Disclaimer: I don't own Thunderbirds.
Whumptober Day 27 "Passing Out" and "Collapse".
Jeff should have gone to bed hours ago. He knew that, and his mother would have dragged him there by the ear if she'd been on the island, but Lady Penelope had insisted that she have some time away from home – and more importantly, from running herself ragged over him as he found his Earth legs again – so she was off in England receiving some much-deserved pampering.
His sons were supposed to be keeping an eye on him instead, and there had been pointed comments from all of them at some point or other during the evening and into the early hours, especially from John, but a rescue had come in that needed all hands on deck, and Tracy Island had emptied. Tanusha – Kayo, as he was still getting used to – had gone on Thunderbird Two as well, leaving Jeff for all intents and purposes alone.
The two engineers were deep in the bowels of the island, and Jeff had quickly learnt that the Mechanic was as scatter-brained as Brains when it came to maintaining humans rather than machines. Neither of them would even think about him, still up in the den with a dratted walker – he hadn't even graduated to a stick yet – by his chair.
Jeff wasn't going to bed until his sons were home safe and sound. They were done with the rescue, finally – a mudslide that had buried villages that had taken the entire day and most of the night – and Thunderbird One, at least, would be home soon. He'd come to learn that Scott usually hung back with his brothers rather than tearing off ahead, but sometimes his eldest made an exception. Today was one of those, and Jeff suspected it was because Scott intended on attempting to chivvy him to bed.
His eldest son had tried several times over the comms during the rescue, but Jeff had held firm and over the other side of the world, Scott had been unable to do anything in person. That was clearly something he was looking to rectify.
Jeff honestly didn't care; the faster his boys were home again, the happier he'd be. Before the Zero-X, most of them hadn't been old enough to help out with IR, and he'd been out there with them, not waiting impatiently at home. It wasn't an easy position to be in.
Even after eight years, the Thunderbird's engines were familiar songs. The distinctive raw power and speed of Thunderbird One roared into earshot, streaks of fire crossing the sky to announce her arrival. The blast shutters slid across smoothly as the pool retracted out of her way, and the high speed rocket plane seamlessly settled back into her bay below.
One son home. Three to go, and his best friend's daughter with them. Maybe four, if John decided to descend, but he hadn't so far, so Jeff suspected that he'd fallen asleep where he floated as soon as the rescue was over.
He watched the lamps, counting the minutes until they swivelled around. It was almost six minutes, Scott too good a pilot to neglect his post-flights, but when he did appear it was clear that was all he hadn't neglected.
Still in uniform, more brown than blue, most of his skin and also his hair was plastered with sludge in various stages of drying.
"You're not traipsing that through the house or your grandmother will murder us both," Jeff scolded as Scott took a single step forward. He was ignored, another step taking Scott entirely off of the rotating platform, and Jeff frowned; that was extremely unlike Scott. "Scott Carpenter Tra…"
He trailed off in horror as a third step, halting and unsteady, went awry and the mud-coated young man face-planted the floor. Mud splattered around him, catching the top of the closest sofa as well as the skirting of the wall.
Scott didn't move.
"Scott!"
Dismissing the walker, Jeff lunged across the den, ending up on his hands and knees and dragging himself on trembling arms until he was getting his jeans muddy.
"C'mon, son," he muttered, putting a hand on his shoulder and shaking it lightly. "Scott, wake up."
He didn't, and Jeff ran through his options. There had been no reports of injury; suit telemetry hadn't flagged anything up, and Virgil would never have let his eldest brother pilot home if he thought he was hurt. No sign of anything that Jeff could see through the mud, either. It had, however, been a long, gruelling, day, and Jeff had yet to manage to get his erstwhile son to hand over the paperwork rather than staying up late to do it all himself. There was a high chance that Scott hadn't slept the previous night at all.
That definitely needed rectifying sooner rather than later. Jeff hoped his son's collapse was just exhaustion, but he didn't want any sons collapsing at all.
In the meantime, Jeff had a problem: Scott couldn't be left on the floor, but Jeff could barely walk himself unaided. There was no way he could carry his tall, athletic son with his atrophied muscles. John was presumably asleep, and the others were still an hour out. When it came to people on the island, it was just him and two engineers. One was no better at lifting people, and the other…
Jeff had no issues with the Mechanic as a person. He'd heard the stories, but comparing those to what he knew of Belah's cruelty and the clear remorse the man demonstrated, he was content to trust Brains, Kayo and his mother. Even his four younger sons seemed more or less at ease around the man from what he'd seen.
Scott still hated the man. Or at least, that was what he projected, and likely what he told himself. Jeff knew his son well enough to know that if he truly didn't trust the man, he'd have kicked him off the island regardless of anyone else's stance, and Scott had aggressive, guard dog tendencies, but he rarely hated. His eldest son's hate was reserved for the worst people – people like Belah, people who put money before lives, people who willingly and unrepentantly put other people in danger.
Not for desperate victims like the Mechanic, and Jeff made a decision.
He didn't even know for certain that the engineers were still up and working, but he had nowhere else to turn; Scott still wasn't stirring despite his best efforts to rouse him.
"Brains?" he fumbled his comm with one hand while the other wormed its way to a mud-splattered throat to check Scott's pulse. It was slow, but steady and strong as though he was just sleeping. "Brains, are you awake?"
"M-Mr Tracy?" His friend never had listened to requests to call him Jeff. "W-what is it?"
"Is the Mechanic with you?" he asked, moving his fingers from Scott's throat to instead start clearing mud from what he could reach of Scott's face. At a stuttered confirmation, he continued, "I need both of you up here with a medscanner and a stretcher."
"A-are you okay?"
"I'm fine," he promised, although he wasn't really fine when one of his sons was collapsed on the floor next to him. "But Scott just collapsed."
"O-oh. We'll be r-right up, Mr Tracy."
The call dropped, and Jeff exhaled somewhat shakily. Asking for help felt wrong, somehow, like he'd failed his duty as a father to look after his son, but he knew that he didn't have a hope of getting Scott to the infirmary alone.
"Scotty," he coaxed, shaking his shoulder again gently. "Wake up, Scott." Still no response, and Jeff let out another shaky sigh before threading his hair through mud-matted hair, stiff with old gel beneath the gunk.
MAX was first to arrive, quiet whistles accompanying the sound of wheels on wood and the muffled murmur of machinery. In his hands he was clutching the requested hoverstretcher, currently with hoverjets turned off, and his carapace opened to offer a medscanner as soon as he was in Jeff's reach.
Jeff had just grasped hold of it when hurried footsteps announced the arrival of the engineers.
"S-Scott!" Brains was at his side immediately, adjusting his glasses with one hand. "H-has he stirred at a-all?"
Jeff shook his head as the light of the scanner flickered over the prone body. "Not at all."
The scanner came up with no serious injuries, just some bruises that made sense considering his son was fresh off a rescue, so he turned his head to look at the man lingering on his periphery, hanging back as though unsure why he was wanted.
"Can you get him on the stretcher?" he asked, although it came out as more of a plea, his own helplessness bleeding through. "He can't stay here until his brothers get back."
For such a big man, the Mechanic was very good at tentative moments. Dark brown eyes took in the sight in front of him for several moments, leaving Jeff with the slowly growing fear that the man would say no, before he nodded and stepped forwards.
"Give me room," he ordered – it was probably supposed to be a request, but like Brains, the Mechanic wasn't always the best at communicating with other humans. Jeff didn't argue, hauling himself back with arms that could equally have been trembling from the sight of his collapsed son or the space-atrophied muscles he hadn't yet regained.
Brains helped him, pulling him to his feet as MAX appeared with the walker for him to cling to. His grip was white-knuckled as he watched the Mechanic kneel down beside his son's limp body.
He'd only asked the man to shift Scott onto the stretcher, assuming that the awkward air between the two men would mean the Mechanic wanted minimal interaction with his son. He wasn't expecting the gentle manipulation of the mud-covered figure until he was rolled over onto his back, long limbs akimbo and lax like a ragdoll's, and he certainly wasn't expecting for the Mechanic to spend a moment assessing the mud smeared across his face, barring the flash of skin where Jeff had been able to reach, before wiping it away from his mouth and nose.
Muscles flexed as bulging arms finally slipped beneath Scott's shoulders and thighs, and then his son was being cautiously lifted as though he weighed nothing, near-enough cradled in the grip of a man he claimed to hate.
From the look of intense concentration on the Mechanic's face, not particularly unlike any of Jeff's sons when they were carrying something they really didn't want to drop, it certainly wasn't a mutual feeling.
The hoverstretcher whirred into life, courtesy of Brains' prodding, and Jeff watched the Mechanic carefully settle Scott onto it as it floated up to waist height.
His task done, the Mechanic stepped back, out of Jeff's line of sight in a clear assumption that he wasn't needed any more. Strictly speaking, that was true, but Jeff still sought him out to thank him before edging forwards on shaking legs to where Scott was still refusing to resurface.
"Let's get him to the infirmary," he said to Brains, who nodded in agreement.
With Jeff slowed by his traitorous body, it took them some time to get to the room. The Mechanic continued to follow them, hanging back more or less out of sight but clearly unwilling to leave entirely, although Jeff noticed that he slipped back out of the infirmary once Brains directed the hoverstretcher to a halt and rummaged around in the cupboard of pyjamas all of them kept in the infirmary.
International Rescue uniforms were not the easiest clothes to remove, and less so when Jeff couldn't stand unaided. He resorted to perching on the bed that would soon hold his son so he had both hands free to help Brains strip the mud-concealed blue away and swap it out for dark grey flannel.
A washcloth and basin was then deployed to get rid of the worst of the mud on his skin and hair, until Scott looked more or less like he was just sleeping.
In a way, he was, although Jeff could have done without the dramatic collapse that had heralded it.
MAX re-summoned the Mechanic to help shift him onto the bed, Jeff shuffling out of the way and feeling more than a little jealous that someone else was carrying his son around for him, before he reclaimed his fatherly duties and tucked the layered sheets over the gentle rise and fall of Scott's chest.
One arm was left out, sleeve pushed up to bare the skin, and Jeff blinked as Brains inserted a drip into the crook of Scott's elbow.
"His fluid levels a-are low," the engineer pointed out, highlighting the respective section of the scan's results. It wasn't a dramatic dip, but considering Scott's collapse, Jeff was willing to accept anything that would help him and indicated for him to proceed.
He was going to need to put his foot down about Scott's workload. Once upon a time, just a word would have done, but it seemed like in the last eight years, Scott's stubbornness had increased – or at least was now also applied against parental figures with the same fervour as it had once been to just peers.
But Scott was far from the only Tracy with a head for strategy, and Jeff was already putting together a plan of attack. He'd need to get his mother on board, and probably John and Virgil as well. Gordon, Alan, and Kayo were also options; the more concerned voices against Scott, the more weight they'd have.
Jeff was also well aware that he wasn't – yet – fit to take on all of the paperwork Scott needed to lose by himself, either. That would need to be divvied up and delegated as appropriate, although he couldn't let any of his other sons take on too much, either, or the problem would just shift.
It would take careful organising, but it needed to be done.
For the moment, however, Jeff accepted the chair that Brains pulled over for him and sank heavily into it. The rest of the boys and Kayo would be back in another half hour or so, all ready for bed themselves, and once they were he'd have to convince them to go to their own beds rather than piling in with Scott, all the while fighting off arguments that he, too, needed to go to bed.
As the two engineers and MAX slipped out of the room to presumably either return to what they were doing or go to bed themselves, he checked the monitor Brains had also attached alongside the drip to confirm that Scott's vitals were consistent with exhaustion and nothing more sinister. To his relief, that was the case and Jeff reached out to brush Scott's hair back from his face a few times before lightly holding onto his son's hand.
He wasn't going to leave until Scott stirred.
Originally I was going to do something completely different for today, but I kinda wanted to do something with Mechanic, and that somehow morphed into Jeff pov and I don't even know, but have a father and two engineers who aren't that great with human interactions looking after this idiot.
If you're thinking "Tsari, you missed a day; where's day 26?" the answer is that I did write something, and it can be found on my fic tumblr tsarisfanfiction if you want to hunt it down, but I was so exhausted yesterday that I'm not currently happy with the quality of it so I'm holding off on archiving it here until I've attacked it with an awake mind (and finished it, because it's only a 'bit 1' so far). Hopefully I'll manage that by the end of the month, but my new job is eating most of my time and then family are squeezing all their commitments into my odd days off (I do not get weekends off, just Sunday and one random other day in the week) so we'll see how that goes.
Thanks for reading!
Tsari