A/N: This just came out of the middle of nowhere as I was riding the bus home from Uni this afternoon. As I said to KatZen a few weeks ago, I seem to get the majority of my writing inspiration while I'm travelling; and here's the proof! I figured I'd post it while I think about how I plan on writing out the next chapter of Bound; hopefully it'll tide you all over until I can get it out sometime this weekend! A fluff warning for today and also one for slight Scott-whump: for those who love it! I hope you all enjoy!
Disclaimer: If not for Sylvia and Gerry Anderson, I would not be able to play in this wonderful playground, so no, I do not own the Thunderbirds.
"Scott?"
I lifted my gaze questioningly from the open netbook on my lap, hurriedly minimising the window of the online game that I was playing, in place of the report I was supposed to be finishing.
My father stood in the doorway. He had a slightly shrewd look on his face that told me that I must have looked guiltier than I thought, for I could clearly see that he knew exactly what it was I'd been doing. To my relief, however, other than a single raised eyebrow, he didn't seem inclined to do anything about it.
He was getting on in years, I thought absently, studying his profile in the warm light that illuminated the room from the ceiling lamp. But he was still my father.
Cocoa-dark hair —that I alone of us five kids had inherited— was receding slightly, turning the darkest shade of grey around the ears and temples. Light creases webbed their way across his forehead and around his eyes —souvenirs from the hard times we had endured since the passing of Mom nearly twelve months ago— but far from making him look old, they merely added to my father's distinguished persona.
The dark shadows from not nearly enough nights of adequate sleep told a completely different story. I knew that there were still a multitude of occasions where he couldn't sleep; it was obviously a family trait, as I also had insomniac tendencies for no other reason that my body thought it could stay awake all night without consequences.
He still wore the black work trousers that went with the suit he had worn back from his latest trip to the city, but I noticed with a grin that he had swapped the top half for the ratty Kansas University sweatshirt that I knew he had gotten from an old friend of his long before he had even met Mom. Coupled with the addition of the pair of hideous red-and-white checkered race-car slippers that had been a gift from Alan two Christmases ago, it made a rather absurd picture complete in my opinion.
He raised his eyebrows again as I ran my eyes over his attire, as though daring me to even attempt to say a single word. I merely grinned innocently, and gestured to him that I was listening; even as I was roaring with laughter inside my own head.
He smiled knowingly, before getting to the reason why he had come into the room in the first place.
"Are you good to hunt down John for me?" he asked. "I'd do it myself, but I've got Alan waiting patiently in the kitchen for me to let him help serve, and Virgil is helping Gordy with his ocean diorama. You need to start getting up anyway to come to the table."
I nodded obligingly, and closed the lid of the computer, leaning over from my reclined position on a pile of pillows, to place it on the coffee table to my right before slowly swinging my legs off of the couch. My dad watching me needlessly as I rose to my full height; just a couple of inches shorter than my father had been at my age.
My dad wouldn't usually have actually requested that I fetch my brothers to the dinner table; but over the last few months, a couple of things had happened to severely knock out the dynamic of our entire household. One of them was me being diagnosed with mono.
I hated to admit it, but for the first nine months after the accident, my dad was a complete and utter wreck. Practically drowning himself in paperwork, he had basically all but ignored the fact that he had children in his attempt to forget the pain that losing our mother and his wife of almost eighteen years had caused.
Some people might think that he was an awful kind of parent to literally forget about his children, but honestly; I was old enough to take over the day-to-day running of the house, even at sixteen years old. And it wasn't as if Dad wasn't aiming to do something with his burgeoning company. He was actually trying to get a business off the ground, to ensure that we had a good income; something that had severely dropped after we had lost the money Mom's career as a writer had added to the household. He'd been around, just not as much as we were used to.
The thing was, although I theoretically knew the process of looking after a house and herding my brothers to and from school, from watching my mom over the years —helping them with their various pursuits and homework— I just really didn't have the organisational skills to handle my own stuff as well as everything else.
John had really helped as much as he could, but Mom's death had really hit him harder than it had the younger three. He was getting tireder and more pale as the days went by. It was just too bad that I couldn't see any of that, when I had looked at myself in the mirror each morning.
As the weeks passed, I had begun to sense that my control on my life was slipping; first with my schoolwork. Continually I found myself staying up until one am most nights in my attempts to finish assignments and coursework after having put the kids to bed. I was up at least six every morning to have at least half an hour to myself, to shower and dress before rounding everyone up to get Alan and Gordon to the elementary school by 7.30, and then Virgil, John and myself to the combined junior-and-high school by at least ten to eight.
Dad was barely home for more than five hours at a time. The only clue we had to prove that he had actually been home at all during the night hours was the empty coffee mugs in the sink, and the rumpling of the bed that I made every afternoon, in the hope that my dad could get some kind of rest.
Things had come to a head a few weeks into the fall term, around three months ago. I had been feeling rather off for nearly a fortnight; sore throat, headache, and was terribly hot all of the time despite the weather cooling down rapidly in preparation for the coming of winter.
To my limited knowledge, I had picked up a cold from somewhere. All I knew was that one moment, I had been standing in shorts and shirt for my gym class; my head spinning and unfocused, and the next, it was three days later and I was lying in a remarkably soft hospital bed. There were IV lines, fluids and all, and Dad was fast asleep in the chair next to me with his hands gripping onto mine for dear life.
That really woke him up. He'd gotten a call from the school nurse saying that I'd collapsed, and it had basically sent him into panic mode. According to John, the only thing that had kept him from losing his head completely was Grandma. If it wasn't for the fact that he'd called her first in order for there to be someone to pick up my brothers while he sat with me in the emergency department, my brother reckoned that he would've had a break down that very same day.
As it was, I had spent the first week of my illness tied to needles and tubes in the local hospital; and then the next four-and-a-half confined to my bed at home; too weak, tired and ill to even think about making a fuss about wanting to get up.
Even now, three months following my initial diagnosis, I was still weak and still got tired extremely easily. I hadn't exactly been in contact with anyone who had had mono, so it was still a mystery as to where I had caught it. I gathered someone had been a carrier and I had contracted it through something like dirty school cafeteria cutlery or something.
It had been relatively easy for me to become infected because I was so tired and run-down. I was actually heading back to school the coming Monday —for merely a fortnight before we broke up for Christmas, actually— but my father was still feeling guilty over the whole mess. Like it was his fault I had gotten sick.
Stretching widely in a show of I can do anything; I am invincible, I grinned at him as he leaned against the doorjamb, nonchalantly eyeing my movements. I rolled my eyes. No, I was not going to fall over!
Sliding past him, I slipped up the stairs in socked feet; the hems of my black pyjama bottoms brushing against the hardwood. I thought I knew where I could find my immediate younger brother. He only had a limited amount of spaces that he could hide in, and I knew about them all. Most were where he could easily see the stars, and the open sky that we both loved so much, so I was very much surprised when the just-turned fifteen-year-old was neither in the attic nor on the tiny balcony that Dad had built to extend out from his bedroom window.
Shivering slightly as I stepped into his room, I realised that the draft was coming from the sliver of space that separated the window from the sill.
Why in the hell is his window open? I thought to myself as I moved forward. Being the middle of December, the icy winds that were blowing all through the night made the bedrooms chilly if the curtains weren't drawn by at least five pm. It was nearly seven now; being Friday night and all, we had as usual waited until later to have dinner. Week nights were a lot more rigid with homework and extracurricular activities packed into the time between the final bells and bedtime.
Latching the window closed and drawing the star-scattered curtains, I had the thought that maybe John had already headed downstairs, and I had missed him when I was checking his attic hideaway. The only other place that I could think of that he could be was the hayloft in the barn on the edge of the property; but I knew that John wouldn't be daft enough to go out there this late in the evening. It was freezing during the winter with no heating unit, and he was much too wary of Dad's reaction to rebel against his rules like that.
Frowning, I headed back downstairs, checking all of the rooms in the long hallway for my missing brother.
Moving into the kitchen, distraction came as I was accosted by a small blonde-haired six-year-old, the kid almost knocking me over as he ploughed into my legs with all his strength.
"Hey, Sprout!" I said, lifting Alan into my arms. "I hear you've been cooking up a storm! What's on the menu? If you don't hurry up and tell me, I might just decide that I want you for dinner instead!" I leered at him. "Don't you think that Alan Shepard Pie would taste good?" I nibbled on his fingers for good measure, eliciting a yell of giggly indignation from the boy in question.
"No, Scott!" he told me, beaming. "We're having pasketti bolognaise! Daddy saided that we could have the garlic bread as well!"
"Oh." I said, pretending to pout. I ignored Virgil and Gordon as they sniggered from the other side of the counter, sticking my lip out to exaggerate my reaction, as I jiggled my littlest brother on my hip. "Can you make me Shepherd's Pie next time?"
"Just for you, Scotty." He promised me solemnly, before pointing an accusatory finger at the red-haired brother behind him. "But he's not gonna get none; he tried to taked my pasta mixer away."
"And why did Gordon do that?" I asked; narrowing my eyes as the ten-year-old glared sulkily, packing away his glue, scissors and the various other bits of diorama-building paraphernalia scattered over the table.
Virgil spoke up then, as he placed a clean bowl at each setting. "He wanted to try and have a sword-fight with me and the serving spoon instead of cleaning up his disaster zone over there." He pointed to the desk in the corner, where a large cardboard box —looking as though it had drowned in coloured paper— sat facing the wall in the universal sign of 'this is off limits, so absolutely nobody touches it'. What looked like an entire roll of heavy-duty sticky tape covered the outside of the structure.
As I went to open my mouth to reprimand Gordon, my second brother interrupted me. "It's fine, Scott. Dad handled it."
"Dad handled what?" The man himself rounded the corner, coming from the sitting room where I guessed he had been reading the movie listings to see what we were wanting to watch after the meal.
"Gordon and the swordfight." I answered, placing Alan back onto his feet as he scampered over to drag Dad back over to serve his 'pasketti'.
"Yes." Dad said distractedly, peering around the kitchen as he went. "Scott, did you find John?"
Suddenly, I remembered the reason why I had come into the room in the first place. "I couldn't find him, Dad. He's not in his room or anything." Alarm bells began to ring in my mind. "I thought that he was already down here."
My dad frowned. "Is he in the rec room?"
"No." I shook my head. "I checked on my way down."
"Go and check his room again. He might have just been using the bathroom when you were up there. Your brothers and I will look down here."
Nodding, I retraced my steps, wondering how the skinny teenager had missed the rich scent of tomato sauce and garlic as it wafted through the entire homestead. That was a signal that it was dinnertime if I had ever smelled one.
"John!" I called, listening to hear if I could hear my quietest brother's voice from any of the rooms as I passed. Knocking on the closed door of his bedroom —the Saturn plaque claiming that it was my kid brother's room banged slightly against the door as the wood vibrated. "Hey, Starman. Tea's ready."
No answer.
As I went to turn away, I narrowed my brows. I could hear a slight, insistent tapping sound. Turning the knob, I pushed the door open, following my ears as they led me back over to the window I had closed five minutes earlier.
It was much louder over here. Eyes widening as I had a sudden rush of understanding, I ripped the curtains apart, and there, shivering on the balcony, was John.
Clad in jeans, and a black hoodie that was altogether much too large for him, he had on a thick, blue wool hat that obscured all evidence of there being anything underneath it save for a pair of wide pale-sapphire eyes and an always-pale face. Damp and wet in the yellow pool of light spilling through the glass, he stared at me with obvious relief; his fist raised as he went to pound on the window again.
Throwing myself forwards, I hurriedly flicked the latch, throwing open the window to grab my younger brother by the arm. Hoisting his shorter, scrawnier frame through the window was extremely easy, despite my lingering weakness.
The kid really needs to regain some weight, and fast. I thought, putting his feet firmly back on the floor, and lifting his chin so that his gaze met mine.
"What in the hell were you doing out there?" I asked in shock. "Forget that… Where were you?" I shook him slightly, wondering on earth had possessed him to go outside, especially when he had been looking so peaky all day. I suddenly realised that I needed to revise my earlier statement about my brother not being daft enough to do that sort of thing.
John muttered something so low that it was incomprehensible to my ears, and I resisted the strong urge to shake him again.
"What?" I questioned, lifting his chin again as he went to speak to the collar of his shirt.
"I was on the roof." Clearly unhindered by the obstacle of thick material, I had to take the kid at his word that he had actually said what I had heard with my own ears.
"Why?" I asked incredulously. Firstly, he could have hurt himself had he fallen off, and barring that, had he been left outside any longer he could have gotten really ill, especially as his immune system was as screwed as it was right now.
Taking in his sopping hat and hoodie, I realised that it could still happen, if I let him stay in his wet clothes.
Figuring I'd ask him just how he'd gotten up there later, I shooed him over to the closet, ordering him to change, before heading towards the stairs for the second time, the weariness from the multiple trips up and down beginning to drag on my limbs.
"And don't forget to close the window!" I hollered over my shoulder, hearing an affirmative response as well as the door closing firmly in the frame.
Dad basically jumped me as soon as I stepped onto the ground floor, his worried voice and countenance as he stepped from the kitchen speaking volumes more than words could have said. "Did you find him?"
I held in a chuckle as I saw three heads peer around the corner; blonde, red and chestnut in ascending order of age as well as height.
Nodding in affirmation to my father's enquiry, I headed towards the kitchen and the delicious smell of our waiting meal. "Yeah. He was outside; I missed him the first time. He's just changing clothes. He got a little damp."
Seeing the look on Dad's face as I passed him, I resolved to keep my brother's hijinks to myself, at least for now. John would get it enough from Dad just for being outside this late, let alone on the roof.
He'd kept plenty of my secrets; the latest being my little sojourn two weeks ago to the 'plane hangar in the field, while Dad was at the store and I was supposed to be sleeping off my latest round of Tylenol.
As John walked into the kitchen, now warm and snug in a pair of flannel pyjamas and wearing a dry knit cap to warm his ears, I shrugged my shoulders; figuring, what are brothers for?
There's my round of brotherly fluff... I really hope you all enjoyed my first trip into the realm of teenTracys! Please review!