A/N: An update of three different short stories because 's chapter updating drives me a little bonkers. Enjoy!
Locked Door
A locked door was a powerful symbol in the Tracy household.
Physically speaking, in a house full of rescue specialists a locked door wasn't really an issue if someone decided they wanted in. But to each other while a closed door was a request for the usual privacy afforded between people living together, a locked door represented a request for space that was far more of an effective barrier than the physical rectangle of laminated acoustic dampening foam and synthesised wood. Outside of an emergency, breaching the barrier set up by a family member represented by a locked door wasn't taken lightly. Even John had to 'knock' and gain permission when calling if someone had locked their door.
It was a necessary social mechanism- as the old saying went, good fences make for good neighbours. They were a close knit family and practically lived in each other's pockets a lot of the time so they had to have a way to request space and have it respected.
Scott considered the door in front of him and weighed up the situation. Kayo had locked herself in her room two days ago. She had food, they knew that much- meal trays left by her door vanished and dishes appeared later. They'd all gone searching for the reason when she hadn't appeared after a day- the usual amount of time it took for someone to either work through something or decide that they needed help- and turned up nothing. Knocks at her door, calls and messages were ignored. Even Grandma and Lady Penelope's efforts had been rebuffed.
"Scott?"
The eldest turned to find Alan at his elbow, looking up at him and gnawing his lower lip in worry. "Is Kayo okay?"
"I don't know." Scott frowned, arms crossed and chin lowered as he glowered at the door. "The last time this happened was after Dad's crash." Kayo had been heartbroken, it was only now that they fully understood the depth of the wounds that she and Kyrano had suffered that day with the knowledge of what her uncle and his brother had done. After the memorial service she'd vanished into her room for five days. When she came out her edges had become sharper and she'd developed a new ruthlessness that drove her need to ensure her family would never be hurt like this again.
At the time Scott hadn't been in a place to recognise what had happened to her until it was too late, distracted by juggling a grieving family who needed him to be strong, a multinational corporation demanding leadership and a rescue organisation that was still being called for amidst processing his own grief.
"What should we do?" Alan turned to look at the door as well.
"I have an idea. Go make some hot chocolates, three of them, something Kayo would like. Hopefully I'll have her door open by then and we can all talk." Scott suggested.
"F.A.B." Alan nodded and made for the stairs.
Scott turned back to the door and touched his earbud. "Kayo, it's been two days and we're worried. If you don't open the door or start talking to us I'm going to take the door down." He warned.
There was a long pause, then the lock gave a soft click. Scott took it as an invitation and slowly opened the door.
The interior of the bedroom was dark. He entered cautiously and found Kayo curled up in an overstuffed armchair towards the back of the room, a light cotton blanket wrapped around her. Her hair was down and for some reason that made her seem younger, smaller and more vulnerable. As he got closer he could spy the cuff of her ouch-wear peeping out from under the teal blanket.
Scott quickly recalculated his approach as he crouched beside her chair- ouch-wear meant she needed help, but seeking help wasn't something Kayo found easy to do on the best of days and whatever this was, it had gotten to the point where she needed to retreat into a safe hiding place. "What happened?" He asked gently, knowing he'd have to initiate everything here.
"It was my mother's birthday last month." Kayo began quietly, looking down at the floor. "As of yesterday, I'm the same age she was when she married my father. It just… it just hit me." She blinked rapidly, her eyes wet with unshed tears. "I never got to meet her, but I'm the same age she was when she got married, next year I'll be the same age she was when she was pregnant with me… and then I'll be older than she got to be…" Kayo fell silent and curled up further in her chair.
Scott quickly flicked a message off to Alan in the shorthand they'd developed -sbfn - stay back for now- and trusting his Big Brother instincts he opened his arms in invitation and leaned forward slightly, but paused just outside her personal space bubble, not wanting to force contact on her if she didn't want it. His instincts were right though, after a split second hesitation Kayo wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in the crook of his shoulder. He held her and rubbed her back gently as she silently wept, soaking his shirt with her tears.
What Kayo was facing at this moment was something that he'd soon be facing, Scott realised. It wouldn't be long until he'd be the same age his mother was when the mountain took her away from them. The pain of that realisation was…strange. It wasn't something that he could easily find words to describe.
At least he had years of memories of his mother to lean on and family who shared those memories with him. Kayo didn't. She had a few pieces of heirloom jewellery and clothing, a traditional karambit that lived on her dresser, some photos and holos, but her father was away, sunk in his own grief and guilt, her uncle was a criminal and she didn't speak to the extended family on either side for reasons that his dad had known about but out of respect for Kyrano and Kayo never spoke of to any of them.
But all of that was background, right now he needed a way to comfort her.
"Hey." Scott pulled back just enough to see her face when it seemed that she'd cried herself out."Alan's making some hot chocolates, why don't we sit outside? Maybe talk about her? If you're up to it and want to, that is." He added, realising his intensely private sister may not want to share those details. "Or we could watch a movie instead?" He offered.
Kayo sniffed as she pulled back from him, taking a tissue from a box on a nearby shelf and using it to dry her eyes. "A hot chocolate and some company sounds good." She said at last. "Give me a couple of minutes to wash my face and get changed?"
"You got it." Scott nodded and smiled as he got up, feeling his knees creak a little from staying still for so long. "In the kitchen in five?" He asked, realising he needed to change his shirt too.
"In five." She nodded back to him, and Scott was heartened to see a small smile on her face. The hard part was over- the proverbial door was now unlocked. He knew better than to push her to let the door open all the way- that would only get the door slammed in his face and sealed shut. But now that she was ready to let someone in, they could find a way to help her.
0o0o0o0
Heartbeats
Surrounded by darkness, John cupped the holographic icons in his hands, all his attention focused on them as he let the repeating patterns soothe him.
Heartbeats were a talisman in the Tracy household.
It was the first vital sign they learned to take- fingers at the wrist, searching for the faintest flutter and discerning what it meant. Later their learning developed into reading the patterns of electrical currents as nerve nodes fired to regulate muscles and valves, teasing out every nuance in pattern and pace, decoding the meaning of the P-wave, the QRS complex and T wave in an ECG.
Heartbeats were what their equipment was built to sniff out- the faintest trace of the unique signature of bio-electrical activity to indicate life or the absence of it at a disaster zone, and their own heartbeats were closely monitored by their Thunderbirds and the web of sensors built into their uniforms. These would relay their heartbeats and other vital signs over to the island and up to Five where John would monitor them. If another mission or a call demanded his attention and took him away from their bio-monitors, EOS took over the job for him, a specific subroutine written just for the sole purpose of monitoring them and the promise of "I'm alive, I'm okay."
After a mission gone sideways, when someone was sent to the infirmary to recover, a drowsing sibling would always at some point in the night feel slim fingers at their wrist as Grandma quietly checked on them. While she trusted their equipment, so much could be read through the simple act of feeling a pulse yourself.
Less often now, but especially when Alan was very little, a specific nightmare he could never put into words would send him hurrying to someone's room where he'd curl up on them with his head on their chest and let the sounds of their beating heart and their breathing soothe him back to sleep. Kayo would sometimes do similar- when the darker side of humanity that she dealt with would encroach on her dreams, she'd prowl the house until she found someone awake and wordlessly sit beside them and lean on them, letting their warmth and presence soothe her rattled nerves. With the hours that they all kept despite their attempts at a regular sleep schedule, she could usually find someone awake to scare away her fears.
They teased Virgil that he knew their vital signs well enough to make music out of them right up until he plunked himself down at his piano and proved that he could, picking out different melodies to the BPM of their heart rates that he dubbed 'Scott flying One home', 'Gordon free diving', 'Alan's on the final level', 'Kayo in combat' and 'John drifting on Five'. John had been surprised by the last one until Virgil pointed out that his uniform had bio-monitoring too and he could get John's telemetry just as easily as John could get his.
It was the telemetry that had scared John today. Or more specifically the break in it.
Nicaragua, Central America, was where they had found themselves today. A storm in the mountains had sent three months' worth of water surging down the Río Tipilma. At the river bend right above the village of Villa Sikia was an experimental hydroelectric power station that, amongst other things, powered a World Health Organisation portable field hospital, filled with patients who could not be moved. It'd been a three-ship response- Scott, Virgil, Gordon, Alan and Kayo streaking through the turbulent skies to stave off disaster and fend off the flood waters before the river could break it's banks and sweep away everything in the narrow valley- village, hospital and power station- sending it hurtling into the bigger Río Grande de Matgalpa.
Diversion channels were dug, stopbanks and levees erected, and people evacuated where they could be.
Somewhere in the midst of all the chaos, someone at the power station forgot to stop and raise the turbines. The technology used in them wasn't new, electromagnetic 'frictionless' turbines had been used on a small scale and in labs for years, but this was their first commercial grade large scale power generation application. Instead of the water going through pipes and spinning the turbines that way, the water ran on the outside of the turbines and spun the turbines around the generator, which then sent the electricity to the power station via Tesla wave. Because the system was frictionless on the inside- zero moving parts aside from the external shell of the turbine- the upper limit of rpms it could achieve was limited only by the speed of the water, equalling exponential megawatts of power from a single unit.
The power station had six of them.
Unwatched, the turbines had matched the speed of the raging river until the capacitors at the power station reached their limit. The resulting explosion split the sky with a sudden outpouring of energy, an accidental electro-magnetic pulse that washed over the area for kilometres around.
The first John knew of it was when his siblings' heartbeats vanished from his holograms, along with the status of their Thunderbirds and their communication icons as all of their telemetry cut out.
"Thunderbird One, Thunderbird Two, Thunderbird Shadow, please respond." He'd called over the comms link in his usual radio cadence, but the calm voice was only a facade to hide the spike of pure, unadulterated fear that surged underneath as he reached out to manipulate controls, reset systems, reroute signals and demand that the rules of physics bend to his will as he ordered one of his satellites to reposition and show him his family were alive, storm clouds be damned. EOS' voice was a background noise as he called out to his family once again. "Scott, Virgil, Kayo, Gordon, Alan, respond!" John had felt his own heartbeat spike, heard the ringing in his ears as nothing but static answered him. Had he just lost all of his siblings? He'd ruthlessly shoved the question to the side but it clawed its way back into the forefront of his attention because somewhere down there was his family and they were lost and they were gone and there was absolutely nothing he could do to help them because he was too far away!
He'd repeated their names over and over, panic, fear and terror scraping across his nerves like nails down a chalk board and making his voice start to crack right along with his control. Just before he lost all hope the crackles of static changed.
"..-ohn? John? Thunderbird Five? Do you copy?"
Tears didn't fall in zero-g, they simply clung to the eyes until they were dealt with. John stopped ignoring the tears that blurred his vision when Scott's voice finally broke through the static, wiping them off onto his forearm where they could sit and be ignored while they evaporated. "I'm here Scott, I'm here." He'd clung to that voice, letting it centre him. "The others…?"
"We're okay, we're all okay John. We're safe." Scott had told him, relief clear in his voice. "Virgil says the power station must have blown up, it was like an EMP went off. Alan's resetting all the Thunderbirds, you should have telemetry back soon."
"That's good to know, thanks Scott." He'd replied, falling back into the usual patterns of the mission as his fear ebbed like the outgoing tide.
Now it was over, the village and hospital were saved and the river had been tamed just in the nick of time. Really he should have been in bed an hour ago, but today's mission had left him far too wound up and anxious to sleep, so he'd taken refuge here, in the central sphere, and let the bio-monitors built into his siblings' watches soothe his fears, a talisman against the dark thoughts of 'what if it happens again but for real…?'
As he watched, Scott's readings jumped for a moment but soon evened out again. Nothing to be alarmed about. The others also started showing some increases in activity, but a glance at the monitoring systems for the island revealed they were just moving around- bedroom level, lounge and kitchen. Again, nothing to be worried about. John let himself zone out again…until the faint, reverberating thunk of a docking drew his attention again.
"EOS?" John lifted his head away from the icons as his AI companion giggled.
"You have a visitor!" She announced, delight and mischief making her voice trill. "It was his idea to make sure you didn't notice he was coming!"
The airlock at one end of the central sphere irised open and Scott pushed himself through, kicking off the rim of the airlock with just enough force to let him gently intercept John, the eldest wrapping his arms around the second eldest and hugging him tightly. "C'mon John, no way you're staying up here on your own after today." Scott told him, brooking no argument.
"But monitoring…" John tried anyway as their momentum carried them across the sphere, attempting a protest despite knowing it was futile.
"I will take care of it." EOS was quick to inform him. "You are not in a condition to perform monitor duty at this time."
"We're building a nest in the lounge and there's a corner with your name on it." Scott twisted in mid air and planted his boots against the inner surface of the sphere, pushing off to send them back to the airlock and the waiting Thunderbird Three that had brought him here. "Today scared me too." He admitted, knowing that phrase would instantly trigger off John's brotherly instincts.
Feeling wrung out by the day but pride keeping him from admitting that yeah, he wasn't in a good place to do his job, John simply nodded his agreement and let Scott carry him back through Five to Thunderbird Three. Having the telemetry and the promise it brought was good, but being able to watch over his siblings in person- that was what he needed right now.
0o0o0
Decontamination
Okay, WARNING, DO NOT read this if you sympathy puke. Sineater on Ao3 and I were throwing ideas around again and got talking about chemicals. We started talking about fluorine compounds (which are terrifying) and ended talking about thioacetone, the same family of chemicals that skunks have weaponised.
Then I had ideas.
Enjoy.
-
"JOHN!"
Scott's voice was strained, even strangled, as he radioed in from the site of Fischler's latest enterprise- chemical manufacturing this time, investigating new polymer compounds. Something had gone terribly wrong (of course) with hundreds of distress calls suddenly lighting up the cell tower networks and with reports of a chemical spill from the factory International Rescue had been dispatched. Scott had gotten there first to scout out the area and John had been waiting impatiently for the update since Fischler (typically) wasn't answering his calls to explain what he'd been working on this time.
"Thunderbird One, rep…" John started to answer, but Scott cut him off.
"Get One out of here and tell Virgil to go back!" The words almost ran into each other as Scott tried to get them out as quickly as possible.
"What's going on?" Confusion and concern warred with each other as John reached out to use One's sensors to scan the area. Finding the Thunderbird out of range- chemical spill SOP being to position oneself well upwind for safety's sake- he brought up the remote piloting controls to send Thunderbird One in for a closer look. Moments later he was thanking anyone listening that Scott's answer came just before he could order the Thunderbird to go in.
"Thiolacetone!"
He heard Scott gag, then came the prelude gasp and the clicks of a helmet being unlocked. John, realising what was coming next and knowing he was a sympathy puker, swiped his hand through the 'mute' command just before he could be treated to the sound of the eldest throwing up.
"EOS! Pull One out of there before the wind changes and she gets contaminated!" John snapped out the command, then touched the icon for Thunderbird Two. "Virgil, do not approach the danger zone!"
"What's going on?" Virgil's hologram popped up. The third born was clearly baffled, but tracking showed him obediently killing Two's forward momentum and switching into a hover.
"Fischler was using thioacetone at the factory." John told him, fingers flying over his holograms as he hunted out the appropriate decontamination procedure.
"He was what?!" Virgil blurted out. "And Scott…?"
"Is currently throwing up." John grimaced. "The molecule is considered 'sticky'. He has to be considered as contaminated, I'm looking up the protocols now to see what we can do."
"Someone want to clue me in here?" Gordon's hologram came up. "We've got decontamination units on Two, why not use those?"
"Thiolacetone is the most offensive-smelling chemical known." Virgil glanced over as he filled Gordon in. "Remember that polecat you met? That's a mild example of what the thiol chemical family can be like. A single drop of thiolactone inside a building can be detected in seconds from a quarter mile away and it takes some serious work to shift that stuff, it lingers."
Gordon blanched. "Ah, so, what do we do?" He asked, glancing between his siblings. "It's not like we can just strap Scott to the hull and fly back with him that way."
"It's deeply unpleasant but not fatal." John reported as he rapidly skimmed through the official Material Safety Data Sheet, found what he was looking for and brought up a map of the area. "The GDF can deal with this, but we need to get Scott out of there." He touched the icon that linked him with Scott to bring him into the conversation. "Scott, I've got you on audio only, one way link. You need to go two streets north from your location, there's a pool supply store at the intersection of Harris and Bluell. You want pool bleach containing calcium hypochlorite. When you have it, put your helmet back on and use it to scrub down your uniform as best as you can, it'll neutralise the thiols. Give me two beeps with your bracer controller if you understand."
Beep beep.
Assured that Scott understood and seeing his symbol starting to move in the right direction, John turned his attention back to Virgil and Gordon. "While Scott scrubs, go back to the island. I want a decontamination station set up on the landing pad at Mateo and get Alan to configure a helicopter POD to collect Scott. It'll have to be ditched in the caldera for a month or so after we're done, just to make sure none of it makes it home."
"Copy that." Virgil nodded. "What should we have set up?"
"Screens to mark out the 'red', 'orange' and 'green' zones, with the 'green' as up-wind as possible." John instructed. "In the 'red' zone scrubbing brushes and a strong bath of calcium hypochlorite for Scott to soak in while in uniform, a fresh water wash station to rinse off with afterwards, and a biohazard self-incinerating container for his uniform- everything he's wearing has to go. In the 'orange' more brushes, a second bath at skin-safe concentration with its own wash station and a chemical sniffer to see if there's any traces of it left on him. In the 'green', towels and a fresh set of clothes, sealed in a box."
"I can use the bio-degradable plastics that Brains just finished developing to fabricate it all." Virgil nodded as he processed the instructions. "Once we're done, I can send a clean POD to pick up Scott and remote pilot the dirty POD to knock everything into the sea before I scuttle it."
"F.A.B." John nodded. "Scott, did you copy all that?"
Beep beep, answered him, followed by a rapid cascade of beeps in Morse that spelled out S-M-O-N-E-M-R-D-R-F-I-S-C-H-L-E-R-P-L-S.
"Murder is bad, Scott. Too much paperwork." John deadpanned in defiance of the smile that tugged at his face.
I-D-N-T-C-A-R-E
John wasn't sure how Scott managed to use the monotone beeps to convey the sense of multiple exclamation marks to end that statement, but he did.
"I promise, I'll do something, okay? Now, did you find the chemicals?" John asked, fingers dancing over his communications controls as he updated the GDF.
Beep beep.
"We're on our way back to the island, the POD should be there in the next forty five minutes, just hold on, big brother." Virgil jumped in.
Beep beep.
0o0o0
Three hours later a wan and weak Scott, his hair tousled and rough from the chemicals and still quite pink from the scrubbing he'd put himself through, was huddled in his ouch-wear on the green couch. He had a cup of ginger tea in hand, heavily sweetened with honey, and slowly sipped it as he recovered from vomiting up what had felt like everything he'd eaten for the past six months.
"How are you feeling, Scott?" John asked as he came into the lounge, still in his space suit, sat down next to the eldest and reached out to pat his back comfortingly.
"Getting better." Scott rasped. "But I'll take a decontam gel bath over thiol exposure any day."
"Noted." John shuddered, he loathed the radiation decontamination gel baths. "But this should cheer you up." He brought up a file on his bracer and turned it to show Scott. "The local workplace health and safety inspector sent this to me, Fischler Industries just copped a multi-million dollar fine for the spill and Langstrom himself is personally liable for a five million dollar fine, plus potential jail time if the prosecutor can make the charges stick. Which I'm pretty sure they will." John preened, looking like the cat that got the cream.
"Fischler Industries will have to fold." Scott perked up considerably. "But how can you be sure? The guy's slipperier than an eel." They'd tried something similar after the weather drones to shut down Fischler Industries, but while Langstrom was a second rate inventor, he was a first rate salesman and contract writer and could find the loopholes in pretty much any law. He could cause a disaster and walk away almost completely unscathed.
"The local authorities may have had some ah, help, finding the evidence before Fischler could wipe his hard drives." John smirked.
"Good." Scott grinned weakly, sipped his tea and said no more. He'd long ago learned that if he didn't ask exactly what his brother had done, if Colonel Casey asked, he wouldn't have to lie.