Scott didn't know what he'd done to deserve this, but some higher power had clearly decided that Earth was not fond of him, presumably due to some transgression or other he was utterly unaware of.

He specified Earth because he'd spent much of the previous day in space with his youngest brother, and there everything had (rarely) gone to plan. The space shuttle in distress – a cargo load heading for Mars – had been out of fuel after stray space junk had punctured their fuel tank, stranding them about halfway between Earth and Mars. It had been child's play to fix – literally, as Alan went EVA to patch up the leak and set up the fuel line between the red Thunderbird and the grey space vessel (why were they always grey? Was International Rescue really the only organisation that had found a way to make spacecraft not grey? Even Thunderbird Five was partially gold).

Scott had been little more than a passenger on the rescue – he wouldn't say that was how he liked it, but watching Alan handle a simple rescue solo definitely went a little way towards soothing his nerves about his youngest brother out in space. He'd pushed a button to get the fuel moving from Three to the other ship, but that was about the extent of his contribution. As Alan quipped, glowing from his success, he might as well have stayed at home.

He should have stayed at home, it turned out several hours later when Grandma was standing, arms crossed, in the den upon their arrival. Alan had declared that he had the fuel to stay up a little longer, and with John confirming no other distress calls in space or in need of Thunderbird One, Scott had been unable to find an argument against Alan's gathering up of more dangerous space junk and dumping it "where space junk goes to die!". Alan's words, not his. It was a good thing to do, and showed Alan's growing maturity compared to the days of complaining cleaning up space junk was grunt work.

But elbow deep in laundry, he really wished he'd just stayed at home. Then, his half-eaten toffee might not have fallen out of a pocket as he'd listened to the brief before heading to gear-up and melted its way into the fabric for Grandma to discover. She had not been happy, especially as messy food was banned from the den after a few too many similar incidents in the past. He wasn't entirely sure when toffee had been added to that list, but Grandma was adamant that it was – had even shown him the list, with toffee up there with ice cream in cones (he remembered what had prompted that one well) and sherbet (Gordon had thought they should celebrate Lady Penelope's puppy with its namesake… they were still finding white specks every so often during cleaning) – and he'd been forced to make an apology and accept the chore of laundry for a week.

That included, unusually, but perhaps fitting for the punishment, all furniture fabric as well. All week. If he wanted to join his younger brothers in making a mess of the sofas, he could spend a week appreciating her struggles keeping it clean, Grandma had told him firmly. Privately, Scott thought that was a little unfair, especially as he knew she only washed the fabric once a month, but he had enough self-preservation instincts to not question it out loud.

If that was it, he might not think the world was out to get him. Unfortunately, that was not it, and it revolved entirely around toffee.

Somehow, toffee had ended up in the washing machine. Specifically, he discovered that it had been in some familiar jean pockets. Clearly, not all of the toffee had fallen out of his pocket after all, and he'd missed the stub still remaining until the washing machine had ground to a protesting stop and water started leaking out of the pipes.

Grandma's tongue had been sharp over that mistake – you can pilot the most advanced planes in the world but you can't remember to empty pockets for laundry – and Virgil hadn't been much happier when he'd been called up to help Scott rescue what he could of both laundry and machine. Thoroughly scolded from both angles, he had rather sheepishly been forced to resort to hand-washing everything.

Toffee was delicious, but he never wanted to leave any in his pockets ever again. It was almost worst than bloodstains to remove – scratch that, it was worse than bloodstains. At least Scott, unfortunately, had experience with that one. Toffee just stuck, and even when the lump of food itself was gone, the stickiness lingered.

It took him about an hour to rescue his jeans, the stiff denim particularly attractive to the adhesive properties of toffee.

"Woah, Virg wasn't kidding when he said you'd made a mess."

Gordon's invasion of the laundry room was entirely unwanted, especially when Scott made the mistake of turning to glare at him. In his brother's arms was a pile of dirty laundry, and it was with a sinking feeling he looked back at the clothes already soaked through and ready for a final rinse and realised the lack of anything particularly loud.

He groaned.

"You couldn't have brought that lot down earlier?" he despaired. Gordon shrugged apologetically.

"I overslept this morning," he explained – Scott recalled the unusualness of Gordon not in the pool when he had breakfast earlier, a fact pushed from his mind by a broken washing machine. "Yesterday's rescue was a beast."

What had Gordon been doing yesterday? Something near Australia, he'd heard over the comms.

"You didn't sleep in that late," he argued.

"Well, no," Gordon admitted. "But when I got to the den one of the sofas had lost all its cushions and Alan told me you were on laundry duty."

There was the mischievous glint in amber eyes Scott had been waiting for the moment his younger brother had made his presence known. No doubt, Gordon had decided to play up the annoying aspect of being a little brother to dump his clothes in the basket for washing after he'd started.

"Oh, and I'm meeting Penelope tomorrow," the blond menace said airily. "She likes that shirt of mine."

Scott growled at him, swiped the dumped clothes, and threw them into the mix.

"Thanks, Scotty!"

A blinding grin that was far too innocent to be innocent, and he was gone. Scott stared at the water in front of him and idly considered shoving his head in it. Now that Gordon had set a precedent – and yes, he shouldn't have let Gordon get away with it but him and Penelope was something Scott didn't dare interfere with one way or another – he was going to be getting that from at least two brothers, if not all three of the ones on Earth, depending how annoyed Virgil was about the washing machine.

What did he do to deserve this? Surely a dropped chunk of toffee wasn't worth all this?

Gordon's additional laundry was thankfully toffee-free, having escaped the earlier disaster, but it still forced him to spend an additional fifteen minutes or so scrubbing them before they could join the rest in the rinse.

John summoned him halfway through hanging them up to dry the traditional way – no washing machine meant no dryer – and he traipsed up to the den, where Virgil gave him a dark look and the blonds gave him a contrasting bright and sunny one. They'd been playing outside from the looks of it, although where, on their tropical island that hadn't seen rain in several weeks, they'd found mud he didn't want to know. Virgil's sleeve was covered with what looked like gunk from repairing the washing machine, and Scott inwardly withered at the knowledge he had to wash all of that later.

His earlier predictions about three brothers making the laundry hell for a week seemed to already be coming true, and it was only the first day. Surviving the week was going to be hell, and he wondered – not for the first, and almost certainly not the last time – what he'd done to deserve this.

At least one brother wasn't around to torment him with additional laundry. John was amused at his plight – that much was obvious even through a hologram – but up in orbit there was little he could do to add to it, much to Scott's private relief. There were times he could be worse than Gordon, in his own way.

"There's been a mudslide in the Pyrenees," John began. "A small village has been partially buried and the local authorities are stuck on the other side of the slip." Scott squashed the dread at the word mud and snapped into gear.

"I hope you two aren't fed up with mud," he quipped to the youngest two as he headed for his launch chute. The laughs he got back were lack-luster – none of them liked mudslides. "Both of you, go with Virgil in Thunderbird Two. We'll need all hands on this one." That meant four muddy uniforms to be washed by hand because the washing machine was out of action.

He pushed that thought aside for later. Rescue now, unpleasant chores later.

Maybe that should have been unpleasant rescue now, unpleasant chores later. Scott always tried to look on the bright side of rescues – the moment he started thinking of them as a chore would be the moment International Rescue failed, after all – but there were some that really just knew how to drag a guy down.

Uncooperative authorities, another mudslide halfway through the rescue narrowly avoiding burying Gordon and plastering him with mud, and more mud in his cockpit on the way home was one such scenario. Of course, the knowledge that the washing machine was still broken and that four thoroughly brown uniforms would need cleaning by his hand thanks to Grandma's rather severe punishment didn't help matters at all. He also needed to make sure One was fit to fly before the next call came in, and couldn't rely on any help for that because Two also needed a clean (arguably moreso), and as the bigger ship, Virgil would no doubt collar everyone available for her.

At least he had Brains and MAX for help until the slower Thunderbird got home, and between the three of them, they made a pretty good team. It was hardly the first time a Thunderbird had come home more brown than her painted colours, after all. Brains, bless the man, had a high-power jet was designed to do most of the heavy external work, and had deployed it as soon as he vacated the cockpit and grappled down to the hangar floor. No point in getting changed out of his muddy uniform until the mud was gone from his Thunderbird, after all. That would just mean more laundry.

Still, it was a good two hours of scrubbing the parts the high-power jet wash couldn't reach – inside and out – not helped by the call for help from MAX once Thunderbird Two rumbled into her hangar leaving them a robot short, before Scott could leave his once-again gleaming Thunderbird and traipse into the locker room. Strictly speaking, he should go and help his brothers with the behemoth that was Thunderbird Two, but his own uniform was going to take forever to de-mud, and if he made a head start on it now, he might even be vaguely finished by the time three more were added to the pile.

It was with only a little guilt that he washed up and pulled on civvies before sending his dirty uniform up the chute to the laundry room and trekking up the hundreds of steps to rejoin it in the room he suspected he was going to be seeing a lot of over the next week. Younger brothers were a real menace at times, although he still wouldn't trade them for the world.

Even if they were less than sympathetic, and indeed a little too happy to be dropping off dirty uniforms several hours later.

"I'll see about the washing machine in a bit," Virgil at least had the grace to promise, even if the effect was somewhat lessened by the matching grins on all three faces. What with the chute to deliver the uniforms for them, there was absolutely no reason for any of them to have come to the room other than to torment him, and the youngest two were sent away irritably, and Virgil with only a little more tact.

Thankfully, once wiped free of mud, John was willing to check that all their built-in electrics were still functioning as they should, and it was simple enough to chuck them into another chute which would return them to their storage, ready for the next use. Brains had made them easily washable for a reason, and was fast becoming Scott's favourite resident of the island.

When he finally made it to the den and collapsed into the desk chair, ready to tackle the paperwork, he discovered two things. The first was that John had done the entire rescue report, making him Scott's favourite brother.

The second was that someone had left some half-melted toffee on the seat of the chair.

Several months later, I'm back with the next instalment! I still haven't finished writing the fic so I can't guarantee frequent updates, but this chapter, at least, has been sat around for a while so I figured it was time to let it loose.

Thanks for reading!
Tsari