Here's a weird little AU that popped up out of nowhere a couple weeks ago. I have no current plans to expand on this idea.
I don't own the Thunderbirds, and I am making no profit from this story.
It was the night before the wedding. Jeff had his arm around Lucille's shoulders, and their feet gently rocked the porch swing back and forth in sync as they watched the sun drop low in the sky, painting the vast spread of grassy fields in front of the Tracy farmhouse a brilliant bronze.
Jeff had never realized that a person could be so happy. His eyes remained fastened on the sky as the sun disappeared, replaced by a glorious explosion of pink, purple and gold, but in his mind, he had wandered fifty years into the future. He and his beloved Lucy were still sitting on the same swing – that little squeak still tickled the back of Jeff's mind and made him wonder where he had left the WD-40. Behind them, the house bustled with life, filled with children and grandchildren who had come home for a family reunion. Perhaps some of their children lived on the farm full time, continuing in Jeff's father's footsteps. Perhaps others of their children had joined Jeff in building up the magnificent empire that was Tracy Industries – currently still just a little start-up business. Maybe there was another astronaut in the family who had taken after Jeff. Other children and grandchildren had gone their own way, of course, becoming wonderful, successful adults in each of their respective fields.
He could almost see their faces – he tended to picture them with Lucille's amazing hair and laughing eyes.
He smiled, and was about to share his daydream with Lucy, when suddenly she shifted slightly under his arm and let out a quiet sigh.
"Lucy?" he said. "What's wrong?" He turned so he could see her better.
She looked up at him, and by the torment in her eyes, it was clear that while his thoughts had been only happy, hers had gone entirely in the opposite direction. "Jeff," she said. She hesitated, ducking her head and nervously clasping her hands together.
Jeff reached for the wringing hands and firmly wrapped them in his own. "Lucy, what is it?"
She sighed again and met his eyes. "Jeff, my love," she said slowly. "I have something I need to tell you. You deserve to know, before it's…too late."
Jeff blinked, his mind whirling in a thousand directions. What could she mean? Was she sick? Was she having second thoughts about getting married? Had something happened with her family? "Too late?" he murmured. "Too late for what? Honey, what is it?"
He felt her hands tremble, but her voice was steady as she said, "Jeff, I'm one of Them."
Jeff prided himself on being a man of intense self-control. It took every ounce of his sense of discipline to keep from jerking his hands away from his fiancée's in that moment. He couldn't stop his lungs from sucking in a short, sharp gasp of air, though, and he couldn't stop his heart from beating faster.
He looked down into Lucille's eyes and tried to reconcile everything he knew about the woman he loved with the stories he'd heard about Them. They were strange people – mysterious, possibly dangerous, because they could do things normal people couldn't do – things normal people shouldn't be able to do.
Or at least, that was what the government said.
The government had never mentioned that They were kind, beautiful, and loving. The government hadn't told the general populace that They could have a huge smile and a bubbling, overflowing sense of fun. And the government hadn't said what Lucille's face was telling Jeff at that moment – that Their hearts could be broken just as easily as anyone else's.
Still, it wasn't easy to shake off what he had been told his entire life. His voice cracked a little as he asked, "What – what can you do?"
She didn't say a word. She turned his right hand over, revealing a scrape across his knuckles he had received while changing the tire on his car earlier that day. She laid her own hand across his and closed her eyes, taking in a deep breath and letting it out slowly. When she opened her eyes a moment later and lifted her hand, the scrape was gone.
Jeff couldn't take his eyes off his smooth, undamaged knuckles, and he couldn't breathe for a minute as his panicked mind tried to reach an accord with what his heart was telling him. One part of him was screaming at him to panic, to get as far away from Her as possible. Another part whispered, She's still the same Lucy. She's still the woman you love. You can handle this. And, besides, she heals – that's a gift, not one of the atrocities the government has tried to say They do.
Lucille sat quietly beside him, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes fastened on the floor as she awaited his judgment.
Jeff thought of the joy and optimism he had felt a few minutes earlier – how he had looked forward to spending the next many decades alongside the radiant woman he had fallen in love with. How he had imagined their children and grandchildren, running across the Kansas fields and playing on the same porch swing he and Lucille were sitting on. How he had pictured all of their children inheriting her face.
He had loved Lucille. He had loved her bright personality, her glowing smile, her beautiful, giving nature. He had loved her work ethic and how she wasn't afraid to get dirty – how her hands could go from digging up a vegetable patch to playing intricate compositions on the piano or painting a masterpiece. She was a complex, wonderful, amazing woman, and he had loved her. He really had.
And – he realized with a start – he still did.
He loved her.
He really loved her, and nothing could get in the way of that.
"I love you," he whispered.
Her head jerked up, and she looked at him, her eyes glistening with a mixture of disbelief and hope.
Slowly, not taking his eyes off hers, he reached for her hands again. They felt cold, and he pressed them together, wrapping his own big hands gently around them.
"I love you, Lucille," he said again. "Nothing could ever change that."
Her eyes filled with tears, and with a happy sob, she wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his shoulder. He held her close and tried not to think about the way tears were trying to clog his own throat.
They sat like that for a long time. Eventually they began talking, their voices quiet as they discussed how Lucy's revelation might change their future.
It was a couple hours before they let the conversation slowly die away – not because they were done talking, but because they were tired, and because they were thinking about the event of the coming day.
They settled back into their original pose, their feet gently rocking the swing – in sync – as they looked across the dark fields and up into the night sky that was burgeoning with brilliant stars.
Jeff's arm tightened slightly around Lucy's shoulders, and he said quietly, "I was imagining something earlier."
Lucy snuggled against his side. "What were you imagining?" she whispered sleepily.
Jeff laid his head against hers. "I was imagining us sitting on this same swing, fifty years from now…"
oooooooooooooo
They didn't speak of Lucy's ability again for years. Whenever they were tempted to bring it up, their tongues were cautioned by rumors of the government tracking down and imprisoning all of Them that they could find.
In fact, the situation didn't come up again until they had two children and a third on the way.
Scott, a sturdy five-year-old, had decided one day that he wanted to be a superhero. Donning his favorite blanket as a cape, he had been careening off the furniture all morning, pretending that he could fly.
Lucy finally took a break from trying to corral him and sank down into a chair, putting her sore, puffy feet up on the ottoman. She absently rubbed her distended stomach – she was only thirty weeks along, but Baby Number Three was already nearly as large as Scott and John had been at full term.
Jeff was convinced that this one was going to be a girl, but Lucy knew that they would soon be welcoming baby Virgil into the family – and that Jeff would be entranced the moment he saw his newborn son.
Lucy smiled and wearily tipped her head back. She could hardly wait until it was the boys' nap time…
It was John's burbling laughter that snapped Lucy awake – he only laughed like that when Scott was doing something he wasn't supposed to. She sat up with a jolt, looking wildly around to see what her boys were up to, and hoping that she hadn't fallen asleep for very long.
John sat in the middle of the living room, his chubby toddler cheeks red from laughing as he watched something over Lucy's left shoulder.
"Mommy, look! I'm flying!" Scott yelled from behind Lucy and well over her head.
She whipped around, expecting to see him standing on the back of her chair. But the scolding words dropped off the tip of her tongue as her mouth fell open in surprise.
Scott wasn't on her chair. He was well above her chair, hovering in midair, a huge grin splitting his face.
"See, Mommy?" he said. He stretched his arms out in front of him and zipped in a circle around the room, near the ceiling, his blanket-cape rippling after him.
John's laughter redoubled.
Lucy snapped her mouth shut and cleared her throat. "That's – that's very nice, Sweetie," she said weakly. Then she scrambled for the phone and hit the speed-dial. "Jeff, we have a problem," she said.
oooooooooooooo
The boys all came into their powers at different ages – when John was four, he began showing an unusual interest in the way time worked. With some careful questioning, his parents were able to discover the fact that their preschooler had begun manipulating time. His greatest achievement at that point was slowing time down for long enough to snag an extra cookie after lunch.
Lucy had wondered where that cookie had gone.
When Virgil turned three, he lost his favorite toy truck under the couch. Rather than crawl around to the far side, he simply lifted one end of the heavy piece of furniture and held it there with one hand while he retrieved his toy.
Jeff and Lucy also gradually came to suspect that Scott and Virgil had a bit of a psychic link of some sort, although the two would never admit to it.
Lucy tried a water birth for Gordon. Later she and Jeff wondered if that had influenced his power – when he was a toddler, he turned his bathtub water into a giant sphere and remained inside the water bubble for a half hour, happily playing and swimming around, with no apparent need for oxygen.
It was only a year later that Lucille died giving birth to baby Alan.
Heartbroken, Jeff buried himself in his work, leaving Scott in charge of his younger brothers much of the time, helped occasionally by Jeff's mother, who had, out of necessity, been told of the secret shortly after Scott gained the ability to fly.
When Alan was two, Scott hesitantly approached Jeff one night and asked for his help. It turned out that Alan had super speed. Grandma, Scott said, was cool – for an old person – but she was really too slow to keep an eye on Alan. The other brothers had ways of dealing with him, but they were at school and after-school activities most of the day. Did Jeff have any ideas for containing a toddler who could outrun an Olympic sprinter?
Thus Jeff was pulled back into the family he had nearly abandoned – the family of wonderful, rambunctious little boys who all reminded him so much of his beloved wife.
With Jeff's involvement, Alan settled down some, Gordon grew a bit more focused, Virgil began receiving the art and music lessons he had been secretly craving, John actually slept most nights instead of manipulating time to study college-level material, and Scott began to channel his love for flight into piloting aircraft.
Jeff spent lots more time at home – albeit often in his study, but even so, he was infinitely more accessible than he had been before. And as he worked, with one ear tuned in to his boys' interactions, the seed of an idea began to take root in his mind.
His wife had said something when she knew the end was near. She had held baby Alan for one joyous minute, her pale face radiant. But then the nurses and doctors had taken the little baby away and stepped far enough back to give husband and wife a moment of privacy – their last.
"Lucy," Jeff had said huskily, clenching her hands within his own, his eyes fastened desperately on hers. "You could – couldn't you…I mean…"
She smiled faintly. "Heal myself? I wish it worked like that," she said. "This gift is meant to help other people." She looked down. "Only I never got the chance, because people are afraid." Glancing up again, she met his eyes. "Jeff, please – please promise me you won't let that happen to our boys. They have gifts, and they're meant to use their gifts to help others. Please do whatever you have to do to make sure they're free to use what they've been given."
He had promised. He hadn't known what he was supposed to do with that promise – the words had felt hollow at the time – but they had kept on echoing in his mind, and now he felt that he was finally beginning to get an idea.
He opened a blank pad of paper on his desk and stared at it for a long time, tapping the eraser of his pencil absently against the surface of the desk.
Finally he raised the pencil and wrote boldly across the top of the paper, "International Rescue." He underlined it three times and then blew away the excess graphite powder.
His eyes went to the edge of his desk, where a simple wooden frame enclosed a photo of a beautiful, smiling face, and a bolt of pain stabbed through his heart, even as he smiled. He reached out and gently touched the glass, wishing that it was Lucille's soft skin under his fingertips.
"I don't know how this will work," he said. "I don't know when it will happen. But I'll do my part, Lucy. You can count on me. The rest of it is up to our boys, and I have confidence in them." He laughed softly. "I wish you could see little Alan run! And Gordon looks so natural in the water. Virgil inherited your heart for music and art. He's had to learn such control of his gift to be able to touch the keyboard lightly and to keep from punching through a canvas. John is unbelievable – he ought to be in college. Actually, he ought to be teaching in college. And Scotty – well, he's still got his eyes on the sky, as always."
He leaned back in his chair with a sigh, his eyes still fastened on his wife's photo. "They'll be all right," he said. "We all will. I miss you – more than words can say – but I see you every day in each of our boys, and I know you're right. They're going to do so much good in this world."
A loud crash sounded somewhere upstairs, followed by angry shouts.
Jeff winced. "Well, someday, they'll do a lot of good, anyway," he said wryly, heaving himself up from his seat.
Two years later, a Tolerance Act was passed, and They were free to live – free to use their gifts to help others, as Lucille had put it.
Jeff's notepad had been filled to the brim – and had been joined on his shelf by a host of other papers and related materials. He couldn't wait until the day he could share his plans with his boys. That day might not come for many more years, but he was confident that he would know when it was the right time.
And when that day came, his boys were going to turn the world upside down!