A/N: Part 1 - chained up – requested by Janetm74, with just a hint of more for those that asked - for some reason, I don't think this is what you meant...
(don't worry, I have a part 2 coming)

The one time in their lives when John was the most normal of all of them were the weeks after their mother's death, and when a fourteen-year-old Scott and twelve-year-old Virgil realized that his younger brother's secret hiding place had been in their mother's closet where her clothes still smelled like vanilla and lavender.

Who would've thought? John? Normal. But they (whoever they is) do say the sense memory of smell is the strongest in the face of grief. Alan had been much, much too young and each baby screech for Ma dug the knife in just a bit further. Gordon, at eight, was a spitfire of equal parts poorly timed smiles and chaotic rage in his quest to understand the universe and his place in it and their mother's now non-existent place in it.

By all outward appearances, Scott hadn't had the time to mourn, as the eldest who too suddenly had to care for his four younger, equally torn siblings. Their entire sense of normalcy had been shattered, and slowly, painfully, Scott had scrambled to pick up the pieces and glue them back together with no care for the cuts and scrapes he caused upon himself against the sharp glass.

Virgil's biggest regret is not contributing more to help in the time that Scott had to adopt the roles of both mother and father to his siblings. The speed at which he had to grow up could race Thunderbird 1 and win. It was as fast as – well, an explosion on a snowy mountainside. Their Scott would be a different Scott if not for that.

As an adult, though, Virgil recognized that his brother had grieved just the same as all of them. His brother's memories of their mother were woven inside a navy crocheted blanket that rested folded at the foot of his brother's bed, and it wasn't the ghost of an aroma long gone so much as the soft comfort of cotton against his skin and the memories of family movie nights tucked in together on the couch, the warmth of the cocoon that accompanied a bowl of chicken noodle soup when sick, the soft rocking of being held in their mother's arms and a lullaby.

Grandma says that Scott had been a fussy baby, with ear infections that plagued him until he was three years old. For hours Lucy would rock her firstborn, and Scott's earliest memories were of their mother's comfort. Virgil knew because they were the same for him.

Only for him it wasn't the blanket. It was the lullaby, their mother's voice singing him to sleep. Lucille had shared her musical soul with her second eldest, and it was in music that Virgil sought his mother's memory – not in smell or touch, but in sound. For weeks after Ma's death, Virgil walked numb with his grief so intertwined with his trauma, his solace entangled with terror. He was only twelve when his mother left him with the refrains of comfort stuttering on frosted lips, pleading for her child to please just sleep baby. And yet he'd been awake for every dragging gasp of breath and wheeze. They were his mother's and his own. Until they weren't, and they were just his.

He remembered the snaking tendrils of asphyxiation encircling his limbs as he gasped for air that was too thin and then not there, and his dying brain conjured the gorgon, her glaring lizard eyes locked on to his as his lungs screamed against the transmogrification of organic matter into icy, crystallized stone. No one knew what Medusa's eyes looked like because no one had survived her spell to be able to speak of it, but Virgil remembered.

Because he'd lived.

Only one other time since had he seen her, when Gordon once saved him from drowning in the middle of the Atlantic. He'd survived then too.

Third time's a charm, then? He'd escaped her grasp twice already, and her angry glare left no room for questioning her intents this time. She was not going to let him go, the black of her anger piercing even behind his eyelids.

Her cobras stiffen around his chest.

He knows they are not cobras, but chains, metal, pulled harshly around his chest and torso, and the wooden post to which Havoc had secured him, then around his sore, raw wrists pulled behind it. The smell of the metal, so unlike his Thunderbird, so antique and used, is so strong he can taste it.

Ah. No. That's blood in his mouth.

If anything, the Chaos Crew live up to their name. They are sloppy, which meant that they are unpredictable. Unpredictable meant dangerous. And where a few specialty knots would have been effective to keep a body restrained, they had taken one look at the muscle on their captured victim and decided to overdo it. Too much, too tight.

It would be his death.

Too many tendrils.

Maybe he wasn't supposed to survive when he was twelve. Maybe Medusa had been chasing him for ages to make right what had gone wrong the first time, and his whole life came down the series of moments when Medusa made her revenge for the one that got away, the one that knew the secret of her eyes.

He tries to spit out the blood in his mouth, but the power is lacking without the breath to take in and so crimson dribbles down his neck and pools on his shirt.

A door slams.

"The fu-"

"…need…untie…"

"No time…laser…quick."

He can't breathe he tries to tell them. Momma, I can't breathe.

"V...hang…"

He feels fire shoot through his chest, and he follows lizard eyes into darkness, as somewhere, someone is humming his mother's lullaby.

It's his mother's song, but not her voice, that pulls him from the arms of the gorgon. It's a deeper, masculine voice, youthful and bright with the resonance of the sun and with just a bit of the salty sea.

Gordon.

Virgil's journey to wakefulness is a scramble up the darkness, with the racing heartbeat of the chase as he jolts.

She's caught him – her breath is hot against his cheeks and her snakes slither around his head and past his mouth where he can feel their hiss in his throat, filling his lungs. The medusa grabs his chin and forces him to look deep into her eyes so he can see his own reflected in their depths. The moment his eyes turn reptilian he feels his limbs freeze. The medusa laughs, the tingle of her poison on his lips.

No! She can't have him!

The song stops abruptly, as his flailing arms are caught in transit by warm mariner hands. "Easy, big guy. The mask stays on."

But her hiss. It's still there, and he's got to clear his throat. The instinct to claw the evil away from his face burns at him, and he can't be here like this. Please, Gordon, let me.

"It's ok, Virg. It's Scott. It's ok, you're ok."

He's not. Can't Scott tell she's here? She's him. They need to run. He's got to tell them…

"m'eyes."

"What was that, Virgil?" Scott asks, and Virgil's heart halts as he sees Scott's sky-blues peering down so thoughtfully, so caring into Virgil's ophidian pupils.

"No! Don't look!" Virgil jams his eyelids shut so he can't hurt anyone else.

He doesn't open them again for quite some time.