Just John, not Johnathan. Please, please don't call me Johnathan. Only one person was ever supposed to call me Johnathan.
Because although he's sat comfortably on a white leather couch between Gordon and Virgil, and though the lights are bright and hot and the woman who asks the questions asks them kindly-John's still been snapped backward into a cold, dark basement, with the scent of ozone and mildew in his nostrils, and he can barely think for the memory of rough hands grabbing his face, his jaw, bruising his throat.
But he's not there and he knows that and though his mind still scrambles and panics and goes to pieces a little bit, John's long practiced at not letting anyone see him crack.
"I did promsie that I'd go easy on the hard hitting questions, because frankly picking on you three would be a journalistic death sentence, but it's always been a fairly well-known fact that International Rescue's founding had a great deal to do with your mother. I was wondering if each of you would tell me one word you would choose to describe her?"
"Oh man. Funny."
"Smart."
"Brave. Or...no, you know. Kind."
There's an image of himself in his eyeline, the bright, translucent display monitor of one of the cameras that's pointed towards the center of the set.
The version of himself he sees is smiling, nodding and laughing at the right places. John's not sure how that's even possible. He's tired, jet-lagged and he knows he's pretending not to be. Caked in make-up, makes his face feel false and wrong. He's got Gordon on his left and Virgil on his right, and they're both strangers. He's talked to them every day for the last five years of his life, practically, but in the flesh they're both different and it throws him off.
Only-that image he keeps catching in the corner of his eye-surely it's Gordon on the right and Virgil on his left? He sees it through the back of a transparent display, but surely a mirrored image mirrored twice resolves itself into the proper orientation?
Gordon laughs, definitely at John's left elbow, Gordon's on the left.
John reaches for a glass of water on the table in front of him, and finds himself swallowing and answering a question he hadn't heard. He pauses, has to collect himself for a moment. What's got them breaking the relative silence IR's kept up in the public eye, before now.
"Circumstance, mostly."
"You have to understand, it was never actually a media blackout, what our dad wanted, with us and the press. He just wanted our private life separate from that. And, growing up, he didn't want us to know just how much the family was worth. Silver spoons, and all. He wanted us to have some perspective."
"Doesn't mean they didn't come at us other ways. There was that thing, you remember, with the school paper?"
"That wasn't me, that was you. You told the high school paper that Dad was a tyrant and a slave driver, and Forbes picked it up. We were all grounded for a month. And then we had a 'no reporters' rule."
Virgil shifts and jostles John's shoulder a little. He's changed. He'd been in jeans and a dark brown coat, at some point he's changed into a blue chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The colour of it puts John in mind of their uniforms, for some reason. John forgets to note which side he's on.
"I mean, the larger truth is we're just too busy. There's really no time. Fifty hectares of rainforest in the Amazon are on fire right now, and we're-well, we're here. We're not used to being off the clock, it's weird to know that and not do anything about it. The longest we've gone without needing to respond to some sort of crisis is-"
"-fifty-one hours. And if you think we don't spend all that precious downtime catching up on sleep, well-"
"Never mind sleep, when you talk about maintenance-"
Gordon and Virgil sound too similar. They both have those deep, round voices that make his own sound light by comparison. John's gaze drifts again towards the version of himself that's unperturbed by the fact.
There's a lot that's been said, since he was called Johnathan, and he knows that he's smiled and nodded and answered, but that use of the name that isn't his emptied him from the inside, left him hollow. John's on auto-pilot as the weird facsimile of a conversation happens around him, in this strange, too-bright place with its oddly-placed furniture and a myriad of eyes, staring out of a dark foreground, beyond what he can actually see.
"Yeah, it's a very high standard, but we've just...we've always had it? Our dad always said, if you can achieve excellence, you should strive for excellence, so-"
He really wishes he weren't staring at himself. It's so hard to resolve, how put together he looks, how false. The last time he'd seen himself and not been himself, he'd been staring at a readout with fifteen minutes worth of oxygen and an entity that wanted to kill him, lying to his family in his stead, with his face and his voice. Telling them everything was fine, when everything very much wasn't.
"Two doctorates, actually, MIT. Computer Engineering and Astrophysics-"
"Talk about striving for excellence, ours is the kind of family where I've got a Bachelor of Science, and Virge has a Masters' in Engineering, and then along comes Johnny-Two-Doctorates. Still, it's like Dad said..."
He just, he needs something he can hold onto, something real and familiar and right-it's just nothing's been right ever since he left orbit. Readjusting takes time, and he hasn't done this in too long, and what's worse, he's done it wrong. It's like the vertigo just never stopped, and looking back on everything that's happened, it's jarring to realize that he's the one it all happened to and-
"Virgil, we've got it down here that you had a minor art exhibition a few years ago, is the entire family actually this talented?"
"Oh wow, no, that was right out of college, that was embarrassing-"
There's a camera lens, ringed round with white lights, and his heart catches. For a moment it's enough of a familiar sight to ground him, pull him back into himself, as the aperture finds Gordon's grinning face. There's a brief respite from the sight of himself in the monitors and it helps, it helps a lot to exist only as a single copy of himself and John takes a deep breath, steadying.
"Oh, well, you know. It was a long time ago, the Olympics. I mean, I still swim everyday, probably I will for the rest of my life, but there's a certain point when you realize that you're past your prime. Still-"
Just breathing. Breathing helps.
"John? How are you feeling?"
Not well. The camera finds him again and his shadow looks up, attentive to some sound that's not making it through the buzzing emptiness in his head. And then-
Catherine Cassidy is her name, and he knows that. She glances at a prompt on the small tablet in her hand and then looks back up to him again. "There were a few statements released the week previous, regarding the medical emergency that had you down from orbit. How are you doing, after the heart attack?"
This, of everything, is what snaps him out of it.
"I didn't have a heart attack."
