Disclaimer: I don't own Thunderbirds.

Sicktember Prompt 13: Appendicitis, with Gordon (requested by anonymous) and Scott (requested by islandsandstars and liseylou)

Gordon's back ached.

It didn't really. The first time it had happened, he'd panicked, thinking something had gone wrong. Then it happened the second time, the third time. Enough for the pattern to emerge. Enough for him to realise it was all in his head.

Hospitals made his back ache. Just a reminder, as though he needed it, of what he'd been through. Nothing actually wrong, proven by numerous scans from various machines and people, just an instinct.

Hospital meant pain. Meant suffering, struggling to walk, to find himself again. Remake himself. He didn't go in hospitals any more. Not unless he had no choice. Only a cursory visit to family, just enough to reassure himself that they were alive and well. None of them held it against him; they understood.

There had been no choice. His back ached something awful but he pushed it to one side, reminding himself fiercely that he was fine, it was just a subconscious reaction to the location. No-one else had been around, and he knew their family was inbound as fast as they could manage, scattered across the universe as they were, but they weren't here.

So Gordon had to be.

The awful chairs didn't help the backache. They were probably making it a reality, but Gordon swallowed down the ever-rising panic, fists gripping at his legs as tightly as he could manage. Skin-tight neoprene wasn't very good for bunching up, but he was stubborn.

Scott was asleep.

Well, that was an oversimplification. Scott was held under by a concoction of drugs, administered to keep him out of it during the surgery and not yet ready to relinquish their grip again.

Surgery. Another word that made Gordon's back ache, even though this was nothing like that. His experiences had been dramatic, traumatic. Scott's was no less life-saving, but that was where the similarities ended. This was no injury, nothing shattering his body and needing to be put together again.

Still, Gordon would have much preferred that it hadn't happened the way it had – with an ideal preference towards not happening at all, but clearly his preferences hadn't been taken into consideration.

Scott's face was peaceful in sleep. Drugged up, there was no pain to tighten his face or concerns to furrow his forehead. Gordon ran a thumb across his forehead, where that divot appeared so often when he was stressed. No reaction, but then he hadn't expected one. The grey hairs mingling with the brown at Scott's temples looked bizarrely out of place without any other signs of stress. Without those, Gordon could almost picture Scott in a different timeline, without the weight of the world on his shoulders.

It was a good view. Pity the circumstances that brought it about were anything but pleasant.

They'd been on a rescue. Just the two of them in Thunderbird One, picking up some stuck rock climbers. Virgil was off the other side of the world with Thunderbird Two, while Alan and Kayo were somewhere the other side of the moon, last Gordon had heard. Even John was out and about, something about a problem on Global One.

Scott, Gordon, and some rock climbers on the side of a mountain. It sounded a bit like the start to a bad joke. It felt like a bad joke. In hindsight, it was obvious that Scott would have been in pain for some time, but he'd never let it on. That was something they had in common; pain was, until a certain point, compartmentalizable. Ignorable. The rescue came first.

The rescue almost came to an abrupt, smear-on-the-mountainside, end when Scott had folded over where he sat – in the pilot seat, piloting – and Thunderbird One had taken a nose dive. Gordon would be forever grateful that his big brother had managed to realise and react, sparing them from that fate. He knew he wouldn't have reached the controls in time.

Terrified hikers demanding what was going on – if Scott was trying to kill them all, that International Rescue was supposed to save people, not accelerate their demise – had been dumped at the base of the trail by a too-white Scott, and Gordon had pounced.

There had been a sudden surge in pain, Scott had admitted, hands resting on his abdomen lightly. If it was enough to distract Scott while he was flying, it was clearly bad. His brother hadn't protested the scan.

He had protested vacating the pilot seat to let Gordon pilot. It had taken the threat of sedation and a pointed reminder that Gordon was not interested in a crash landing to get him to move.

The scan had left no room for interpretation with its results. One ruptured appendix, requiring immediate medical intervention, and at some point there was going to need to be a Conversation about not mentioning obvious symptoms, but in the moment the only requirement had been to get to the nearest hospital.

Gordon hadn't even had a chance to think about what that had meant for him until they'd arrived, Scott hunched over with his arm slung across Gordon's shoulder and a hand securely around his waist. Not until Scott was whisked away, the word surgery floating around for a moment before it slammed straight into Gordon's back and where he was sank in.

His back hadn't eased up since. Even when he fled back to Thunderbird One, making the calls to the rest of their family, it had niggled at him. Certainly not since he'd bit the bullet and strode back inside, assaulted by pale walls and disinfectant smells and bustling of nurses.

He hadn't had to come back. He could have gone home, picked up Grandma, then dropped her off and thrown himself in the pool. No-one would have blamed him. He suspected they'd expected him to do that.

But that would have meant leaving Scott alone. Waiting for news to trickle to him, whenever it might arrive. Abandoning Scott.

Gordon couldn't do that.

So here he was, some hours later in a rubbish hospital chair, keeping vigil over a sleeping Scott as his brother recovered from the surgery. A week, they'd told him. Barring no complications, a week in the hospital, then another five taking it easy at home.

Scott was going to hate that.

Gordon knew he wouldn't stay the whole time. Hell, as soon as Virgil got there, he was going to be out of the hospital faster than a bat out of hell, replacing the bedside vigil with holocalls from the safety of home until Scott was allowed to join him in person.

But he couldn't leave Scott alone, not for a single moment. His hand found limp fingers and threaded between them. The only thing worse than being in hospital was being alone in hospital, and Gordon would never inflict that on his brother.

It didn't matter how much his back ached.

I'm dabbling in Sicktember over on tumblr! Only doing prompts that I get a character request for, so feel free to drop by with a request. You can find the list on the sicktember tumblr blog!

Thanks for reading!
Tsari