Archive of Our Own ^beta

Graham Francis Simmons was (say it along with his mother, his two sisters, and his youngest brother, but don't, for God's sake, say it in his father's hearing) a member of "a fine old American military family". His mother was in the DAR. His father was in the Air Force. His grandfather (1918-1976), E. Dwight Simmons (Senator Simmons's son, such a nice young man) had joined the Army Air Corps in '41. E. Dwight already had a pilot's license. His father the Senator (D-SC) was a good friend of Charles Lindbergh.

In due time, E. Dwight had selected the former Miss Katherine DuBois of Charleston to be his bride, and Katherine, quite properly, produced Francis Edward. E. Dwight subsequently chose Miss Sarah Cunningham (Arlington, Virginia) as Francis's appointed mate. In due time, Sarah Amelia Cunningham Simmons produced Graham Francis Simmons.

Graham, like his father before him, attended the Air Force Academy. Graham, unlike his father before him (Colonel Francis E. Simmons, having been thwarted in his reach for the (General's) stars, had turned his eyes upon politics, resigning his commission but keeping his titles in a fashion that would have horrified both Graham's mother and Debrett's Correct Form) wished to serve his country. America's new warfighters were technical specialists, and in 1998 Graham graduated the Academy with a degree in Military Communications.

His grandfather was proud. His mother wasn't well enough to attend. His father said he'd pulled a few strings to arrange for Graham to get a fasttrack posting. And so, that July, Graham reported to Cheyenne Mountain Military Complex to join Stargate Command.

His technical skills came in handy (he hoped it was that, and not his father's puppeteering) and he was assigned as Gateroom Tech. He was rightly terrified of Chief Master Sergeant Walter D. Harriman, and restricted his activities to the communications equipment (it was pretty easy except when aliens were trying to contact the SGC; then, Graham spent as much time chasing down the right frequency as a lepidopterist did pursuing a prize specimen).

The time it really mattered, though, Graham (in his own opinion, one not borne out by General Hammond or Captain Carter), blew it. He came into work that Friday thinking about the embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam, oversaw SG-1's gear-up (full space suits) for an offworld mission to a place the dialing algorithm called P5C-353, and then was tasked to run the telemetry package as Dr. Jackson and Captain Carter examined what they'd brought back. (It looked like a big gold softball, and Captain Carter said it had been built by aliens over a hundred thousand years ago.) Graham loved his job.

He also loved Samantha Carter. At least he thought he might. She didn't have any time for him, but then, she didn't have any time for anybody -- fast-tracking, ambitious, driven, and probably out to make General, just like her father had. (They could have bonded over prescriptive military fathers, but Graham didn't talk about His Father The Colonel to anyone.) He'd thought his feelings were his own secret, until Dr. Jackson made a joke in the lab. (Opinion about Dr. Jackson was divided at the SGC. Nobody was sure what to make of him and a lot of people said they wouldn't trust him, except that Colonel O'Neill so obviously did. And Dr. Jackson was brilliant, and witty, but sometimes smart guys didn't notice, or care, when their jokes hurt people. So Graham just smiled and pretended it hadn't hurt. He'd gotten a lot of practice at that.)

And because nobody thought he'd noticed, he was back monitoring the alien softball thirty-six hours later. Dr. Jackson and Captain Carter hadn't left the Mountain since the mission, and Graham wished he hadn't, since His Father The Colonel phoned from Washington to give him another hour-long lecture on intelligence, duty, patriotism, and loyalty. Graham had been getting these phone calls roughly every four days since he'd joined the SGC, and Graham (who had graduated in the top five percent of his class, something his father seemed to think was no big deal) was not dumb. Stargate Command was a black books MAJCOM, which meant it wasn't just secret, it had a specific portion of the Air Force mission as its mandate, and answered only to Headquarters Air Force. And clearly His Father The Colonel was out of that loop, and had decided that his eldest son would be the perfect Q-ship. (He was wrong, but Graham had stopped arguing with His Father The Colonel some time around 1984.)

Graham had listened to His Father The Colonel's lectures for so long (and there'd been so many of them) that he could recite them himself. Some of them (about loyalty) appeared on a standard schedlue, but others (about the Cult of Personality and how leading men by personal charisma was the greatest sin a commander could commit), had been on heavy rotation since Graham had joined the SGC.

It was all he could think about, later, seeing Colonel O'Neill pinned to a concrete wall by an alien machine that clearly did not want to go home. Cult of Personality. Patton's Disease. MacArthur's Folly. Colonel Simmons said Colonel O'Neill was the same way, that he wanted his command to follow him instead of following orders, that soldiers (airmen) who subverted the natural military order of things were flawed and dangerous (Colonel Simmons did not say that such men should be put down like rabid dogs and the man who did it was a hero, but His Father The Colonel usually hadn't been drinking, these days, when he and Graham had their little talks).

All Graham could think (reading off measurements, hoping Captain Carter could broker a miracle or maybe even Dr. Jackson could translate something that would help) was that every time a Gate Team stepped through the Gate, they were representing not just the Air Force and America, but Earth to everyone they met, and it really didn't matter whether those people were trying to kill them or running away from them: they'd remember.

Then he wondered how long they'd have to remember before they saw someone else from Earth. And he tried not to wonder if he'd ever see the sun again, because the Base was sealed up once the alien softball turned out to be a hostile alien softball, and Graham was pretty sure he wasn't supposed to know, but he was Colonel Simmons's son, so he did know -- about Wildfire, about the countdown, about the nuclear detonation that would come at the end of it. (The last thing Wildfire did was open the Gate to a neutral destination, so the force of the blast would have somewhere to go once it had turned 28 floors of people and concrete into ash and molten lava. The wonks said the Gate would survive and still be active until it was sealed up.)

He was congratulating himself on keeping his head, keeping cool, helping (following orders, not trying to start his own Cult of Personality, even if that were possible, just Graham Simmons, doing his job) until they shifted the lights to UV from the Control Room and he looked down and realized his skin was covered with whatever it was that was eating Colonel O'Neill alive.

He scrubbed off in the Decontam showers in the Infirmary (he was pretty sure that wouldn't help; he'd seen Captain Carter's face) and got into a set of scrubs. He was pretty sure Dr. Fraiser could cure anything (maybe including death), so he was still trying to be hopeful, right up to the point she checked his tags.

"Allergies?" she asked.

"Nothing important, really," he said, "just tetracycline, you know, it's really common...."

And she gave him a bright artificial smile, and dropped the little bottle she'd been holding into the pocket of her jacket and said: "We'll get you fixed up, Lieutenant, don't worry."

It didn't seem fair, he thought, that something that wasn't even alive could make you sick. He knew by now that the only thing slowing it down was tetracycline, and he would have told Dr. Fraiser he was willing to risk it, except he also knew they were running out of it. The Infirmary was filling up, and supplies of it were running out (it wasn't the first line of defense in a modern pharmacy, but nothing else was working), and what was left had to be prioritized to the people still working on trying to save them. Like Captain Carter.

He knew she blamed herself for this, but none of it was her fault. It was all by the book, by General Hammond's orders, by Colonel O'Neill's, and she'd done nothing wrong. He thought he'd tried to tell her that. He was never sure, afterward, if he had. The next thing he remembered was Dr. Fraiser wiping hs face with a cool cloth and telling him he was going to be evacuated soon, and everything was fine.

He spent a week in the Academy Hospital before they'd let him go home. Everything he knew was by guess and by gosh (one of the upperclassmen at the Academy, a southern guy named Mitchell, had a cornpone cliché for every occasion, and some of them had stuck in Graham's mental monologues), but it was pretty clear that the Good Guys had won. Colonel O'Neill even came to see him while he was on the Sick List, so Graham knew he was okay too.

His phone was ringing (he could hear it through the door of his apartment as he approached) and Graham almost turned around and walked away. He knew who was on the other end, and he'd been playing over the conversation in his head for most of the last week (both sides; if there was one thing The Colonel His Father was, it was predictable). But if there was one thing Graham had learned since August 7th, it was that the SGC wasn't a matter of field units and support personnel. Everyone was on the front lines. Together.

Lieutennant Graham F. Simmons was. And Colonel Francis D. Simmons...

...was not.

So he opened his door, and he picked up his phone, and when The Colonel His Father demanded to know where Graham and been and what he'd been doing (and more urgently, what the SGC had been doing, somewhere Colonel Simmons couldn't see), Graham did what every ounce of birth and breeding and training had prepared him to do.

He lied.

And he went on lying for the next eight months, until The Colonel His Father (having ascended in some nebulous hierarchy Graham was kept in ignorance of), decided his son was of no further use where he was, and had him transferred. "For the good of your career," he said, and Graham pulled strings of his own and got his Pentagon posting exchanged for one at Area 51. (They were glad to have him. He had experience.) Graham knew where he belonged, though. It took him three years to get back there. (His father being sent to prison helped, apparently, even though neither Graham or his siblings ever quite knew why Colonel Simmons was sent to Leavenworth.) By the time he got back, Dr. Jackson was dead, and the first orders Graham was given were to report all contacts with his father directly to General Hammond. (Just in case, you know, he managed to escape from prison.) Three months after Graham was back at the SGC, Colonel Simmons (not really him, General Hammond told him later; a Goa'uld) was dead. (Colonel Simmons was listed as Missing In Action, if you could be missing in action after escaping from prison, stolen a starship, and having retired besides.)

Graham found it hard to grieve.

Dr. Jackson came back from the dead a little while after that, and two years later, the Goa'uld Empire was defeated (finally, really, conclusively, definitely), and everybody, human and alien (Graham had gotten used to having aliens around in the last few years; Teal'c had never really counted as an actual alien because he lived here), was talking about having been freed, and saying SG-1 were heroes.

Graham already knew that. And they'd freed him a long time before.