In her defense, she gives it a week.

Basically a week. Almost a week. A business week. From the earliest hours of the morning that her boyfriend had crashed her Singapore hotel room, shotgunned three tiny bottles of overpriced hotel liquor (thankfully charged to her company card) and then dramatically spilled his guts about the latest goings-on in his family's life—Jane permits a week to pass. Functionally a week, anyway. It's Saturday morning in Kansas by the time she decides to make her move.

The Tracy family farm can be found in the heart of Anderson County, a few miles outside a tiny town called Colony. Jane Carter grew up, right around the same time, in the more compellingly named Bourbon County, rather ironically just outside a city called Fort Scott. She and Scott had first worked it out in the depths of some boozy conversation in some anonymous hotel bar, back when all they had between them was a string of no-strings hook-ups. And the coincidence had become alarmingly apparent in the course of ironing out the details, that their respective childhoods were separated by not more than their two year age difference and a distance of about forty miles, as the crow flies. They'd grown up practically in each other's backyards, their lives almost but never quite touching over the course of about a decade or so, separated by nothing more than their ignorance of each other and a perfectly bearable one hour drive.

Thirty-five miles west and ten miles north, or ten miles north and thirty-five miles west, depending on whether she wants to shake things up a little. Neither route is scenic, the scenes in question are almost as empty and desolate as it's possible to be, the dusty agricultural sprawl of the American Midwest. Sometimes Scott drives the opposite, during the weeks she takes off from work, and comes to join her at her little prairie cottage, built on the leveled remains of her own family's farm—but most often she joins him at his childhood home-away-from-home. Scott's years growing up in Kansas were a far more fondly nostalgic period of his life than hers, and even though her first active overture into independent adulthood had been the demolition of the house she'd grown up in, the worst of the memories hadn't gone along with it.

She knows more about Scott's childhood than Scott knows about hers, and by now she knows the place he grew up almost as intimately as he does, has lived his memories vicariously in the stories he so loves to tell her about growing up here, about his mother and his brothers, his grandparents, his frequently absent father. Jane loves Scott and Scott loves his family, and so Jane loves Scott's family by extension. She's heard stories about all them, from the halcyon innocence of their earliest childhoods all the way on up into the adventurous tempest of their respective adulthoods. Scott talks about his brothers with more love and esteem than anyone she's ever known, and it's almost impossible for it not to be catching. She's never meaningfully met any of them, knows that her relationship with their eldest brother is a closely guarded secret, and yet she's been privy to some of the most intimate details of their lives.

After the clusterbomb of bombshells from her most recent conversation with Scott, she's starting to feel uncomfortably as though that might not exactly be fair to the four of them, for a stranger to know the most intimate details of their lives without their knowledge or consent. And lately Scott, by his own admission, has behaved like an absolute ass, and has landed himself further up the ranks of everybody's shit list than usual. He's fucked up, knows he's fucked up, and had poured his heart out to Jane in a rapidly decaying state of emotional coherency, thanks to the vague approximation of a Long Island Iced Tea he'd ad hoc'd together in her hotel room, bottle after tiny bottle. Eventually there'd been nothing to do but put him to bed, while Jane had stayed awake, sitting up in bed beside him, her fingers carding absently through his hair, mulling over the details of what she'd just been told.

Gordon and Penelope, not as impossible as Scott had figured they were, but actually so entirely possible as to be unexpectedly pregnant together. Virgil and Kayo, of all people, though Scott hadn't stuck around to get the details of that one, too utterly blindsided by the prospect to want to know anything further. John, left in charge of the island and IR and in such a towering state of complete and total fury with Scott that he'd invoked their father's memory to damn him with. And Alan, turning all of twenty years old in a weeks' time—tomorrow, by now—and how utterly and completely any of their family has failed to take the time or or make the effort to acknowledge that.

International Rescue is a well-oiled machine. This family, even from an outsider's biased and once-removed perspective, is a smoking hot goddamn mess. And while Jane may not know any of them personally, she knows enough about all of them to know that they're better than this. Probably. Hopefully.

Hence the trip out to Scott's childhood home, when she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that Scott isn't there. An hour's worth of highway driving has flown past, and she slows her sky-blue truck only slightly as she rounds a familiar bend onto an old dirt road, carving a straight line from the K-58 into the heart of the prairies, and her intended destination.

She's not nervous. Maybe she should be, and maybe a different sort of person would feel differently about barging into the personal life of a semi-stranger, someone she knows only by proxy, and knows too much about besides—but Jane's not one to sit idly by when she thinks she can solve a problem. The problem, as Jane perceives it, could probably be solved if all five of them were dumped into a box, roughly shaken, and told to sort their shit out.

The first step in this process is getting her hands on an appropriately sized box.

The dusty gravel of a familiar driveway crunches beneath her tires as she turns onto it, and the farmhouse towers in front of her, a big enough box if ever she's seen one, because that's the easy part. The trick is going to be getting the lot of them into it, but Jane wouldn't be here if she weren't confident in her ability to make it happen.

Still, it's a bit of a gambit, and as she clambers down from the cab of her truck, she catches sight of herself in the driver's side mirror, and can't help a briefly, slightly self-recriminating grin as she thinks her way ahead to what will be her very first impression. She hadn't meant to—she'd just rolled out of bed that morning and into a thrown together outfit, stuffed her feet into a pair of cowboy boots, and gone striding out the door—but her jeans are faded denim with a hole blown in one knee, she'd pulled on a raglan shirt in the Kansas City Chiefs' colours with an 06 below the customized CARTER on the back, and the ballcap she'd tugged her ponytail through has the Royals' logo scrolled above the brim. She pulls the ballcap off and tosses it onto the front seat, in an attempt to look a little less like she's trying too hard on behalf of the state of Kansas. This would fly with Scott. But she's pretty sure it won't float Gordon's boat.

The farmhouse stands silent behind her, though she knows from experience to peek in the windows of the garage, and she can see the dark green truck parked within. If they're still here, at least they're probably still home. If they're not expecting her, at least it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility for someone to knock on the farmhouse door, and there's no reason they wouldn't answer. As she turns and ambles her way up the front walk, she wonders if her arrival has been noticed at all. There's no twitch of the curtains that hang inside the windows facing the porch. There's no outward sign on this sunshiney spring morning that the house is occupied at all. Jane has a key to the front door burning a hole in her back pocket, but even at her most meddlesome, she's not that presumptuous. The heels of her boots hit the creaky wood of the front porch, and she stops just shy of the welcome mat, reaching out to rap her knuckles smartly on the door, before adding a ring of the doorbell for good measure.

There's no peephole in the front door. Her house doesn't have one either. That seems like more of an urban affectation, compared to a place like this, where the notion of not opening one's door to a neighbour-come-knocking is a foreign one. There might also be a shotgun propped nearby and readily available to hand, but rural Kansas is a neighbourly sort of place. Standing on the porch, after a long minute, Jane can hear movement on the other side of the door, which either means she's about to achieve her objective, or she's interrupted a burglary. If the latter is the case, her own shotgun is locked to the rack in the cab of her truck, and only about a minute away at need.

But of course the latter is not the case, and finally she hears the lock turn from the inside, and a moment later the door swings inward, revealing a politely bemused Gordon Tracy. He's shorter than she'd imagined him, but otherwise the same blond, brown-eyed, broad-shouldered and athletic young man Jane's seen in pictures, scrolled through on Scott's personal phone, or in news footage from the gossip blogs that are her secret vice. If there's any wariness in him regarding the arrival of a stranger on his doorstep, he doesn't demonstrate it, and is instead outwardly bluff and friendly as he steps halfway through the door, and practically chirps, "Morning, ma'am, what can I do for you?"

"Hi," Jane starts, tripped up only momentarily by the use of the word "ma'am", but meeting and matching the same outward friendliness as she sticks out a hand. "I'm Jane Carter." She pauses just a moment, waits until he's reached out to accept the handshake before she adds, "Scott's girlfriend."

Even if she didn't already know how this introduction was going to land, she'd know just what a shock this statement actually was by the way his hand freezes in the act of shaking hers. It's a point of sudden paralysis that seems to spread right up through him, such that he freezes entirely for a moment, before his head snaps up and his eyes widen as he looks at her, and almost all semblance of midwestern politesse vanishes, and he stares, asking, "…sorry, you're his who in the fuck now?"

"Girlfriend," Jane answers pleasantly, unbothered by the intensity of this reaction, as his hand drops from hers and he pulls back slightly, almost retreating back into the house. He hasn't stopped staring, and she helpfully repeats her name again, just in case, "Jane."

"Yeah no, I heard that. But Scott isn't—Scott doesn't have…" he trails off and if she's not mistaken she thinks she sees him recoil slightly, visibly spooked and shrinking into the space between the door and the door frame, as though answering the door in the first place might've been a mistake. She just hopes he doesn't have a shotgun to go for.

The inside of the house behind him is dark compared to the brightness outside, even in the shade of the covered porch. And so it seems that the hand that reaches up to clasp his shoulder from behind emerges from nothing at all, pale, dainty fingers with tastefully manicured nails in sharp contrast to the heather grey of Gordon's t-shirt. A velvety, accented voice murmurs a commanding, "Move, darling," and Gordon gets shouldered aside as the Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward steps into the doorway.

All five-foot-three of her.

If Gordon is shorter than Jane's always imagined, then Penelope is absolutely tiny by comparison to the image of her in Jane's head. Granted, the image in Jane's head is from the glossy cover of whatever magazine she'd seen latest, and depicts her ladyship all bold and beautiful and begowned in the latest Parisian offerings, with the text on the cover promising a tale of her latest charity gala, and all the glitter and glitz and glamour that still beguiles the only daughter of an alcoholic dirt farmer from the-middle-of-nowhere, Kansas. The reality she's presented with now is the same woman, but softer and simpler, with her hair down and her make up undone, and her outfit about as far from a runway or a red carpet offering as one can get, in a pair of cropped black yoga pants and a t-shirt obviously borrowed from her boyfriend, by the way it hangs off her petite frame and attempts to claim the defense that she was left unsupervised.

Her ladyship is adorable and Jane has to suppress the deeply unbecoming urge to squeal, because her ladyship also has eyes like flinty blue daggers, and the sort of expression she's never worn on the cover of any magazine Jane's ever seen. Tiny or not, her presence is still imposing, and all six feet of Jane (6'2" with the boots) gets subjected to an excruciatingly critical once-over, and then the iciest, most aristocratic inquiry Jane's ever heard on sovereign American soil— "And just who exactly are you supposed to be?"

Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward was born on December 24th, 2034. She is two years Jane's junior, and yet the tone of her voice demands immediate, unquestioning compliance, has Jane trying to shrink away from the sharpness of the lady's gaze, as she stammers her answer, "Jane Carter, ma'am. Uh, your ladyship."

"I wasn't asking for your name."

Something about this diminutive, iron-willed little woman makes the truth sound like a lie when Jane admits to it, "Scott's girlfriend. Um, Scott Tracy?"

"Scott Tracy hasn't got a girlfriend."

Lady Penelope makes this statement with the sort of imperious conviction makes Jane doubt the reality for just a moment—but only a moment, before she remembers herself and squares back up, kicking up a heel and tapping the toe of her boot on the porch, as she corrects the assumption, "Not one he's ever told anyone about. But he does, though, has for years. Two years, this past Valentine's Day. It's…well, that's me. Scott's girlfriend. Jane."

It sounds lame as hell as she says it, and the lady's gaze is still icy and appraising, but behind her, Gordon's tall enough to peek out from behind the door above the crown of Penelope's head, and Jane meets his eyes for just a moment. Despite how rocky things have gotten between Scott and his younger brother, she doesn't catch anything like animosity in the way Gordon looks at her—just a sort of wary curiosity, accompanied by a tilt of his head and a quirk of his brows as he gives her a far more charitable once over of his own. He clears his throat and a reaches up to tap a fingertip on Penelope's shoulder, as he pushes the door further open and steps around to stand just behind her. "Can you prove it?" he asks, not challenging, but just genuinely curious. Penelope immediately lifts a hand to swat him lightly in the chest, glaring up at him with obvious disapproval as he protests, "Ow, hey! Well, what, Pen? I wanna know why the hell she'd say a thing like that if it wasn't true." He glances back up at Jane, almost apologetic now, and prompts, "So…can you?"

And Jane can, actually. She hadn't expected to need to, but she'd also come prepared, and so she nods, once, and says, "Close the door and lock it."

The house key burning in her pocket is out and glinting in her hand in almost the same instant that she hears the turn of the tumblers. She let's a brief moment pass, just long enough for the pair on the other side to be quite certain the door is locked—and then she inserts her key, lifts the handle slightly, and turns. The door swings open again, but Jane's not quite done yet, as she drops the key back into her pocket, and points to Lady Penelope, "You're about eight weeks pregnant," she announces, and her finger swivels to level at Gordon, "And you tried to brain your brother with a bottle of Jack Daniels."

Lady Penelope's incredulous expression grows suddenly blank and she pales visibly, at having such a secret repeated back to her from a semi-stranger—and doesn't yet know Jane well enough to know that she'd take a secret like that to her grave, if necessary. By contrast, Gordon just grins, and his hand squeezes Penelope's shoulder, as he adjusts the details of the supposed secrets Jane's just repeated back to him, "It was Maker's Mark. And I was aiming at the floor. But okay. Yeah, sure, all right. Jane Carter; Scott's girlfriend. Scott's secret girlfriend that he's had for the past two years now. That hypocritical fucking bastard. C'mon in, I guess! I'll put coffee on, and you can tell us just what the hell you want."


The pair of them are objectively a study in contrasts, at least as far as their outward attitudes go. If there's plainly still a chip on his shoulder as far as Scott's concerned, apparently Jane is exempt from any hostility by proxy, and Gordon's a friendly, gracious host, inviting her inside and seating her at the dining room's hulking trestle table, still bedecked with the remains of the breakfast her arrival must have interrupted. Penelope sits back down in front of her plate, a stack of perfectly golden pancakes halfway dispatched, and adorned with fluffy sprays of whipped cream and dewy, glistening strawberries. But she makes no move to touch her breakfast, and instead continues to sit in frosty silence, poised at the head of the table, while Gordon clears up his own place setting and chatters about putting a pot of coffee on and informs Jane that she can help herself to pancakes if she'd like.

He returns from the kitchen with a clean plate and silverware, which he deposits in front of Jane. The dining room is invitingly bright in the mid morning sun, and while this is hardly Jane's first time breakfasting at this particular table, as she helps herself to a short stack of pancakes from the dishtowel covered platter, despite her host's hospitality, she still feels like an unwelcome intruder. As Gordon circles around behind Penelope, he leans over to plant a kiss on the top of her head, and reaches down to suggestively pull her plate a little closer. "You oughta eat, hon," he tells her, unperturbed by her icy exterior, and endearingly concerned about her well-being, as he sits down at his own place at her right hand. The coffee pot in the kitchen burbles cheerily as it percolates, and thus instructed, Penelope grudgingly picks up her knife and fork.

"Thanks for breakfast," Jane starts, as Gordon crosses his arms atop the table in front of him, leaning attentively forward into the beginning of this conversation. He's shorter than Scott, but built a little broader; his forearms are lightly tanned and muscular, a pair of braided leather cords and a diver's watch adorning his wrists. "And I'm sorry to just drop by uninvited, but last I talked to Scott, he said you were both out here, and I felt like I should introduce myself." She goes on to add, sheepishly hoping to ingratiate herself with her hosts— "He doesn't know I'm here."

Beside her, Penelope begins to dispatch her pancakes with elegant precision, neatly redistributing strawberries and whipped cream to the areas where they're most desperately needed, with the ecumenical eye of someone accustomed to the division of funds associated with international charities. Her gaze flickers upward from the task at hand, and as she looks coolly at Jane, her fork mercilessly spears a strawberry and flicks it through a dollop of whipped cream. She doesn't lift it to her lips to take a bite, and instead says, bluntly, "We still don't know who you are."

Jane doesn't flinch, but across the table she sees Gordon wince slightly and his hand drops below the table, presumably to land atop Penelope's knee, as he gingerly takes someone else's side. "Well, babe, except she did say—"

"She gave us a name, claimed to be in a relationship with your brother, and then repeated two pieces of information that should absolutely not be public knowledge. A key in a lock isn't enough to convince me—not when I don't know how she came by a secret of mine."

Duly chastised, Gordon still shoots an apologetic glance across the table and shrugs lightly, as he nominally agrees, "Yeah, okay, I guess that's fair enough. But except I don't know how she could know about the bourbon thing unless somebody'd told her, and I don't know who else could've told her except for Scott. I'm not being naive about it, Penny, I'm just trying to be kinda logical."

"And I'm trying to ensure that neither of us ends blackmailed, kidnapped, or murdered by the strange woman you've invited into your home and given pancakes," Penelope replies, and takes a neat, delicate bite of her strawberry, and those ice blue eyes glance in Jane's direction again. "I'm sure no one here wants that to happen."

Jane's knife scrapes loudly on the plate at this declaration, and she looks up, mildly horrified by the suggestion as she protests, "I wouldn't—Jesus, that's—I mean, I'm sorry if I freaked you out by coming here. I didn't mean to. It's just—"

A single shake of her ladyship's head is enough to cut her off, and Jane falls silent. Lady Penelope doesn't interrupt, so much as she waits for it to be obvious that she intends to say something, and does so, addressing Jane, "I'm afraid there's really nothing you could say or do that would convince me of your intentions. That's going to require some external intervention. Gordon, love, if you'd be so kind as to fetch my purse?"

Even after only about ten minutes in her company, Jane has learned enough about Lady Penelope to know that this is a command only thinly veiled as a request, and Penelope is a sufficiently domineering presence that it's instantly obeyed, as Gordon stands up across the table and obediently makes his way into the master bedroom.

Briefly deprived of the only moderating influence in the room, Penelope lays her silverware down and picks up a cup of tea from the outside edge of her plate. "I'm aware that I must seem unnecessarily hostile," she remarks, unprompted, and Jane can't help but be a little bit transfixed by the way her ladyship contrives to hold a stock standard white ceramic coffee mug as though it's a teacup made of the daintiest porcelain, "especially by contrast. I hope you can appreciate—especially if you've been telling the truth—that Gordon would open the door to an axe murderer asking to borrow a whetstone. I'm only trying to keep him safe."

Jane chuckles at this—doesn't snort, thank Christ—and nods. Despite the obvious hostility, Jane is still determined to make her way into Penelope's good graces, and this admission seems like the first indication that this is even remotely possible. "I get that," she agrees quickly, and hesitates for only a moment before she adds, "Sometimes I think the person Scott most needs saving from is himself." Another beat, and then she volunteers a confession of her own— "I guess that's why I'm here."

This pays off in the same moment that Gordon ducks back out of the bedroom, as Penelope's expression softens briefly, and the ice in her eyes seems to thaw somewhat. But she's brusque and businesslike again as her purse is dropped into her lap, a momentary detour on Gordon's way into the kitchen for coffee. Penelope begins to rummage around inside until she withdraws a small, matte silver compact, with IR's logo rendered in a flowery script on the lid. This clicks open at the touch of a cleverly concealed switch, and the faintest hint of blue colours her skin, competing with the light of morning through the windows at her back. She begins to page through the holographic display, her fingers moving quickly and deftly through menus and icons, and Jane diligently reapplies herself to her pancakes.

"There enough cream and sugar?" Gordon calls from behind the kitchen island, leaning over with a pot of coffee in one hand, trying to assess the cream and sugar reserves still remaining on the table.

"I take it black," Jane volunteers, and Penelope spares a moment to dismissively wave a hand in the direction of the kitchen, though she doesn't look up from browsing through her little holoscreen.

Gordon shrugs and returns to the table with a steaming hot pot of coffee, which he pours in a satiny dark ribbon directly into the mug he's placed in front of Jane, to a nod of thanks. He sits down, sets the pot aside for just long enough to dump three heaping teaspoons of sugar and a gurgle of cream into his own mug, and then tops this up into a concoction of sugary white death. He winks across the table in response to Jane's raised eyebrow, downs half of what must be a lukewarm cup of coffee at best, and says, "So. Eight and a half billion people on this planet, and somehow my brother was the most attractive prospect. How in the hell does that happen? He's not even the most attractive member of our family."

Penelope dispels the illusion that she isn't paying attention to the crosstalk across the table by murmuring her own editorial comment, "No, because that's definitely John. And you still don't know that she's telling you the truth."

"It's absolutely John, purely on account of the irony of it," Gordon agrees immediately, and downs the rest of his coffee. "And I know that, Pen, but to keep it all from getting too far over my head, I'm just gonna assume she is, okay?"

This is an inside joke at John's expense that Jane has to pretend not to get, for fear of tipping her hand and revealing just exactly how much she knows about this family. She shrugs, diffident, and sips her coffee. "I can start rattling off undisclosed details of his personal life, if it would help?" she suggests, only partially joking.

"Yes," Gordon says, in the same moment Penelope says, "Not necessary." The compact still resting atop her palm chimes softly and her smile is subtle but triumphant, as she murmurs, "Speak of the devil."

With another flicker of a manicured fingertip, the call is answered—only the devil in question isn't Scott, but John.

"Good morning, Penny," he says pleasantly, speaking up from a tiny speaker. "I've gotten six download requests for an old mission debrief from you in the past forty-five seconds. What's up?"

"I put a particular name into IR's database and it came back associated with a particular file, but it hasn't downloaded as per the usual. I do need it, John, and rather urgently. Please."

Even only in pint-sized hologram and unaware of her presence, this is the closest Jane's gotten to meeting the second of Scott's brothers, and she can't help leaning over to peer at Penelope's compact, though from this angle there's not much to see. Across the table, unconcerned by whatever his girlfriend is doing, Gordon pours himself another approximation of a cup of coffee, pulls the entire platter of remaining pancakes into the place where his plate used to be, and goes to town with butter and syrup.

Jane can't see much of him, but John's voice is soft and patient and pleasing to listen to, and there's a casual affection to the way he chats to Penelope as he goes about fulfilling her request, "All right, let me have a look for you—I just finished a broad hardware update, you know, and I compressed and archived most of our old mission data, because it's out of date with current telemetry and isn't useful for calculating relevant statistics any longer—and it seems like you're trying to pull…mission data from the twentieth of June, 2060—what happened on the twentieth of June, 2060?"

On the twentieth of June, 2060, Scott Tracy pulled Jane Carter from the precariously dangling wreckage of a half-demolished cargo plane before it plummeted off a cliffside into an explosion of fiery doom. But Jane is the only person at the table who knows this, and doesn't speak up to answer the question. Penelope says, "Never you mind. The file, please?"

"Your initial searches cross-indexed a name—Jane Carter? Who's Jane Carter?"

Jane Carter is Scott's girlfriend of the past two years, but apparently Scott's brother doesn't need to know that at present, as Penelope huffs indignantly at John's mild curiosity. "Mind your own business."

John's mild curiosity becomes indignation of his own, and he protests, "This literally is my business. This is exactly what my business is. It doesn't get more 'my business' than this."

"Do your job then, please, John."

"Hey, IR's still officially off duty until further notice. And doing my job means my files, my rules. Someone's in a bit of a mood this morning."

It's funny to watch this little tableau between the pair of them, particularly as the object of the inquiry in question. This is a problem Jane could solve, and easily, just by speaking up—but the part of her that solves problems has taken a backseat to the part of her who is slavishly and shamelessly devoted to the perusal of the worst sorts of gossip rags, and rather enjoys watching a live drama between two semi-celebrities, playing out in front of her in real time. So instead she just sips at her coffee and watches Gordon methodically demolish half a dozen pancakes, slathered in syrup and butter, still undisturbed by the ongoing argument between his brother and his girlfriend.

Penelope's exasperation with John escalates to the point of weaponized politesse. "John, darling, it's a question of personal security, and I promise that I'll explain once I've gathered the relevant information, but for now if you could please give me what I've asked for, I would be very much obliged."

Her testiness works, and the tiny hologram version of John holds up his hands in surrender. "All right, all right, I'll have EOS get into the compression and extract whatever data we've got for the original search term. Gimme a second."

This catches Gordon's notice and he glances up from a half-gone plate of pancakes, and takes a sudden technical interest in the conversation, speaking up and getting his brother's attention, "—Hey, wait a sec. John? Hey, Johnny? Hey, so J, are you saying she can pull compressed data directly, without putting it through a separate decryption algorithm? Since when?"

Penelope sighs and rolls her eyes skyward at the interruption, but also points her compact in Gordon's direction, so he can give his brother a little wave of greeting, and get a rather smug sounding answer, "Well, she is the decryption algorithm, is the thing. We're gonna go through one more broad reformat and make sure everything's all squared away on TB5's new drives, but yeah, we figured that with her on board I can store older mission files at like eight times the usual compression ratio while still using 4096-bit encryption. The whole archive runs a lot cleaner, but I still have the same data recall as I ever did, only now it's serverside and not uplinked from the island's databanks."

"Hot damn," Gordon comments, evidently impressed by this exchange of technobabble. "Tell her I said that's badass."

"She heard you, she says thanks. Tell Penelope her file is downloading—except—it's…hm. This is a bigger file than it should be. Damn. I'm talking up my new encryption algorithm and it looks like this one might've corrupted. Hang on—"

Whether this technical foible is relevant or not, Penelope declines to hear any further on the subject. "Thank you, John, that will be all for now." The call disconnects in the same instant that her compact chimes again, the arrival of the requested file heralded by another muted, silvery tone. Satisfied, Penelope pulls the device back, only to open it all the way up at the hinge, such that it lies flat in her palm, before setting it down on the tabletop. A bright holographic display springs up above the table between the three of them, and her slender fingers tap open the file.

What Jane expects to see is the details of that bright summer day, three years ago, now. She's curious to see how the flight data from Thunderbirds One and Two is rendered, or the assortments of camera footage from suit and ship and helmet cams. She's almost morbidly intrigued by what it all must have looked like from the outside, the day she very nearly met her maker. She and Scott have talked about it before—but she doesn't remember many of the details that led up and into the circumstance of their first acquaintance, and she counts herself lucky to have come out of the whole event relatively untraumatized.

But what appears above the table isn't limited to the events of June 20th, 2060. Instead the dining room is suddenly dominated by a vast, complex schematic rendered in pale holographic blue—with Jane Carter at its center. Data iterates upward and outward and continues expanding, shrinking incrementally as it reaches the limits of the holographic display, populating the room with every last detail about Jane's entire life. Her childhood home, a photo of her kindergarten class, middle school discipline records, high school transcripts. Her parents' divorce and her mother's wholesale disappearance from her life, her father's bankruptcy and eventual arrest, her own legal emancipation from her family at the age of sixteen. The entire eight year span of her tenure as a Navy pilot, her post-military career in the private sector—everything. More than she could've imagined anyone knowing about her, almost more than she knows about herself.

Jane feels a surreal, disconnected sense of burgeoning horror, as she realizes she's not the only person in the room who can see this, and that this is vastly more of herself than she wants to reveal to strangers, more than she's revealed to Scott even after two years of knowing him, and more than she can parse in the seconds of silence that tick slowly past.

At her elbow, Penelope looks up at the reams of information, wearing the closest thing to a genuine, triumphant smile that Jane has seen from her yet, as her eyes rove hungrily over the display. There's an intensity to her that brings a hot flush of embarrassment to Jane's cheeks. From across the table, Gordon glances between them both, and is the first to stir himself into action. He reaches out and the palm of his hand covers the holographic projector at the center of the compact, and then he folds it closed with a soft, final click. His fingertips don't leave the top of it, keeping it firmly closed, and he stubbornly doesn't budge as Penelope makes an irritated little noise of displeasure and reaches for the device.

"No," he scolds her, gentle but slightly stern. "I don't know how the hell that happened, but you know that's not what we do, Pen."

"Not what you do," Penelope mutters, petulant, but she withdraws her hand and shrugs. Despite her obvious disappointment in being abruptly deprived of the absolute entirety of Jane's life, she seems satisfied by what she's learned, even just at a glance. Her expression approaches beatific serenity, as she directs a knowing, newly predatory smile in Jane's direction. "But I do feel just so much better about our guest now that I've her entire existence downloaded to my personal comm. Now then, Jane Alexandra Carter. What exactly was it you wanted?"


All Jane wanted was to try to level the playing field between Scott and Gordon, to make an overture into this family and to make her presence known. Presently, what she needs is some air, and she's stepped outside to the front porch to get it, seated on the bottom step with her cowboy boots scuffing in the dirt of the front pathway, and trying to decide whether this has all gone better or worse than she'd expected. On balance, she thinks it's probably about an even split.

Jane knows more about International Rescue than most of the general public, barring a few hyper-obsessed fan groups that populate the more zealously devoted corners of the internet. She probably knows more about the Tracys than just about anybody else in the world, owing to two years of intimate acquaintance with Scott, who cares about nothing in the world so much as his own family, and that's the thing she knows best about him. It's equally the thing she loves the most, and she'd hated to see him so absolutely torn up by his own actions, his own massively overblown reaction to the news about Gordon and Penelope. Even if there were reasons behind it, she knows he regrets the way it all went down. She'd only come here hoping that the very fact of her existence in Scott's life might help bridge the gap between Scott and his brother.

It's hard to say if she's accomplished that objective. An unintended side-effect is the argument she's caused between Gordon and Penelope—part of the reason she's stepped outside in the first place—because her ladyship's compact had been plucked off the table and then vanished into the back pocket of Gordon's jeans, and his outright refusal to return it had been very poorly received.

Jane left the pair of them arguing in the kitchen, ironically not wanting to intrude on their privacy any more than she already has.

But there's no moral righteousness to the act of stepping away, and if anything, it just makes her feel like she might've had this coming. For everything she knows about International Rescue and the Tracys without their knowledge, it's almost fitting that apparently they seem to know just about as much about her in return. There's nothing in her past that Jane's ashamed of, exactly, she's made her peace with most of her history and under the right circumstances to the right person, there's nothing she'd consider strictly off-limits.

But to have all of it revealed all at once, in a non-consensual tell-all exposé—it's a strange feeling, icky and uncomfortable, but at least partially because it puts her in mind of all the times she's thumbed through celebrity gossip rags, devouring exactly the same sorts of details about Lady Penelope. Jane's read the worst sorts of convincingly contrived lies, polished pearls of bullshit with tiny grains of truth at their centers, from all manner of sources. Old classmates claiming intimate personal knowledge of her ladyship's sexual history, other members of the gentry with their snipes and sideways comments, insider reports from catering services about the lady's general demeanour, all the way up to wild tabloid speculations that Lady Penelope is actually an elite secret agent, acting on behalf of British interests around the world. She gives that last one a little more credence, now that she's met the woman personally.

There's plenty about her that Scott doesn't know, sure, but Jane considers that to be more to do with who Scott is and what he's like. When Jane had first summoned up the nerve to tell Scott the truth about her father and her childhood—Scott had offered to ruin him. With every last iota of the power and wealth and leverage afforded to him by his own billion dollar legacy, Scott had very casually offered to utterly and completely annihilate the life of a man who'd made her childhood and adolescence into a hell of pain and terror. She'd declined, citing the fact that a man doesn't get much more ruined than slowly dying to cirrhosis of the liver, alone and friendless in a Kansas state prison, but let Scott know she appreciated the sentiment.

Jane wonders if that fact is among those now in Lady Penelope's possession.

But she doesn't get to wonder for long, her train of thought interrupted by the sound of the door opening behind her, and then closing again as Gordon joins her outside. He clears his throat, awkwardly announcing his presence, and gives her a little wave as she looks up over her shoulder at him. He's in jeans and a plain grey t-shirt, but barefoot on the bare wood of the deck, indifferent to the prospect of splinters as he crosses the porch and takes a seat at the other edge of the steps. He perches right at the top, one of the only circumstances in which he could contrive to be taller than she is, and gives her a long look, hesitating, before he coughs again and then rubs at the back of his neck.

"So," he starts, but abruptly stops, and scoots down a couple more steps, getting a little closer without crowding her, puts himself nearer to her level before starting again, "So, I guess first of all, I'm really, really sorry for…uh. For all that. John is too, by the way. Like really sorry. He had no idea, and I think that kinda freaks him out. But yeah, I explained about who you are, and he's cleared all data that wasn't mission-specific out of TB5's servers, and then he hacked the back end of Penny's comm and pulled it off hers—she's…well, she's kinda yelling at him about that, at the moment. That was not her favourite thing." He pauses a moment, sheepish, and adds, "And for the record, she's, uh, usually a lot more pleasant than… than this. Sorry."

Jane already likes Gordon, but now they have a quality in common—that she doesn't hold his partner's behaviour against him. She shrugs and offers an olive branch of her own, in the form of a wry half-smile. "Well, she is eight weeks pregnant. Hormones and whatever. And I get it, honestly, it's okay. I came barging into your morning and told her something she hasn't told anyone else. I get why she wouldn't want to hear that repeated back to her by a stranger. That was my bad."

Some of the inherent awkwardness decays out of the encounter as Gordon warms up slightly, "Technically, I think you'd find that one's probably on Scott, actually, because it wasn't his to repeat to anybody else. And none of it excuses us having an archive of your whole entire life squirreled away on TB5's servers. We, uh. That's not a thing we do to rescues, for the record. Uh, as a rule. Not that I know of, anyway."

Jane shrugs. "I didn't think it was."

"Because that would be really shitty of us."

"Right."

"And also just, like, straight up impractical. Nobody needs that much hard data about another person, let alone as many rescues as we've got on record. One time me and Virgil towed a wholeass Carnival cruise ship back to port, we better not have the social security numbers and dental records for all those stupid assholes. If we do, I'll riot."

Jane's beginning to get the sense about Gordon—the same that Penelope had warned her about—that there's not an ounce of caution in him, such that he'd so casually call a few thousand hapless rescue victims "stupid assholes" in front of someone he barely knows; someone who might repeat it to someone else, who'd blow it way out of proportion and cause International Rescue a massive PR shitstorm. He's only lucky that Scott's said worse, and that Jane recognizes just what she's been trusted with, and wouldn't repeat it anyway. "You guys save a lot of people."

Gordon grins at that, with a streak of flippancy that he seems decent enough to be at least a little ashamed of, as he agrees, "Too many to care about, sometimes. Awful as that sounds. But then, that's where he met you, hey? 06-20-60?"

He references the date—her and Scott's first—as the a rattled off sequence of numbers from the parlance of an industry professional, and Jane chuckles softly and nods. "Hanging off a cliff in New Mexico in the forward half of a cargo plane, yup, that was me."

"We're not supposed to date the rescues."

There's a slight ring of disapproval in his tone as he points this out, but once again, Jane gets the idea it's not directed at her, specifically, so much as Scott, by proxy. She turns it back around on him anyway. "Well, I've been led to the impression that you're not supposed to date your London Agent, either, but it doesn't seem like that's stopped you, hey?"

If this is a judicious callout from the tenets laid out in the Big Book of Rescues, then it only trips Gordon up for a moment, before he shrugs and doubles down. "I mean—for a whole lotta years, it kinda did stop me, but…like, fuck it, y'know? That's not written down anywhere and I wouldn't care if it was. I'm twenty-five, I'm a goddamn adult, and I love her, so if Scott's got a problem with that—" He trails off and shrugs. "Then I guess he's just gonna have to have a problem. Fucking hypocrite."

Jane can't help but wince at the little lick of vitriol off the tail of that one. "I'm not defending what he said to you," she starts, carefully, because she's learned from Scott's experience that you do need to go kind of carefully with Gordon, "or the way he handled any of this. That was really shitty, and you know that and I know that—but the only reason I know that is because he knows it, too."

The question of "what Jane Carter knows" is one that hadn't yet occurred to Gordon, perhaps not until this exact moment, and Jane gets to watch it finally hit him. She can't be surprised, because she's more or less nudged him gently into asking it, after coming to the conclusion that he wasn't going to get there himself. Penelope, far shrewder than her dearly beloved, had asked and demanded an answer to the same, basically from the moment Jane had knocked on the door. But it catches Gordon suddenly off-guard, and he pauses and looks across the front steps at her, brow furrowing as he frowns, given thoughtful pause as he thinks his way up to it, and then asks, rather rhetorically, "…Does he tell you everything?"

Overhead, the breeze picks up and dances through a pair of wind chimes, their silvery sound mingling with distant birdsong. Outside the shade of the porch, the sun is already warming the world around them as the morning sun advances through the sky. It's a clear day, and a day for clarity, and Jane's already resolved to be nothing but honest about what exists between her and Scott. "I mean, not everything. But a lot." Jane jerks a thumb over her shoulder, indicating the house behind them, and the lady within. "Do you tell her everything?"

Gordon scoffs at that, sardonic and self-deprecating, even as his posture relaxes, and he leans back where he sits, reclining with his elbows on the step behind him. "I tell everybody everything, I'm a bad example."

Jane can't help a slight smile. "Yeah, I know that about you."

Gordon gives her a sidelong look, wry and appraising. "Uh huh, yeah, I'm kinda starting to get the vibe that maybe you know a lot about me. Kinda starting to feel a little less guilty about the fact that I know your name, rank and bra size, Captain Carter."

"Turnabout is fair play," Jane concedes placidly, offering up the folksiest of the folksy prairie wisdom available at her disposal. Scott thinks this is charming. It doesn't make much of a dent on Gordon.

"Still don't know what's brought you out here, though."

Jane looks up over her shoulder at Gordon, the apparent ease of his posture mismatching the hidden edge of the inquiry, the question she hasn't answered yet. It's not that she's avoiding it, exactly, so much as she just hasn't yet squared herself up to it. "Do you want the long answer or the short answer?"

"I mean, I've got nowhere else to be." He glances over his shoulder in turn, to the closed front door of the farmhouse. "She's probably got a solid five more minutes of yelling left to do."

"Fair enough." Jane gingerly resituates herself so she can face Gordon, shifting to lean her back against the balustrade of the front steps, picking one foot up to rest on the bottom step, while the other remains on the ground, toe tapping an idle beat in the dusty gravel of the pathway. "Short answer, because it's just about goddamn time. Long answer—because it isn't fair. I know so much about your family; more than I have any right to, without any of you even knowing I exist. That doesn't sit right with me. I don't want to be a kept secret any longer. It was fun for a while, but now it doesn't seem…right. And it just isn't damn fair. Not to your family, not to me, and not to him. He's only living half his life honestly, and it's the half without me in it. And I know I mean more to him than that."

The content of this revelation is nothing that would've been visible in pale blue hologram, nothing she's expressed outwardly, not even to Scott. But it's the truth, and she already feels much better for having told it.

"Damn." Gordon sounds impressed—eventually, grudgingly—and the long look he gives her is unsubtle and evaluating, before he sits up and scoots down a little more, joining her properly but arranging himself to perch cross-legged on the lowermost step. "Two years, huh?"

Jane nods. "As of this past Valentine's Day, yup."

"And you don't mind it? You don't mind about who he is and what he does and how…how goddamn hard it is to make this kinda thing work, in spite of it all? With our job and our family and just…just everything?"

Jane can't be sure if Gordon caught a glimpse of her age, or made a note of the four years between them if he did, but she suddenly feels it keenly, just how young he is by comparison, how earnest and vulnerable the question really is. "I don't mind," she answers, gentle with her honesty, and with a suspicion of her own about what he's really asking. "It's worth it, I think. He is. We are. I mean, two years is a long time. A long time, longer than I'd ever been with anybody. And it only really came out of the fact that we weren't supposed to get serious…we just sort of fell into it. Into each other. Neither of us were looking, it was just random chance that brought us back together. At first it was casual, and then it started to get exclusive, and then…I don't know. We just seemed to make sense. We fit together."

Gordon accepts this with a slow, considered nod, before pointing out, editorially, "He's a bit of a shithead, though."

"He has his moments," Jane agrees.

"And he really, really hurt me."

She knows that, because Scott knows it, too—but it's different to hear Gordon say it in person, even if she only met him about an hour ago. She winces at the heat in his voice, the raw, obvious pain and anger caused by something that had cut down to the bone, and she means it when she says, "I know. I'm sorry."

Gordon bristles a little at that, gets a little sharper than he has been yet, and tells her, "I hope you didn't come here to apologize for him, because I don't want that, and I wouldn't accept it."

Jane shakes her head. "No, I didn't. That was just…from me. Because I've heard a lot about you from someone who loves you a lot, and you deserved better than what he said. He knows he hurt you. I'm not making excuses for him and I'm sure as hell not going to apologize—but I know he would, if he were here. I guess I came out because I wanted to ask you if you're ready to give him the chance."

His only answer, at least up front, is a big, defeated sounding sigh, as he drops an elbow to rest atop his knee and then props his chin in his hand, visibly thinking through his answer. In spite of the subject matter, it's all been very casual, this heart-to-heart on the front porch; the sort of forthright, honest discussion that Jane suspects might've only ever been possible between a person like her and a person like Gordon. She hopes that's a good sign. And she's patient, just watching and waiting, while she wonders if Scott likes her because she reminds him of Gordon, or if she likes Gordon because he reminds her of Scott.

"Okay," he says, finally, though it's not clear if this is his answer to her question, or just the acknowledgment that he's reached his own personal resolution. He reaches up to catch a hand on the railing, pulls himself to his feet and dusts off the seat of his jeans. He squares his shoulders and looks back down at her, and Jane lifts her chin slightly, expecting his answer. Instead, non-sequitur, he asks a question of his own, "—Do you know how to make a birthday cake?"