Disclaimer: I don't own Thunderbirds.
IRRelief fic, using gumnut-logic's prompt "Toffee on the couch"
Gordon was tired. Very, very tired. By all rights, he should have stumbled to his bedroom to flop on his wonderful, soft, comfy bed, but that required tackling stairs and he was too tired for that nonsense. His launch chute got him up as far as the den, so that was as far as he was going. A graceless collapse had him landing face first on a sofa.
His body connected with cushions, as expected. His face found contact with something less soft and desirable – and sticky.
Weariness was immediately abandoned as he lurched upright, clawing at his face in an attempt to clean it of whatever someone had left on the sofa. Squinting, his fingernails came away with something brown under them, and his first instinct was to recoil in horror before the sweet scent registered.
Cautiously, he sniffed his fingers, and scowled.
Which one of his evil brothers had left half-melted toffee on the sofa for him to faceplant? It would have been a stroke of genius as a prank, if not for two important factors: first off, it was not Gordon's prank, and secondly, they hadn't left anything between the sticky nonsense and the cushions themselves. Even he was careful not to make a mess that would get Grandma up in arms.
He didn't know which of his brothers was responsible, but Gordon smelt an accident, not a prank, if only for that fact. If even he didn't dare push Grandma's buttons when it came to food on the furniture, then none of his brothers would. Now, the question was, did he ignore it and let it be someone else's problem, or did he get up and do something about it?
The knowledge that if it was left to someone else, the blame might come crashing down on the resident prankster's – his – head spurred him into reluctant action. If nothing else, he could just report it to Grandma, he reasoned, yawning loudly. Yes, he'd do that. The clean-up could be done by the brother responsible.
He stumbled down the flight of stairs to the kitchen, where Grandma was almost certainly to be found, to his stomach's ongoing distress. Sure enough, arguing with the automated kitchen module again, his purple-clad grandmother was wielding a whisk in a manner that was too similar to the wooden spoon of his childhood.
"Hey, Grandma?" Interrupting her in the kitchen was a dangerous business, and already he was formulating several possible excuses to not eat anything he was offered as she turned to him.
"Hello, kid," she grinned. "Long rescu- What have you got on your face, young man?" she demanded as his toffee-covered face caught her attention.
"I think it's toffee," he groaned, making a half-hearted attempt to cover another yawn. It had been a long rescue, and with Virgil off on another mission when the call had come in, and the trouble off the Australian coast, he'd had to launch from the island and complete it solo.
He didn't do solo missions often. Thunderbird Four often relied on her big green sister for transportation to rescue sites, meaning that Virgil was guaranteed to be with him, and it wasn't unusual for Thunderbird One to come a-hovering overhead, worried big brother supervising and ready with a helping cable on the off chance it might be needed. Maybe, just maybe, he was used to being able to crash out on the way home, and actually having to pilot all the way back to base was unusual enough to be an additional strain on a tired aquanaut.
"And why is there toffee on your face?" Grandma asked him, finding a cloth from somewhere and wiping at his face like he was a child. He was too tired to stop her.
"Face-planted the sofa and found someone left toffee on the cushion," he yawned.
"Someone?" she asked, pausing her dabbing to narrow her eyes at him.
"Wasn't me, Grandma," he mumbled in protest. "Don't like toffee. Wouldn't get the sofa sticky, either."
She scrutinised him intently for several moments before resuming her cleaning of his face. He leaned against the counter and let her.
"So who is cleaning my sofa cushions?" she asked him, and he shrugged.
"I don't know," he admitted. "Not me."
"I can see that," she chuckled. "You're asleep on your feet, kid. Up to bed with you. I'll find the culprit."
"Wanna watch," he protested, and she shook her head.
"I'm sure I can get Brains to record the hunt," she told him. "Bed, now. Unless you want supper first?"
Supper?
Gordon's body found another surge of energy, straightening up and stumbling for the stairs.
"That's okay, Grandma," he waved sleepily. "I'll eat something later."
It wasn't his record for a kitchen to bedroom flight, but it was still pretty impressive. Face-planting his bed – where he should have gone in the first place, although at least now Grandma believed he hadn't done it, against whatever claims his guilty brother might make – he made no effort to undress.
"John?" he called out sleepily, and a hologram flickered into life by his bed.
"I'll record it," his brother said without prompting. "Get some shuteye while you can."
"You know whose toffee it is?" he mumbled, and John let out a short sound of amusement.
"What do you think?"
Gordon groaned, because that was either John speak for 'no, but I'm not admitting I don't know something' or, more likely considering the amusement, 'yes, but I'm bored and I'm an evil, evil brother who wants to watch and laugh' - or however John expressed his amusement, because flat-out laughter was not his style (although Gordon suspected he just laughed when there was no-one to hear him, thereby preserving his image).
"Sleep, Gordon," John insisted.
"Sleeping," he groaned into the pillow.
He wasn't sure what woke him, but the sun was glaring in through his window which meant it was way past time he should have been doing his morning laps, and he groaned, pushing himself up from his bed and cautiously stretching out his back. A little stiff, but nothing worse than usual.
Nothing a good swim couldn't fix.
Urgh, he was still in yesterday's clothes. Forget showering after the mission, he hadn't even shed his shirt, and the pool hadn't done anything to deserve something this gross (it suffered enough from Thunderbird One's exhaust, thank you, Scott).
Okay, shower first, then swim, then another shower. That sounded like a perfect, if belated, start to the day, provided a certain space resident didn't pipe up and send him out on a rescue.
Speaking of John, he'd been talking to him last night, he was sure of it. What was it..? He stumbled into his en suite, glared at the mirror that greeted his thoroughly dishevelled appearance, and poked at a lump of something brown that had caught in his hair.
Toffee.
The toffee!
"John?" he called, shucking well-worn and stinky clothes and lobbing them out into a dirty clothes pile by the door, ready to be well and truly shoved into the washing machine at the nearest opportunity. Clean freak he was not, but Thunderbird Four was the only place he suffered foul-smelling laundry and body odour for any length of time. The hazards of research trips.
"Did you have to wait until you got rid of your clothes before calling me?" his older brother sighed, ginger head flickering into view. Was it slightly weird that his brother had access to his bathroom? Probably, but rescues didn't wait for dirty squids (or flyboys, for that matter; Gordon had seen all of his brothers in less clothing than he'd particularly care for during mission briefings before). Besides, it was a great place for private conversations – none of his fellow Earthlings were going to walk into his bathroom unannounced.
"Jealous?" he asked, flexing arm muscles out of habit as he stuck his tongue out. There was at least a concession that the holocam couldn't detect anything below chest height in bathrooms – whose benefit that was actually for, who knew. It wasn't like it was nothing any of them had seen before (individual bathrooms was an Island luxury – they'd been sharing bathrooms and even baths at times in Kansas).
"Of what, your height?" John quipped. Gordon narrowed his eyes at him. "I have something you want, Gordon. Don't try it."
So that was a yes to the unasked question: Grandma had found the culprit, and there was a recording ready and waiting for Gordon's viewing pleasure. He looked at the floating head expectantly, hand on hip as he waited for it.
"You're going to watch it in the shower?" John asked, before shaking his head with a sigh. "How am I related to you?"
"Because we both take entertainment from our brothers ending up on Grandma's bad side?" Gordon offered. John acknowledged the point. "So now that we've agreed that we are, in fact, brothers, can I have that video?"
"One last thing." Gordon groaned. Maybe asking John to record it had been a bad idea. Maybe he should have trusted Grandma to get Brains or MAX to do it for him. Who knew what he was going to have to pay John for this privilege?
Aw, who was he kidding? No matter who recorded it, John was going to end up with monopoly on who could watch it. He was sneaky like that.
"Two, in fact." Gordon groaned more loudly. Still, waiting was always worse, and unlike certain other brothers, John didn't have the sadistic streak of making him beg – much, anyway. He derived his amusement in other factors. Like playing brothers off against each other… Gordon was starting to get an inkling what one of those two things might be.
"Okay, what are they?"
"First is a message from Grandma: She's got him on laundry duty for the next week, including all of the sofa covers, and says to be creative with your revenge."
"Revenge? Moi?" Gordon certainly hadn't been planning to exact a little revenge for an accident that got toffee on his face. Certainly not.
"Secondly," John continued as though he hadn't said anything – he was good at that, was John – "You did not get this footage from me, nor does any other assistance that might appear during your endeavours over the next week have anything to do with me."
Ooh, Johnny-boy wanted to get involved. Gordon's face split into a grin. This was going to be fun. He hadn't had a team-up with the second eldest, so-called 'responsible' one, in a while.
"What did our culprit do to you?" he asked. The grin he got back was maybe a little chilling, as he was reminded that the current resident prankster was not the original resident prankster.
"Who said they did anything?"
That proved it. John was bored. Gordon almost felt sorry for the brother who left toffee lying around. Almost. His face was still phantom-sticky.
"Play the video, big bro," he grinned, stepping into the shower.
Grandma on the hunt. He hadn't seen that in a while (without being the prey, anyway).
It was almost disappointing, how easily she collared the perpetrator. She'd put on a show – one Gordon appreciated – of interrogating each and every non-Gordon Island resident (and even John, although both parties had been too busy trying not to show their amusement for that to be anything but staged), but it was clear even from the very beginning that she Knew.
The final confrontation was pitiful. A confession, right off the bat? Clearly his brother had no understanding of how the world worked. Confessing to a crime of that magnitude did not reduce your sentence one iota, which a crestfallen face at a week of laundry duty showed some belated awareness of.
It did not escape Gordon's attention that at no point had his unfortunate encounter with the toffee been mentioned. Brothers had mentioned his name, of course (even Brains, oh ye of little faith), but Grandma had expertly deflected them away from his scent. Oh to watch a master – or mistress, as it may be – at work.
Gordon hadn't done a prank with Grandma as an ally since he was a very small child, imagination limited to switching the salt and sugar. With John and Grandma secretly supporting him, the possibilities were endless.
But really, there was only one way to start this.
"John," he sing-songed, stepping out of the bathroom after towelling himself dry and pulling on some underwear – if he wanted to pull this off, he was going to need to keep John on his side, which meant keeping him sweet and not playing the usual obnoxious younger brother beyond keeping up the charade.
"Yes, Gordon?" John's hologram appeared by his bed, this time almost full length and in an almost sitting position.
"How might a squid locate Scott's toffee stash without the assistance of an eye in the sky?"
He hadn't even known Scott had a toffee stash until the confession. Crafty biggest brother. Crafty.
Not crafty enough.
There is a chance this might get more chapters added at some point, but for now it'll sit here as a oneshot.
IRRelief is an amazing idea and bless Gumnut for coming up with it! For those that don't know, it's a collection of prompts anyone can add to and use on tumblr, with a focus on fluff, to give us something to do while we're stuck indoors. Full details are on tumblr under the tags #irrelief and #irrelief2020
Thanks for reading!
Tsari