Only on every day ending in y. Ha. We’re apocalyptic-level petty.
Scott has a tendency to be… Scott. John and Virg are much better at dealing with him. Virgil can talk him down and has the remarkable ability to make him see sense. John, you can’t actually argue with, he just raises an eyebrow and it’s game over (learnt that a long time ago).
Anyway, neither of those things happen when it’s the two of us. Because despite looking like entirely different ends of the gene pool, we’re unfortunately too alike not for things to get fiery (and petty). He freaks out, I get defensive. Both of us snap at each other. All hell breaks loose.
And it happens more frequently because we happen to live together… and work together… a lot of together…
So, y’know. Yeah. Petty, stubborn, chaotic and somehow, still brothers. Family isn’t neat. Neither are we.
In the timeline where your brother didn’t survive his hydrofoil crash, what was your plan for International Rescue? Would you have trained Alan as an aquanaut in his place and had John use Thunderbird 3? Or would you have trained?
I… I don’t quite understand how you think I’m going to answer this?
Like I was sat there at his bedside making contingency plans? “Oh no my future aquanaut might not be available let’s plan who to train as a replacement!”????????!!!!
Let me be quite clear: I cannot begin to imagine how that alternative timeline would be. Because in all that time not knowing, imagining the worst - everything I could imagine stopped at the point he did.
I cannot believe there would have been an International Rescue. How I could even suggest to the others we do it after that? I can’t even comprehend how IR could have come back after that… not because we’d lost our aquanaut but because we’d lost our brother. I can’t comprehend how I would have come back from that. I know people do but… i just… can’t… see how.
I’m sorry, but you have to understand that in the list of priorities in my life, IR is not at the top. It isn’t “IR must exist at all costs”.
My family is first.
Which means that all I can say is, whatever had happened and whatever will happen I’d have put my family first.
If Gordon had survived but needed lifelong care, then all other plans would have come second to providing that and to making his life as comfortable and joyful as possible. To spend as much time as a family as we could, so that he would always know how precious he was to us.
Luckily, we were spared a third heartbreak.
Luckily we could carry on and we were able to realise the dream and do our best to spare others from heartbreak too.
But you gotta know we are more than just the guys in blue suits… we’re a family.
Hello Scott. Gordon is very quiet. Is he okay? I hope so. As a first responder, I know how hard it is when a call doesn’t go the way you want it to. It’s very easy to blame yourself. Even if it’s not true. But the guilt can be very hard to make peace with. I know he will have a lot of support with all of you. You all do such a fantastic job. Thank you for always answering the call!
Thanks Anon that’s really sweet of you to ask.
He has been quiet around the house, we’ve all done our best to help him with the weight of it all but honestly it never gets easier does it? You have to let yourself grieve a little. We try to move on in time because we have to. Because somebody else will call and we can’t let the uncertainty and the guilt stop us trying for the next person. But it doesn’t stop the knowledge that for the families of the people you couldn’t save they can never fully move on and that hits again and again.
I only hope they know how much we care and hurt with them.
Thank you for all you do on the front lines - y’all doing so much good with so much less resource than we have and I never cease to be amazed by your service.
Do you feel a lot of pressure being the youngest? Your brothers have all achieved some amazing things. Do you feel you have a lot to live up to? Or maybe not?
I know I'm appreciated, I don't worry that much 'bout it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I do. I do so much it makes me nauseous. What if I'm not good enough? I'm so replaceable that even Squirt can fly Three, why would they even keep me in the air? I'll never achieve anything like they've done
As a concerned citizen, I feel it is rather telling that IR is more concerned with receiving rightful “flak” than the apparent failure of their rescue, and the resultant loss of innocent lives.
Do you have any comment, Mr Tracy? Is IR to be trusted? Or does the Tracy PR machine protect what should be rightly criticised?
- J. Rooney, Global News Today.
Hello there J. Rooney, Global News Today
As ever I cannot comment on specific rescues. It isn’t fair to the families, and it could adversely affect the independence of any subsequent legal process. Any complaints or investigations will be pursued and overseen by the GDF and we will do our own analysis in due course to see if there were any improvements to kit or processes we can make. For now - your suggestion that any criticism is “rightly” administered is somewhat premature.
However. I do have three comments to make more generally:
Firstly - your reading comprehension sucks if you think the ‘flak’ is our main concern. The only reason I mentioned my capacity to absorb it was to try to prevent my team member piling more guilt upon themselves for the perceived burden of paperwork and responding to messages such as your own. I did, in fact, tell them it wasn’t an issue.
Secondly - IR are not miracle workers responsible for keeping the whole planet out of trouble. Maybe have a think about how ridiculous that sounds when you consider we are a voluntary organisation and there are very few of us and a lot of you. You shouldn’t be relying on us - why not spend your time campaigning for better resourcing of local first response and rescue services who could then get there quicker than we can, rather than getting your click-bait by tearing into us.
Thirdly - I do think you could benefit from a little research into “First Responders Mental Health”. Try a little actual journalism for once, and maybe you’ll see why my priority following a tragedy I couldn’t reverse was trying to reduce the ongoing impact on my brother.
We don’t really have a “PR machine”. If we did none of the posts you are referring to would exist. But we made a decision a while back to try to be honest in light of criticisms about our being mysterious and inaccessible. And so now you know: We’re human. This job is hard and it hurts. And it is agonising every time we can’t bring the miracle for someone who is grieving.
Approaching hour two in the shower, and the blood, sweat and crushing disappointment of not doing a job well done is yet to budge.
There is always plenty of press comments about when rescues don’t go our way, but trust me; can’t say anything worse than we tell ourselves, because we know the outcome all too well, and know how much it hurts. We’re not perfectionists for the fun of it.
I done wrote a thing!! Thankyou @flashfictionfridayofficial for giving me a kick up the backside with this one. It's a bit introspective and possibly nonsense, but it's ideas I've had for a long time - I'm hoping that this might finally prove to be the start of me actually finishing Lone Star, but we'll see I guess... (I've made promises like that before. 😅)
Anyway, no particular warnings, just a lot of ponderous existential blah.
Or read it on AO3
Fandom: Thunderbirds Are Go
Rating: Universal
Genre: angst
Warnings: none
Words: 945
------------------------
John gazed down at the planet below him, and blue seas and brown-green lands looked back at him. The slowly-revolving view was vast, taking up the entire fused quartz window, and yet with landscapes, vistas, mountains and lakes rendered almost indistinguishable by the sheer scale of it; the Earth writ large and incalculably small all at once.
Planet Earth.
Home.
To him that was a uniquely complicated word.
He took a sip of cocoa from his leak-proof mug. The world turned.
Of course, it never used to be that difficult a concept. Way back in the beginning home was actually very simple: wheat fields, a dirt track, a farmhouse painted blue. Roses in the yard, cookies warm from the oven, an apron-wrapped hug. Laughter, joy, love.
But that sense of home had disappeared far too quickly.
Home was somewhere else now. Right now his family were all safely back on Tracy Island, tucked up in their beds, rescues complete and flight hours exhausted for the next… - he checked his watch - ten hours at least. By that time the sun would be high in the sky over the villa, and the petrels would be chitting and charping up there with it. But for now there were only snores and the sound of breaking waves drifting softly in through the windows: the island’s own heartbeat.
By rights John should be asleep now too - he’d been up just as long as they had - but he couldn’t feel less like sleeping at the moment.
He took another sip of his cocoa, ignoring the small knot that grew in his chest every time he looked out of the window.
Instead he began idly calculating the exact distance between him and Tracy Island right now, incorporating the gap between Thunderbird Five and Earth of course, but also estimated distances from his current position above the Kaloo Desert back round to the South Pacific, reckoned both circumferentially and directly through the planet itself… Was that cheating? If a direct path wasn’t actually travelable, did it still count?
He frowned. Like so many things, how far he was from home was very much a matter of perspective. Miles and kilometers obviously, but also time. After all, the journey from Thunderbird Five to planetside took only twenty minutes by space elevator; fifteen at a push. Factor in the time it took to reposition Five and by that measure he really wasn't very far away at all.
The knot in his chest twisted.
It was never just a matter of measurement.
The fact was that despite the communications links, the regular care packages, the day-to-day check-ins and obviously the rescues, up here he was still a world away from everything down there. In every practical way he existed in an entirely different realm to the rest of his family, and the rest of humanity pretty much. He breathed a different atmosphere, he experienced a different gravity, night and day were rendered practically alien concepts to him. It wasn’t just a different landscape up here - there was no landscape!
When he’d first moved to Five he’d missed movement more than anything else. There was no cool morning breeze in space, nor the swish of leafy trees. There were no plants, no animals, no other living being of any description that wasn’t either computer-based or tin can-enclosed. Everything here was metal and glass; cold and sterile and still.
But even that didn’t fully describe it.
He sighed and set his half-drunk cocoa on the side table and sat back on his bunk, eyes closed.
The feeling of detachment was far more profound than the things he missed or the sensations that space lacked. It was more than just the distances. It wasn’t quantifiable. Wasn’t explainable. It was barely comprehensible. And it was all-encompassing.
Everything he was, everything that identified him as a person, as a human, was down there. His family, his history… Every concept of personhood, every aspect that had made him who he was and everyone whose existence in turn determined the shape of his own was now separate from him. The whole world - the whole of civilization past, present and future - could implode tomorrow into a single speck, and he would still remain, a final monument to the existence of the human race, drifting in his man-made cocoon until the end of time. Just him, alone, endlessly floating until the last star blinked out.
It was a lonely thought.
And yet…
He sat there for what seemed like an age, listening to the whirs and creaks and hums of Thunderbird Five, as familiar to him now as any home he’d ever known planetside. He knew every nut, every bolt, every corner and every cranny. He’d memorised the layout the same day Dad had first showed him the initial plans. He’d even personally had a hand in designing some of the systems. This was the sanctuary his father had custom-built just for him: his dreams made real in cahelium and silica.
He thought of Tracy Island once more, and all his family: seven people in one house, clattering and talking and bumping and tripping over each other, teasing each other, borrowing each other’s stuff, stubbed toes, hurt feelings, arguments, jokes, noise…
He loved his family. Of course he did. And he believed they loved him too.
And yet…
Home is somewhere you’re comfortable, right? Somewhere you belonged. Somewhere you wanted to be.
His chest ached.
What did he want? Where did he belong?
The world kept turning. His mind drifted.
One foot in one world and one in another, he thought just as sleep finally pulled on him, dragging him under.
(Explanation for the reposting spree and links to everything so far here)
Resurface (MIA Series Part 4)
Chapter 11 - Revise
John should be in his element but struggles to compartmentalise as everything slides out of control. Perhaps blocking it all out is a terrible idea after all…
🧡💚💙🧡💚💙🧡💚💙🧡💚💙🧡💚💙🧡💚
John growled and swiped his organic chemistry notes off his desk. The file sailed over the bed, slammed into the wall and, inevitably, the pages popped out of the binder and fluttered all over the room.
It was useless anyway, he couldn’t focus. None of it was making sense. Chemistry made no sense. His lack of ability to THINK made no sense. Probably because his entire life, right now, made no sense. His scattered notes had more chance of putting themselves back together than his family did. But he couldn’t let himself start thinking about that.
Not now. Not yet.
John had managed to get nearly back on track over the last couple of months, after that first four weeks of agony. He’d have respected the determination, the sheer bloody-mindedness that only John ever came close to taking his title for.
John just had to get through the next 3 weeks then he could… fall apart or whatever.
He clawed at his scalp in an attempt to release the constant tension that was making his eyes hurt and to distract himself from the suspicion he already had fallen apart or whatever.
Everything was… too much. He had so much to do. And 418 hours 47 minutes in which to do it all. So much still to get in his head. Which was way too full of all of the other thoughts he couldn’t compartmentalise properly because apparently he was weak minded and about to throw everything away. And on top of all that, with Dad doing whatever he was doing with the GDF big wigs, John was expected to cook for everyone and look after the kids and generally pick up the slack Virgil had just abandoned for a five day binge of complaining of a headache and creeping around the house muttering nonsense to himself.
John was actually a little worried about that. More than a little. But he forced himself to shut it away. It would be fine… Virgil would be fine. He had to be fine. Just like John did. Was. Fine was the Tracy way. Scott was always…
No. Stop.
Later.
He dug his fingernails into his thighs, bending one of them slightly back on the thick seam of the chinos he’d been wearing for 19.7 days. Nobody had noticed. All the other pants he owned were annoying. So. Whatever.
Scott would have noticed and quietly ordered him a second pair…
His fingertip throbbed angrily.
Argh, this had to stop. None of these thoughts were a good use of time. All of it was irrelevant, except the work.
A tiny voice asked how he could possibly betray his brother’s memory by adding him to that list… he quashed it with a mental fist of steel. He’d want him to do well. He’d always been proud, cheered him on… been sat in the front row between Dad and Virgil and clapping excessively loudly as John reluctantly shuffled red-faced on to the stage at high school prize-giving…
Breathe, John.
He picked up a well thumbed tome on astrophysics… it may be a waste of time - this was easy and didn’t need revision, but he needed to stop these unproductive trains of thought. This was easier to get absorbed in.
Approximately 8.25 minutes later his focus was broken yet again by a scratching noise above him. Aaaaah. Not bats again! Please no, they gave him the creeps but it was illegal to shift the things once they took up residence. He’d have to swap rooms with Virgil. He couldn’t sleep up here if there were…
Hell, they were massive sounding bats…
John flung open the window to peer up into the eaves… Dad had blocked the hole last year so how had they got in there to…
Some sixth sense made him suspicious of the volume of the scrabbling noise overhead and he ducked his head back inside, very narrowly avoiding having his face smashed in by a falling roof tile. Closely followed by… a shoe. A big shoe.
What? It hit the ground with a thud and John squinted down at it. A boot? One of Virgil’s he was sure of it but why on earth…?
A thud overhead, a clatter, a muffled curse in a very familiar baritone and two more tiles slid past his horrified face in quick succession.
Everything in his head went grey and screechy. He rushed from through the house yelling for Dad. Screeching for Dad. It was him screeching. He had no control over his vocal cords anymore, they had short circuited with his amygdala and were bypassing all coherent thought.
