Look after him, Virgil had said, He's exhausted.

And maybe he is, at that.

Long day, long week, long month, and yeah, Gordon's so tired he'd barely been able to smile at her, when she'd come sauntering down the manor's front steps to give him a hug and a kiss and someone to lean against, as they'd both watched the great green bulk of TB2 lift up and away into the sky. His arm had been heavy around her shoulders. He hadn't been able to muster the energy to wave.

He's lucky that she can tell just how done he is, but then, it's gotta be obvious. As his brother's Thunderbird disappears from sight, she turns into him and does that thing where she puts her hand over his heart and lays her head against his shoulder and just stays there for a long, lingering minute. That's good. That helps.

And then she takes charge, and that helps even more. "I think it's going to be straight to bed for you, darling," Penelope informs him, although it's only half past four in England, and the skies are a rare, clear blue, and it seems like he shouldn't waste any of that oh-so-precious English sunlight.

But no, fuck it, Virgil was right. Gordon's exhausted and there's just no other word for it. He's still in his blues and his blues are caked with the remnants of their last rescue, and he hadn't even noticed the way he's getting dried, crusted mud all over the pretty dress Penelope's wearing. He curses himself for being so thoughtless, but she doesn't seem to care, and before he can string together anything like an apology—for being so tired and filthy and still kinda cold and miserable and also for just showing up without a whole hell of a lot of warning—she just takes his hand and pulls him along up the stairs.

There are too many stairs in this damn house. Creighton-Ward Manor is a beautiful old place and Gordon loves coming here, but there are too many damn stairs. Pen takes him straight up the sweeping grand staircase in the entrance hall of the manor, and it seems like it takes forever to get to the top, and he has to stop for a minute when they do, just so he doesn't fall flat on his stupid blond face. Or just keel over backward and go ass-over-teakettle back down the entire flight of stairs, and not even care if he breaks his neck on the way down. It's good that Penelope's here, or that second scenario seems like it'd be a hell of a lot more likely. Her hands are steady where she puts them; one of them gentle against his chest again, while her other arm wraps around his hips.

When she looks up, he gives her a nod and she takes his hand once more, pulls him along down the hallway.

Her bedroom's all done in white carpet and he balks at the threshold, tries to tell her that he'll mess everything up, streaks of dusty dark grey grime that he's tracked all the way from Peru, where he and Virgil had spent the past sixteen hours working a landslide. He doesn't want to think about it, doesn't want to drag the remnants of that long, godawful day into her private, personal space and ruin the carpet. This place is supposed to be free of all that.

But Penelope overrules him, not that it's hard. He can barely win an argument against her on his best day, never mind one of the worst he's had in a long damn time. She shakes her head at him, and gives that chiding little sigh that she employs when he's frustrating her. "Dearest, if you think I care about the carpet in the slightest, you're an absolute and utter fool. Gordon, darling. Come."

She's just like that, though, she's—it's that old money thing. By comparison, his family's money is so new that it still squeaks when they spend it, only a generation old. Gordon can still remember a life where he'd catch—has caught hell—for tracking mud across the carpet. Penelope will ruin a carpet like it doesn't mean anything, like she doesn't think about how someone has to come along and clean it up afterward, like she's not making more work for somebody—like he's not making more work for somebody—how he's made such a damn mess already, it's so stupid. One day they're gonna have a fight about that. Not today. Another day. Later.

"Gordon," she says, and she's standing in front of him now and one of her hands has come up to cradle his jaw, her thumb stroking softly along his cheekbone. Her eyes are that perfect cornflower blue, and she's close enough that if he breathes deep enough, he can smell the lavender and jasmine of her perfume, can let the scent of her hair overpower the mildewy grey reek of mud and muck and filth and his long, awful, terrible, godawful day. "Take a shower. A lovely hot shower, darling, you'll feel better. There are towels on the counter, there's a bathrobe for you in the closet. I've had it monogrammed. It was going to be a present, but never mind. Are you hungry?"

"I could eat," he answers dully, and presses his face against her hand instead of nodding. It's the first coherent thing he's managed to say. He blinks, but catches himself at it. If he closes his eyes for too long, he'll just crash right out. He'll just drop and then keep falling, fall right through the floor and then the floor below it and then the wine cellar and then the bedrock below the house and then the whole entire Earth and out the other side, because hitting the ground seems like it'd be too much effort.

Penelope stretches up on her tiptoes to kiss him, brings him a little way back to life, because the response to that is just automatic, even if he tastes dirt, feels grit between her lips and his, and the soft little sound he makes when she pulls away might sound more like regret than pleasure. But maybe she doesn't notice, as her fingers curl around the back of his neck and she says again, "Shower, Gordon. I'll be back with tea."

She knows enough about him to give him a little bit of a push towards the doubled French doors of her master bathroom, and yeah, he needs to be told to go. He stumbles a little, leaves a streak of black mud from the heel of the boots he should've taken off, but by this point he's past caring, either. That didn't take long. Two, maybe three minutes and any semblance of his principles had just bled right out of him. Great.

God, it doesn't matter. All that matters is getting this stupid suit off and scouring all the dirt and the death off his skin and getting clean and warm and just getting rid of his stupid fucking blues for a while. Stop being Thunderbird Four. Stop being Gordon Tracy, even. Stop being human at all and just wash away with the water, drain away and leave nothing behind. Yeah. That'd be good. It's not gonna happen, but he can still try.

So, once he's through the bathroom doors, has them closed behind him, he leans against the wall and undoes the four thousand straps that keep his boots on his feet, and then levers them off. Strips off his gloves, flexes his fingers without them, feels all the stiffness and the hurt and the aching weight of everything that's passed through his hands. His fingers are sore enough that they're clumsy as he fumbles at his collar, find the zipper that curves down past the ridge of his collarbone, down along his ribcage, stops at his hip. He peels away neoprene all stiff with mud. Thick, dark grey, awful stuff that's more clay than dirt, tenacious as it coats and clings.

His suit's tight. Maybe it's starting to get a little too tight, maybe he's gone and bulked up again, gotten a little broader across the shoulders, more muscular in the chest. He'll need to get Brains to look at it, or—no, just scrap it. Just cut the damn thing off, shred it to ribbons, get rid of it. He's done with that right now, he doesn't have to be that guy when he's here. He pulls his arms free, the cuffs of his sleeves slipping off like shackles. That's always the hard part, and it's past, and when he shimmies his uniform off over the ridges of his hipbones, he almost, almost feels like he's come free of it all.

There's a full length mirror that runs the length of Penelope's bathroom, because Penelope's bathroom is also her dressing room, and there's a walk-in closet big enough to house Pod A or B, if Penelope hadn't stuffed it full of a few hundred thousand dollars worth of couture and then about that again in shoes. There's a chaise in the corner. There's the bathrobe Pen had mentioned, hanging in a little alcove just around the corner from the shower, and that pile of towels, so dense and fluffy that they're nearly as tall as he is, standing stacked on the counter. There's a crystal chandelier and a glass walled shower; a bathtub in the corner that's more than big enough for two people (and a small, enthusiastic pug who doesn't know when he is not wanted). But the mirror is the thing that dominates the space, doubles the entire room over again, all gleaming white marble and gold fixtures.

And Gordon, pale and bruised and tired, with that crumpled heap of sullied IR blue at his feet, looking wrong and out of place and ugly in the middle of it all, against all the soft white and gold. And somehow still filthy, where liquid mud has crept beneath his blues, left smudges and stains on his skin, mingling with blood and sweat and tears.

The blood and sweat he'd expected. The tears are a bit of a surprise.

He wonders when that started up. Wonders if Penny noticed, and hopes not. The tears are only just barely there, and he wouldn't have noticed at all either, if it weren't for the mud on his face, and the salt water tracks cut through it.

He's not even upset really. Just tired. Just really, really goddamned fucking tired.

Shower time.

Pen's right, he'll feel better. He always feels better at the end of the day when he hits the showers, and this is a hell of a shower to hit. Penelope doesn't screw around in the bathing department, there are like six showerheads in the damn thing. At the moment he only wants the one of them hangs right over the center and lets water fall just exactly like rain. Warm, clean, clear water that doesn't pound on the top of his head or batter his aching body any worse (TB2's shower is a particularly terrible offender, because Virgil's beefed up the water pressure, seems to believe that when people hit the showers, the showers should hit back, and that dirt needs to be beaten off people), but just falls gentle and slow and does what water does best.

The best thing is watching all that grey wash away. He has to keep a hand on the wall to keep himself steady, but watching all the dirt swirl down the drain is improving his mood by leaps and bounds. Watching the water start to run clean again might just bring a few more tears along with it. Today was awful, but today is over. And he's done, John's pulled him off the roster for a solid weekend of downtime, and he gets to spend it here, with Penelope. It's not even five in the evening yet, and so, okay, maybe he's not up to much, but he can manage an evening curled up on the couch or in the library, and they can watch some terrible sappy old movie or play chess or checkers or cards. Pen's only okay at chess, but he's been teaching her, and she's getting better. She's already fantastic at cards, and that's the kind of ass-kicking he could go for, after having his ass kicked by a day like today.

The heat and the white noise are making him drowsy, and he's only just decided that he doesn't want to be. Pen's here and he's been all zonked out of his skull up til now, he doesn't want to waste any time with her. Even if it's only a few more hours of daylight, Gordon can pull a grin back onto his face and they can go sit down in her big enormous dining room and have a proper dinner. Candlelight and fine china and silverware and crystal and he's too hungry to even care what they eat. And hey, maybe a glass of wine, and hell, he's off the roster, maybe two. Something to wash away what's messing him up on the inside just as well as what's on the outside, or at least take the edges off it.

That's worth perking up for. That's worth swapping all the hazy, cozy warmth for a bright shock of ice water. That's worth waking himself up, shaking himself out of it. He reaches out and turns the tap on the wall from hot to blood-freezing cold.

The vertigo hits just as he pushes away from the wall, breath hissing through his teeth as he jumps back from the fall of icy could. The jolt of the temperature change would have been enough to jerk him awake, but it hits too late. In the backswing of that swooping rush of dizziness, his knees buckle and Gordon drops straight down, boneless, and cracks his head on the gleaming white tiles.