A/N: This story has been languishing in my drafts for over five years. I've written at least five discrete endings because none of them felt right. Guess where the tonal shift due to new-as-of-this-week content happens and win a prize!
You've never told your family that when the world pleads the help of International Rescue, when the Klaxon wails and the adrenaline surges, when Thunderbirds leap proud and eager from their hangers, John Tracy ceases to exist. He vanishes, quarantined beneath a forced lockdown of thick mental firewalls that leave a nameless, determined International Rescue operative with intense mission focus in his place.
How are you supposed to put into words that sometimes it's imperative John Tracy doesn't exist? That you must sever all familial ties and become an orphan of your own making? That it's a deliberate action on your part to keep your International Rescue persona separate from anything that can be linked back to John Tracy?
Security is paramount, after all. Everyone involved in the operation has their own methods of ensuring absolute secrecy is maintained. This—this is yours.
No one needs to tell you that disassociating yourself completely is an extreme technique, but there's no danger. Not for you, not after this many years of compartmentalization. It started as a coping mechanism, a way to gradually come to terms with the ragged negative space left in your psyche, the place occupied by your mother until she didn't. You never imagined a hurting boy's need to escape would mature into a skill you now rely on every single day to save lives.
Even when it isn't enough. You weren't enough. Weren't good enough. Weren't fast enough. Weren't strong enough.
No amount of identity suppression and detachment can prevent every single death. You know that. And yet the caustic certainty that you could have done more remains, lumped hard in the base of your throat, twisting your stomach around the back of your spine.
She's dead and it's your fault.
Your brothers will try to convince you otherwise. They probably have—you don't remember. But it doesn't matter: you have no intention of listening to them. Allowing others to smother you beneath the heavy, dark blanket of denial has never been your way of dealing with problems, no matter how good their intentions.
She's dead and it's your fault—but why?
You jam the heels of your palms against your burning eyes to hide the smudges of color that should be coalescing into the lounge's familiar shapes but aren't. This is, without a doubt, the roughest transition you've ever experienced, made worse by its doubled nature. The worst bits are bleeding through, seeping around the cracking safeguards. It's an unfortunate fact that no firewall is foolproof.
You have an easier time separating yourself from John Tracy when you're on Thunderbird Five. Maybe it's the thousands of miles of empty distance between you and the nearest person. Maybe it's the lack of physical contact with your family. Maybe it's the certainty that you have an entire space station to yourself where no other living being can wander in and disrupt your concentration—or condemn you for shutting yourself away.
They—they have no right to judge you. It's not like you retreat permanently. You could, so easily. And you've considered it, in those crushing moments where the loss and pain and heartache become more than your body and your mind want to tolerate. But you'll never go through with it, never hard delete all the pathways leading back to John Tracy. You can't. Your family has already lost one precious, so very precious member. You won't put them through the agony of losing another.
Besides, it's not like you don't have a reason to live. If anything, you have too many: hundreds, thousands, an entire world of them.
No, leaving John Tracy boxed away forever is as selfish as it is useless. So you press the back of your aching head into the sofa and continue.
Releasing John Tracy isn't as simple as hitting "enter" to activate a string of code and watching the firewalls retract. It's a delicate procedure with no written formula instructing how to piece yourself back together, no blueprint to compare before and after, only your own sense of self to rely on. There's no asking other people for help—you're the only one who knows when everything feels right.
And at the moment, nothing feels right. Everything's wrong, you're wrong, all shattered and off balance and raw to the touch.
She's dead and it's your fault.
One memory. You went to the effort of a complete second reversal of self to block the one memory that's defied all attempts to manipulate it and is now pressing heavy and in colors sharper than realistically possible against the backs of your eyes.
Some memories are too vivid to shut away.
Aside from the single, too-stubborn-to-repress memory, the partitions did their job—they always do—but eventually you have to reconcile yourself into a single man, and that takes time. It doesn't help that any trauma experienced while you're segmented needs to be handled with extreme care. If you're fortunate enough to have some uninterrupted hours following a crisis, you can sort through the emotions and reach whatever closure is necessary before you stop repressing yourself and splice together any loose ends.
But solitary time isn't always available—there's no predictability in life, and marked less in the rescue business. So several years ago you constructed an emergency protocol, not to be employed unless critical, in which you perform a complete swap: trauma-riddled not–John Tracy for John Tracy.
It's a stopgap measure, only to be implemented if you need to continue functioning beyond what you can, and the side effects almost aren't worth it.
You slit one eye open, marshal the blurry blobs, like splashes of ink, into focus long enough to confirm that, yep, Virgil's still glaring at you.
It would be nice to know why, but you can't ask. Not without exposing the gaping holes in your memory.
Side effects indeed.
Movement whorls around you, sharp and disorienting, and you close your eyes against a rising swell of nausea. You should have waited for the sanctuary of your bedroom; you've never tried a reintegration this complex—or messy—before. Then again, you would have run the serious risk of falling asleep mid-defrag and inflicting worse damage upon your already fragile sense of self.
It's only happened once, but it was bad enough that you begged another month's rotation on Five so you could sort yourself out, even though every cell in your body screamed with the need to come down to Earth and spend as much time in your family's presence as humanly possible.
Experience is a cruel teacher, and you've never been the sort of person who needs to learn a lesson twice.
You're making decent headway on reconciling the sterile facts from the last... not rescue, it wasn't that successful—outing, perhaps, when hands grasp yours, pull you upright in defiance of the protests you don't have time to form and the sucking well of gravity cocooned beneath your body. No, go away, can no one see you're busy here? If they want their brother back in one piece, sanity intact, they'll leave you alone—now.
Then again, maybe Scott, because it is Scott, all glints of blue eyes and low, clipped tones muttering words you don't listen to and presence offering comfort you don't deserve—maybe, hopefully, he's defaulting to big brother and wants to make sure you get to your room safely, just as he has for as long as you can remember.
A topic that is debatable right now and will be until you finish sorting yourself out.
You can walk and unsnarl the mess in your brain at the same time, better that you're being led, but before you can snap back into full focus mode, you catch another glimpse of Virgil.
The intensity of his gaze strikes you with the force of a flaming meteor, scalding, ready to inflict grievous harm, and you scramble for the comparative safety of your own mind.
It takes but moments to bury yourself in the exacting process of affecting repairs, meshing together what is John Tracy to what isn't, but a sliver of processing power remains dedicated to puzzling out what is an unexpected turn of events.
Virgil is rarely angry, particularly toward you, so what happened? It started after you left the island two days ago, you're certain of that, otherwise you would remember the cause. Did you say or do something to turn his wrath upon you out in the field? On the return flight? A misphrased comment during debrief?
Full disclosure: you have no recollection of the debrief you just sat through—how long it lasted, what was discussed, where you sat. You think Gordon flopped down next to you, since you have a vague impression of his voice murmuring in subdued, un-Gordon-like decibels near your ear, but that might be nothing more than your fragmented memory attempting to fill in the blanks with details pilfered from the return flight to the island, or perhaps even other rescues or debriefs.
It's happened before, but since it always seems to work itself out, you're not worried. You're not feeling much of anything at the moment, just numb, hollow, the core of you echoing with a single damning certainty.
She's dead and it's your fault.
Perhaps that's why Virgil looks like he's contemplating murder. You have no way to cross-reference that theory—memory is still in tatters. Short-term is, anyway. Long-term, for whatever reason, always slots into place first, possibly due to familiarity, possibly due to the distance offered by time that separates from the now, and it's no trouble to unblock long-ago memories. They're safe, at least.
In fact, it's only two days' worth of memories that are causing trouble. Surprise, surprise.
She's dead and it's your fault.
She's dead and it's your fault.
She's dead and it's—
All right, you get it. You know. You were there.
And it's your fault.
A snarl tears itself from your lips, and you throw yourself headlong into the reintegration process. Firewalls are yanked aside, memories strobe lightning fast and lightning bright across yanked-taut synapses, emotions are acknowledged and shelved for later perusal, and after what feels like seconds and feels like days, the labor-intensive work is done.
Short-term memory is still a frazzled mess, but it's already sorting itself out, unraveling moment after moment in the time line of your life. As it shifts from high priority to a background process, you find yourself surfacing from the depths of your mind, bone weary, craving sleep but already dreading the return of dreams—nightmares—that linger in the coding of your brain. Bugs you've tried and failed to eliminate a million million times, and will no doubt try and fail to eliminate a million million times more. Maybe someday you'll get it right, smooth away the glitch.
Right. And maybe you'll discover a way to stay thirty forever. Wouldn't that be swell?
Normally your senses are at their very sharpest during your first two weeks back on Earth, so you're bewildered when you stumble over a rock—a rock? Inside?—and only the presence of a warm hand on your arm holds you steady enough for you to regain your footing.
It takes several glances around before your taxed brain correctly processes the data striking your retinas and you realize you're no longer in the villa. Hands—work strong, gentle, familiar—brush your arms and shoulders every few seconds, guiding you without force down a set of stairs cut into the slab of rock the villa is built on. For a moment, you think they're taking you over to the roundhouse, and you wonder who decided to drag you the long way to Three's hanger and why when all you want is to finish sorting yourself out and sleep; but no, you're led to the left, not right, slipping one by one behind a swaying palm of remarkable size, and suddenly you know where you're going.
You shouldn't know.
It's the only clear thought, the only certainty, that emerges from the swirling haze of lethargy clouding your mind, noxious, suffocating.
Confused. You need to act confused.
Well. That's not too hard. You're not even sure if you're fully conscious right now. Maybe this is a nightmare; maybe you'll be fortunate enough to jolt awake, heart pounding, sweat plastering your hair to your temples, shaken but secure in your bunk on Five.
But no, the sharp pain spiking through your knee when you trip over a broken branch that shouldn't be on the ground; the way one, two, three hands support you with the ease of too much practice—it's all too real. You're awake. Conscious. Little difference.
"Guys?" A sickly chill coils serpentine around your lungs. Is that your voice? You sound half dead—
Slam a heavily shielded wall across that thought. You're repairing yourself, not wreaking more damage.
No one's said anything, so you clear your throat, try again. "Where are we going?"
"You'll see."
Virgil's voice: a husky murmur, barely loud enough to reach your ears even though he's right behind you, and you don't like the way the frigid serpent shifts, tightening around your spine as his clipped words ricochet against the tender sides of your brain, painful and bruising. You and Virgil rarely argue, and you're not certain how to respond to his anger.
Not when it's justified. Not when there's no way to make it up to him.
No way to make it up to her either. She's dead. It's your fault.
But you don't want to think about it.
Correction: you don't want to feel. After what's happened, who would? And that's why you make a concentrated effort to redirect your focus toward what's happening outside of your head, even though it hurts like someone's ripping a scab with agonizing slowness off a wound that you knew existed but forced yourself to ignore. You don't want to return to the real world. You're not ready.
But if you allow yourself the indulgence of lingering in limbo, you know you'll never be ready, so you brace yourself against the pain and soldier forward with a determination that you think Scott would be proud of.
Where is Scott, anyway?
It takes some work—enough to leave you panting, although that might be due to the steep grade of the path—but eventually you isolate the correct messages pinging about your brain, which currently seems full of files that don't have a set destination and are left to drift through the vastness of cyberspace until someone gives them direction and purpose.
Your purpose, it seems, is to follow Scott up the side of this mountain and wherever else he leads you—just as you've always done.
No, that's not right. You know that's not right, but you don't dare split your attention even one more time to locate the information necessary to correct it—not now that you've succeeded in finding a balance between maintaining reintegration while also observing what's transpiring outside your head.
"Careful," Scott says, quiet, as though he doesn't want to disturb the birds singing and insects clicking away in the trees hanging over you. Or maybe he doesn't have the energy to speak any louder; he sounds exhausted. It's been a trying couple of days. "This path still hasn't been cleared from the storm that hit as we were leaving."
An equally subdued "FAB" from behind you confirms Gordon's also on this trek, and you're... not pleased—not after everything that's happened. Relieved, perhaps. You're coming to the realization that for all you want to drop unconscious to get away from everything that's happened, you equally want to be around all your brothers right now, even Virgil. Too bad Alan is stuck on Five...
You try not to think about how different things might have turned out if you'd been up there instead of him; there's nothing you can do to change the past. Won't stop you from attacking the situation from every possible angle, not now that the memories are being released. If you hadn't noticed the cry for help, if Virgil hadn't needed a second set of hands to put away the equipment, if Gordon's harness hadn't gotten tangled and wasted precious seconds, if Scott hadn't ordered that sector checked last, if the aftershock hadn't struck, if you'd been deemed unnecessary for this job, if Alan hadn't picked up the call in the first place—
"Almost to the top," Gordon says, but it's the there-and-gone pressure on the outside of your shoulder that saves you from plunging headfirst into a downward spiral of thought and emotion you won't survive with sanity intact. How he knew, you don't, but you're grateful he's as sensitive as he is.
As Scott promised, there's debris—palm fronds, chunks of dead wood, clusters of putrid half-rotten bananas—strewn across the path, if it's fair to call the cracked, rocky soil beneath your boots a path, and it takes very near all the concentration you have left to navigate around the mess. You're willing to bet next month's rotation that Scott will order this mess cleaned within the next twenty-four hours.
It's morbid of you, but part of you is relieved—glad, even; can you still feel glad?—to finally walk this path, such as it is, with your own feet. You've followed each brother, and sometimes several at once, here before but never in person, always by way of a wristwatch or, last resort, Brains-designed biochip if their need for privacy is so severe they leave their watches in the safety of the house.
There are no cameras trained on this specific path through the jungle; nearby, yes, but not on the disguised trail Scott's leading you up. You suspect the design is deliberate, although there's no way of proving your theory without destroying the privacy your brothers—and possibly your father or even Brains—have gone to such lengths to create.
Another part of you feels like an outsider. Not unwelcome, certainly not, but intruding on something that isn't for you all the same. The others have all done this before, more often than they should have had to, and you wonder if your youngest two brothers felt this way—unraveled, empty, lost—when their first times came. This did, after all, start with Scott and Virgil after a rescue-turned-recovery that they have never discussed beyond the cold, hard facts they provided during the debrief. Alan and Gordon—no, wait, never WASP-trained Gordon, just Alan used to pester them for details about it when the mood struck him.
You noticed even though no one mentioned how all pestering stopped after Alan's first trek up this pseudo-path.
And now it's your turn. You wish it weren't. That the work you and your brothers do necessitates a place where you can remove yourself from the rest of the world and break down, sometimes all the way, is rather terrifying, but you suppose it's better than never dealing with the accumulation of stress and emotion.
Even though you have your own method of doing this. But you aren't going to say anything. This isn't just about you.
You know how many times each of your brothers have been up here, and you hope beyond reason that this will be the last time. An unrealistic hope, a foolish dream. Every single time a Tracy goes on a rescue, there's every possibility something will go wrong and any combination of brothers will need to make this climb once again. You consider putting forth the idea during the next family discussion that an actual path be laid here but immediately dismiss the thought. The cliff you're hiking toward is for private retreats; having an official path leading up to it screams "come visit me!" to anyone walking by.
No, your brothers have done right in limiting the amount of attention this not-quite-a-trail receives. You wonder if your father knows. Probably, it's near impossible to slip anything past him, but as far as you're aware, he's never mentioned it, not to you, and he probably won't. He's always been concerned for the welfare of you and your brothers, but he's not nosy either. He won't pry unless you come to him first.
Your chest bumps a broad shoulder, and you lift your attention from a pile of bananas crawling with flies to peer around the back of a chestnut head. You've made it to the top.
Scott turns to you, lips drawn up in a faint smile, but his eyes are shadowed with guilt—guilt and a measure of relief burning so bright that you can't hold his gaze.
I'm glad you survived, he doesn't have to say aloud, and I feel awful because someone had to die in your place.
It's a sickening admission, but you can't hate him for it. When a call comes in and you're dispatched to the danger zone, you go out willing—never ready but always willing—to trade your safety, your life if need be, so others can live. You're International Rescue. It's what you do.
No, what wraps tight bands of impotent rage around your chest is how the choice, one life for another, isn't always yours to make. Sometimes you can do nothing, nothing, as the foundations of the Earth heave, ground splits apart, in the single moment when your very best isn't enough uproots an existence barely begun and now forever unfulfilled, leaving behind a void where once there was joy and purpose and life now turned so dark and so heavy that you might as well have not tried to save her in the first place because she's dead and it's your fault—
"Breathe," Scott says, because you aren't and you think you should but you don't want to, it hurts, why does it hurt so bad, Scotty? And then there are hands on your shoulders, firm against the base of your spine, Scott's gentle command to breathe, John, breathe soft but insistent in your ear, compelling you to listen. And because it's Scott, you obey: take a deep breath, let storm-scrubbed air cleanse away the bitter, gritty taste of raw mud and helpless frustration that's sloshed heavy in the bottoms of your lungs since day.
"That's it, deep breaths," Scott murmurs, squeezing your shoulder and then backing off when you indicate you're fine now. Well, not fine, but you can stand under your own power, and your brothers know you well enough to give you space when you request it.
As you regain control over your lungs and firmly do not think about blond hair and blue eyes and features still rounded by baby fat contorted into an expression of wordless horror—
Focus, Tracy. Time enough to grieve later.
And alone. Always.
So you square your shoulders. Let the damp sea breeze ground you in the here and now. Turn your awareness outward degree by aching degree. You're higher than you expected: the whole north coastline and almost all of the western expanse of the island are visible. This rivals the view from your observatory. How did Scott and Virgil find this spot in the first place? You'll have to go back and check their chip trails to see if either of them came up here prior to the day you thought IR was going to implode.
You don't like being wrong, never have, but you can't think of a time you were so relieved that you were mistaken.
Your brothers haven't moved, and you realize they're allowing you to take the initiative, so you do. Within moments you're seated against a concave expanse of weathered-smooth granite, Scott to your left, Gordon to your right. You expect Virgil to bookend Scott, use your eldest brother as an excuse to ignore you, so you're forced to fight your expression into neutral when he nudges Gordon aside and settles with Virgil-like deliberation into the empty space at your side.
He doesn't look at you, but it makes you wonder: Is it possible you've misread him?
Yes. There's a reason you declare yourself unfit for duty while performing reintegration.
You don't feel ready to smile yet, so the realization that there's one tugging at your lips takes you by surprise. Or not. Your brothers couldn't get closer if they tried, shoulders and elbows grazing against yours, legs stretched out to meet in a gathering of feet pointing toward the seemingly never-ending expanse of the sea, still whipped into frothy peaks by the retreating storm.
Silence reigns. As you confirm the progress of and tweak the reintegration moving systematically through your mind, you try to remember if there's a pattern your brothers follow when they come up here, but those details are lost in the murky, gelatinous sludge that's gumming up your memories now that you feel too tired to function properly. Doesn't Scott usually take the lead up here, as he always has, always will, and begin just... talking? Or does he wait and let whoever is hurting reach out to him?
You try to cast your thoughts back, but you're distracted, too aware of the heat that's radiating from your brothers and soaking into your own body, the faint trace of salt staining the breeze, the protrusion in the cliff face digging without mercy into the gap between two of your lower vertebrae.
You wonder how it's fair that you're alive to experience these sensations when so many others aren't. You wonder if you'll ever be free of the choking guilt of not being able to save them all. Of not being able to save a few.
Of not being able to save one.
"I hate this job."
Your brows furrow. This isn't the first time you've heard those words—all of your brothers have said them at least once while sitting against this rock formation over the years—and you try to figure out who said them this time. Lift your head. Realize your brothers are watching you with an understanding so deep that the breath is crushed from your lungs.
The hair on the back of your neck prickles. This is bad. You have no recollection of lining the words up in your head or giving them shape with your lips. Yes, your memory's all over the place, but you shouldn't be forgetting things that happened seconds ago.
And that isn't even the issue. That isn't why you're not sure whether the flashes of temperature change erupting all over your body are hot or cold.
The damning words—they're yours.
