Out of his uniform, showered, and back into his civvies, Alan's flat on his back on the floor of his room. He's made himself comfortable with the electric guitar that usually hangs on his wall lying on his stomach instead, humming quietly while he twangs his way through meaningless little tunes. Decompressing. He's winding down from a long day before Grandma calls him down for dinner, potentially about to doze off, when a custom alert he's got set up pings off his comm.

"Thunderbird 5, Space Elevator docking," is announced in a cool, artificial tone from the speaker system over on his desk, and Alan puts his guitar aside, rolls over onto his elbows, looks at the icon hovering above the comm to make sure he's not hearing things. John's on the ground. He's not due to be off-rotation for another two weeks, but sometimes he shuffles his schedule around. Alan grins to himself and clambers to his feet, intent on going to welcome his brother home.

Gordon's on the other side of the door when Alan pulls it open, and Alan nearly runs into him. "Hey! John's down, huh? I just got the call, you wanna come and—"

"Al, uh, actually." Gordon's a little pale, looks a little spooked. "I was gonna say, you maybe wanna park it in your room for a while? Just chill out, give John some space. No pun intended."

Alan blinks at him. "What, why? He okay?" He glances over his shoulder at the hovering hologram, the little symbol that announces that the space elevator's docked. It's benign, benevolent green, not the glaring red of an emergency descent, or the yellow that demands technical assistance.

Gordon shifts, uncomfortable, and shakes his head. "I think he and Scott are gonna get into it. Uh. You know, about today."

"Huh? What about today? Today was fine. Me and Scott were great! Man, I know our comms got cut off and John gets antsy, but—"

Gordon's four years older than Alan, but sometimes it seems like less. Sometimes it seems like a lot less, like they're both still kids. Gordon's a drinking, driving, voting adult, and Alan's none of those things, but with his hands stuffed in his pockets and chewing his lower lip, Gordon looks nervous the way adults aren't supposed to. "Comms didn't get cut off. Scott shut 'em down. The mission data from TB3 got uploaded for review and John got into it, and…oh, man. He's on the warpath."

The novelty of it, the connection between the concept of John and the concept of anger, that's almost enough to get Alan curious. John doesn't get mad. Alan's still a little thrown off by the fact that Gordon's being weird about it, and goes in for the joke, "Ding ding ding, round 1! Right? You and Virgil are always—"

"This isn't like me and Virgil," Gordon interrupts sharply, and shakes his head. "God, Al, I mean it. John is just really, really fucking angry. Trust me, you really don't wanna be anywhere near this. This is gonna be—this is like Mom and Dad."

Alan laughs at that, but then realizes he's not supposed to, realizes he doesn't know what Gordon means. For a moment he stops trying to figure out what's funny about this, because it's starting to seem like maybe nothing. "…Mom and Dad used to fight?"

Gordon laughs now, faint and strained and not at all funny. "Yeah. Not a lot. Only when it mattered. Hopefully they both just need to get it out of their systems. Probably it won't be too bad. Maybe." He shrugs awkwardly and looks miserable. "If you hear anything, just try not to listen, neither of them'd want you to know the kind of stuff they say when the gloves come off. So just, uh, try not to worry about it and just hang out here for a bit. Okay?"

The second youngest, oddly enough, tends to have the most success in getting Alan to do anything, mostly because he so rarely asks Alan to do anything. And it's starting to seem like it might be important. "Sure, Gordon. Okay."

Relief writes itself on Gordon's features and he nods, grins a bit feebly. "Yeah. It'll all blow over. And look, this isn't—it's not anything to do with you, got me? Whatever happened today, none of it's on you. So John's not—and Scott isn't either—neither of them are mad at you, okay? Remember that. I'll come get you when they're through, but like—I dunno, do your homework or something. I gotta go."

Gordon doesn't look like he wants to go.

In fact, he stays long enough for Alan to ask, "Why've you gotta go?"

"Al, believe me, if it wasn't the right thing to do, I would be cramming myself under your bed right now. No room under mine, it's all packed with my spare scuba kit. But—no, I dunno. I should know what gets said. And Virgil's gonna need help breaking them up, if it comes to it." He shakes his head, sighs heavily, and now he looks older than his years. "This is gonna be bad," he adds, softly, almost to himself, and then, "Please keep out of it, Al."

Anxious in his own right and starting to get worried about what he'd thought had been a pretty smooth mission, Alan nods and says again, "Yeah, Gordon. I will."

Virgil's doing Scott's post-flight checks when the space elevator hits the island's airspace. He glances up, and while he doesn't exactly hurry through the rest of them, he definitely stops dawdling. Scott had already been running through the checklist Alan's behalf, but Virgil had told him to hit the showers, that he'd take care of it. Virgil's mostly doing Scott's (Alan's) post-flight checks to be quite sure that Scott isn't in the hangar at the same time that John is, because the hangar is filled with blunt, heavy objects, plasma torches, and all manner of other implements of potential violence. It's not to say any of them would be employed, necessarily, but the temptation would exist, and better safe than sorry. That's Virgil's motto, anyway.

He's signing off on the last of it, just as John's docking procedures wrap up, and there's the pneumatic hiss of the pressurized capsule opening. The footsteps on the stairs down to the hangar floor are heavier, hit harder than they should, a storm descending all the way from orbit.

Virgil's waiting at the bottom when John reaches the hangar floor, and he holds his hands up, preemptively defensive. When John's angry, it tells on his face. In anger, Gordon and Virgil both share the quality of simmering away beneath a relatively neutral surface and then boiling up only when provoked. They both tend to calm themselves down, as often as not, and calm each other down when they don't. Scott adopts a sneer and a tone of voice that drips sarcasm and contempt like hot, thick tar, but he wields their father's not-mad-just-disappointed tone equally as well, and just as often. Alan's too young still for anything but a sullen pout, real displays of temper out of Alan still look like tantrums.

John's got a long fuse. Possibly it's the longest fuse of anyone Virgil's ever met, because what's set him off here and now has been sizzling along the length of John's temper for years. There are flickers and sparks and flashes of irritation. Occasionally John's frustrated, testy, irate. But he's rarely angry. And right now he's furious.

So with Virgil's hand butted up against his chest, there's a hiss of breath and then, dark and commanding, "Move."

"I will. Look, we all knew this was coming, and it's time to clear the air. Fine. But you need to promise not to actually do anything until you've slept on it. Okay, John?"

"Someone has to do something."

Virgil nods, but his answer rides the line, "Maybe. But you're in no state to make a rational decision and you know it, so I want your word, Johnny. Say whatever you want, but don't do anything that you can't take back. Okay?"

John's got four inches of height on his closest brother, narrow and rangy. John's the only member of the family to rival Scott's height and though it's a pair of bright green eyes glowering down at him, it's still Scott Virgil's reminded of. With his hand against John's chest, the elder is a trip wire, drawn taut, about to go off. "I'll do what I have to."

"After twelve hours and another long talk, you can do what you want. Anything before then and I'm gonna sit on you. So you gimme your word, John, we clear?"

"Fine."

"Fine, what?"

This is getting dangerous, and it's plain in the way John's jaw clenches the way his hands tense into fists at his sides. "Fine, nothing drastic for twelve hours."

"Okay. Good. Thank you."

"Now move."

Virgil, aware of the way the wind's blowing, stands aside, and John takes his thunderhead with him, leaves a void of silence in his wake.