Disclaimer: I don't own Thunderbirds
Spoilers for 3.25 "The Long Reach (Part 1)"
It was quiet in the bowels of Tracy Island. Not silent – after the depths of space at the edge of the solar system Jeff didn't think anything on Earth would ever be silent to him again – but devoid of conversation, voices talking all at once all the time in an endless babble. He hadn't thought he'd be uncomfortable in his own home, surrounded by his sons, mother, and those not related by blood but family all the same, but after an eternity in solitude the presence of so many other warm bodies at once overloaded his senses.
He needed to be alone again, just for a little while.
It wasn't even the sensory overload, too much noise all at once. It was the awkwardness, the way the dynamic was there but changed, evolved to exclude him. His younger four never knew where to turn, looking to Scott before him when there was a decision to be made, and Scott himself jarring to a halt each time as they struggled to determine which of them had command of the organisation, of the family.
He loved them all dearly, never wanted to leave them ever again, but the need for a timeout was burning.
A shadow caught his attention, a large figure in the edge of his periphery informing him that he wasn't alone in the catacombs below the villa. The silhouette fit none of his family, blood or otherwise, leaving the logical conclusion that it belonged to the mysterious tenth occupant of Tracy Island.
Jeff had yet to interact with the man mysteriously referred to as nothing more than Mechanic beyond Brains' brief introduction of him as the engineer behind the T-Drive engines in both the ill-fated Zero-X and the more successful Zero-XL. He was having a difficult enough time interacting with his own family, people he should know better than himself. An elusive engineer who was seen little and spoke less was put aside to deal with later.
"I did not realise anyone else was down here," the Mechanic said, looking up from whatever he was fiddling with as he noticed Jeff before the older man could find a new solitude. "I will leave."
Jeff watched him awkwardly pack up his project, and realised he knew nothing about this man.
Absolutely nothing.
No expectations, no preconceptions, no years of daydreaming and wondering.
The Mechanic was just another person to meet.
"Wait," he called, lengthening his stride to catch up with the hulk of a man. He looked intimidating, jagged tattoos over bulging muscles, but Jeff had met many different people over his life. Appearances were most often misleading.
The Mechanic paused, looking at him as he drew level.
"What is it?" he asked. A severe lack of human interaction had done nothing good for Jeff's ability to read people, but he fancied that the Mechanic was defensive. Nervous, maybe? Or perhaps the man was always like this, a quirk of genius like Brains and his eternal stutter.
Impulsivity had always been his downfall – a trait Scott had undoubtably inherited, from both his memories and the stories babbled by Alan. Jeff had no plan for what to say, how to interact with this true stranger in his home.
Spontaneity had always been his strength – that one visible in Gordon every day, even now – especially now. Jeff didn't need a plan.
"I haven't thanked you yet," he said. "The boys say they couldn't have reached me without your help."
The Mechanic made a noise like a scoff.
"Without me, you would never have been stuck there in the first place," he said, turning his head away. "I do not deserve your thanks."
"The T-Drive engine is amazing," Jeff said to the broad, leather-covered back as the Mechanic started to walk away. Stubbornness was a Tracy trait through and through, and if Jeff could tough it out through too many years alone and trapped light years from home, he could manage a simple conversation – one-sided though it might be.
It was still better than talking to himself.
"It nearly killed you." Not so one-sided, then, although this time the Mechanic was continuing to walk away. Jeff, despite all his original plans of peace and quiet for just a while, followed.
"But it didn't," he pointed out, gesturing to himself. "I'm still here, alive and kicking for a while yet."
This time there was no response, the Mechanic steadfastly ignoring him as he continued to walk. But Jeff wasn't finished.
"Mankind never got anywhere by taking it easy," he said, old words he'd shared with Lee many a time when things went wrong and their equipment failed. Words he'd told himself over and over in the eternal night of the Oort Cloud, the sun little more than a distant memory and almost indistinguishable from any other star in the sky. Words he'd clung to when the enormity of his situation threatened to overwhelm him.
Whatever reaction, or lack thereof, he'd expected that to draw from the Mechanic, laughter was not it.
It was more of a chuckle than anything else, a quickly-stifled expression of amusement that lit up the man's face for a brief moment. Jeff thought it made him look younger, just for a moment.
"You really are your mother's son," the Mechanic said, face resetting into the more melancholy expression Jeff was used to seeing – if he could say he was used to anything about the Mechanic, when this was his first real interaction with him.
The words hit him harder than he thought they should. He'd been compared to his father, Lee, and even his sons before, but his mother? For all that she was a tough woman, hard as old leather and well and truly married into the Tracy stubbornness, she had never been in the limelight of his achievements.
"Follow your own path, not mine, Jeff," she'd told him in his youth even as she guided his hands to the controls of a plane for the first time and taken him across the world in a small single-engine craft most would have condemned to a museum before he was born.
For the comparison to come now, years after his own prime and from a man that knew of him more from family stories than any interaction? It felt odd, like a new pair of shoes not yet quite moulded into shape.
But it felt right, a new outfit to slip into now his prime was behind him and the torch passed to his sons.
"I suppose you're right," he said, barking his own short laughter. "But that's no bad thing."
Something like amusement gleamed in dark eyes, and the Mechanic stopped walking, looking him up and down before breaking into what Jeff suspected was the first smile – nothing big, a small uptick of the corner of his mouth and the smoothing out of deeply carved from lines – in a long, long time.
"No," the man agreed. "It's not."
I am so excited to see how Jeff and the Mechanic get along because I think that'll be an amazing relationship (but with so much left to tie up and only 22 minutes to do so I won't be surprised if that's something to be left to the imagination of fans). The Mechanic's relationship with Grandma is a beautiful one and I do think he'll find familiarity in the mannerisms Jeff inherited from her, even if Jeff doesn't see those himself - "mankind never got anywhere by taking it easy" is something I've always felt would have been just as right coming from Grandma, even if it's one of Jeff's iconic lines.
tl;dr Jeff&Mechanic friendship please.
While this fic focuses more on the Stranger than the Familiar, I still consider this to be one of my Familiar Stranger fics - Jeff's adaptation back to life on Tracy Island.
Thanks for reading!
Tsari