okay, civil war. a BIG jump in quality, like holy shit. the writing. the drama. the characterizations, especially for nat. this is where shes finally done justice. also love sharon carter throughout all of this.
there is some things im not too happy about (tony getting a minor involved in all this, although its probably top management mandating that for the spiderman movies to take off, the way all of this is kind of due to steve and tony just being hella self-righteous and arrogant).
i get where tony is coming from, the fact that they need oversight, the fact that the climate has changed and if they dont agree to this now it will be forced on them, thats all completely on point. the avengers were originally conceived and run as a shield response team. they were never supposed to operate on their own. they dont have the staff to do all the legwork to properly do their job, which leads to the many mistakes they made.
on the other hand, i also get steve. oversight doesnt mean bureaucracy, it doesnt mean being at the beck and call of politicians, and with the way the accords were later executed, there were a lot of human rights violations committed because of them (see agents of shield season 4 although you could probably argue about whether that exists to the mcu (although i would think it does, because visions line about exponentially growing numbers of enhanced people and world ending events since ironman showed up wouldnt make sense just on the movies alone, but it definitley does if you consider the inhuman crisis in aos season 3)).
then the entire zemo plot. the fact that the movie took place in germany (although they ruined the berlin government district, it does NOT look like that in RL). Thats my country! i literally walked along the spree river at exactly the spot where stucky crashed the helicopter into the river! and all the german spoken in the movie is on point too, those are german extras!
still feel weird about the sharon steve kiss but uh. yeah. thats just uncomfortable. omitting this from my headcanon just as much as the powerbroker bs later on.
but yeah, the best thing is the way nat was finally done justice. moving on to black widow now, which is one of my favourite mcu movies straight up, maybe even the most favorite. the sister relationship between nat and yelena breaks me everytime.
Gordon - how much he’d be willing to give up for her sake.
Penny - how frightened she is by how safe he makes her feel.
Virgil/Kayo
Virgil - Nothing of anyone else’s.
Kayo - Everything of her own.
John & EOS
John - how afraid he is to fail her, how inadequate he feels to the task of being her moral compass.
EOS - how much of his life she’s rendered and modeled and tested, in the name of trying to understand even just one single endlessly complex human being.
Scott/Jane
Scott - that he could ever want anything more than what they already have.
Jane - that she can see the shape of herself in what he tells her about the rest of his life.
Alan/Brandon
Alan - that he hasn’t had enough friends in his life to know when a friendship is something more.
Brandon - that none of the friendships he’s had before Alan’s have been anything like the one he has with Alan.
talented amateurs - deleted scene (Scott and Jane)
the interlude to close out all that emotionally charged and highly dramatic Island Nonsense was originally going to be a monster of a chapter, a six way rotation through the POVs all of the significant other characters (plus a couple new voices) who we haven’t heard much from. this proved to be FAR too monumental a task and while I’m happier with the simplicity chapter I wound up with, there are still a few thousand words worth of written but unpublished extra content that add context and depth (as well as a bunch of important points I didn’t get to address on account of opting out of The Monster Chapter, fml), so here’s one of them.
There's a certain kind of long distance intimacy to the fact that they always know where to find one another. It's the first thing she does when she lands anywhere new---tells him where she is and how long she'll be there, just on the off chance that it's somewhere he's got the time to be. He responds in kind, and especially makes a point to let her know when he'll be free for more than one or two days at a stretch, and when possible, they'll both make a point to get together.
Jane's job takes her to almost as many corners of the world as his does, and currently she finds herself in a hotel room near the airport in Singapore, getting the requisite amount of sleep before her next cargo flight, a contracted sequence that takes her all over the South Pacific.
But she isn't sleeping. She'd already called Scott earlier in the evening to let him know she was going to be in the neighbourhood, relatively speaking, and he'd promised to get back to her as soon as possible. Now she's in her pajamas, curled up beneath the blankets in her hotel room bed. Instead of sleeping, she lies awake beneath beneath the bedsheets, frowning at the messages that glow from the screen of her comm.
S: I need to see you.
J: ooh I kinda hoped you might <3
J: Room 301 @ Aerotel Singapore ;)
J: bring me a bottle of whiskey or I'm not letting you in
S: Not like that.
J: oh.
J: Is everything okay?
S: Can't talk about it. Unsecured comm. I'll be there in an hour. Talk then.
And then nothing else. There's not much to go on, and she knows better by now than to try and press Scott for information when there's something bothering him, and she knows something's bothering him by the way he's terse and sharp and short. Whatever it is, it must be serious enough to warrant such strict privacy.
An hour is a long time to lie alone in the dark wondering what exactly her boyfriend's problem is. Initially she scours the news for any mention of any sort of disaster requiring the involvement of International Rescue and Thunderbird 1 by extension---but there's nothing. Nothing that's been publicly reported, at least. It's not in Jane's nature to worry about things she can't change, and so she puts it resolutely out of her mind. She passes the time reading recipes that she never intends to make, and browsing idly through the latest offerings from the tabloid press, though the "news" is all fairly stale and none of it sparks her interest.
She's dozing a little bit by the time there's a knock on her door, hard and loud enough that she starts awake, briefly bewildered before she remembers she's expecting company. There's an insistence to the second knock on the door that makes it more of a pounding, and she mutters uncharitably under her breath as she climbs out of bed.
The hotel room is cool, and it's late enough that it's starting to be early. Outside, the first suggestion of dawn creeps into the sky, a reminder that she really does need to be fresh and well-rested for her next flight, and whatever's brought Scott to her doorway right now had better be urgent.
Even though she's expecting him, natural caution has her stop and tap a fingertip against a touchscreen embedded at eye-level in the door. Just to be safe. This activates a camera to reveal a view of the hallway, and grants her a glimpse of Scott in an unguarded moment. The weariness and the worry in his bearing stifle any inclination she might have to tell him off for pounding on her door. He's rested one of his forearms against the doorjamb, and leans against it, looking worn out in a way he usually doesn't. He's also in full uniform, which isn't exactly uncommon, considering the usual manner of their meetings. Every now and again their schedules will overlap in such a way that she can join him somewhere where they can both be in their civvies---but tonight her uniform hangs pressed and ready in the closet by the door, and he's still in brilliant IR blue when Jane opens the door.
She only just catches him straightening up and pushing a hand through his hair, and if he doesn't quite smile when he sees her, some of the tension around his eyes seems to soften slightly.
"Hey," she says, and offers a smile that's gentle where it might otherwise be wicked, if this were their usual flavour of rendezvous. "C'mon in."
"Hi," he answers, but something about the way he says it seems almost absent, perfunctory. He's visibly distracted as he steps into her hotel room, moves swiftly past her as she closes the door behind him, and when she turns, he's made a beeline straight for the minibar in the corner of the room. A glass hits the countertop, and there's a melodic chime as the mini fridge swings open, and then three tiny bottles of liquor cluster around his chosen glass.
"I was kidding about the bottle of whiskey," Jane volunteers, watching as Scott deftly twists a tiny lid off a tiny bottle, and pours himself a shot of straight tequila. For Jane's part, her current employer maintains a strict zero-tolerance policy for drugs and alcohol, and there's a twelve hour delay required betwixt bottle and throttle. "I'm due back in the air in nine hours, I won't be joining you."
"Wasn't planning to share." Shots of rum and vodka join the tequila, tinting the concoction into a light amber colour. Scott reopens the mini fridge, frowns into it briefly, before closing it again. Before Jane can comment any further, he's picked up his drink and thrown it back, in the manner of somebody who'd better not intend to fly anywhere in the next twelve hours. This accomplished, he abandons his empty glass on the countertop, and turns away from the bar to drop bodily onto the waiting couch at the far end of her suite, tipping his head back and closing his eyes with a heavy sigh.
Jane, having watched this dramatic little one-man tableau from the doorway, takes her cue to pad across the room in her bare feet, and seats herself gingerly on the sleek coffee table in front of him. She doesn't say anything, quietly expectant, and waits patiently for Scott to set the tone with whatever he decides to say first.
To his credit, he doesn't make her wait long. "...Sorry." He lifts a still gloved (gauntleted, really) hand to rub his fingertips against closed eyes, and then drags his palm down his face.
"Hit the bottle kinda hard there, champ," Jane observes, keeping her tone carefully light and non-judgmental, at least until she has a better explanation of what's going on. "You're lucky the room gets charged to my company card."
Scott chuckles but doesn't look at her, darkly sardonic in a way that he just isn't, usually. "Just following orders."
That's uncharacteristically cryptic, and something about the way he's said it makes her skin crawl slightly, hinting at something she's starting to suspect, but doesn't want to believe. Three little bottles still sit empty atop the minibar, winking in the low lights of the hotel room and persistent at the edge of her awareness. She'd been joking about the bottle of whiskey, but it's true that some of the best times they've had together have been over beers at a ballgame, or sipping Scotch at some nameless hotel bar. But this is clearly different. And not just because he's on his way to getting very drunk, while she remains resolutely sober. Something's wrong; this isn't like him. Something brought this about.
Jane reaches out to put a hand on Scott's knee, and her voice is gentle and sincere as she asks, "Are you okay? What happened?"
Scott takes a deep breath, and his gaze falls to her hand upon his knee, as though he can't bring himself to look at her when he answers, "...I fucked up." His fingers close over hers with a kind of desperate urgency, like her touch is a lifeline he can't lose hold of. "I mean I really fucked up, Jane, and I came here because I need to talk to somebody, but I don't know if I can even tell you. It's some shit about me and some shit about my family, and it's big and ugly and complicated and none of it's good and I just---I don't know what you'll think."
He falls silent, and Jane isn't sure what to say. Even after two years, vulnerability is rare in the man who saved her life, and truth be told, Jane likes it that way. Not that she'd fault him for it, just that she wouldn't entirely know how to respond. She knows, though they never really talk about it, that Scott's seen some shit. Jane doesn't know how to talk about that kind of thing, because that kind of thing is the kind of thing she renders in terms like "seen some shit". Sensitivity isn't her strong suit. Softer emotions don't come naturally to her.
But then, Scott knows that. They have it in common.
It's some instinct, then, that has her take his hand in both of hers. Idly, absently, she starts to undo the assorted straps and buckles that fasten his gloves. It's easier to talk if she pretends that this task is meticulous and demands more attention than it really does. All she really wants is to get down to bare skin, the intimacy of real contact, and hope it'll help make her point clear.
"I remember when I told you about my dad," she says, not looking up and unbuckling a clasp and loosening a strap, and starting to work the fingers of the gloves loose. This gets a little tricky as Scott's fingers twitch, reflexively trying to clench into a fist at the mere mention of her father. She squeezes his wrist gently and his hand relaxes, so she goes on, "Speaking of 'big' and 'ugly' and 'complicated'. I didn't know what you were going to think, either."
She tugs the glove free, tosses it onto the couch beside him, as he protests, "This is different."
Now her hand clasps his for a moment, before she gets up from the coffee table, and sits right back down, beside him this time. Insistent, she curls herself up on the couch, leans against his chest, tilts her head against his shoulder. "Maybe. But you let me tell you, and you listened, and it helped to get it out, and now you know something about me that almost no one else does. If it would help to get it out, Scott, just talk. Or do you need me to get you another drink?"
"I need you to stay just exactly where you are." His right hand is bare now, and much more deftly than she had, he pulls his other glove off. Reflexively, maybe, his arm wraps around her shoulder, and though she'd nestled close, he pulls her closer still. The bare skin of his palm is warm against her arm, and she can smell the alcohol on his breath when he rests his cheek against the crown of her head and sighs.
Jane tilts her face up and kisses his cheek. For being as brave and intrepid and daring as he is, it can sometimes be hard to get the ball rolling with Scott. More often than not, Jane finds herself initiating things between them. She gives him another little nudge, literally and metaphorically. "Look---I recognize the irony of telling you this while we're in another damn hotel room, but babe, when we decided that this whole thing was going to be more than just hook-ups in hotel rooms, part of that was an agreement to talk to each other about our lives, once in a while."
He shifts beside her, but she refuses to do anything but cuddle stubbornly closer, even if she can hear the discomfort in his tone when he protests, "It's my brothers, though."
She can't help a snort of laughter at this. "You tell me everything about your brothers. The number of times you've come bitching to me at the end of a long day about Alan's whining or John's micromanaging---some days I think I know your brothers better than you do."
The statement is carefully crafted, deliberately phrased so as to needle at Scott's not-so-subtle competitive edge, his perpetual need to prove himself. Still, even thus prompted, it takes him a few long moments to volley back, and there's genuine anguish in his voice when he asks---
"Do you know what to do when one of them gets his girlfriend pregnant?"
the thing is that joss whedon wrote both this and the first avengers movie, which unlike this, is great.
and the relevant detail here i think is that mojed actually had a huge hand in writing that one, which isnt common knowledge, but it sure does explain a lot
Prelude, I am COUNTING on you to write a post-finale series for TAG. You write the boys soooo well, you know their voices as if you were related to them and I must know how it all works out now that Jeff's back. Like, is Scott still in charge or does Jeff become the lead again? Do any of the boys (read: John, because we love him) have a hard time with the change? Are Pen and Ink official?! Who is the spy in the GDF?! What does Jeff think of EOS?! Who really is the Mechanic?! I need to know!!
okay well, boy, well okay
full disclosure, as of this answer I still haven’t found the mental energy or brainspace to watch the latest and lastest ep, which is a sad but accurate commentary on how far this show has fallen in terms of importance in my life, because I remember the early days of staying up til five in the goddamn morning, with fuckin hola vpn doing all manner of evil via my IP address, just to watch the latest eps live on ITV. But times change, and times have changed so much that I’m no longer awake at 5AM anyway because I have to nurse a one year old back to sleep, but instead I have to be in bed by 11:30 at the latest so I can walk a six year old to school. Times change.
Anyway, that personal note aside, as far as my writing goes, my major projects have always been a magnification of the aspects of TAG I find the most interesting. Heavenward dialed that lens in on John and EOS and the intensity of their relationship, Harvard likewise focused on John and his most fundamental nature, and these days TA’s focal point is on Gordon/Penny as a couple and the way that all of the relationships both within and without this family ripple outward and overlap and interfere with each other, like a handful of stones thrown into still water.
I’ve been pretty transparent about how I feel re: TAG and the way its latest season went, and the problem with me taking the metaphorical cueball of TAG’s canon and trying to bank a post-series fic into the corner pocket is that I fundamentally disagree with the arc that canon’s taken, pretty much from the end of Season 2. Right up to the finale of S2 there’d been nothing I couldn’t manage to work with, barring a few mental tweaks and adjusted details here and there, but S3 just went so buck fuckin’ wild compared to what I would’ve done, storywise, that to try to write past the end of it is fairly untenable for me personally.
And while those are all interesting questions, I’ve already addressed a lot of them. The spy in the GDF was a literal fucking rando in a goddamn raccoon burglar mask with a walkie talkie in hand. That is how far the writing had fallen, because if you want a couple of those questions answered right here and now, the mole in the GDF should have been Colonel Casey. And who the Mechanic really was should’ve been was Casey’s son, kidnapped and brainwashed and leveraged against her by the Hood, because that’s a poetic and perfect and poignant level of betrayal---Casey betraying IR as a mother who loves her son, as much as those boys ever loved their father.
Anyway. Here’s the bigger problem I have right now.
(TA spoilers-ish below the cut, a loose discussion of the map of the rest of the story, leave this unread unless you want some insight into my process re: currently unanswered but fairly obviously rhetorical questions and the overall arc of the story)
What the finale does do is makes me ask a fairly critical question about the work I have ongoing now, and makes me wonder if I might want to make it into the venue where I explore what I would’ve done with the series’ larger plot (ie: see above re: colonel casey). talented amateurs is, as mentioned above, fundamentally a fic about exploring relationships within IR. TA is my homage to the art of the slow burn, only I’ve done it bassackwards on account of the pair of them fell in love and promptly slept together within the first five chapters of the work. TA also started as a straight-up mood piece, just something to explore what that moment of an initiated relationship between Gordon and Penelope would look like. Needless to say, it blossomed, and now about 200k later, here we are.
In the same manner that TA wasn’t initially intended to be the behemoth it’s become, it was also at one point a question whether the thrust of the plot would concern Penelope’s pregnancy. Obviously it does now, and the works that follow it will continue along that essential arc---that’s the fundamental three act structure of this story, the three trimesters of pregnancy.
But ever since it started getting serious and started making itself apparent as my Next Big Thing, its been teetering on the knife’s edge of the question: Do I want to bring Jeff Tracy into this? Do I want to overshadow the future of IR with the spectre of its past? Do I want to bring him back?
Because the thing with TAG is that, if you’re the sort of person who can perceive the fundamental shape of an overall story---even one as disconnected and disjointed as TAG’s was---it was always transparently apparent that one day they would find their father. It was the series’ biggest macguffin and it’s kind of like, invisibly woven into the tapestry of the narrative. I can’t even quite clearly articulate why it always seemed so obvious---probably simply because they open the show by searching for that last desperate trace of him, but there was never a doubt in my mind that one day that would be the resolution of that question and the ultimate expression of the boys as IR. Their father wasn’t dead and they got to save him.
So it seems like any fic taking place in TAG’s verse must have that truth baked into it---their dad isn’t dead. He’s out there somewhere, alive and findable. I think the question of where could be more compellingly and believably answered than by “he’s been fridged in the fucking Oort Cloud for eight goddamn years” and I think as a writer I could take the bones of the show we’ve got and craft a more interesting version of that story. TA is a Season 2 AU in the same way that hwd is a Season 1 AU, and as far as canon is concerned, it doesn’t consider anything from S3 to be true. In TA, the Hood is still in prison and he’s going to stay there. Havoc and Fuse and Rigby don’t exist. The Mechanic is the biggest unanswered question, but also no longer IR’s problem. As far as TA’s cast is concerned, their dad is dead as a goddamn doornail.
And maybe that would be the bolder move. Maybe he could just be dead and that’s the deeper and more interesting and more poignant thought. What I can’t decide about TA is whether or not I want it to catch a case of Plot. It’s a double-edged sword, because on the one hand, the interpersonal happenings of this story are easily as interesting than anything like an actual high-stakes narrative about their father being alive could be. But equally I know I could tell that story as well or better than the actual writers actually did, and it seems silly to pretend that I’d ever do it elsewhere, though it would be a hell of a thing if I did, and I only know that because I’ve done it already.
Anyway. I’ll know in about ten chapters or so. Til then the coin’s still in the air.
the front half of the following conversation was pulled out of chapter 16 (tl;dr: valentine’s date, paris, our boy has just said those three lil words and I had just chosen the best possible name for this particular chapter) and recycled into the back half of chapter 32, but I always quite liked this section, and hung onto it for no particularly good reason other than just that. it can’t really live anywhere else, so here it is:
"I don't like that," he tells her, in that wholehearted way he has, simple and straightforward, meaning every word. "I just---god, Penelope, please tell me you never loved anyone who didn't love you back, because I couldn't stand it."
"Gordon," she murmurs, and gently pushes him away, just enough so she can reach up to touch his face, to cradle his jaw in the palm of her hand, and brush her thumb lightly over his cheek as he looks to her for an answer. "Whoever else may or may not have loved me at any other point in my life seems to matter very little, when I'm lucky enough that you love me now."
He still doesn't quite seem to believe her, despite all the effort she's pouring into sincerity, but there's a note of hope, hidden behind the doubt in his voice, when he echoes, "...is that something lucky?"
"Yes," she answers firmly, so he'll know that she means it as she continues, "And please don't imagine that I won't love you back, because I do want to. Just...do remember that it has been three weeks, and only three weeks, where you've got years' worth of feelings for me."
He's still embarrassed, abashed, and hasty as he apologizes, "I know. And I'm sorry, and I know that, and I didn't want to---"
Penelope's not especially interested in any further objections, and presses a fingertip to his lips again, bossy. "Shh. I only mean to say---you'll need to give me some time to catch up. You've had so much longer, and you're so very much better at this than I am."
That gets a startled, incredulous burst of slightly nervous laughter, and she takes this as a good sign, an indication that she might be getting through that stubbornly thick skull of his. "Pen, some days I still can't understand how the hell this happened in the first place. I don't actually think it had a single goddamn thing to do with me."
"Or it had everything to do with you, and you're just being incredibly dense."
"You kissed me."
"You kissed me back," she counters, but playfully now, hoping that the anxiety and tension that had threatened the mood might be starting to ease. "And do you expect me to believe you didn't want me to?"
"No, I'm just saying I didn't think you would."
Penelope sighs in a dramatic and exaggerated fashion. "And here you're usually such an optimist," she laments, teasing.
Gordon shakes his head. "Nah. Common misconception. Less of an optimist and more of an extremely well-prepared pessimist. Easy mistake."
Penelope frowns at the correction. "I don't often make mistakes," she points out, as a politely roundabout way of informing him that she thinks he's completely wrong about this especially quintessential truth of his nature.
"Not much room for mistakes, in your line of work."
"Nor in yours."
He chuckles at that, just a little, wry and self-recriminating. "No, I save them all for my personal life, where I crack under the pressure of things going better than I expected, and then I panic and say things I can't take back, and just, like, totally tank the mood." Gordon closes his eyes and heaves a disconsolate sigh. He bows his head slightly, so his forehead touches hers. It's a gentle, intimate sort of gesture that makes Penelope's heart ache, for how vulnerable he's made himself, and with only her to turn to for solace, when at the same time she's clearly the reason he's this anxious in the first place. "I'm sorry."
Penelope doesn't often make mistakes, personally or professionally, and she's certainly not about to make one now. Carefully, in a manner very much the same as she had three weeks ago, she turns her face upwards to press her lips against his jaw. "Darling," she murmurs, comforting. It's hard to think of anything to do but lower her hand to his chest again, seeking out hi the beat of his heart, and hoping to reassure him by doing so. "Nothing you've said or done has been a mistake. You've nothing to be sorry for. And I'm just going to keep telling you so until you believe me."
"Mmh." But it's a noncommittal little grunt of a noise, dejected and discouraged, as he sighs again. "Can we walk this all back to the part where you said you wanted to fuck me? Because that's usually the beginning and end of where anything ever goes with me, and I think maybe I'm only good for that part."
This calls for a measured, delicate pause and a prim little cough. And then it becomes necessary for Penelope to exercise some diplomacy. "My acknowledgment of the fact that you are very, very good at that part is in no way meant to suggest that you're bad at any of the other parts. Really, Gordon. It's all right." She hesitates and then carefully asks, "Have I done something to bring all this on? If I've come on too strong---"
"No!" His objection is too immediate and earnest to be anything but sincere, which is another endlessly appealing truth about Gordon, not that he seems like he'd believe it if she told him so. "No, I just---" He takes a deep breath and then fails to find anything to do with it, trailing off and shaking his head. "I don't know. I didn't mean to screw everything up."
"You haven't." Penelope gently extracts herself from his arms, drops her hands to take both of his. She makes the executive decision that a change of venue would be more appropriate, and that this conversation should continue somewhere that feels appropriately private, more intimate and less exposed, even if she derives some vaguely patriotic satisfaction from staunchly ignoring the Paris skyline. She's paid an exorbitant amount for the most expensive hotel room in Paris, and at the moment they're getting criminally little use out of it. "Come inside, pet. Let's the both of us get more comfortable and sort this all out."
this is not a chapter of TA so much as it is something that was GOING to be a chapter of TA, but i just wasn’t feeling it. It’s not BAD, it’s just...ehhhhh. It meanders a lot and its narratively dense and it doesn’t end well. It can be taken to be sort of nebulously semi-canon to the story itself, but it wastes a lot of words to say very little and doesn’t quite do what I want it to and so it won’t be included. I feel bad about how slow I’ve been lately, though it’s not for lack of trying, just for lack of time and energy and a sort of mire of challenging personal circumstances. Nothing’s wrong, just having a rough month.
Anyway! here’s about 4k of something that won’t be published elsewhere, concerning Gordon and introducing Alan into the story, although when that happens properly it’ll probably happen in a different way. Sorry for the wait, and hopefully I can get myself back on track again soon. thanks for reading and thanks for your patience with me <3
There are worse places to spend twelve hours of his life than in the Azores, even if it is the rainy season. And even if the rainy season has resulted in flooding and mudslides throughout the archipelago, and has Gordon and Alan hopping from island to island, figuratively putting out fires, and literally helping to manage the damage done by all of the aforementioned flooding and mudslides. So far they've evacuated a handful of assorted small villages, helped dig channels to reroute inland flooding, and reinforced a few dozen miles worth of levees (from the French levée , itself from the feminine past participle of the verb lever, "to raise") along a few dozen miles worth of rivers.
Of course, there are better places he could've spent the past twelve hours of his life, and Gordon's especially conscious of the fact that he's only about an hour's flight away from Penelope. When his mind wanders, as it's wont to do when he's bored and shoving dirt around to build dikes, lately it wanders back to Creighton-Ward Manor, the master bedroom at the end of a long hallway and the shift of a paradigm that had happened therein. With rain pounding relentlessly on the exterior of his little yellow pod, in the muggy darkness of a thunderstorm in the middle of the day, with saltwater and mud permeating everything---Gordon's thinking back to the way the earliest morning sunlight had filled Penelope's bedroom, all white and gold and satiny softness, and the scent of lilac on every breath.
It's hard to believe that she's only about an hour's flight away. And not even at top speed---if he really punched it, if he pushed all the way up to even TB2's poky-slow Mach 6, he could be there in a bare twenty minutes.
Admittedly Gordon's sense of distance has been skewed by the work they do and the way they do it, because actually it's a whole 1500 miles. There are entire climates in between him and Penelope, but he's still daydreaming about the twenty minutes it would take for him to get to her doorstep. He could just show up. He's sweaty and tired and he's got mud in places that mud shouldn't logically have been able to get to---but in twenty minutes, he could just be there. With her.
---And Thunderbird 2, and his obnoxious little brother, and with the Azores still slowly being rained into the ocean at his back, and with no actual guarantee that Penelope's even at Creighton-Ward Manor, and not off in Milan or Tokyo or Belarus, because he hasn't managed to keep track of what her plans were for the week, because in the two weeks since he'd had to leave her alone in Paris, they've only spoken twice, and he only remembers the first time, because he'd pretty much passed out in the middle of the second.
He hasn't even managed a spare moment to call and apologize for that. It's just another reason he wants to drop everything, leave the Azores behind, and fly his ass to England. It's really not that far.
But it's a moot point, because any distance is insurmountable when there are people who need him. So he stays on the ground, in a mole pod in the Azores, because people need him.
It's nice to be needed. Showing up to a place and being essential to the continued survival of the people who've been waiting for him has always provided something of a rush, something he'd grown to crave over the course of his family's existence as International Rescue. But lately Gordon's starting to think that on the whole he might prefer being wanted.
Knowing that Penelope wants him is a whole other kind of thrill. She'd said it in French, when she'd said it, but she'd still said it, and in his head he keeps hearing it, imagining her voice all soft and sultry and sincere. It's hard to believe that the way he feels about her began as an idle crush, all those years ago, when these days his feelings for her seem to consume his every idle moment, not to mention all the not-idle moments, when he's really supposed to be paying more attention to the circumstances at hand. It's been hard as hell not to be able to talk to Penelope. It makes it very difficult to concentrate on building dikes in the Azores. It makes him wish he at least had someone he could really talk to about her.
But Virgil's at home on Tracy Island, probably lounging poolside, on a deck chair with his broken leg propped up, recuperating. In Gordon's head, his big brother is nibbling on bunches of dewy grapes and sipping champagne, while MAX waits on him hand and foot, as the rest of the family toils in their usual heroic obscurity.
So it's Alan who's flying TB2, keeping her steady and level in the rough skies that go with the rough weather and rough seas in their current rough situation. And in his big brother's absence, Gordon's had to settle for melancholy rambling at his little brother about just how much he misses the love of his life. Pines for her. Aches for her. And all sorts of other tormented emotions that Alan probably doesn't understand, because when it comes to affairs of the heart, at least as far as Gordon can tell, Alan has the emotional range of a turnip.
He's definitely not as good a listener as TB2's usual pilot, and has answered Gordon's heartfelt lament with nothing better than "mmhms" and "uh huhs" and the occasional "oh yeah, really?"
That is, until he finally stirs himself to break the pattern.
"So if you love her so much, why haven't you told Scott yet?"
He's also a little blunt, for Gordon's tastes. The last vestiges of sullen teenagerhood cling to Alan like cottony down on a baby chick, and in the weeks leading up to his twentieth birthday, he seems determined to pull out all the stops. One last sulky hurrah before he's officially in his twenties and fully expected to smarten up and act his age. He's being more of a brat than usual, which is notable, because he's not usually a brat at all.
To be fair, Alan's always been well aware of his position as the baby of the family, and it's always suited him just fine. He leans into it more than a little bit. It helps that he still looks like a twelve-year-old. Ever since his little brother was born, Gordon's been of the opinion that it was a good thing that Alan came along when he did, because he makes a much better baby of the family than Gordon ever would have. In Gordon's head, his baby brother is eternally caught at nine years old, with his big blue eyes and his freckles and his perpetual baby-face. And his blunt, tactless questions.
Despite the fact that he's younger by an entire five years, Alan's a good pilot---probably the best in the family---and he handles TB2 as well as anyone else; as well or better than Gordon does, even. And he's even a decent co-pilot, which is another skillset entirely. As far as everything else---well. Virgil wouldn't need to ask why Gordon hasn't told Scott about Penelope yet. Virgil would just get it.
But Virgil's back home on Tracy Island, and MAX is feeding him grapes and topping up his champagne glass and probably fanning him with a palm leaf, not that palm trees are actually native to Tracy Island, or that Gordon's even sure offhand if MAX has that many arms.
"Because," Gordon answers, in the manner of elder brothers since time immemorial, and means that to be the extent of the answer.
"Because why?" Alan asks back, the other half of the ritual as observed by little brothers. A little brother three times over himself, Gordon probably should've seen that one coming, but it stymies him all the same.
Rain continues to pound on the outside of his pod as Gordon fails to find an answer. It's dry inside, but it doesn't feel like it, because it's also swelteringly hot and he's sweating beneath his uniform, almost fogging up his helmet. It's only midday, but with the weather raging outside, it's too dark to see too far in front of his pod, so Gordon's been relying on a holographic rendering of the surrounding terrain, helpfully provided by TB2's scanners, as the ship hovers overhead, monitoring his dike-building progress. They're nearly done here. Despite all evidence to the contrary, apparently the storm is finally starting to slacken off. Soon it'll be back home to the island, just in time to catch just enough sleep before something else, somewhere else, goes terribly, tremendously wrong.
"You can say it's 'cuz you're chicken," Alan tells him, in the annoyingly smug fashion of a teenager who thinks he knows what he's talking about.
Gordon bristles and revs the pods engines a little harder than they need to be revved, so that he buries the leading edge of the bulldozer blade in a mound of thick, tenacious clay and gets a little bit stuck. "I don't care what Scott thinks."
"Still haven't told him, though," Alan points out, as though he knows the first damn thing about anything at all.
"There hasn't been a good time for it," Gordon counters, terse, and smothering his own internal guilt about the fact that he hasn't made an effort to seek out his eldest brother and sit him down, to tell him the truth and just get it over with. He keeps putting it off. Other things always seem more important, because in their line of work, the other things are usually other people's lives. That's as good an excuse as any. "Hell, there just hasn't been any time, good or otherwise. We're a man down, Al. We're all busting ass trying to cover for Virgil. We're so busy that you're flying the big green bathtub. We're so busy that John actually needs to be useful. I've barely even Scott in like a week---if he's not flying, he's sleeping. Same with me. I'll tell him when things are less batshit crazy."
Alan ignores this perfectly rational explanation and Gordon attempts to change gears and get his stupid pod unstuck from the riverbank. The engine revs impotently against stubborn, sodden clay, as his little brother continues to press the point. "Is it 'cuz you think he'll be mad?"
Gordon doesn't actually know. Truth be told---though he's not actually about to tell this particular truth to Alan or even to Virgil---inwardly, he's still reeling from what Penelope had told him. Weeks ago, now. About Scott. And her. And her and Scott. And the fact that Penelope and Scott had ever been even a remote possibility, because the very thought of the two of them makes him feel a muddled up mess of emotions that he doesn't entirely know how to process. Nausea, if nausea counts as an emotion, though that might be down to the fact that he secretly gets a little carsick in pods, sometimes. Jealousy, but in retrospect, of something long since past that had never happened anyway, so there's nothing to actually be jealous of. Bafflement that anyone in the world---even his eldest brother---could ever have taken only an idle interest in Penelope and then not been completely devastated by her rejection.
And a deep, resonant fear that the reasons she'd turned Scott down in the first place, all those years ago, are the same reasons why their own nascent attempt at a relationship might not work out in the end.
But he doesn't like to think about any of that for too long, and especially not while he's operating a motor vehicle, and so he fends Alan's question off with the judicious application of false bravado. "Don't care if he would be. I'll tell him when I'm good and ready. It's none of his business anyway."
"It's a little bit his business if it's an IR thing."
"Yeah, well, it's not."
Alan persists, "It kind of is, though. Since it's Lady P, and all."
"We both have lives outside of International Rescue, Allie."
Gordon's taken aim at lofty disdain, reinforced with the condescending use of his little brother's nickname. His little brother just laughs at him. "Well, she might. You sure don't."
On the ground, in a pod, while Alan watches overhead from TB2, there's not much Gordon can do in retaliation for the way he's being picked on, but he makes a mental note to smack his brother solidly in the back of the head once he's back in the cockpit. As it stands, he grinds his back teeth together and changes gears again, switching back and forth between forward and reverse, rather aggressively along the edge of the riverbank. He's fixing to give his brother a proper piece of his mind, when Alan comes at him out of the blue with a question he hasn't anticipated---
"If you and her get married, d'you think you're gonna quit IR?"
This is not where Gordon had thought the conversation was going, and it's a surprising enough question that he guns his engine a little too hard, in the act of getting himself unstuck from the riverbank. The pod's treads come free all at once, and the thick mud that had gummed up the whole works suddenly grows slick and untrustworthy, and the pod goes plunging over the top edge of a freshly reinforced levee, to land squarely in the river. This is deep, swollen right up to its banks with rainwater, but despite how damp and filthy Gordon feels, the pod is completely watertight, even as it as the nose of it finds the bottom of the riverbed, the whole vehicle upended about fifteen degrees shy of vertical. He's jolted against the restraints, sudden and uncomfortable against his collarbone, but not as sudden or uncomfortable as his little brother's question. He'd thought it had been dark before. Dropped below the level of the water, it's pitch black outside the pod, and the inside is only illuminated by the pod's protesting systems, which are blaring all manner of alarms and alerts about the current situation.
"...Fuck, Alan!" he explodes at his little brother, temper finally bubbling up from below the surface. "Lookit what you---"
"Hey, this one's all on you, bro." There's an unbearably smug note in Alan's tone, because he's not wrong. Goddamn brat. When he gets back aboard, Gordon's just gonna throttle his little brother. Overhead, TB2 will be lowering itself into position, preparing to drop a cable and haul him and his stupid pod out of the river. "Should've been paying more attention."
"Yeah, well, what the hell is with the fucking third degree about me and Penny! Jesus!"
In lieu of an answer, predictably, there's the solid, ringing impact of a magnetic clamp being fired at the exposed back end of Pod-A, upended in the middle of the Ribeira Grande with Gordon fuming inside of it, angry about the situation and deeply annoyed with his baby brother for needling at him.
"What the hell d'you even care, anyway?" he snarls, still irritated. There's another jolt of his shoulders against his harness as TB2's not-inconsiderable lifting power starts to haul him out of the river. "I don't know why I thought I could talk to you."
"Kinda doesn't seem like it matters what I care about, when you whine about her for an hour straight." The pod splashes upward out of the river, but Alan doesn't set him back down on the banks. Instead he continues to pull the pod upward into into the belly of TB2's cargo bay. "We're done here, by the way," he adds, cheerfully. "We've been done for about twenty minutes, the local police guy radioed me that we could clear off, they've got it handled from here."
Gordon mutes his radio and swears an extremely unkind but unheard blue streak at and about his little brother, and thinks about how much better he could've spent those past twenty minutes. Time and distance get mixed up in his head sometimes, especially at times like these, when he's rambled for what his brother thinks was an hour. Gordon can't honestly pretend he kept track. He'd only been trying to pass the time.
The pod gets pulled securely up into the cargo bay, and as the bay doors close beneath him, there's a moment of absolute darkness. Before the halogen lights of TB2's interior flood on, there's a brief pause, a silence and a stillness that swallow him up and then spit him back out as brightness floods the space around him and the pod docks properly. Gordon shoves the hatch open and climbs out. His pulls helmet off and throws it on the ground so hard that it bounces, just in time to be caught in the act by his little brother, descending on the lift from the cockpit. Gordon looks up to see a cheeky smirk plummet off Alan's face, replaced with the abrupt, wary caution of a younger sibling who realizes that he's accidentally crossed a line.
Alan's wide-eyed and baby-faced and all pseudo-twelve-year-old innocence again, as he shifts where he stands, suddenly awkward and contrite. "I was just messing with you, Gordie," he tries, summoning up a feeble half-grin, and reaching for the same diminutive Gordon had tried, maybe hoping to placate his older brother. "It's only been like five minutes since we could go. I was gonna tell you, but then things were just getting interesting, and I figured---"
"What?" Gordon snaps, pushing a hand through his hair. This has gone all cowlicked and curly in the humidity, damp with sweat to the point that its dissolved away the industrial strength hair gel meant to last the past twelve hours. He glares at his little brother, who has the sense to look appropriately cowed. "What'd you figure, Alan, that maybe she's all I wanna talk about because I miss her like crazy? We're working ninety goddamn hours a week and she's all I can think about and Scott still doesn't even know? Because yeah, actually, I'm scared as hell to tell him, but you wouldn't understand why!"
The silence that falls after shouting at his brother seems to fill the cargo bay from the bottom up, like water rushing into the vacuum of an empty space, a hollow roar that slowly fills with the sound of Thunderbird Two's VTOLs, on autopilot.
The problem with yelling at Alan is that he does look like a twelve-year-old, and so almost instantly after cussing him out for whatever reason, Gordon almost always feels like an absolute monster; like he's the sort of person who'd kick a puppy. He kicks his helmet instead, venting the last little flare of his anger and in its place feeling every last minute of the last twelve hours, playing achingly along his muscles and nerves. He takes a deep breath, holds it for a moment as he closes his eyes, and then lets it out as a heavy sigh, with an apologetic shake of his head. "...Sorry, Al."
When he looks up, Alan's still lingering on the lift, and looking at him like even his immediate apology might be a trap. Probably with good reason. Gordon's always been quick to scrap with his older brothers; arguments with Scott, deliberate antagonization of John, and the occasional parody of an altercation with Virgil---but he's always tried to keep his temper in check around Alan, on account of Alan's the only little brother Gordon's got. If he's always been happiest as the baby of the family, it's because everybody babies him, and Gordon no less than the rest of his siblings. Yelling at Alan makes him feel worse than he had before.
"I didn't mean to make you mad. I was just screwing around. I'm sorry." Alan offers his own apology like an olive branch, hesitant and awkward. "it's just it's the first time I ever heard you talk about her like this, I guess, is the thing. I didn't know you were, like, really serious."
Gordon shrugs wearily, bends to scoop his helmet up off the ground, and then trudges across the cargo bay to join his little brother aboard the lift. It'll be his turn to fly home, at least for the first shift, and they've got about eight more hours to spend in the air before they can make it back to Tracy Island. They're just about as far from home as it's possible to be, and Gordon can't help thinking about how much easier it would be just to fly to England instead, and the hell with Tracy Island. "I shouldn't have gone off on you," he says dully, acknowledging the mistake. He clambers up onto the platform with another sigh, as Alan toggles the switch to bring them back up to the cockpit, starts the lift with a slight jolt. "I'm just tired. I don't wanna talk about Scott. I dunno how to tell him about me and Penny. I dunno what the hell he's gonna say. But it's not like it matters, anyway, because I don't know when I'm gonna get any goddamn time."
"We're working way too much," Alan agrees fervently, quick to commiserate, eager to work his way back into Gordon's good graces. He follows obediently as the lift reaches the cockpit and Gordon makes his way to the pilot's seat. "You're the second best in TB2 after Virgil, and nobody else can really cover for TB4. You're pulling a lot harder than the rest of us."
That's maybe true. Hearing it acknowledged, even just by Alan, lends a legitimacy to the shortness of Gordon's temper, and just how quickly his mood had turned. It doesn't quite make him feel better, but it goes a little further to soften his sharpness with his little brother, as he offers back, "Yeah, well, it's not just me. At this rate, you're gonna have a pretty lousy birthday." He settles himself in the pilot's seat, starts to switch the autopilot over to manual control so he can set a course for home. "Maybe Virgil'll manage to haul his lazy ass to the kitchen and stop Grandma from inflicting a cake on the rest of the family. Maybe John and EOS can figure out how to get you the day off. Maybe Scott'll even let you have it." And then, magnanimously, just to make it clear that all is forgiven, "Hell, I'll cover for you if that'd help. You shouldn't have to work on your birthday."
"Oh, nah. I dunno." Alan drops himself into the co-pilot's place and shrugs, and it's with a maturity beyond the last of his teenage years that he admits, "I kinda wouldn't mind, I guess, if we end up working. I kinda didn't wanna say so, 'cuz everybody's so tired and mad and stressed out lately---but I like being busy. I get out more when I'm backing you up in TB2 than I ever do in TB3. And...I just...I like it, you know? I like this job. There are worse ways to spend a birthday."
