Space is silent.
Thunderbird 5 is not.
TB5 is actually incredibly loud, a symphony of engines and thrusters, fans and pumps, computers and comms, all the myriad systems that keep the ship habitable and safely stationed in Low Earth Orbit. TB5 is also so-well engineered that this has all been taken thoroughly into account, and so the racket has been cleverly diminished and acoustically dampened into what amounts to no more than a gentle roar of constant, meaningless white noise.
And John can't actually sleep without it.
So while a storm rolls and rumbles over the island, John's rarely used bedroom is filled with the sounds of his Thunderbird—not recorded, but broadcast in real time to a suite of cleverly placed and carefully tuned speakers, from a few hundred miles above the surface of the Earth. It's quietly loud in John's room, loud enough that what rouses him from his fifteenth hour of sleep is actually the slow fall of silence, as the sounds of his distant space station fade. If the villa, particularly the bedrooms, weren't so well soundproofed, he would hear the storm overhead. Or maybe the storm down below, as his brothers shout at each other.
But instead he wakes to a suspicious level of quiet, beneath a night sky muffled away behind oppressively dark cloud cover, illuminated only briefly by flashes and flickers of inaudible lightning, blurred through the rain that sheets down the skylight. Some psychological trick played from some deep recess in the memory center of his brain supplies the sound of the storm, though he can't really hear it, and for a few moments John just lies still, staring up at the skylight. TB5 is somewhere overhead and lying on his back, warm and drowsy and safe, he addresses his first question heavenward—
"What time is it?"
And because there's a wide-open audio channel between his bedroom and his Thunderbird, he gets an answer.
"It is 1:54AM, Tracy Island time. Good morning, John."
EOS can hear him, but not see him. John still smiles, yawning and stretching and rolling over to the other side of the bed, though he curls right back up in a nest of cool sheets and soft blankets, closing his eyes again. "I don't think I'm back on the clock 'til 0600h. Officially."
"You have had nearly sixteen hours of sleep, and while I am reluctant to disturb what you have assured me is necessary rest, there is a developing situation that urgently requires your particular attention."
"…my attention?"
In some ways, EOS does John's job better than John does, and John would happily be the first in line to admit it.
It's not that he wants her to replace him. Far from it, the past few weeks on the ground have only reinforced how much he prefers his life aboard TB5, removed from the thick of the action and working with his partner behind the scenes. John's capable, of course, held to the same standard that his brothers are—but fieldwork isn't his forte, and for as often as he's been an extra pair of hands in Virgil's absence—mostly he's become an extension of his Thunderbird into the midst of an active situation. With EOS in his ear, he's become a relay point for TB5, and despite the fact that the intensity of the work is the reason that he's spent sixteen out of twenty-four hours on deep, restorative sleep—it's still been rewarding and satisfying. Sometimes, as far removed as he is from the hands-on reality of International Rescue—sometimes, John catches himself wondering why they do this. After three weeks in the field, he feels like he understands again.
And in his absence from TB5, EOS has risen brilliantly, beautifully, perfectly to the occasion, almost like it's what she was made for. Knowing what he knows about the way she grew and evolved and became wholly and entirely her own, this isn't actually something John considers to be the case—but he has to admit, in the years since she'd first become part of his life, EOS has come to fit into TB5 and into his life like something he hadn't known was missing. She's his partner and his friend and it might just be she's something even more than that—but for now, she's just covering for him, back aboard his station.
And he's prouder of her than he thinks he'll ever be able to say, for repaying his faith in her when first their paths had crossed.
"What could the world possibly throw at you that you couldn't handle?"
There's a soft, digitized little chuckle from the omnipresent speakers hidden around his bedroom. "It's what the world is about to throw at you, John Tracy."
Whatever else has changed, EOS still hasn't quite lost an occasional, slightly sinister flair for the dramatic.
John's just lucky he's known her long enough not to be spooked by it. Concerned, maybe, a little—but not quite spooked.
Still, he sits up in bed, rubs at his eyes and pushes a hand through his hair, and plays along with the little pantomime. She's always going to be fond of games, and it took him entirely too long to learn that she treats him like one. Thankfully the rules aren't complicated. "Oh?" he prompts.
"In approximately fourteen seconds, there will be a knock on your door. And shortly thereafter you will be told something which I wanted to tell you, approximately three weeks ago, and I am obligated to remind you of the fact that you turned me down. That is all I have to say on the subject at present. I will talk to you later, John."
And the line goes dead, leaving John sitting up in bed in the relative silence of his bedroom, faintly bewildered by the cryptic format of her—warning? There'd been a slightly smug note in the synthesized tones of her voice, which generally means that she knows something he doesn't.
Which, to be fair, is something like her natural state.
Because before he's even had enough time to dig through his memory and dredge up just what exactly happened three weeks ago, there's a soft, almost tentative knock on his door. He wouldn't have heard it over the sounds of TB5, would've slept right through it. Now he's sitting up and awake, when the door swings open and his little brother appears on the threshold, looking absolutely terrible.
John is nearly three years older than Gordon, and ever since he can remember, the most constant and consistent feature of their relationship is that, when Gordon gets in trouble, he bolts immediately for John's room.
Not for advice—or at least not usually. And not for solace or succor or comfort or anything so affectionate or brotherly, so much as just the certainty that underneath John's bed was the absolutely the last place anyone would ever look for him. And at one point in time that may have been true, until the unfathomable became the unlikely and the unlikely became the probable and the probable became the certain. When Gordon's in trouble, even decades later and far from the home they'd grown up in together, John's room is still his hiding place of choice.
And Gordon still retreats here in John's absence, though he can't quite fit under the bed any longer (platform, low to the ground, king-sized), he's just as liable to flop on top of its neatly made and pristine surface. John's room is immaculate, compared to Gordon's own little den, with its unmade bed and tousled linen sheets, Celery KRUNCH! wrappers littering the vicinity of the wastebasket, while dumbbells pilfered from the gym lie in wait beneath strata of aging laundry for the unwary to stub their toes upon. Given the frequency of his absence from the island, John's room is almost John's room in name only, and it's always an oasis of calm and silence in the midst of their family's usual chaos. Unlike his own room, Gordon has the base decency to leave John's space in a better state than he found it, smoothing out the bedspread after he's spent whatever time he needs to with his face planted in the middle of the mattress, raging or weeping or daydreaming, getting whatever he needs to out of his system. It's not always trouble in the traditional sense that lands Gordon in John's room, these days.
But—crucially—John's not usually in his room. And he's not usually sitting up in bed, right on the edge of expecting something, thanks to a warning from his partner. He hadn't been expecting Gordon, but neither is he surprised to see him.
And maybe it's just force of habit that's brought him here now, because he catches himself on the threshold instead of stumbling inside, and seems confused and almost a little distressed that John might have the temerity to do something as ludicrous as sleep in his own damn bed.
"…oh," is all he says, and his voice is thick and a little bit choked with something that might be emotion, or might be the miasma of liquor that wafts into the room with the swing of the door. This is, actually, a more likely explanation for why Gordon looks glassy-eyed and unsteady and shaken. It takes a hell of a lot before Gordon gets visibly shaken. It doesn't take much to get him stumbling drunk.
"Next door down," John advises helpfully, automatically—before remembering that he'd been warned about this occurrence, down to the second, and that something must need his attention. He's quick enough that his recovery manages not to be awkward, as he pats the edge of the bed and says, "But get in here. What's up?"
Gordon's about as subtle as a boot to the kidneys, and he's plainly, pathetically grateful not to have been turned away, by the way he slips into the room. Immediately he shuts and locks the door behind him, leaning his weight against it and sliding downward to crumple on the floor with his head between his knees, instead of accepting the invitation to cross the room and sit on the bed. John can't tell if it's because he's been less hospitable than he thinks, or if Gordon's drunker than he looks.
And smells.
"You reek of bourbon," John informs his little brother, and with the awareness that he and the rest of the family are all due to be back on the clock in only a few more hours, this doesn't bode well. If it's trouble that's brought Gordon up here, just like the old days, John suspects that it's got something to do with with their father's booze and their big brother's temper. "What happened?"
"Broke something," is the only answer he gets, and though Gordon mumbles his answer and doesn't look up from staring at the floor, John's listening more closely to the way the words sound than what's actually being said, and so he hears the slight slur staring to mar the less important syllables of Gordon's answer. His head jerks up suddenly and the back of his skull knocks against the door, and when he fixes John with a bright-eyed stare, it's beyond a doubt that he's drunk. And with Gordon it doesn't take much and it doesn't take long, but it does take a pretty significant reason. "Wanna…hear 'bout another stupid thing I did?"
John pushes the covers back and shifts cautiously to the edge of the mattress. He keeps his room cool, and he shivers slightly, pulling down the sleeves of the soft grey Henley he'd worn to bed, bunched up around his elbows from where he'd had his arms cinched around his pillow. His pajama pants are a charcoal Glen plaid, and a long ago Christmas gift from Penelope, who blips subtly back onto his radar as a reason why Gordon might be so bent out of shape. John summons up some tact and is appropriately gentle and cautious as he asks, "What'd you do?"
A big, shuddery deep breath precedes the answer. "I got Penny pregnant."
The news lands in the middle of the space between the bed and the door, dropping so solidly into the silence of John's bedroom that it bounces off the hardwood a few times, before John understands the significance of what was just said.
Penelope's pregnant.
Gordon got Penelope pregnant.
This is what EOS wanted to warn him about.
EOS knew this three weeks ago.
"Fuck," John says, startled for so many more reasons than the obvious.
And across the room Gordon fails to stifle a sob, wraps his arms around his knees and buries his face between them.
The question of what EOS knew and how and when she knew it becomes abruptly secondary to the issue more immediately at hand.
The last time John can remember really, properly crying he was stood at a graveside beneath a willow tree in Kansas, watching his father's empty casket descend into the ground next to the place they'd laid their mother to rest. That was over three years ago now, and in the time that's passed since they've lost their father, it would be a lie to say that he's shed no tears since then, but these are rare and usually fairly restrained. John's definitely at the opposite end of the spectrum from Gordon, who's always been a bit of a crier. John's pretty sure he's seen tears dashed dramatically away because Grandma came home with smooth peanut butter instead of crunchy.
Obviously this is different, and John immediately gets out of bed and crosses the room to sit on the floor next to his little brother, and to put a comforting hand on his shoulder. Up close, the smell of alcohol is even stronger, but with his head still bowed and his face still hidden, the scent of it isn't on Gordon's breath so much as his clothes. It's dim and dark in John's room, but his eyes have mostly adjusted, and he can see a pattern of splattered droplets on the bright red canvas of Gordon's hightops, the turned up cuffs of his jeans. He's not about to interrogate his brother about what got broken, but it's not a broad leap to guess that it might've been a bottle of liquor. John wonders how much of it is in his brother as opposed to on his brother, as he sits and patiently waits for soft sobs to diminish into softer sniffles and then fade into a heavy sigh.
"What happened?" John questions, appropriately gentle and patient as Gordon finally picks his head up from his knees and presses his palms against his eyes, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. He does this a couple more times, and John knows enough to recognize it as Gordon, undertaking a very deliberate exercise to calm himself down.
"Penelope's pregnant," his little brother repeats, as though this hasn't already been made perfectly clear, though John lets the repetition pass unremarked upon.
If John's good at anything (and he's good at plenty), he's especially good at carefully triaging information about developing situations out of emotionally compromised people. He has "who" and "what" on lockdown: "Penelope" and "Pregnant". The Where, When, How and Why are sure to follow, as he prompts, "She told you today?"
Gordon swallows and shakes his head, as he clarifies, "We only found out today. Penny—I went to meet her in Auckland, and when we got together, sh-she…she wasn't herself. I could tell something was wrong, and I knew I should've said something, but then before anything else even happened, she just blacked out completely. Scared the shit outta me. I made her go to the hospital, they did blood work. And the doctor came back and told us she's pregnant; she's like eight weeks pregnant."
John winces at the uncharacteristic note of panic in Gordon's voice, as he repeats himself again, trying to corral his little brother back from the precipitous edge of a proper breakdown about the whole situation. "Is she all right?" he asks and then immediately rephrases the question, "I mean, that's a hell of a shock, obviously, I imagine it's a lot for her to process—but was there anything else…uh…wrong?"
Whether he realizes it or not, talking his way through the details is helping him calm down, though Gordon nods miserably as he answers the question, "Anemia. Chronic, apparently, except I never knew that. But then, why the fuck would I know that, when we've only even been together since just January? She's supposed to be on iron supplements, she stopped taking 'em, not that I knew that either. And then with all the travel, and running around Fischler's HQ, and then barely eating all day, and on top of all that, she's pregnant—Christ, John, she scared me."
Gordon has a tendency to babble a bit when he's really upset, and he gets no less loquacious when he's drunk. John is habitually taciturn, but he's good at listening between the lines of what people babble about when they're panicking, and gently guiding them towards more relevant information. "Yeah, I'll bet. How'd she take the news?"
There's a solid thud as Gordon tips his head back, knocking the back of his skull against the door. "Bad, I guess. I've never seen her cry like that. I've never even seen her cry at all. Oh…god, Pen…"
"Penelope's pretty tough," John tells his brother, quick to reassure him about what her ladyship can withstand. This is, admittedly, a different sort of challenge than what Penelope usually squares up against, but he still has every confidence in her capacity to endure it. John's honestly less concerned about Penelope than he is about Gordon, which leads to his next question— "Are you okay?"
That gets a short, wounded little bark of out-of-place laughter, and a shake of Gordon's head. "No. I can't…I can't believe I let this happen, I am such a fucking idiot. And Scott—Scott says I ruined her life."
This late-night scene between John and his little brother is a rare one, and unusually intimate for either of them, with respect to each other. John and Gordon aren't what you could call close. Gordon's close to Virgil and John's close to Alan, but Gordon and John aren't close to each other. In the moment that Gordon mentions their older brother's name, it's like the moment they're currently sharing is frozen, suddenly, and etched into glass. This shatters into a million tiny pieces in the space of the moment it takes John to realize that he isn't the first person Gordon's told about this. Gordon's talked to Scott.
The words Damage Control blare into his brain, complete with red flashing lights and a screaming klaxon. What could've possibly possessed Gordon to go to Scott with this kind of news—as far as John's aware, Scott didn't even know Penelope and Gordon were dating, let alone that there was a possibility that they could get pregnant together. This is the sort of thing that should've gone to Virgil, and Virgil would've had the sense to pull John into the loop, and then John's advice would've been to go directly to Grandma, as a means of distributing the impact of such an enormous piece of news. Instead, Gordon's told Scott.
And John can just imagine how well that must have gone.
So. Damage control.
"You haven't ruined anyone's life," he corrects firmly, immediate and insistent and certain. "Not hers and not yours, either. Something unexpected happened between two consenting adults who love each other—" —though at that John catches himself and pauses suddenly, because this isn't really his area, and he isn't entirely sure he's read the scenario correctly— "…I mean—you do, right? Love each other?"
Gordon nods and sniffles again, wiping his nose on his sleeve and coughing. Crying is messy, not that messiness bothers Gordon nearly as much as it bothers John. It seems like the same could be said of falling in love with someone. John's privately thankful that he'll never have to know about that. "Yeah," Gordon answers, quiet now, and properly subdued. "We do. Or…I mean, I do, anyway. For sure. And she says she does, and I wanna believe her."
John nods, satisfied. "Then this is nothing like what happened with Scott."
The context is so deeply ingrained and intrinsic to John's perception of their eldest brother, and the connection is so blatantly obvious that it takes a couple awkward moments of silence and a blank, bewildered stare from Gordon before John remembers that he's one of very few people alive in the world today who actually knows "what happened with Scott". Gordon certainly doesn't.
Not yet, anyway.
"What happened with Scott?"
"I shouldn't have said that," John says quickly, as though the fact that it was a mistake—a rare slip of the tongue—will somehow grant him an exemption from the sudden laser focus of his brother's attention, as Gordon presses the point. "Uh, never mind."
"No, what? Tell me. What d'you mean?"
"I shouldn't tell you," John hedges, stating the ethical reality out loud and for the record (and for the benefit a certain specific somebody who is almost certainly listening in), with the complete and total awareness that he's going to do so anyway.
There's an audible shudder in the deep breath Gordon draws through his teeth, and the steadiness in his voice is obviously manufactured and deliberate as he says, "Johnny, Scott basically told me that if it's gonna be my kid, then the best thing Penny could do is get rid of it. He told me I ruined her life, that me and her shouldn't be together, and that she couldn't possibly want this with me. So if you know something that explains why our big brother suddenly fucking hates me, I think you'd probably better tell me what the fuck it is, because I think I'm the closest I've ever been to hating him right back."
John winces at the dark, serious edge to his little brother's voice. "…I didn't say I wasn't going to tell you, but Gordon—" John trails off and hesitates again, because his little brother is objectively rather drunk and obviously emotionally compromised, and this is a secret that John's kept for over a decade now. Information management is John's job. What people know and when and why and how much of it they need (or don't need) to know. This is relevant information, and despite his current state, John's pretty sure that Gordon deserves to know. He might even need to know, it's just that John really shouldn't be the one to tell him. And the distinction represents one of those sticky, morally gray choices that John doesn't like making.
But there's nothing for it now.
"—Okay. Gordon, I'm only telling you this because I think the context will help take some of the edge off whatever Scott said. I imagine there was a lot and he probably massively overreacted. I promise, Scott doesn't hate you. But he definitely hated himself, back when this happened with him."