Disclaimer: I don't own Thunderbirds.
Prompt from purfectpurple: "It feels like I'm dying" with Scott and John
Neither of them were prone to exaggeration. Hyperbole - John liked that word, had found it in a dictionary as a child and found it apt to describe things like Gordon's latest claims that he could hold his breath for an hour. Alan was prone to being hyperbolic, too, and even Virgil wasn't always immune, but John preferred to stick to the facts, and Scott…
Well, Scott could be known, sometimes - more so when he was younger - to flourish his storytelling a little. But something like this, he wouldn't say unless he meant it. Not after Mom. Not after Dad.
On the surface, Scott looked fine. Went about life the same way he always did, a strong, unshakable force that nothing could cower.
Under that front, however… Scott was only human. Mom's death was still an open wound. Dad's crash was raw. Scott pretended he was okay, pretended that he could manage, but he was barely twenty and Dad had been so big. So famous. So much.
And now all of that was on Scott's shoulders. In the dead of night, when no-one was watching, it was too much.
John hadn't meant to be in his brother's room. He wasn't entirely sure why he was in there, rather than his own, but despite his general preference for isolation - and the delight of having his own bedroom - he'd found himself gravitating towards his big brother.
Instantly, he'd known two things. One was that he'd never breathe a word of it to anyone. The second was that he couldn't leave.
Moonlight highlighted the tear tracks running down Scott's face, his unshakable big brother curled up at the head of his bed, knees to his chin and arms wrapped around them.
Scott was their big brother. Scott was the one that held them all together, kept them going.
Scott had lost his parents, too. Scott had lost his own support even as he carried on supporting the rest of them.
When the realisation washed over him, John felt like an idiot for not noticing how much he'd been struggling.
He didn't announce his presence, but he let the door shut silently behind him and padded across the carpet on bare feet. Whether or not Scott noticed him at all until he pulled himself onto the bed and pressed up against him, shoulder to shoulder, he didn't know.
Scott didn't pull away at the touch. There was a quiet sob at the contact, but otherwise no response. If John hadn't already realised how much he was suffering, that would have sent alarms ringing all the way through him.
It still did, Scott never one to show weakness if he could help it, but this wasn't the first time John had seen Scott broken. Fifteen years of sharing a bedroom had seen to that, and the weeks after Mom's death had been hard. Terrible.
Agonising.
Scott wasn't the big brother here. He didn't need a little brother curling up next to him and looking up at him in wide-eyed adoration and blind belief. He was the grieving son, the young man barely out of teenagerhood who'd had both his parents torn from him and four brothers to be strong for.
John shifted slightly, raising his arm and wrapping it around Scott's shoulders the way his big brother did for him when things were particularly bad and even he needed the physical contact to ground himself again.
Scott melted against his side.
Words weren't exchanged. There was nothing to say; anything he tried would be worse than meaningless. Sniffles and gulps hung in the air instead, emotions and grief pouring out of Scott after having to hold everything together for so long.
"I feel like I'm dying." The words were quiet, a secret hanging tentatively between the two of them. From anyone else, John would dismiss it as hyperbole. Scott… Not Scott.
He tightened his hold, feeling his brother slot more firmly against his side in an almost unheard of role reversal, because Scott needed this even if it wasn't John's personal preference when it was him on the receiving end.
"There's so much," Scott carried on, more words to linger for a moment before scattering into the void of the night, never to be caught again. "Dad- He-" A louder gulp interrupted the stuttered words. "I'm drowning."
John understood. Dad had been larger than life, but he'd lived more than twice as long as Scott. He'd had time to amass all of that, to adjust to the weight of the world he was building.
That world had slammed on top of Scott all at once. He hadn't been ready for it, and it was breaking him.
Drowning him, as Scott put it, as though it had morphed into shackles, pulling him down, down, down, into the depths of responsibility. Maybe it had. But whatever form it had taken, John knew what he had to do.
"You won't," he promised, voice just a little louder than Scott's near-silent confessions. Firmer. "I won't let that happen."
Scott's breath hitched, but it was a startle, not another sob. "You-"
"We'll work it out." Ideas were already swirling, logistics and what responsibilities could and should be shared coming to the fore, but now wasn't a time to vocalise those. Now was a time to hold his brother afloat. "I won't let you drown."
They weren't the two kids that sometimes curled up in the same bed when the world got too rough any more. They were both adults, if only barely, and John hadn't shared his sleeping space with anyone else - even Scott - in years. Not since Mom had died, and there was a tragic poignancy that it was mourning for Dad that had them back in this position again.
John let his bare toes nudge underneath the covers, pressing his ankle to Scott's in a silent promise that tonight, he wasn't leaving. A shudder ran through his brother at the touch, and as though a switch had been flicked, Scott moved.
Come morning, there would be no sign that it had ever happened. Scott would rise with the sun and get on with his day while John slunk back into his own room before any little brothers noticed he hadn't spent the night there, and they'd go back to the daily routine of scraping their lives back together. John would find a way to start siphoning off responsibilities, releasing Scott from some of the weights dragging him into the depths, despite the resistance his brother would put up, and the world would keep turning the same as it always did.
Come morning, no-one but the moon and stars would know that Scott spent the night curled up against John's chest, head buried in his shoulder and salt on his cheeks, as though he was a drowning man and John was the lifeline keeping his head above the water.
Scott fell asleep like that, looking like the young, lost, fledgling of a man he was, kept afloat for one night by his brother.
There was no sleep for John that night.
If this feels familiar, it's probably because this used to be in my collection fic Behind The Scenes. I recently reorganised that collection and came to the decision to post anything 1000+ words independently, so some chapters have been removed from that and will be going up as individual works over the coming weeks.
Thanks for reading!
Tsari