A/N: Okay, so a totally different sort of piece I've got here. It's a birthday fic, first and foremost, for my friend Misterida, who had her special day this past weekend. I hope you like this hunny, Happy Birthday! I'm sorry it's a tad late, but thanks for being so patient.
I've made a couple of references in here that may not be strictly correct, not being of the same nationality as the Tracys, and I'm not a scientist or meteorologic expert either, so please forgive me any transgressions. Think of them as a lack of knowledge, despite my endeavour of keeping things as close to the truth as possible, both in a situational and human-based light. I've done my best, so just bear with me.
I hope you all like this. It's set pre-IR, not long before the outfit begins operating for the first time, so think around early-August, just before my fic 'Dangerous Boys', in essence. You do not have to have read that fic beforehand, though I am ever so flattered if you have. Off we go.
Disclaimer: If not for Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, I wouldn't be able to play in this wonderful playground, so no; I do not own the Thunderbirds. Furthermore, I do not claim to own anything in Robert Frost's poems either, much as I love them.
I stare out of the panoramic window at the slowly turning orb of planet Earth, the darkness of the South Pacific Ocean engulfing the Pacific archipelagos and the islands of Laharu, New Zealand, and the bottom-half of the Australian continent in darkness.
There isn't any indication of exactly what time it is for them, or the rest of the world, really, except for the timepiece that blinks at me from the console at my side; broadcasting what time it is down on the island I call my second home.
The automated system up here on the station mimics the strengthening and dulling of light simultaneously to what my family down on the island experience, keeping me in what Brains calls a Continuous Geostationary Orbit. I could get lost in time and space if I just turned that particular system off, but that would seriously freak out my family, and I've absolutely no wish to be dragged off to be psychoanalysed ever again. Once was well past I've had enough thanks for anyone.
Ten to eleven at night, is what it tells me. Dad will be in bed by now, and Virgil. Even Scott will be starting to settle down, before he'll be up again at four in the morning for his run. Virgil might join him, if Scott thinks it's worth the fight it will take to get our younger brother out of bed. It takes him a while to get going, but once he's awake, Virgil won't sleep again until the next evening.
I've had far too much sugar this evening to even bother trying for sleep myself yet, and none of the few books I've bought up here to occupy me hold any interest at the moment. Well, I got most of the way through that one sitting on the console there, beneath the photo of the family, but I've found my thoughts whirring too much, and I just can't seem to focus enough to get back into the lines of verse. It's a little irritating actually.
It might seem a little weird, and entirely too existential for this time of night, but it is now, as I stare out of the view-port of Thunderbird Five, more than any other time in my life, that I realise quite how fragile my home is.
Home. It's such a strange word; so flexible, but simultaneously constraining in what the name constitutes. Home can be many different places or none at all. It seems to be more a feeling than a particular parameter of surroundings, like it's the people or emotions we feel there that make a house worth living in.
A house in the traditional sense is a bricks and mortar shell; built out of toil and sweat, with the family's own hands, usually the man of the house to provide a place of shelter for his family. Nowadays, the family 'home' is built far more extraneously, by development companies or realtors, and it's more the family that moves in and furnishes it to their comfort, and through their thoughts and actions, make it a home.
The Villa, as Virgil named it (for the house on one of those weird sixties TV shows Dad introduced him to), is more of one of the traditional homes than the contemporary ones, in the way that it was planned and built by Dad and Grandpa, when it still appeared that he and Grandma were intending to come and live with us on the island. Most of the grunt work was done by a private, trusted team that Dad hired to get everything in tip-top shape, but a lot of the cosmetic work was done by us later on, to conceal the rather obvious inclusion of the portrait system that conceals the lifts down to the 'Birds, within the island's extinct volcano.
But I digress. Sometimes the home is more than just that small building where you live, whether it be that you dwell with family or not. Sometimes, a home is one on a considerably larger scale.
Isn't our dear planet Earth a home? Does it not sustain, protect and support us? Do we not live in the circle of her embrace, live our lives and love our families as she spins on her axis?
That is all true, it is, now you're thinking about it, isn't it? But if that's all right, then answer me this; why do we all treat Mother Earth so badly?
Okay, there are some theories that Global Warming and the melting of the poles aren't directly a link from the activities of humans, and more just the natural progression of things in this universe. I think that it's the complete reverse of that, but what I can't understand is why people just won't take more care of the precious resources in an effort to slow that aforementioned action down?
If the majority of people were half as concerned about the state of the environment and the way our actions impact the earth, as the so-called environmental lunatics, the lot of us would be much better off. True, there are more than a few crazily obsessed fanatics who tie themselves to trees in the way of bulldozers to get their point across, but there is a whole facet of the activism that doesn't get shown beyond the 'look at what this idiot is doing'.
My brother Gordon is one of those people who do a lot of behind the scenes protests with his work in aquatic conservation, and it's really only through that that I know the truth about how bad the situation is. He's only sixteen, and still in high school yet, but even with the time he's spent training for the Summer Olympics lately, Gordon is still fully engrossed on how he can promote the best ways to help our earth. I admire him for having that drive and determination, I'm the same, but it's different when that passion and desire to change is something that is for the greater good.
Yet, I have to give my father kudos where kudos is due, because Dad is the one that has combined Brains' initiative and Gordon's insight and research to strive to make the Thunderbird machines work on clean energy, so they don't pollute or put any strain on the world's natural resources. It's kind of no surprise, considering that Gordon is one of Dad's sons.
All five 'Birds, from my space station-sized Thunderbird Five down to the tiny thirty-by-eleven-foot Thunderbird Four make the use of ultra-lightweight symbiotic reactors, and despite the sheer size of each of the larger crafts, they're efficient and clean, not like the coal burning fossil-carbon emitting, dirty energy sources that some of the largest countries in the world still use. I have to be fair when I say that there are countries that are looking to find different sources to create an even cleaner world; New Zealand (or Aotearoa in the native tongue), and even parts of Britain, Australia and the US, but there's still always more room for improvement.
That desire to change the state of the planet isn't just something that Gordon strives for alone, all of us Tracys, as part of the technological conglomerate that is Tracy Aeronautics, do the best we can as representatives on the world stage, enough so that we can influence others to band together with the same goal.
There's a dark side to that passion to change though, and it's in no way related to the debate of a 'cleaner future'. There are too many wars and conflicts that are tearing the world apart, all because of differing opinions on a variety of topics, and the outcome is always far from being peaceful. The U.S has been involved in conflict with Middle East for the last seven years, and then there were many others in the last two thirds of the twentieth century that completely changed the methods of modern warfare. If there was to be another all-out, full world war, it's very unlikely that there'll be any planet left to live in.
The fire that each soldier has to defend their country and protect their family is not always pure; the information that that individual may be given when drafted or enlisted may be fed miscommunications, and there is no such thing as being completely on the side of right, or of that of wrong, though there are many notable cases when things are definitely more skewed on one side than the other.
Scott in particular was embroiled in a war zone himself, though that was in South-Eastern Afghanistan rather than in the midlands of Iraq, a couple of years ago now. It had a devastating impact on my brother himself, as well as the rest of us as a family. He has a deep-seated hatred of war, that our father shares, despite him not being an active soldier, but that wouldn't stop Scott, were he to be called back to arms again; recent honourable discharge notwithstanding. My brother wouldn't let something as tiny as fear stop him anywhere close to the middle of the track. He's much too driven and loyal for that to occur.
He and I, more than any of the younger ones, were old enough to remember clearly being taught about the bombing of the Twin Towers in New York City, and that act of pure cowardice and outright, unwarranted murder, more than anything, is what strengthened Scott's resolve to join the military.
Despite the horrific outcomes of war however, that passion to succeed and survive is a blaze that can heal as well as destroy; like a forest can be renewed after the razing of a bush fire, the trees re-germinating and the new plants are then able to rise unencumbered from the remainders of the ones before. The same is true of human ideals and emotions; love, hate, passion, drive, determination, loyalty, obsession, fanaticism and lust. They all have the power to destroy the world, or salvage it.
Fire. That's what it is. But if the violence and riots don't stop soon, it'll be the flames that consume instead of save us.
But like the possibility of the world heating up, both literally and metaphorically, the same is true of the coldness of the world.
Scientists have been predicting for many years, upon the patterns in history and the fluctuation of climate and longevity of summers and winters in the Southern and Northern Hemispheres respectively, that in spite and on the contrary to the warnings of Global warming, they believe that the world, within the next forty to fifty years will be heading for a new 'Ice Age'.
Most people are sceptical of this, the widespread belief of the warming of the planet dissuading them of any notion to the contrary, but as a scientist of sorts myself, I can't help but look at the facts side by side, and realise that even if it does not prove to have any truth to it, in the way that fire is an emotion and a perspective of things, the same thing is true of cold and ice.
My brother Virgil is one of those people who feels what happens to other people more sensitively and keenly than others. That's not to say that Alan, Scott, Gordon and I don't empathise and sympathise with other people, but that Virgil just has the cold hate against human selfishness, and the added determination to prevent anything that he can from happening, even if it's in the smallest action he can achieve at the time. That's why he, more than the rest of us, was so emphatic that he was going to get to be a part of our father's new endeavour, International Rescue, even at the tender age of almost-nineteen.
He hates the fact that there are people that die every day from war, hunger, dirty water, abuse, and natural disasters, and there's often not much that can be done to help on a large enough scale. He hates that it is often greed or selfishness, or mean-spiritedness, etcetera, that cause the majority of industrial disasters, and the fact that IR is so close to launching now, means that he is even more driven to participate and be involved than ever. He wants the fire of his own passion and determination to aid him in making a difference.
Coldness isn't just a person's behaviour and the consequences of things though. It's more inherent in our personal lives, in how we treat one another and how we react to certain situations; how circumstances treat us, and how we are changed in the aftermath.
Sometimes, people can turn into cold, stone-like replicas of themselves; hard times and traumatic events can destroy a person from the inside out, like a patch of garden vegetation frostbitten from the winter wind. Sometimes, if a person is not rescued in time, they can become a shell of the person they had once been; burned out by the cold fire of the shattering events that led them to withdraw. It might only be that person's world that comes to an end, which falls to pieces around them, but then, it might only takes a single burning spark to allow them to revive again. It might take a long time for them to be back to normal, their heart and mind might never truly heal completely, but the fact that they were able to be brought back at all, is a miracle in itself.
My father was like that once; after the death of our mother, Lucy. It's ironic that she died in a snowstorm, and then, though my father was as far from that avalanche as it was possible to get, he died inside almost as much as Mom did physically, when she was smothered to death by the snow that almost took two of my brothers away.
It's the circle I guess. A circle that has no end and no beginning, really. There might be places in that circuit that we might go round and round and round over the same mistakes and errors and memories, making the same actions; never changing, but there is also the possibility that repeating them might somehow fix it, allow for enough practice in the hope that somehow, things might get better.
On a larger scale, there's never a true ending to anything, we're tiny, insignificant little specks of humanity; our lives are merely pinpricks of light in infinite blackness, as easily snuffed out as a flame on a candle-wick. In the grand scheme of things, revenge and hatred and regret are useless feelings, they're only a waste of time and energy, and there are too many people who wither away in the face of hot anger or cold, calculating hatred. The ones that are suffering are far more deserving of that fire and determination than the ones who could not care any less.
People like my youngest brother, Alan, might think that that's the most frightening thing of all, that their flame isn't bright enough to truly make a difference. But Alan is still only young, he hasn't yet had the chance to experience the life-altering clarity that the rest of us have so far, and as much as it gets irritating at times, I find that I'm thankful that Alan hasn't yet had to deal with gut-freezing hatred at somebody else's actions. He's too young to have discovered the existence of that sort of emotion yet, and I'm hopeful that it will be a long time until he does have to deal with it, and have to truly understand the reality of what one human can do to another. He's safe still; for just that little bit longer.
I don't know why I'm sitting here like this: cold cup of cocoa still clenched in my hands. I feel the rough surface of the ceramic mug between my palms, and I realise that I've been dozing off and on. I scrub my eyes and look blearily towards the computer screen in front of me, before my eyes stray to that raggedy old book of poems Scott tucked into my duffel when I headed up here.
I think it's partly because of what we're going to be launching in three months' time that I've been so introspective tonight; that the eerily still orb that hangs so deceivingly close below me is sharing with me all her secrets. The other option, excluding the other fifty per cent, is that I'm just being annoyingly sentimental.
I am being a bit whimsical here, I know, but I do feel sometimes that space speaks to me somehow. It's probably just me missing Mom and all the times we spent out on the veranda when I was small and all the evenings with her and Dad and my brothers in the farmhouse where Scott was born, but then again, as my eyes stray back to that book, the bent spine keeping the book limply open on what I know is Scott's favourite page, I know that that's not the entire story.
The poems of Robert Frost have always slipped into my dreams; the reality of the leaves below our feet, the crackle of frost on birch branches, the perils of living as a child on a farm, always reminds me of home, and how even if your surroundings change, and your family and yourself move from one place to another, our home is the memories we take with us. It's how we choose to remember them, and how we choose to let them guide us in our choices, is what is important.
The world might end someday, but it's the things that we do in the time we have, without worrying if we've somehow messed them up, or done things wrong, that make us who we are, and make our time on this earth worth it.
Fire or ice, it doesn't matter what they show themselves as, it's just how we handle what they throw at us; whether we can weather the storm. Whatever they might be, I know we'll be strong enough to meet those challenges head on, whatever form they might take.
Enough of this, I decide, clutching my mug, and forcing my pins-and-needles-aching feet to hold my weight again. Time for bed.
I'm not sure how much sleep I'll end up getting. I'm far too lost in the realms of philosophical reasoning to hold much hope with dreamless slumber, but the least I can do is try. Brains wants to run some sort of diagnostic repair tomorrow, and it'll be far from helpful if the Space Monitor-to-be of International Rescue is too exhausted to do his job. Burns and frostbite are nothing when it comes to the intensity of Jefferson Tracy's wrath.
Believe me, I know that all too well.
The world might end tomorrow, but right now, despite the prose and lyrical conventions running through my head, I'm pretty content.
A/N: Please review and tell me what you think. Happy Birthday Mis!
- Pyre. Xx