What's it like to have your dad back after such a long time? 🫂
“I… actually, honestly, I don’t think I can describe it.” John’s voice comes out far quieter than he’d intended. He shakes his head, soft and slow, and his shoulders tense like the question has set him on an edge he’s wary of toppling over.
“I… sometimes I don’t think I can even believe it. After all this time, Dad’s actually home and it’s real and-” John's shoulders roll themselves through a shrug, his Adam's apple bobbing visibly as he swallows. “All I have to do is walk downstairs and he’s there, sitting at his desk like nothing happened and-" and John doesn't think he knows how to vocalise what that means to him. The ginger head shakes again.
“So many times, while Dad was gone," His voice is surprisingly thick, "I’d call, expecting him to be there like normal. I'd forget, almost. But the comm would just ring and ring and- and now he’s actually back on the other end.” The astronaut laughs, but it sounds suspiciously wet. “He’s actually home.”
It’s so… unbelievable. Surreal. Beyond their wildest dreams.
The happiness it's brought is indescribable to John (who has trouble expressing such a thing at the best of times). He's just ridiculously deliriously, unmistakably happy - in a way he's never felt his whole life. It's like riding a drug high. Like a sky he'd forgotten was black has finally cleared. His heart just feels so full and the relief is all encompassing. John has, in fact, smiled so much recently that his cheeks have started to hurt. Gordon jabbed him in the face with a finger and asked him what was wrong with it. Twice.
Because, while John had never stopped looking - while Thunderbird Five never turned off the facial recognition protocols scanning the globe - that didn't mean he'd not stopped hoping. He thinks Scott had stopped too. Then Virgil and Gordon. Only Alan, really, who was eight at the time their Father had disappeared, and therefore too young to fully remember a time when he had always been there for them, had completely refused to accept the possibility he wasn’t coming back.
The systems and algorithms Five has designated to look for their Father are, actually, still running, even now. John can't quite bring himself to shut them down just yet. From the moment it was suggested that the Zero-X had launched Jeff Tracy into the Oort Cloud, that they could follow him there, everything has just seemed... too good to be true. Like this might all be an incredibly realistic dream he could wake up from. Like it would be giving up to turn them off, even though Jeff Tracy is right here; perfectly alive and safe with one hand on Scott's shoulder and the other arm curled around Alan, loudly talking their ears off about space rescue parameters.
John thinks that, maybe, the systems have just been running for so long, for so many years, that, like background noise, he's become intrinsically used to the blank, empty results - and that turning them off would feel like losing a vital part of his Thunderbird. Of maybe himself.
Only the results aren't blank anymore.
If John's honest, though, having him home has also been... a bit of a struggle to adjust to. Scott seemed to expected their Father to need to fully retire after his stint in space, for him to let them continue as they have been, but, if anything, now he's recovering Jeff seems more keen to get back into the running of International Rescue than ever. Had Scott properly thought about it, he would have known what they all did - Colonel Tracy would never let go of IR's reins. Not without a fight.
And it's making their current Field Commander butt his stubborn head hard against their old one's.
John thinks their Father needs to learn that, well... a lot has changed. His little boys have really grown up, and stepped into the shoes it took all five of them to fill.
The current problem is that Jeff thinks Alan's still too young to run ops by himself - but John has over a hundred successful mission logs from the times they had no choice but to send Alan up alone, to prove him wrong. He doesn't feel the man can really argue with both the evidence that his youngest son is a prodigy, or the fact it was Alan's determination, at the core of it, that saved him from deep space.
The kid's a better pilot than any of them, after all - and trained not by their Father like the rest of them, but by his big brothers and his own natural skill and sheer determination. They just need to get Jeff to see that he's the reason they’d gotten to him just in time.
Weak and malnutritioned - bleached thin and shaky by life in zero gravity, in space, with only old oxygen scrubbers and the bare minimum of ration bars that had been aboard the space plane, their Father is hardly the strong, idealised man they’d lost. He’s come back with something softer, quieter. Something a little more like John in ways the younger astronaut had always assumed he’d got from his Mother. Jeff talks to himself a lot, sleeps a lot, eats a lot. He’s a very much changed man by the experience.
But he’s still their Father.
And they’d have given anything to get him back home safely.
And, with their lives and Thunderbirds on the line, they almost had.
