It's a beautiful day in Kansas. Alan's birthday almost always is.
The sun shines bright overhead, dimmed only very occasionally by the passage of fluffy, cotton white clouds. There's a soft breeze, rolling gently over the prairie grasses, rustling softly in the leaves of the trees. The bees are buzzing, the birds are singing. And the lilacs are in bloom.
Their scent is heady and delicate and sweet. Even this early in the season, even when only the day before the buds were barely beginning to even think of blooming, as the first tiny flowers open to the warm spring air, they still bear that faint promise of brighter, better days.
Gordon hopes so, anyway.
He and Penelope stand outside on the (freshly mowed) front lawn, waiting. Gordon has a hand shading his eyes as he squints upward into the western sky above the treeline, and Penelope has both her arms around his waist and her head against his shoulder, leaning into him as she watches the way he watches the skies.
"There," he says finally, pointing to a near invisible speck in the far distant sky, though the gesture is nearly useless with how far out it is. "TB2."
Penelope lifts her head and joins him in peering into the sky. "Really? How do you tell?"
Gordon shrugs. The truth is that after as many years as they've been doing this, he just has a sense for it, but he tries to explain anyway. "It's the right heading, pretty sure. And it'd track with the last ETA I had. Gotta be Al flying, though, Virg's still out of commission."
"Are they far away?"
"Mmm. Maybe like fifty klicks, sixty-ish? He'll have been slowing down pretty much ever since he hit American airspace, they don't like it when we buzz the continental United States doing better than Mach 4 or so. Scotty sometimes gets away with it. Be another…like, say ten, maybe fifteen minutes? Depends on how fiddly the landing is. Al's not the best on Two's VTOL's, they're tricky. Not sure exactly where they're gonna put down. I'll grab the truck and drive over wherever they do, pick 'em up." His gaze hasn't left the approaching pinprick in the sky.
Penelope hums in acknowledgment and leans her head against his shoulder again, sighing softly into the freshly washed cotton of his t-shirt. Gordon's dressed down. Way down. There are holes in the knees of his jeans in defiance of the idea that this is any kind of occasion—other than just Alan's birthday, which has never demanded any kind of formal attire. He's just keeping it nice and casual; light and breezy, like there's nothing completely life-altering hanging in the air over his family and their future.
Perhaps in deference to his own forced casualness, Penelope hasn't dressed up, exactly. She's in a dress, but it's just a simple layer of faintly patterned chiffon over a sheath of pale, creamy satin, some sort of floaty, floral, wrapped-around thing that somehow manages to soften her silhouette at the same time as it clings to her curves. She looks lovely. She always does, but today she looks just exactly like spring, and she radiates a serene, impenetrable calm.
Gordon has been trying to squeeze down the bubble of rising panic in the center of his chest, more or less since he woke up this morning. It sits just below his throat, a steady, unrelating pressure that has him swallowing too often and breathing exclusively through his nose, rather than risk being overwhelmed by the urge to take great, heaving gulps of air, as though he's drowning on dry land and starving for oxygen. It does nobody any good at all if he slips into a hyperventilating panic attack, and will give Penelope entirely the wrong idea about his feelings in the moment.
Somehow TB2 has gotten close enough that he can make out the great hulking shape of it, still tiny, but uniquely silhouetted in the clear blue sky. There's no way to mistake the Mean Green Rescue Machine for anything like a commercial jet, or even one of the bulky GDF fliers that trundle through the skies. They're really almost here. This is real, and it's happening.
"…Hey, I've got an idea." When nothing follows the statement, Gordon realizes he's said this out loud, and as Penelope looks up at him again, he has no choice but to continue, "…let's leave."
All those springtime sounds come rushing back in to fill the silence that falls after the slightly-too-high and a-little-bit-too-loudness of his voice. Penelope's gone quite still beside him and pulled away to get a better look at his expression, looking up with just the tiniest furrow of concern between her elegant and artful brows.
"…Leave?" she echoes, like it's a question, like the word doesn't make sense in this context, because of course it doesn't. Nothing about what he's just said makes sense, but she deigns to give him the benefit of the doubt, and asks him to clarify. "Darling, what do you mean?"
"I mean leave like go, like get outta here." That rising tide of panic starts to swell behind the dam in his chest, and starts to wash his voice away with it. "Like, we take the truck, right, and you're all packed, and I'm all packed, and we just…we throw our stuff in the back, and we just go, right? We just drive. And we drive and we keep driving and we just…Hhh–ha. H-haha." The laugh burbles out of him like the foaming crest of a wave and then breaks just before he can manage to fish his voice back out of it and master himself to complete the idea. "…just, we just, w-we can go. We can leave. You and me. Just you and me, Pen, right? None of the rest of it matters, and no one else needs to be involved. Right? It's just us, right? We could go. That'd be funny."
"Gordon." The tone of her voice is its own soft agony, all concern and delicacy, and her hand has fallen to his to catch his fingers tightly, like she means to hold him there and not let go. And if he expects her to ask what's wrong and if he's okay and that whole pathetic song and dance—instead she surprises him, and asks, almost cautiously, "Is that really what you want?"
It's such an absolutely ludicrous proposal on its face that the question is actually confusing, and Gordon can't do anything but stare at her, mutely terrified, until he shakes his head and helplessly offers up the only answer possible—"I don't know."
"Hmm." It's a considered little sound, thoughtful. Enough to tease a scrap of curiosity out of the panic, as her grip loosens and her arms wrap lightly around the back of his neck, her hands slipping furtively beneath the collar of his t-shirt to the bare skin at the top of his spine. Her fingers are dainty and her skin is still cool, and the quirk of concern between her brows has become a furrow of concentration, as she starts, in the tone of someone thinking aloud, "I don't know if I could do it, to be perfectly honest. But the fact that your brother has been prised out of his precious space station and is presently earthbound certainly makes it tempting. Even just eight hours of lead time to go to ground before he could get back up and start really looking would quite possibly make all the difference."
This is not what Gordon had expected. "Uh."
Penelope continues, and Gordon gets the impression that it's no longer for his benefit. "Of course we'd take the truck, but we wouldn't take anything else beyond the absolute essentials, so as not to arouse suspicion, and you must understand we couldn't keep the truck for any meaningful length of time. Too easily traced. It might get us out of the state, but after that we'd need to leave it somewhere anonymous and find something else and keep driving. And then figure out how we mean to leave the country. I know you've a passport, but we'll need to find our way to someone who can make you a new one before we cross any borders. At least one, perhaps several. Passports, not borders. I brought three of mine."
"Three passports?"
Penelope does not seem the least bit phased by the utter shock in his tone, and carries on with her planning, as though nothing's amiss. "Mmhm. One of them will get me arrested in most of Eastern Europe, but we probably won't spend much time there. I'm thinking we'd best start in Asia somewhere, I've a fondness for Bangkok. Very easy place to disappear. Would you be adverse to dyeing your hair? Nothing permanent, but for a few weeks at least, just for after we've been able to lay a few false trails around the globe. I'll probably cut mine off and go auburn. How do you feel about a sort of chestnutty colour? Mm. Too much like Scott, perhaps."
Her hair has been prettily plaited into a braid as thick as his wrist, glossy champagne blonde. Gordon's never seen her hair cut short in the entire time he's known her, though there's an old picture somewhere around the villa of a much younger Penelope with a sleek, angled bob. His own vanity has him balking at the hypothetical, but she's proposing something far more drastic on her own behalf. "No," he protests, and the whiplash of going from stark terror to sheer indignation is almost enough for him to feel physically staggered. He steadies his hands on her waist and shakes his head. "That's crazy."
Penny shrugs, and looks up with her eyes wide and artfully innocent, fully inhabiting the role of the winsome ingenue, who couldn't possibly have proposed fleeing the country with a handful of fake passports, in order to lay low in Bangkok and evade his responsibility to his family and the world at large, all while the love of his life is pregnant with his illegitimate bastard child. "You wanted to leave," she reminds him.
"I didn't really."
It's a new tactic for Penelope to double down on absurdity, but she does so anyway, blithely going on. "I'm just letting you know it's possible. Would you want to be gone for the entire duration of the pregnancy? Shall we get married while we're away? Where do you want our baby to be born? Have you ever delivered a baby? Can you deliver a baby if we wind up alone together in an isolated safehouse somewhere in Norway? And are we completely cutting all ties, or might we enlist Parker's help? Because if he's not helping hide us, he'll be helping find us. I can probably dodge John if we go off the grid entirely, but Parker's known me from birth and he's an absolute bloodhound. We could make a bet of it. Your family or my family, who'd find us first? Winner gets to name the baby."
She's being intensely facetious, and Gordon wishes he could find it funny, but even just the mention of his family tightens the knot in his stomach. His eyes flicker back upward to the incoming Thunderbird, and now he can pick out the green of its hull against the blue of the sky. It makes him feel dizzily nauseous for some godawful reason. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, shuddering slightly on the exhale, as he protests, pleading—"Stop."
She stops. Her hands slide gently forward from where they'd clasped behind his neck, and though he's closed his eyes, he feels it as her palms come up to gently cradle his jaw, her thumbs stroking his cheekbones. Her skin is soft and her wrists are scented with perfume, and he takes a deep breath of her, turning his face just slightly, just enough that the briefest of kisses can ghost against the print of her palm. Even with his eyes closed, Gordon can feel her gaze searching through him, looking for something he's not sure he wants her to find. His hand comes up to clasp her wrist, even as he leans his face against her palm, as though she could hide him away.
"It's strange," she says, in a voice as soft and secretive as the buds on the lilac tree, meant for him and him alone. "Quite probably the bravest man I know, and it's so strange to learn what scares you."
Gordon groans softly and tries to shake his head. "I am the biggest coward on the face of the Earth."
Her answering laughter is barely more than a breath, but it's enough to know she doesn't believe him, and to betray her sarcasm. "Mm. Well, my darling, you seem most afraid of the rest of the bravest men I know, so perhaps there's some logic there."
"It's not them."
Penelope cocks her head slightly to the side and looks up at him, challenging. He looks back at her, challenged. "What, then?"
He doesn't know if he has the words. It's at once bigger than he can explain and smaller and more subtle than he can put his finger on. Macro and micro. But he tries anyway. "This. Us. Everything. If we're gonna be able to fit into the way things are. How it's all gonna change if we don't. What'll happen if we don't work out."
She seems genuinely taken aback by that last sentiment. "Are you really afraid we won't?" she asks softly.
Gordon's hand slides downward to rest gently over her abdomen, and for perhaps the first time since the decision became official, allows himself to acknowledge the fact that they mean to bring a child into the world together. "We're betting someone's life on it."
Now she smiles, gentle and amused. "People bet their lives on you almost every day."
"You know this is different."
"I would still take that bet in a heartbeat." To emphasize the point, she gathers his hand back up, lifts it to clasp against her heart, and pulls herself insistently close. "Gordon, I don't know if you truly understand just how unimaginably lucky this child already is." Penelope leans further into him, and takes a deep breath that releases as a slow, contented sigh. Her voice fills with a longing he's heard from her only once before, and she goes on, "And how much luckier they'll be on they day they get to meet their father. And if your family somehow fails to be as excited for that as I am—and, darling, that's a bet I wouldn't take—then we'll just have to be a family of our own."
The comm on his wrist buzzes and he glances at it automatically. Speaking of his family, it's a set of landing coordinates, the kind he's seen hundreds of times before, but this time close to home in a way that Thunderbirds aren't supposed to be. Somewhere International Rescue isn't welcome; somewhere only his family was ever supposed to belong. The Tracys, with their family name unattached to airplanes and islands and industries, but only to themselves and each other.
If luck is genetic, and if what Penelope believes is true about the luckiness of their baby—then maybe Gordon's lucky enough that when they land, his brothers will just be his brothers. And his family will be as happy for him as he only hopes they might be.