Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“You don’t need to worry about me,” John has his arms crossed and  jaw set, sitting poker straight, his most stubborn body language. John takes his job very seriously, and has spent years perfecting the image he presents to the world. No gesture, no facial expression is out of his control, not when his is the face of International Rescue to many governments and agencies around the world. Not when his face is the first one that a rescuee will see, and he needs to project calm and recurrence. Not when his might be the last they see.

The trouble is, once that absolute control, those walls are up, it can be difficult to bring them down again. Right now it’s John the  IR operative rather than John the brother that is sitting on the couch opposite. 

“Well, someone has to, because you’re clearly not going to look after yourself.” Scott doesn't throw his hands up in the air, but it’s a close thing, his frustration bubbling just under the surface. It’s become a bit of a game between them.To and fro, pushing as close to the line as possible, testing how much could one get away with before the other put their foot down and quoted regulations. Before one snitched  to the others. Today it was Scott’s turn to wrangle John into obedience and he has a couple of aces up his sleeve.

Scott's managed to get John to agree to forty-eight hours down time. He’d even managed to get John on the ground. Getting John to agree to a full medical panel is a step too far, but Scott wouldn’t be a Tracy if he just gave up when things get tough.

Scott sighs heavily. “When was the last time you ate? Or slept? Or drank something other than coffee?”

“Hah, you can talk.”John rolls his eyes. “I know exactly how much caffeine you chug down.”

Scott deflects that, because really he should probably cut down, but he can’t afford to let John change the subject. Scott shifts slightly, to block the coffee cup on the table with his body. “Which is sorta my point. You wouldn’t know that if you clocked off like a normal person.” 

Scott waits for a response, one questioning eyebrow raised. John should have a comeback ready, but he doesn’t. Because he’s worn out, spread too thin. And they both know it. 

“Tell you what, if you can make it to your room and get twelve hours sleep, I won’t make a call and pull your space-rating renewal forward.”

“You wouldn’t.” John growls, but Scott nods slowly. Sadly. If it meant it kept his brother working himself to death he will play that card. 

“Fine.” John stands, “but we’re going to have a conversation later about that threat. I don’t appreciate it.” 

He’s angry, and Scott may come to regret that, but at least he’s going. Unsteadily, using the bookshelf for balance, but he’s going. 

“It’s just the gravity, stop scowling.” John throws back over his shoulder leaning heavily on the rail as he makes his way slowly upstairs. Scott bites his tongue. A few hours sleep and a meal that isn’t rehydrated would thaw out the frostiness, and once his brother was back they could have a conversation about the importance of health and rest. Again.

Scott will head to bed himself, after just one more coffee.

Chapter Text

When John emerges, eighteen hours later, he looks like a functioning person again, instead of a semi-transparent imitation of one. The dark circles have lightened and his skin has lost it’s grey undertone. Scott is in the kitchen waiting for his toast, so he pours out another glass of orange juice and slides it across the counter top. He’s not offering coffee.  

“Slept well then? I was thinking about sending a search party.” He wasn’t. If John had slept for days Scott wouldn’t have looked the gift horse in the mouth.  

“That wasn’t fair, you know.” John says, brushing a lock of hair, still damp from the shower, back off his forehead and taking a small sip of the juice. There is a simmering anger in his tone. And a hint of something else.  

“What wasn’t?” Scott adds another couple of slices of bread into the toaster. 

“Threatening to bring my renewal forward.” John his ‘I’m very serious eyebrow' which Scott ignores. 

“You drove me to the nuclear option. If you would stick to the rules – the ones you wrote, by the way - I wouldn’t need to.” 

“Would you really do it? Bring it forward?” John is looking much smaller than his six feet- whatever it is currently, with his extra zero-g inches. Much younger. More worried than Scott’s seen him for years.  

“If I had to.“ Scott sits on the stool next to him. It’s a fine line with John, to be close enough for him to feel the difference between holograms and real people, but still not crowd his personal space.  “But you always fly through them; I’m surprised it’s a threat that works.” 

John is so still and quiet that Scott can almost hear his brain working.  

“And if I don’t.” John all but whispers, not making eye contact. 

“Don’t?” Scott is confused. 

“Fly through. What if I fail it?” 

“Why would you fail it?” Scott leans in, getting far too close to John’s personal space, but only so he can see every flicker in his eye, and practically see the thrum of his pulse below pale skin. John was a good liar and if you wanted to catch him, you needed to really concentrate on his tells. “What makes you think you would fail it?” A hidden injury, illness, a hundred horrid possibilities flash through Scott's mind. 

John shrugs. 

“Tell me.” Scott grabs his hand, still warm from the shower, personal space be damned. 

“I always think I’m going to fail it. Forget protocol, screw up the math, something. And the day I fail is the day I’m grounded, maybe for good.” John ends with a sorrowful frown at the thought of being confined to gravity. That day might come – driven by health or a simple change in John’s priorities – but Scott is not anticipating that for decades. Hadn’t anticipated this deep well of self-doubt.  

“John.” Scott chides softly. “You can do this in your sleep.” Scott had reason to believe that John had taken them once while basically asleep, an assumption based on Virgil’s careful examination of the rescue logs revealed the number of times Five had crossed the International Date Line that week. “It’s a formality. An annoying, inconvenient formality.” 

“Sure.” John throws Scotts hand off his, downs his orange juice and heads back to his room. 

Chapter Text

“Why’s John holed up in his room still?” Wiping oily hands on an old rag, Virgil’s entry is surprisingly quiet, making Scott jump where he’s hunched over the latest stack of paperwork some hours later. “Thought he’d be awake by now.”  

“He is.” Scott leans back and stretches, shoulders cracking in a rather unhealthy way. “Or he was at least. Went back to bed I guess.”  

“He’s not coming down with anything is he? We did that meet and greet at a school last week and kids are always covered with germs. Just because we didn’t get sick - “  

“No, nothing like that I don’t think. We were just talking and he left. You know how he is when he can’t switch off a hologram to ignore you.”  

Virgil eyes him steadily, analysing him in a way that makes Scott deeply uncomfortable.  

“What did you say that upset him?” Virgil says at last.  

“I didn’t say anything!” Scott denies the accusation vehemently and defensively.  

Virgil leans his knuckles on the desk. “You did. You must have. Once he’s awake, he's awake. He doesn’t go back to sleep unless he’s sick and he’s been explicitly told to. So, he wants space. What. Did. You. Say?”  

“Nothing! I made some lame threat about bringing his Space Certification forward if he didn’t get some actual rest, and then he spouted some nonsense about failing it. And I told him it was nonsense, then he left. That’s it.” As far as Scott remembered.  

“Oh Scott, sometimes you have a knack of saying just the wrong thing.” Virgil runs a hand over his face, then turns and hooks a chair round with his foot, so he can sit opposite Scott at the desk. He pauses for a moment, drumming his fingers on the stack of neatly ordered paperwork that Scott hastily reclaims, pushing out of Virgil’s reach before he can knock it over.  

“Did he ever tell you about the semester in college that he was bumped up in two classes?” Virgil asks, speaking slowly and thoughtfully.  

“What about it? I don’t think we ever talked about it, but I know it happened. Probably Dad told me.” Scott doesn’t understand what that’s got to do with anything: John had always been taking some sort of advanced class, or working on extra credits or something, it was just the way he is – a never ending appetite for knowledge and a brain to match.   

“Yeah they did it just before the mid terms. He basically had a week of surprise exams which he failed because he didn’t study the material, didn’t even know he needed to. And on top of his usual courseload. I spent hours on the phone every other day for a month talking him out of panic attacks because he thought he was going to get kicked out because he flunked a couple.”  

“He failed?”  

“Yes.”  

 “John failed?”   

“Yes.”  

“Our John.”  

“My god. Yes.”  

“Really?”  

"Yes."  

"Failed?"  

“Is there something wrong with your hearing?”  

“But John doesn’t fail any sort of testing, not since he was a kid. He hardly fails in anything at all. It’s one of his most irritating qualities.”  

Irritating and enviable. For every distinction and award that Scott had slogged his guts out for John had coasted through with a grin. Not that John didn’t work hard for his qualifications, but hard work was easy for him: he absorbed knowledge like a sponge and could make equations dance.  

“Yeah, and what sort of pressure does that put on someone?”  

“John thrives under pressure. Never seen him happier when he’s got four things on the go at a time.”  

“That’s not the sort of pressure I’m talking about. There’s always been this…. expectation that he’ll be academically brilliant. From Dad, from us, from teachers. From himself. Which is fine when he’s top of the class….”  

“But not so much when he gets an F, I suppose.” Scott has his own struggles with the weight of expectation, more so since they lost Dad.  

“When he’s too busy to think, sure he relishes the challenge.” Virgil leans back in his chair. “But if he lets himself dwell on it... well, it’s not pretty.”  

Scott knocks on John's door as he’s opening it: if John really wanted privacy it would have been locked instead of just closed. His brother is laying on his bed, hands behind his head and ankles crossed, staring at the ceiling and the dancing display of stars from the small projector on a side table. It’s not really dark enough for that yet, and the stars are just feint outlines, identifiable only if you knew what you were looking for.   

John doesn’t look at him which means he’s definitely not forgiven yet.   

“Virgil told me I was an idiot.” Scott offers, leaning on the door frame.  

John snorts, amused, his eyes flicking to the door for only a moment. “You should listen to him more.”  

“I’m well aware. He told me ... some stuff I didn’t know. About those extra classes you took. And failed.” Scott tries very hard to keep any emotion out of his voice, scraping out anything that might be considered anger or annoyance or – god  forbid – disappointment. Whatever is left is like a red rag to a bull, as John practically launches himself upright, furious.   

“Don't listen to him.”  

“You can't have it all ways.” Scott closes the door behind him and sits on the end of the bed, where John is almost in reach. John always feels like he’s almost in reach. Only a hologram away but deceptively distant, able to cut himself off as an easy way out of any conversation he doesn’t like. But not today, not with Scott right up in his space.  

“Watch me.” John’s prickly and defensive.  

“Please John. I know I put my foot in it, but I didn’t know why. I’m still not sure to be honest. If I don’t know what the problem is I can’t fix it, and I really want to fix it.”  

“You can’t fix it.”  

“So there is something wrong.” There’s a war going on in John’s eyes. He can’t deny his own words and he’s dropped himself right in it, but that self-sufficient, proud, some would say aloof part of him clearly isn’t ready to stop fighting yet.  

Scott suppresses a sigh, and meets John half way, pushing aside his reluctance. “I don’t know if I ever told you, but I only applied to one college. Never even looked anywhere else. He never said it openly, but I know Dad always assumed I would follow in his footsteps and go to Yale.”  

John is watching him, eyes fixed and attention undivided in the way he usually reserves for careless millionaires and makes Scott want to squirm. “Did you not want to go to Yale?”  

“It wasn’t that. I wanted to go. But I don’t know what he’d have thought, what I’d have done if I’d failed to get in, or quit a semester in, or if I had wanted to do something else. I never had to explore that reality because I was right on track.” He smiles a little wistfully. “Right where I was meant to be.”   

Everything he’d ever done -  academically, professionally, socially – had led Scott to leading International Rescue. Helping people. Making a difference. Watching over his family as they broke records and changed the world. He wouldn’t want to do anything else. He wouldn’t want to be anyone else.  

“I think I’m right where I’m meant to be too.” John says softly. “Everything I’ve ever wanted to do, I can. But if I screw up, like failing the space rating, then I can’t.” His voice drops even lower, so it’s barely audible. “And if I’m not Thunderbird Five, what am I? What am I good for?”  

John looks heartbroken, as if he’s already living that life and finding no joy in it, and the truth hits Scott like a sunbeam breaking through the clouds. He’d always suspected that spending so much time in space was bad for John’s physical and mental health – all the research paper’s John’s waved in his face be damned – but he hadn’t considered the impact on his self worth. To John, space and Five and International Rescue and him were one and the same. Remove any one component and the whole package collapsed and there would be nothing left for him. Of him.  

Scott scoots closer on the bed so he’s sitting shoulder to shoulder with John, putting an arm around his brother and squeezing him tight until John starts to struggle to get away. “You are good for a lot. If you fail a measly test, that doesn’t mean you’re not still the smartest person I know. If you’re not Thunderbird Five that doesn’t mean you’re not one of the kindest and bravest people I know. What you do doesn’t change who you are.”  

John looks dubious, just a hair’s breath from his patented ‘you are being an idiot’ glare, but he’s listening. Scott squeezes as hard as he can, so he can speak directly into John’s ear. “What you do for International Rescue doesn’t change how important you are to this family.”  

“That is.... a very.... soppy thing to say.” John’s a little breathless, voice is a little horse. Probably from the force of Scott’s hug. Not because he was overwhelmed, or relieved, or felt secure. No, probably none of those things. Scott smiled, safe in the knowledge that John couldn’t see him.  

“If you weren’t on Thunderbird Five, that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be Thunderbird Five. And if you weren’t - if something happened, or you made a decision and you didn’t want to be Thunderbird Five anymore, or any part of International Rescue -  that wouldn’t matter to me. You’re still my brother. If International Rescue went away tomorrow there is still a whole world to live in, and make a difference in.”  

“If International Rescue went away tomorrow we’d all have a lot bigger problems than me moping about space.”   

“Maybe.” Definitely. “But as much as we live and breathe this job, and as much as I have every faith in you, it shouldn’t be the sum total of our existence.” That gets an amused snort, and yes, Scott recognises the hypocrisy in that. Maybe it was long past time for both of them to get a hobby. Virgil has his art, Gordon his swimming and Alan’s currently obsessed with games: Scott and John needed something just for themselves as well.  

John squirms and puts a little distance between the two of them – not enough to break the hug, just enough to breathe and look him in the eye.  

“I won’t bring up the space rating thing again. I promise.” Scott offers in all seriousness. “Just try not to worry about what might never happen.”  

A big ask, for someone for whom ‘what if’s’ and contingencies are his bread and butter, but “I’ll do my best.” John says, the twinkle that’s returned to his eyes says that he recognises that was the problem in the first place!