Disclaimer: I don't own Thunderbirds.

Whumptober Day 7 "Blindness"

Cloth bit into the soft divots where the tops of his ears connected with the rest of his head, taut and achingly sharp in that way fabric had. Strands of hair were all snarled up in the knot at the back, pulling uncomfortably and at times parting company with his scalp when the strain got too intense, lasted too long.

Needless to say, he couldn't see a thing.

Removing the blindfold was likewise out of the equation, because his wrists were shackled behind his back, looped around slats in the back of a cool, metal chair and securing him firmly in place. His ankles were likewise secured, metal on metal and unable to move.

The chair was bolted to the floor, attempts at rocking it to no avail had surmised. He was well and truly locked in place and left wondering when someone was going to make an appearance – preferably an appearance of the rescue sort.

He didn't yet know who had him, or why, but the accommodations made it pretty clear that he wasn't there for any reasons he'd enjoy.

So did the steady drip, drip, drip of moisture onto the echoing floor beneath him. They – whoever they were – had gone through the effort of shackling him firmly to a chair, and blindfolding him tightly enough that he knew there'd be marks on his skin when he finally got the cloth off, but hadn't bothered to wrap up the wound in his arm.

The blood slid down his skin steadily, originating from a gash in his bicep – courtesy of flying debris when the coffee shop he'd been in had exploded – and trailing all the way down his bare skin to his fingertips, from which it was periodically gaining enough weight to fall away to the floor. Other, smaller, wounds stung across his exposed skin – face, hands, arms, and something on his throat that felt like a wound, too.

Shrapnel sucked.

Scott didn't know why the coffee shop had exploded. He didn't know if anyone else had been hurt – there had been the barista serving him, was he okay? He certainly didn't know how an exploding coffee shop had resulted in his current situation.

He'd quite like to know what they wanted. Or where help was. Help was preferable. Help would get him out of there.

It shouldn't take too long. He hadn't been alone. Alone on the coffee run, yes, but his brothers – all four of them, for a nice change – had been hanging out together in a park after an afternoon revisiting their childhood in an arcade, and in John's case wiping them clean of prizes in the claw machine.

International Rescue now had a fresh stock of plushies to hand out to traumatised children. Even Alan was too old to accept John's prizes any more, and villa or not, they would be running out of places to stash John's winnings by now if they actually kept them all.

Scott had been the one to go on the drinks run while Virgil lost himself in something that had drawn out the pencils, John poked around at something on his tablet, and Gordon and Alan decided to menace the playground.

It had only been the next street over. There was no way they hadn't heard the explosion and come to investigate. They'd have figured out almost immediately that he wasn't there, and Scott didn't even know where his phone was, let alone have the capability to pick up and answer any calls. His brothers would get suspicious quickly.

So where were they?

Footsteps rang out, the unmistakable sound of someone walking on metal. Just one set. Getting louder.

Approaching.

Behind the blindfold, Scott closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. Friend or foe?

Brother or kidnapper?

He let his head slump forwards, hanging limp against his restraints in feigned unconsciousness, and waited.

The footsteps stayed slow and measured as they continued to approach, and Scott's heart sank. A rescuer wouldn't be walking around like they owned the place; there would be a sense of urgency in the way they moved, light on their feet and constantly shifting as they walked.

His captor – who else could it be, and who was it – didn't stop until they were close enough for Scott to hear their breathing. In and out, and in and out again, as they stayed still for a moment. He continued to feign unconsciousness, hoping to glean some information.

Then hands cupped his face, tilting his head back up while fingers snagged on his throat, near his pulse point. Near his racing pulse point, which was definitely too fast for an unconscious person.

An exhale of air brushed his cheek and rushed past his ear, their mouth closer than he'd realised, before his head was released and left to once again hang limply in feigned unconsciousness. The footsteps sounded again, rounding his chair until they stopped behind him.

Warm hands caught his, slightly calloused fingertips brushing across his palms, and then the warm air was brushing his cheek again, this time from behind.

"Stay like that." Words ghosted on breaths, barely discernible, but the voice was instantly recognisable. "Until I say otherwise."

It was a voice that he trusted.

Metal chimed, not the same as boots on metal floor, but smaller and higher-pitched. Keys on a key ring. More movement, and then there was a click from the vicinity of his ankles and the restraints fell away. Instinct demanded that he move his legs, ensure his freedom and subdue the threat in the first place.

Scott supressed those instincts. A secondary clank had his wrists no longer secured to the chair, although they were still secured to each other, and without those to counter his weight, he began to sag forwards.

Hands caught his arms to keep him upright. Their owner shuffled around again, until the sound of footsteps once again came from in front of Scott, and he wondered what the plan was now. It wasn't making much sense so far.

Whatever he was expecting, it wasn't what he got. The hands on his arms moved, one a little too close to the gash for Scott's liking, and the metal floor creaked a little as weight shifted. Nothing major, nothing obvious, but then Scott was falling forwards, off of the chair with no way to catch himself before splatting the floor.

He landed on a shoulder, breath punctured out of his stomach by the bony protrusions with an oof he couldn't quite swallow entirely.

"Shhhh," came a hiss on a breath, a clear warning if not quite a full explanation of what exactly was going on. If Scott didn't trust the owner of that voice as much as he did, he wouldn't have forced himself to fall limp again, but he trusted them with his life, no matter how strange their actions.

The thought crossed his mind that it could be the Hood, voice-changing technology deployed to lull him into a false sense of safety. If it turned out that was the case, Scott was going to make the bald-headed bastard regret it.

Hands gripped hold of him securely, pinning him in place in an awkward over-the-shoulder lift, and Scott tried to stay limp and unconscious-looking as they raised to their full height and headed for what he assumed was out.

He would have vastly preferred to have walked on his own two feet. The removal of the handcuffs and blindfold would have been appreciated, too. There were odd stumbles as he was carried forward, feeling like a very ungainly stack of potatoes in danger of being dropped any moment, but the hands' grips were solid.

"Hey!" An unfamiliar voice shouted all of a sudden, perhaps a minute later. "What are you doing with him?"

"The boss wanted him moved," his carrier replied, voice pitched to carry a distance. "Don't ask me why; he was nice and snug in there, and he weighs a tonne." A put-upon groan finished the sentence. "Didn't even have the courtesy to be awake and walk himself."

"Didn't the boss only just put him in there?"

The shoulder beneath his stomach gave an awkward shrug that had Scott lurching forwards like a rag doll. "Hey, don't ask me. I just do what I'm told."

"Don't we all," the other voice muttered. "Good luck lugging that lump around."

Hey! Scott groused internally.

He really hoped this was a rescue and not an elaborate mind game of the Hood's. Even if it was certainly a bizarre rescue.

Surely there had been a better way than this? One that allowed him to walk? Being carried was murder on his abs, and his nerves weren't overly impressed about it, either.

Something to stop the blood trickling freely down his arm would have been nice, too.

It was several, uncomfortable, minutes before the sound of the footsteps changed, no longer tapping out against metal, but instead the far more muted sound of walking on most firm grounds. His brother sighed.

"Nearly there," he muttered, and Scott felt him accelerate slightly.

Behind them, there was a shout of outrage, and the sound of running feet.

Gordon swore and his grip tightened to the point of painful. "Hold on."

With his hands still cuffed behind him, there was nothing Scott could hold on with as his brother broke into a run, bouncing painfully on the hard shoulder and knowing his abs were going to be rather upset about that later.

"Open the door!"

It clearly wasn't aimed at him, but with whatever façade Gordon had been trying to employ broken, Scott allowed himself a grunt of complaint that went unacknowledged. The noise of what had to be a car engine revved loudly, loud enough that it had to be right in front of them, and before Scott could panic that they were about to be run over he was suddenly weightless, no longer painfully folded over his brother's shoulder.

The landing was softer than he expected, soft leather blissfully cool against his bare arms, but the body that crashed on top of him ended up with an elbow jammed precisely into the same part of his abs that had survived the sack of potatoes treatment and he grunted again.

"Go, go, go!" Gordon yelled, scrambling around on top of him and sticking multiple bony appendages in soft parts of Scott's body. Tires squealed, a souped-up engine screamed, and the sudden external acceleration slammed him back into more soft leather.

Scott gasped as one of Gordon's appendages – he really was a squid, there had to be more than four of them flailing around, surely – ended up in a particularly vulnerable part of his anatomy. The cloth still biting in too tightly around his face greedily absorbed the water that leaked from his eyes, and his next gasp somewhat resembled his brother's name as Gordon moved again.

A car door slammed shut, the noise of tires on tarmac muffling abruptly, and Gordon let out a sigh of his own. Then they turned a corner and Scott found himself slamming up against a thankfully closed door, Gordon still on top of him.

"Gordon," he wheezed. "Get off."

"Hmm?" his brother responded absently, before apparently finally realising where his bony appendage was digging in and thankfully moving it. "You okay, Scott?"

Scott glared through the fabric, hoping that Gordon would get the gist regardless.

"Oh, right," Gordon realised after a moment. "Give me a moment and I'll get those cuffs and blindfold off you."

Gentle hands edged around the back of Scott's head, dextrous fingers yanking at the knot and pulling out several more hairs when another swerve of the car threw them across the seats again. Whoever was behind the wheel seriously needed a refresher course in how to drive.

Gordon didn't give up, though, and alongside what felt like an entire handful of hair, the cloth finally fell away.

For a moment, Scott couldn't see at all. After the oppressive darkness of the cloth, even the interior of a car was incredibly bright, and it took several blinks before everything came into focus.

Being thrown across the seat again didn't help any, and as everything began to gain definition again, he squinted towards the driver's seat, half expecting to see Alan treating it like a video game.

The driver had rather distinctive ginger hair.

"Hey, roll over?" Gordon prodded, somehow shifting his weight so that he wasn't laying directly on top of Scott any more. "I have keys but they need keyholes."

Rolling over on the backseat of a car, with one brother on top of him and another driving like a demon, was not easy. Partway through the endeavour, he found himself slipping into the footwell, only for Gordon to catch him and somewhat roughly manhandle him until he was laid on his front.

"What happened?" he asked as the keys slid into the lock and with a heavenly chink disengaged the latch. Gordon snatched the cuffs away from his wrist and made a move to sit up.

It was thwarted by John taking a corner at triple the speed limit.

"Oof."

"Still figuring that one out, bro," Gordon told him, seemingly giving up on sitting up like a sensible person complete with seat belt and flaking down on top of Scott. "Some gang activity; we guess they saw you and thought 'hey, money.' Virgil and Alan are helping out at the coffee shop. There were some injuries but nothing serious." Amber eyes surveyed him closely. "Looks like you got the worst of it."

Scott followed his line of sight to the large gash on his arm. It didn't look too bad; the blood flow had almost stopped, too.

"It's fine," he said.

"It needs cleaning and medical attention," Gordon rebuked. "John, any chance of slowing down?"

"Only if you want to be caught," John bit out. "These guys are good."

Scott tried to prop himself up high enough to see through the back window, but his gashed arm caved on him.

"Okay, fine," Gordon grumbled. "I'll see what I can do."

As it happened, he could do a reasonable amount of wrapping. It wasn't Gordon's neatest, not by a long shot, but it was something to try and keep the blood inside his body, where it belonged, and not staining the leather seats – although it was probably already too late for those.

Sitting up to try and strap in properly was out of the question with a brother sprawled out on top of him, so after a few failed attempts, Scott gave up.

"Was your rescue attempt really just 'pretend to be one of them and carry me out'?" he asked after narrowly missing landing in the footwell again.

"It worked, didn't it?" Gordon challenged him. Scott rolled his eyes.

"It worked until a point," he corrected. "Now we're in a car chase with a driver who hates gravity and is clearly trying to get the car to take off."

"Says the one who hates driving anything not measured in Mach," John retorted. "No backseat driving from the peanut gallery." They swerved around an S-bend with far less finesse than the manoeuvre required.

Scott rolled his eyes but didn't reply again. He didn't particularly want to distract John's insane driving – that was how accidents happened.

Gordon was still laying on top of him, providing some vague form of safety belt with his own body. Scott wrapped his own arms around him in turn, trying to secure him as best he could.

It was not the best car ride he had ever endured. By the time John finally decided they'd lost their pursuit and slammed on the breaks, both he and Gordon had almost fallen into the footwell several times, and likewise been thrown against the back of the seat and both doors more times than Scott cared to count. Gordon's seemingly endless limbs had also assaulted him entirely too many times, including a spot Scott really would rather knees didn't go near.

Not all of his imminent bruises were going to be from the coffee shop explosion.

It was by the remains of that same coffee shop that John had elected to finally stop, and before Scott could consider recovering long enough to push Gordon off and sit up, the door was being yanked open and Virgil's silhouette was blocking out the light.

"Scott!"

Gordon was shoved away with a yelp, tumbling out the other door and landing on top of Alan, who squawked. Scott blinked up at his brother, who was surveying him with worried brown eyes that honed in on Gordon's rough car-chase bandaging.

"Can you sit up?" Virgil asked, stooping down. With a groan, Scott pushed himself upright using his non-gashed arm, wincing at the pain that shot through him from his groin. Thanks, Gordon. His black-haired brother sidled onto the seat next to him and immediately started unwinding the bandages. A first aid kit was magicked up out of somewhere – the trunk, probably – and Scott hissed as antiseptic was applied to his various scrapes and cuts.

"I think that's the end of today's outing," John commented, still sat in the driver's seat. Scott sincerely hoped he wasn't going to be driving them back to their hotel, but Alan didn't have his license, Virgil seemed far more interested in digging out shrapnel he hadn't noticed with a pair of tweezers, and the other option was Gordon.

Scott knew full well that no-one was going to be letting him drive. He'd be lucky to claim shotgun.

"I agree," Virgil rumbled. Scott winced as a particularly sharp bit of shrapnel was tweezered out of his arm. "Gordon, Alan, get in the car."

"Shotgun!" Alan garbled, lunging for the seat in question. Gordon rolled his eyes and crawled into the back seat next to Scott, this time not landing on top of him and pulling on a seat belt in the process. Virgil paused in his ministrations long enough to engage his own, and Scott followed suit, pretending that his arm didn't hate him for the movement.

It looked like John was driving after all.

Thankfully, the ginger menace was rather more sedate when they weren't being pursued, although Scott still found himself pressed against either Virgil or Gordon whenever John had to make a tight turn. Virgil quickly gave up on levering out any more shrapnel for the time being, to Scott's relief. He didn't want more holes poked in him.

The sight of their hotel as John drew up into the parking lot was far more welcome than Scott had expected it to be when they'd left that morning. He wasn't particularly enamoured with the fact that his brothers refused to let him walk under his own steam and wedged themselves under his arms, or the knowledge that the shrapnel removal was not yet finished and would be resumed as soon as they entered the suite, but there was something relaxing about stepping into the building, away from the chaos of the city.

"Well, that was a day," Gordon commented as they piled into the suite – specifically the room Scott and John were sharing – and Scott was deposited on his bed.

He sank onto the soft sheets gratefully.

"It certainly was," John agreed.

"I vote for not doing that again," Scott added, sighing resignedly as Virgil resumed his treatment.

"Agreed," the medic said. "This is supposed to be a relaxing time off."

"Do we ever get that?" Alan asked. Virgil sighed and tied off another bandage around Scott's arm before pawing gently at his throat and nudging Scott's head to tilt back, out of the way.

"I can live in hope."

I honestly have no idea what this is, but it was really fun to write, so there's that.

Thanks for reading!
Tsari