Fire and Brimstone
Summary:
Part 2 of the Hamartia series (Bo Kata is Part 1).
International Rescue, a volcano, and the ongoing fallout from their disastrous first meeting with the woman who calls herself H.A. Martia.
Notes:
So - a long time after the first part, finally we are moving on with this story. This cannot stand alone; it follows directly from the first part, Bo Kata, and will be even more strange if you don't know what happened there. My sincere apologies for the delay in getting on with this one, but the muse just wasn't with me.
Amazing how inspiring a thoroughly good new TAG episode can be!
Thanks as always to the unfailingly generous Soleil_Lumiere.
Chapter 1: Prologue
Prelude: Three weeks ago. The night before the events of the last chapter of Bo Kata part 1
Scott Tracey was no stranger to disciplinary hearings. They didn't happen often; he was always too much of a straight arrow accepter of hierarchy to front his commanding officer's desk much. But every now and then the other overriding facet of his character, the one that valued justice over orders, meant that the blunt hammer of military discipline collided with his own sense of what was right. He knew the scalding nature of such interviews. He'd long accepted them as the collateral offered in his bargain with military life.
Meeting Admiral Pang and Colonel Casey in such an adversarial way was both challenging and ever so slightly humiliating. It was a long time since he'd worn a uniform that consisted of something beyond his own choosing, and now he came in nothing more impressive than tailored civvies. His armour as he stood before each, consecutively and in different continents, was a fundamental sense that he had trodden a moral path. He remained acutely aware that morality as such was a sidebar notion for much of the military judicial system.
Pang was hard to read, and yet, Scott felt they understood each other. There was a desert dry humour to the admiral that recognised absurdity as part of the human condition, and so when Scott stood before him and explained, once again, the imperatives that had driven his behaviour in tracking and reclaiming Thunderbird Two, Pang nodded, only once, to share recognition of the absolute quandary Scott had found himself in. Pang had the integrity to follow through when Scott met him after the loss of the First Responder team. He gave brief but comprehensive approval for International Rescue to continue, with the proviso that they were on probation, as far as WASP command was concerned. Scott expected no less, feared worse, and so left San Diego with a measure of satisfaction, even as Pang's eviscerating description of Scott's choices on Nazca plain still tore his guts as he headed for Geneva.
Colonel Casey was a different matter altogether. Their shared history, including the time of the feared loss of two of his brothers, meant that he cared rather more deeply about what she thought of him. Her disappointment in his lack of control aboard the WASP vessel Tiger Shark was clear, and it met an equal disappointment in himself. And yet, even as she levelled her stare at him and expressed her disapproval, his own mind was clear. Gordon was being tortured. Gordon was an innocent. Gordon had required protection. And as big brother nonpareil, Scott had brought deliverance in spades. If the political and personal aspects of Colonel Casey's scorn were discomfiting, in his heart Scott was secure.
He would do it again, and never regret it. So Colonel Casey's thorough and complete demolishing of his decision process, while saddening, did not touch his core conception of what had gone down. He could live with withholding information; he could live with her professional admonishments. He did what he had to do to get his people home, and the decisions that kept him awake at night – and oh, there were some doozys – had nothing whatever to do with keeping in sweet with the GDF, and even with Colonel Casey, no matter how highly he regarded her.
In the end, her judgement had been the same as Pang's; International Rescue was on probation, and would remain so for the foreseeable future.
"And while this madwoman is on the loose," she had added, with an asperity born of sensing Scott's resistance to her disapproval, "I want you to let me know any and everything you find out. She's targeted you, Scott. She knows too much about you. The GDF is fully prepared to activate a search and detain operation worldwide, but we need intel. So I need you to promise me you'll be proactive in sending me the slightest hint you have about her whereabouts."
Her whereabouts. Her. It always came down to her. The First Responder criminals were a team, sure, but the woman loomed large as the one who was the instigator and director and sheer unmatched intelligence of this horrendous dyad.
It was a tough 24 hours. Scott didn't make it back to Tracy Island until almost 2200, but even so, he was surprised to find only Virgil in the living area.
Virgil was seated in the pit, his legs supported by pillows on the central table. Also ensconced there was a large and half eaten cake.
He gave Scott a weary salute.
"You're back."
Scott dropped into the opposite seat with a sigh.
"I am."
"And not arrested. Or flagellated."
"Oh, there was flagellating. Multiple bouts. You just can't see it because my shirt is absorbent."
"Hmm." Virgil nodded towards the cake. "Gordon made it. Carrot with cream cheese topping. Of all the surprising things on this planet, the fact that Gordon is actually not a bad cook is one of the more bizarre."
"What's the occasion?" Scott leant forward and cut himself a large hunk of cake before getting back up and heading for their father's desk. "Does carrot cake go with bourbon?"
"Carrot cake goes with anything. Or bourbon goes with anything. I forget which?"
"Want one?" Scott picked up the bottle and waggled it invitingly. "A different kind of medicine."
"Sure." Virgil waved a hand. "Celebrations due. You were not hung, drawn and quartered."
"I agree. So how come it's just the two of us?"
"Ah. Well. That's probably on account of the fact that even though International Rescue has been cleared to resume operations, we're beat to hell."
"Yeah." Scott considered pouring two glasses at his father's desk, but instead hooked the bottle around his fingers and took the glasses with him back to the pit. "Here." He handed Virgil a glass, and waited until he took it before filling it to the brim. "To being back in the game. With provisos."
"Provisos?"
"Probation."
"Ah."
"So." Scott took a long draught of the bourbon, felt its cool heat roll down his throat into the belly that had never quite settled since his decision on Nazca. "Care to fill me in our current status? How's Brains doing with the recommissioning?"
"About what you'd expect. He's completely re-routed the internal systems on all our birds. Still a lot to do, of course. I think he's working 25 hours a day, would extend that to 30 if it was in any way possible to bend the space time continuum. You need to tell him to take a break before he does. Break, I mean."
"Will do. That's good news, though. Okay, so Brains is being Brains and doing the work of five people. Next on the agenda - how come Gordon and Alan are in bed by ten o'clock?"
"Gordon's got a headache. You know, he's so easy to read. He just gets more and more still. Not like he's usually still. And then he starts to realise it, and so he starts trying to – I guess, move for the sake of moving? Only it looks wrong, and his face goes all tight, and then finally he says he's going to his room to do stuff, which translated means he's going to bed way too early for cool points."
"Yeah." He knew how loose Gordon usually was; catlike, his body splayed across the furniture, one minute all action, the next complete shutdown. Scott had never gotten close to that kind of off switch mechanism. He'd envied Gordon, even sometimes resented him for it. Now he missed it acutely, as he watched his younger brother struggle through deafness and headaches and vertigo.
"Alan?"
"Hmm. Alan. Aiming for normal. Stretched too tight."
Virgil wasn't always the most forthcoming of his brothers, but whatever he said had purpose and power. 'Stretched too tight' from Virgil meant his kid brother was only barely handling any of what had happened. Their loss of agency; the existential threat to their lives and their organisation. Sometimes it was easy to forget that Alan was still in high school when he dealt with problems and dangers so far beyond that usually encountered by his peers. Alan was strong and smart and willing, but the sinews that surrounded the rest of his family's hearts were not yet fully formed. Those tight bindings that kept his older brothers and Kayo and Grandma from letting their hearts fall through their floors were not yet in place. If Scott occasionally wished they never would be – because he knew each of those sinews was won with trauma faced and overcome but not forgotten – he also knew that Alan would never be content outside of IR. He was a child of a family that asked extraordinary things of each member, and the unvarnished truth was that Alan was always going to grow to become an integral part of everything they were.
"Anything I should do?"
Virgil took a sip of bourbon, then shook his head.
"I think he'll be okay. Gordon is insisting on a day at the rock pools sometime in the next few days. Maybe tomorrow? Says he has to get out of the air-conditioning, or something. I think it's a good idea."
"Yeah?" Scott matched Virgil's sip, although truth be told, his was the deeper one. "Yeah. Sounds good. Penelope?"
"When Gordon left, so did she. Penelope's kinda doing it tough alongside Gordie."
"I never think of Lady Penelope doing anything 'tough'."
At that, Virgil sent him one of his most arch eyebrows.
"You don't think it's tough to watch someone you care about go through all that?"
Scott lifted his glass, saw it was almost empty, and filled it again.
"I take your point. Kayo?"
"Kayo. Kayo has what she thinks is a lead."
Scott tilted his head, tiredly. "You're not impressed?"
"I don't know." A sigh, as weary as Scott's bones. "Kayo - of all of us, she's the one struggling the most with what happened."
That was not what Scott expected to hear. "Come on, Virgil. Of all of us, she's the most professional."
"And she just got her ass professionally handed to her. Scott. Come on. Professionally, Kayo's job is to protect us."
Wincing, Scott put his head back on the seat. "Yeah. Right. Should have seen that."
Virgil let that sit for a minute. The lights were low enough in their room that the South Pacific stars could glitter a rococo ceiling for them, and Scott let his eyes drift there for precious seconds.
"She thinks there might be something in Sao Paulo. There's – I don't know. Brains can fill you in. Kayo's downstairs with him right now, figuring it out."
"You don't think it's anything?"
"Oh, I don't know. Maybe. John can't say if it's a weather anomaly or some kind of air disturbance like the one we caught on Nazca. I just think she's…"
"Desperate?"
A small exhale of breath, replaced with another sip of bourbon.
"Not yet. We're not desperate."
"Not desperate. Just…?"
Ha." Virgil grimaced. "Decommissioned. Discombobulated. Not quite destabilised."
"Not quite." Scott closed his eyes, shutting out the beauty, focusing on the void. "What do we need?"
"The million dollar question." Virgil leaned forward and put his drink on the table where their communication hologram was conspicuously silent, an absence that felt both wrong and blessedly right, for now. "Time. I guess. Gordon and Kayo need to heal up."
"You need to heal up," said Scott sternly, and Virgil shrugged a tired acknowledgement.
"Yeah, I do. But we're all getting there. It's just time."
"Time." Scott swallowed his drink, then pulled himself to his feet. "And some poolside R and R." He hesitated, then reached out a hand. It was both gratifying and worrying that Virgil took it, to help him rise from his seat. Virgil accepting help was rare enough that it told Scott more than anything that had been said tonight.
"Oh, by the way. When I was in Geneva I went and found Dr Barczak. Nerve specialist. Best in Europe, apparently. Or so Colonel Casey told me. She gave me some of these." From his trouser pocket he pulled a small packet of pills. "Thought they might be useful."
Virgil took them from him, glanced at them, and nodded.
"So Colonel Casey was not so mad she wasn't up for some medical recommendations?"
"Ah, she loves us. Can't help herself."
That brought a short snort from his brother, and Scott was glad to hear it.
"Go on. Bed and pills. Tomorrow, we'll relax and realise that this is all behind us."
"Yeah?"
"Yes. Only thing to worry about tomorrow is sunburn. And Gordon's unfiltered mouth."
They both began to move together towards the stairs that led to their bedrooms, but gradually Virgil slowed. He didn't face Scott, his frown landing somewhere near the kitchen, but Scott waited with him as his brother balanced his thoughts to find the words he needed.
"Do you – " Virgil cleared his throat. "Do you think we're really done with her?"
"I do." More conviction than accuracy, but Scott was never one to shy from the occasional use of positivity in place of precision. "We were beaten, but it was never a fight we were equipped to take on. No shame in simply surviving. In fact, that makes it a huge win in my book. So now, we move on. Rest. Heal. Go back to doing what we do best."
Virgil's expression didn't change, but at last, he nodded.
"Avoiding Grandma's cooking."
Scott dared a gentle squeeze on shoulders that were still tender from the damage incurred on that dreadful flight.
"Amen, little brother. Amen to that."