Disclaimer: I own neither the Tracy boys, nor the universe in which they inhabit. All hail the almighty Gerry Anderson!
Authors note: A big hearty 'cheers!' to everyone who's reviewed.
'A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity'
"Virgil?"
Silence.
Scott scowled, trying vainly to suppress the rising swell of frustration growing in his chest. His brother's stubborn quiet was more than just irritating - it was infuriating. Ten minutes without speaking. Ten whole minutes. Given the considerably shortened life-span that Scott was now looking at, those ten minutes might as well have been an eternity.
His wounded leg gave an involuntary jerk. The faint worry was beginning to creep into his mind that the spike might have snagged a nerve, crippling him from the knee down...a worry made worse by the fact that he could no longer feel any sensation in his lower leg. There was a hot, throbbing pain in his knee, but nothing beyond that.
Cold, dead nothing.
"You're going to have to talk to me sometime, you know. This isn't going to go away."
In the dim semi-dark, Scott could just about make out his brother's huddled form. Virgil was sitting on the floor at the opposite end of the flight deck, hugging his knees to his chest. His head was turned away in an all-too obvious attempt to avoid Scott's gaze. It was an obstinate and childish gesture, and it caused Scott's spark of frustration to suddenly blaze into a flame of indignant anger.
"Goddamnit Virgil!" he yelled suddenly, "Don't just sit there! Say something!!"
His words reverberated off the smooth metal walls. The echo hung in the air – harsh and accusing – before gradually fading into quiet, like a poison diffusing in water.
Finally, Virgil looked up.
"I'm hungry," he murmured, his voice as dull and emotionless as a child reciting a math table.
Scott glared furiously towards the younger Tracy, dark eyes blazing. Something ugly stirred within him then...something hateful and irrational. He saw his brother's weakness – his inability to cope with the situation – and felt nothing but disgust towards him.
...For one, brief moment – the first time that he had left such an emotion in his entire adult life – Scott Tracy hated his brother.
Truly hated him.
Scott had always considered it a privilege to hear his brother perform on the piano.
Music allowed Virgil to express all the things that he could never find the words for. When his heart ached, he played soft and low; when he was happy, his songs were like pure sunshine. He weaved a small piece of himself into every simple melody, laying his normally-guarded soul bare on the ivory keys. If he had been born anything other than a Tracy, Scott was in no doubt that his brother would have graced the finest concert halls in the world.
However, despite Virgil's obvious gifts, he very rarely performed in public. He preferred to play alone, or to a select few family and friends. In fact, during the whole of the twenty-eight-year span of his life, Virgil had only ever taken his music to the stage once...
...only once...
Virgil had surprised everyone when he announced his part in the upcoming school-recital. He had been fourteen years old at the time: a quiet, unassuming adolescent, with eyes that seemed too old for his boyish features. He performed a solo rendition of Mahler's fifth symphony, and there was no question in anybody's mind that Virgil was the outstanding star of the night's show. The applause rang out long after the curtain had fallen on the stage, and nobody clapped harder than the four Tracy boys sitting in the front row. The evening had been perfect in everyway, except for one detail:
The empty seat next to Alan where Jeff Tracy should have been sitting.
Hours later, when the recital was finished and the Tracy family had returned to their modest sub-urb home, Scott had found Virgil sitting alone in the lamp-lit cool of the kitchen. He hadn't bothered changing after the concert and was still dressed in his rented tuxedo; his shoulders slumped low as he methodically excavated a tub of chocolate ice-cream. He did not look up as Scott sat down in the chair opposite.
The two brothers sat in silence for several minutes. The refrigerator hummed quietly in the background, a comforting barrier of white-noise.
"Virgil?"
"Hm?"
"Are you okay?"
Another mouthful of ice-cream. A pause to lick the spoon.
"I'm fine."
Scott sighed and leaned back in his chair, turning his head away to stare out of the darkened window.
"I'm sure that father didn't mean to forget," he murmured quietly, the lie tripping off his tongue with well-practiced ease. "He's just been so busy lately, that's all. Maybe next time, huh?"
Virgil's expression did not change, and Scott noticed for the first time how desperately tired he looked. Deep down, they both knew that there would be no 'next time'. His recital - and, by extension, his love of music - had been scorned by the one person that he had most desperately wanted to please. Jeff's absence might not have been consciously meant as a rejection, but that was how Virgil interoperated it nonetheless.
Scott stared sadly at his younger sibling for a long moment.
"Virgil?"
"Hm?"
The eldest Tracy son opened his mouth to speak, but – somehow – no words were forthcoming.
...So many things that he wanted to say...
Seeing Virgil on-stage – alone and fearless under the glare of spot-light, his elegant fingers coaxing a haunting melody from the piano – had left Scott with such a mixture of emotions that the performance itself was nothing but a blur in his memory. He had been frightened, elated, moved, saddened...all, it seemed, within the same heartbeat. For the first time in his life, he truly comprehended just how much he admired Virgil. A fierce swell of devotion had surged through him, and he had realised - with sudden, brutal clarity - that he would rather die than see his brother hurt.
...But, of course, Scott would never allow himself to say such things aloud. He gathered his feelings and locked them away deep within himself...hidden alongside his love for his mother and the aching guilt that he still felt over her death.
It was for the best.
"You were amazing up there, Virg," he told him, voice steady with a deeply-felt sincerity. "We were all really proud of you."
...I was proud of you.
The last part of Scott sentence remained unsaid, but they both knew what he meant nonetheless.
Virgil smiled, and – for a split second – his too-old eyes seemed to become young again.
"Thanks, Scott. It means a lot."
...And it had meant a lot. To Virgil, it meant everything.
Fifteen minutes of silence now, and if Scott hadn't been in such crippling pain, he probably would have gotten up and smacked Virgil around the head a few times.
The air in the cramped flight deck was beginning to feel hot and stale...a factor which did nothing to help quell Scott's increasingly black mood. Under normal circumstances, he was a remarkably calm and collected young man. These, however, were not normal circumstances, and his famous Tracy temper – as inherited from his father and grandfather – was currently bubbling away under the surface, ready to unleash itself at any given moment.
He gritted his teeth suddenly and looked towards his unspeaking brother.
"Alright, fine...just fine. Sit there and bury your head in the sand if that's what you want. But if you won't talk, you can at least listen."
Virgil stirred, but said nothing. His breathing was becoming deep and haggard, and Scott, in spite of his anger towards him, felt a pang of worry tighten across his throat. The younger Tracy didn't sound too healthy...which only made him all the more determined to see Virgil escape before it was too late.
"I'm guessing that all of Thunderbird 2 is flooded," he began, voice clipped and sharp with militaristic bluntness, "You can use the aqua-gear to get down to the docking bay – as long as the missiles didn't do too much damage, it should be pretty easy to find the spare equipment kept there for Thunderbird 4 missions. Gordon's deep-sea diving suit is stored in one of the lockers there. It'll protect you from the water-pressure once you get out into the ocean, and there's a new air-regulator to make sure that you don't get the bends while resurfacing, but you'll have to move quickly – it's not much above zero degrees out there and the dry-suit won't protect against the cold for very long. You'll have two hours...maybe three, before you go into shock."
A rising tide of nausea rose in his stomach at that point, and he had to pause for a moment to wait for it to subside. He tried to tell himself that it was just the blood loss making him faint, but the truth was that the thought of his brother - lost and alone in the middle of the ocean - terrified him beyond reason.
...Still, it was certainly better than the alternative: to allow Virgil to stay here and watch him slowly die.
...Anything was better than that.
"Hopefully you'll get picked up before then, though," he said, picking swiftly up on his last train of thought, "It's a busy shipping lane – someone's bound to spot you. Even if they don't, you can still make for the coast. The swim will keep your body temperature up, and it shouldn't take you too long to - "
"Scott."
Virgil's ever-calm voice cut through him like a subtle knife.
"What?"
"I'm not going."
A drop of sweat ran down from Scott's temple and into the corner of his right eye. The salt-water stung at his corneas, and he instinctively raised a hand to knuckle it away. "We've been over this - "
"No, you've been over this." Virgil raised his head to look to his brother, his eyes flashing in...what? For a split second Scott had almost thought that Virgil looked angry...but that was impossible. Virgil was never angry. "I'm not leaving you here by yourself, alright? I'm staying."
"Like hell you are," Scott snapped. "I'm still the field leader here."
Scott's irritation towards Virgil was, he felt, more than justified. Not only was Virgil disobeying a direct order from his field-leader, he was also neglecting his duties to International Rescue, and – worst of all in Scott's opinion – was placing his own personal feelings above the greater good of the Tracy family.
To his surprise, however, Virgil merely laughed. It was a shrill, hysterical laugh...unnaturally loud against the oppressive quiet. "Yeah? Well from where I'm standing, you're not in much condition to be giving out orders."
"And in no condition to swim, either. We have to be realistic here, Virg. I'm as good as dead, I know that. You, on the other hand, have a chance of getting out of here. You have to at least try."
Virgil shook his head in quiet defiance. "I can't. I...I won't. Not without you."
Scott sighed and hung his head. The heavy blood-loss that he had suffered was making his head swim, and he suddenly felt tired...more tired than he could ever remember feeling before. He felt like some ancient thing; no longer flesh and bone, but dust...centuries-worth of dust held together by a web of pain. He wasn't angry anymore – just old and frightened.
"You're going to do this, Virg," he said, knowing the truth in his words even as he spoke them.
"Why?"
The elder Tracy closed his eyes. "Because I'm asking you to, and you've never said no to me before."
He felt his leg give another involuntary jerk, the hollow pain in the base of his knee crawling up his thighs to burn across his hips. He bit down on a hiss of discomfort, forehead contorting in a blood-smeared scowl. This wasn't how he had hoped to die. In his grim dreams of death, Scott had always hoped to leave the Earth in the midst of some valiant rescue attempt...something noble enough to make his passing not so much an ending as an honour. He had never thought that his days would end like this: crippled and pathetic, and waiting for death like a rat on a trap.
...He didn't want his brother to see him like this. He didn't want to be remembered this way.
"Please, Virgil" he whispered softly, pleading to the darkness beyond his closed eyelids, "...Don't make me beg..."
He was ashamed to hear himself speak those words...ashamed to hear the raw need in his voice...but he knew that it was the only way.
...Virgil had never been able to deny him anything...
"Alright Scott," Virgil whispered at last, voice crushed and trembling in defeat, "Whatever you want."
Tbc...