewed vigor following the disaster that got John sent to Antarctica and then his disappearance right after Cam got injured in his "aircraft testing accident." When in the space of six weeks he showed up, moved in with Cam, and vanished down the rabbit hole again immediately after promising to be home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, people talked. A lot.
As for Skipper and Spencer, well, they've been in John's camp from day one, when they had stumbled across the pair of them necking in the woods and had been inducted into their first Real Adult Secret. (Spencer doesn't bring up Skipper's gigantic man-crush, just as in turn Skipper doesn't remind Spencer of his epic love for Samantha Carter. MAD is such an ugly term; they prefer to think they've matured a little.) The fact that John has finally lead Cam to his oft-prophesied doom doesn't bother them in the least, because Cam is a big boy and can look after himself.
Actually, no, scratch that. Their favorite uncle and his partner are out in another galaxy facing countless life-sucking space vampires, killer robots, and hostile humans with barely even a short battalion to back them up. It just wouldn't be right to leave them out there to fend for themselves.
It leaves them with a bit of a quandary, though. It's clear someone wants them at the SGC, but they're pretty sure it's not Cam. They know he wouldn't want them near the kind of shit that goes down here, which makes even their old gig seem downright safe. The casualty rate for new gate team members in their first six month is almost twenty percent; its just about as bad in Pegasus.
The two of them have a conversation that goes something like this (edited for clarity):
"We should volunteer to go to Pegasus," Skipper says, in his role as leader, brain, and all-around superior twin. "They could use guys with our skill set. Also, someone has to keep Uncle Cam from killing John after the third or fourth time he pulls some stupid-ass stunt. Man's insane."
"That's true, but he'll never let us," Spencer points out, being the incorrigible pessimist and all-around downer that he is. "He'll say something like, 'it would be improper to have relatives under my command' and then add something about teaching us to ride bikes, so on, so forth."
"He's sleeping with his vice commander," Skipper reminds him. It's a sad necessity; his brother's memory isn't what it used to be, the result of a few too many blows to the head, probably. "He doesn't have a lot of room to complain."
"He will, though."
"He might go the other way, feel better if we're where he can watch over us."
"He'll try to guilt us out of it. 'You boys wouldn't want me to have to tell your mama I let you get killed, would you?'"
Skipper frowns, nods, and reconsiders their options. "Do an end run around him?"
"Yeah. Not through John, though. He'd blab. I saw Lorne on the org chart as personnel officer, among other things."
Lorne is a good guy, a not-quite-an-uncle; eminently practical, very reasonable, excellent sense of humor, and loyal to fault. They get along well with him, he might cooperate. So, between long days of endless briefings, they shoot him a few emails to feel him out.
Its surprisingly easy to convince him: Atlantis had been looking for someone with an intelligence background and had recently lost some people, and he could use someone to counter-balance "certain daredevil flyboys who will remain nameless." He does extract promises of good behavior and threatens dire retribution should they be broken; clearly someone has been telling him damnable lies, or maybe he just remembers the little incident that occurred when Uncle Cam had first brought him home one Fourth of July.
(Really, the fire hadn't been nearly as big as people seemed to think.)
He doesn't mince words, either: tells them straight up that he might not be able to pull them both in, that Atlantis is none too high on the IOA's or Air Force's list of priorities and they could end up stuck there indefinitely, both in the sense of it being a career dead end and in the "oh fuck we're physically unable to go home" sense, and that there were any number over very gruesome ways one or both of them could end up dead or worse. Anything that could happen in the SGC could happen there, and they didn't nearly the same level of manpower or the starships to serve as backup if and when things went south. It was everything they heard in orientation without the white-washing, and a confirmation that the stories the veterans told didn't need to be exaggerated.
"One of us should do it even if we both can't," Skipper says, thinking it completely obvious who would be the one to go. Despite what some people seem to believe, they aren't one person with an extra body; they can live apart. Don't want to, no, and God knows what he'd do if any of those hundreds of awful things happened to Spencer when he wasn't there, but they could do it.
"You're right," Spencer says, then, "So I guess I shouldn't unpack all my stuff."
Skipper loves his brother, he really does, but he can be thick sometimes. "I don't know why not, seeing as how I'm the one that's going."
"Are not," Spencer retorts, and then they're off into a recursive loop for a minute. The arguments they use are arcane and full of half-sentences that make sense only to each other, and include ample references to age-old sleights, mistakes, and moments of shear stupidity that run back to kindergarten, with thinly-veiled insults to each other's masculinity thrown in for good measure. The conversation could be summarized thus:
Skipper: "I am a font of rationality and have numerous reasons to show that I am more qualified to live in a cool alien city."
Spencer: "My head is a solid block of concrete. I only wish I could be half so awesome as my dear brother."
(Spencer may, perhaps, disagree with that assessment.)
It's exactly this sort of orneriness that had nearly made Mama and Aunt Sassy pull all their hair out when they were young; it is all, of course, Spencer's fault as the (supposed) dominant twin. Skipper is and always has been entirely reasonable and innocent in all things. They quarrel over it for the better part of two weeks, right through off-world training at the Alpha site and several days of crawling around in the mud while being shot at with intars, and in the end it's Skipper who comes out on top.
There's no telling when or even if Lorne will come through for them; if Uncle Cam gets wind of this before being presented with fait accompli he'll stop it right quick. There's probably going to be hell to pay as it is. Cam needs help, though, whether he wants to admit it or not, someone to watch his back. He has John, yeah, and Lorne for when they're both failing to think of themselves, but every little bit counts in this fight. They might not be the fighter squadron or mechanized battalion that Atlantis really needs, but they're something, and family helps family in situations like this.
Besides - space vampires or no space vampires, it's the lost city of Atlantis. How awesome is that?