A night that John remembered
There was a night that John remembered- the fourth after he'd gotten back from Oxford, temporarily freed from his studies on compassionate grounds.
Scott had been released by the Air Force on recuperative leave and on the way back after getting him, Dad had called the family to meet them at the ranch to help the eldest pull himself back together.
The first two days had been a briefing for the family (aside from the very youngest) on the scant details that the Air Force had given them of what had happened in Bereznik, supplemented with what Dad and Kyrano had scraped together with a combination of money and connections. Scott had said very little. The third had been spent in fruitless strategizing that did little but give them something to do. People of action, sitting and waiting for the right moment wasn't something they were familiar with. All the while Scott had either shuffled around the house like a sleepwalker or slept for hours upon hours, finally rousing himself to full awareness on the fourth day.
That night, Scott, hollow eyed and still favouring his left side, had silently padded out to the courtyard behind the house where John had set up a telescope, wordlessly taken his immediate brother by the elbow and guided him inside to the gym. When they got there, Kyrano was waiting for them, standing on the padded mats.
"Kyrano," Scott had asked in a voice scratchy from disuse, "can you teach John how to kill someone?"
John, who had been running possible scenarios for 'what on earth is going on right now?', had felt his train of thought come crashing to a halt at the question. "WHAT!?" He'd shouted, uncaring it was far too close to midnight and a good chunk of the family were asleep. He completely missed Scott's defensive flinch at his angry shouting, he didn't even register it until Kyrano had taken him aside the next day and pointed it out. "Are you out of your mind!?" He'd continued, aghast and pulling back from his brother. "I am not going to learn how to kill someone! I can defend myself and that's enough!"
"I only got out of there because I know how to kill!" Scott had retorted in a deadly quiet voice that John had never heard him use before, blue eyes narrowed and darkened by something unfamiliar. "I got lucky. Next time it might be you, and you might not be lucky."
"You can't order me to do this!" John had flared back, horrified by what Scott wanted him to learn and ready to bolt, to flee from this unfamiliar persona inhabiting his brother's body.
"If I may, Scott?" Ever exquisitely polite, composed and intuiting something that had escaped John, Kyrano glanced between the brothers and joined the conversation. "John," he had turned to the second born, "there is value in this knowledge and some moves are not necessarily lethal, but they are disabling. It is only pressure increased to a certain point or applied to a specific location that makes it deadly." He had continued, referencing force, momentum and making an ally out of gravity to lure John in, teaching him how it was this or that which made a move lethal, but taken to here or there it was not.
By morning John had been well schooled on several moves, but it was only later that he realised how sneakily Kyrano had indeed taught him how to kill.
He hadn't liked realising that, the realisation that he now had the knowledge of how to kill someone with his bare hands felt…uncomfortable. But it was Kyrano who also supplied the tempering that made it bearable.
Taking advantage of a quiet moment the next day, Kyrano had taken him aside and explained: Virgil was already bulking out and could flatten their father with a single hit. Gordon was a slippery Fish who could dance out of range and stay out of range long enough to make an obscene gesture at his opponent before darting back in again. Though only a green belt Tanusha regularly wiped the mat with bigger opponents and grinned while doing so. Alan already had lightning quick reflexes, a real scrapper who was showing evidence of a powerful right hook. John was lithe and quick, a veritable dancer on the mat, but he was missing an unidentifiable something that would make him dangerous like his siblings.
To Scott's mind this left John vulnerable in a way the others weren't. With his own trauma and vulnerability still a raw and gaping wound he'd asked Kyrano to help bridge that gap with knowledge that would make John dangerous should he ever need to use it.
And considering where John would be, should their father's dream ever take flight, alone and far from his family, the odds that he might need to were higher than Scott had liked.