Altho… the only reason they are the biggest is because Virg spends hours shaping his. When the hair is that pristine he wouldn’t be happy with rogue brows messing up the look…
I also had the thought that if the power of the eyebrows could somehow be harnessed then the rockets would have environmentally friendly energy to burn!! (So to speak).
There's definitely an entire language to be explored in the various deployments of the Tracy eyebrows.
I also can imagine if any of those boys were to have an errant eyebrow hair growing wild there would be no shortage of siblings volunteering to (sneakily, and without warning) pluck the offending hair.
(My hubby used to be able to sprout a single eyebrow hair that would grow in completely the wrong direction compared to all the rest, which would appear seemingly overnight at twice the length of all the others! Whenever I noticed it I would tell him, he would tell me to rip it out, then he would yelp in pain when I did.)
Perhaps proof of concept would be if they fall out of the sky without their eyebrows.
Could Virgil still fly Two when his were burnt off?
Hmm, that’s a fic that needs to be written…though poor Scotty would have some kind of seizure.
Also, @flyboytracy has all da skillz. They be like Johnny and terrifying if they go darkside 😁 We should tremble in terror lest they wield the eyebrow clippers with dark purpose.
and you wanna scream
don't call me "kid"
don't call me "baby"
look at this godforsaken mess that you made me
you showed me colors
you know i can't see with anyone else
Scott demonstrates why his imaginary counterpart is such a bad influence because of course he’s going somewhere he shouldn’t be.
But it does mean we (and Scott) finally get to see Virgil’s picture.
💙💚💙💚💙💚💙💚💙💚💙💚💙💚💙💚
By the time he got down to the infirmary, Scott was hobbling slightly and this irritated him. It certainly wasn’t helping with his need to be stealthy. He paused for a moment in the corridor and wrapped his hands tightly around each foot in turn, as if pressing the dressings into place would speed up the healing and prevent the cuts from reopening. He didn’t have the time or energy for that right now. Again he wished he’d slowed down, just a little, and avoided creating an unnecessary distraction with a pointless injury.
But how could he slow down when a brother was in danger? When anyone was in danger? When the split second could make all the difference? Everyone told him he had to… Virgil, Kayo, John… even Gordon lost the plot and yelled at him on occasion but Scott just didn’t see how he was supposed to make that call. How did everyone else see that bright line demarking “this far but not that far”? He knew he had to find it, learn to see it… if only because, as Virgil kept pointing out, Alan was beginning to follow in his footsteps and he’d never forgive himself if the kid got hurt because of it.
He silently eased open the door and crept into the infirmary. As if conjured there by Scott’s musing, Alan stirred a little and he froze in the doorway but almost immediately his exhausted little brother’s breathing slowed again. In another example of littlest brother imitating the biggest, Scott realised with a jolt that Alan had precisely mirrored his own habitual bedside position. Perched on the edge of the chair, leaning forward and to the right, the weight of his upper body supported by his right upper arm which tucked in alongside the pillow, head propped up by the right fist and left hand gently holding that of the patient. The only difference was that Alan had clearly slumped in his sleep and so his face was buried in the edge of Virgil’s pillow while his right hand fell limp over his own shoulder. He was going to get cramp if he stayed like that for long…
The urge to interfere was strong - to scoop his baby brother up in his arms and tuck him into his own bed, away from sights and sounds that might distress him. But Scott resisted. Just. He sent Alan into space on a regular basis, the kid had earned the right to watch over a sick brother the same as any of them.
The shirt fairy had visited here too, it seemed, and had left their bounty of neatly folded clothing piles arranged around Virgil’s sleeping head like a halo in some bizarre classical artwork. Scott spotted Alan’s t-shirt, a violently patterned item of Gordon’s and an equally-painful-to-the-eye-for-different-reasons one of John’s. There was something of Kayo’s and Grandma’s there too. Virgil was surrounded, guarded in a way, by all of them. But… Scott felt a stab of hurt in his gut as he realised… not something of his? Was he to be written out of existence entirely? He was about to storm out and hide himself away somewhere they couldn’t find or be bothered by him when he realised that the cover tucked tightly up to his brother’s chin wasn’t a duvet or blanket or any other bedding found in the infirmary. Virgil was snuggled up in Scott’s own fluffy blue hooded bathrobe, clearly pilfered from the back of his bedroom door.
Oh.
Oh right.
The wave of rejection panic receded and he felt a little silly. The whole being excluded and replaced by a hallucination thing was clearly getting to him.
Virgil was sleeping soundly, and the sound of his sleep was as loud as it ever was. At least that hadn’t changed… Alan despite being at close range was oblivious and Scott allowed himself a smirk at how they were all so accustomed to that particularly niche white noise.
He crept a little closer and his toes nudged the discarded sketchbook. Overcome with curiosity he knelt down and lifted it so that the moonlight from the window fell upon the most recent addition.
Virgil had depicted a storm.
The clouds were heavy and dark. A lightning bolt tore the sky in two from the top right to the bottom left where a carefully drawn silhouette of a fighter jet dived towards the ground, smoke and fire billowing from its tail. Scott’s stomach clenched as he realised it wasn’t intended to be lightning at all, but a streak of burning fuel. The violence and despair radiated off the page at him.
Scott knew that during his… absence… some top secret photographs had been leaked to the press and splashed alongside that same formal photograph of himself that had caused all the recent trouble. It was too much to hope that the sensational front pages hadn’t been seen by his younger brothers. Later, Scott had been required to comment on the same images at the war crimes tribunal. The high res arial photographs of the blackened and twisted cockpit of his plane had been unpleasant viewing even to someone who knew the pilot had escaped. It wasn’t surprising that this was the image conjured by a grieving artistic imagination who’d believed he hadn’t.
His hands shook a little as he fought back the nausea. It wasn’t much of a leap to put himself in his brother’s shoes… he’d had enough nightmares in which Thunderbird Two or one of the others had been in a similar condition. But every time that happened, Scott had woken up to realise it wasn’t real.
Virgil had woken every day for months to find that it was.
Scott couldn’t imagine how his little brother had kept it together as long as he had. If the roles had been reversed… he shuddered.
He lifted his left hand to brush a prickling of cold sweat from his brow and noticed the patch of light in the very top left of the drawing previously covered by his thumb. The black clouds had been erased leaving a spot of clear sky, in the middle of which was a tiny silhouette of a person dangling from a parachute.
Scott swallowed as, for a moment, he hung again in mid-air and watched his only way out of hostile territory smash into the earth in a ball of fire. It was as if Virgil had known.
HAD Virgil known, then?
Had he known THEN? Scott could almost believe it… that his closest brother would somehow know, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that he wasn’t dead.
Or maybe it was just that now the facts from the present were seeping back into his understanding of the past. Which must be a good sign.
He hoped it was a good sign.
Unable to tear his eyes from the drawing, it felt a little like time itself had been put on hold all around Scott in the same way the sound had. He suddenly realised that this was odd - the quietness almost oppressive in its emptiness. Then he realised what was missing:
The snoring had stopped.
Scott looked up in alarm to find a pair of inscrutable brown eyes looking silently down at him. So familiar, so beloved yet somehow also unfamiliar, unnaturally dispassionate. Virgil had never looked at him that way and it stripped all the courage from Scott’s bones as he struggled to maintain eye contact with his best friend. He had absolutely no idea what to do. His whisper when it came was barely audible:
I confess I don’t know precisely where/when I picked that one up… I suspect I stole it from @flyboytracy (apologies if so) but it has a vice grip on me so I’m calling it fanon now.
#in the article it says that the sailboat sailors were concerned because they could not be towed quickly because of the kind of boat#so they asked Götheborg what type of ship they were and warned that they would not be able to go above a certain speed#and götheborg went ' we are also a sailboat. 50 meters length. no worries :) '#and the poor sailboat sailors were just like ' That's not possible. they have to be messing with us' and then the ship Rolled Up (via bunjywunjy)
I'm crying. Here's a photo of a sailor from the Götheborg watching over the little sailboat in tow:
From the story:
We repeatedly emphasized that we were aboard a small 8-meter sailboat, but the response was the same each time: "We are a 50-meter three-masted sailboat, and we offer our assistance in towing you to Paimpol." We were perplexed by the size difference between our two boats, as we feared being towed by a boat that was too large and at too fast a speed that could damage our boat.
The arrival of the Götheborg on the scene was rapid and surprising, as we did not expect to see a merchant ship from the East India Company of the XVIII century. This moment was very strange, and we wondered if we were dreaming. Where were we? What time period was it? The Götheborg approached very close to us to throw the line and pass a large rope. The mooring went well, and our destinies were linked for very long hours, during which we shared the same radio frequency to communicate with each other.
The crew of the Götheborg showed great professionalism and kindness towards us. They adapted their speed to the size of our boat and the weather conditions. We felt accompanied by very professional sailors. Every hour, the officer on duty of the Götheborg called us to ensure everything was going well.[...]
This adventure, very real, was an incredible experience for us. We were extremely lucky to cross paths with the Götheborg by chance and especially to meet such a caring crew.
Dear commander and crew of the Götheborg, your kindness, and generosity have shown that your ship is much more than just a boat. It embodies the noblest values of the sea, and we are honored to have had the chance to cross your path and benefit from your help.
"Our destinies were linked for very long hours" is just knocking me out.
Well, you stood there with me in the doorway. My hands shake. I'm not usually this way, but... you pull me in and I'm a little more brave.
FEARLESS ERA
Taylor Swift: The Era's Tour (Taylor's Version)
Everything you lose is a step you take / So make the friendship bracelets / Take the moment and taste it / You've got no reason to be afraid / You're on your own, kid / Yeah, you can face this // You're on your own, kid (2023)
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