Disclaimer: I don't own Thunderbirds.

Characters: Gordon. Rating: T. Warnings: Background Character Death

Drabble challenge from janetm74: "I can't eat, I can't sleep, I can barely fucking breathe because they're gone and it's my fault. And god knows what they're doing to them right now and I'm just sitting here doing nothing!" with Gordon

Gordon enjoyed WASP. Well, enjoy might be the wrong word - skirmishes, battles, and tough orders from Above left many a submariner scarred and broken, and Gordon was not exempt from the harshness of the life - but he fit in. Months at a time beneath the water felt more like home than Kansas had ever been. The only thing missing was his brothers, but even that wasn't a lack.

He didn't want his brothers here. Alan was too young. Virgil too soft. John too breakable. Scott… he knew Scott could have hacked it - he was Air Force, after all, with their equal levels of skirmishes and battles and too many scars - but did he want his overprotective big brother clucking over him like the smother hen he'd always been while he was trying to prove he could swim with the best of them?

Normally, the answer to that was hell no. He didn't want to be stuck in Scott's shadow, the base baby just because he had a big, overachieving brother inevitably higher in the ranks trying to hold his hand even though the lifestyle didn't really allow for it (if anyone could, though, it would have been Scott).

Today, like yesterday and the days, week and a half, before, he wanted that security blanket. He wanted the big brother who could tell him everything was going to be okay and fought the world to make it happen. He'd take being laughed at as the base baby. He'd take the jibes and embarrassment and everything else that came along with it, because it would mean he wasn't alone.

WASP's front lines weren't the same as on land. There was no way to draw a line in the water and say "this is where we sit". There were territories, but much like the ocean itself, they moved with the tide and a hundred other factors. WASP's front line was wherever the rebel submarines appeared. Whichever craft they attacked.

Unless you were right in the middle of a pod, you could be the front line any moment, and Gordon had found that out the hard way.

They'd been boarded. The rebels were vicious, and no doubt had inside intelligence from the ease with which they'd navigated the internal workings of the Manta he'd been assigned to for that mission. His crewmates had been slaughtered. Gordon himself had been left for dead, luck the only grace by which he'd survived the attack.

He'd still been conscious to hear the screams of the two crewmates that had been taken. Objectively, there was nothing he could have done. Objectively, he was very lucky a Stingray had responded to their distress call in time to save his life, if nothing else.

The human brain didn't do objectively. The human brain did guilt and hallucinations and self-flagellation until he barely had the facts straight and insomnia was a self-defence while food tasted like death.

He was still hospitalised. Still recovering physically, still hadn't even started on the mental healing. They hadn't told his family. If he got through, they wouldn't. If he didn't… Well, WASP was no place for a man who couldn't pull himself back together again. So Scott wasn't here, none of his family were here, and all he had was a standard-issue therapist probing to see if he was a lost cause.

He'd snapped more than once. He was tough, but his steel hadn't been tempered in fire yet. That would come later, once this passed and he pulled himself back together. Like a warrior. Like a Tracy.

"I can't eat, I can't sleep, I can barely fucking breathe because they're gone and it's my fault!" he'd screamed the first time the therapist visited. "And god knows what they're doing to them right now and I'm just sitting here doing nothing!"

He wasn't doing nothing. He was healing, but it felt like doing nothing. Maybe if they were all just dead it wouldn't hurt so much. There was nothing to be done for the dead; he'd lost enough precious people already to know that. But alive and taken? The uncertainty of it all was what really hurt.

They were probably already dead, but there were no bodies to show for it.

He never saw them again. Never heard their names in passing. He healed, although healed was the wrong word. He rebuilt himself, the first tempering of what would one day be nigh unbreakable steel, and despite wishing for Scott then, never told his family what had happened.

Alan was too young. Virgil too soft. John too breakable. Scott… Scott had his own demons.

WASP!Gordon is fun to play with. I got this prompt twice - once for Gordon and once for another character - so there was some creativity required to make sure they don't both follow the same plot!

Thanks for reading!
Tsari