A/N: It's probably already become apparent from previous chapters, but I still feel the need to warn that there will be references to torture throughout the rest of this story. It's bloodless and will never be described, but it's there.

Also, there was something weird about notifications for the last update, so if you've been subscribed to this story, you might want to check and make sure you've read the chapter that comes before this one. As always, thank you so much for the reviews. They truly make my day.

To say that John was still reeling from the events of the past 24 hours would be an understatement so vast as to be comical under other circumstances. His kidnapping would have been staggering enough, but to wake up to find that his father was still alive, that John was to be used as leverage to get him to build weapons for a greedy sociopath…it was too much to process at once. Joy and anger and terror were warring within him, threatening to overwhelm him.

John didn't break down easily though, and he'd managed to find a state of calm, such as it was. It wasn't that he didn't understand what was coming, how bad things might get. But he also shared his father's conviction, and that meant there was nothing he could do but brace himself and hope he could make it through. So instead of simply waiting around in fear, he'd decided to take advantage of the one positive aspect of this nightmare, and just chat with his dad for the first time in two years.

He started with an update on their family.

"Grandma Tracy's been keeping us all in line," he was saying. "No easy task, but she's more than up to it. She even helped Virgil out in the field on a mission last year."

"She what?"

John grinned at Dad's expression.

"It's true," he said. "Virgil was taking her to visit Lady Penelope in London when the Hood triggered an EMF device that shut down every electronic device in the city, including all the ones in Thunderbird 2."

That had been a terrifying few hours. Virgil's signal had just been gone, and nothing John did could get it back, or penetrate the bubble of radio silence surrounding London. He wasn't used to being so blind or helpless, particularly where his family was concerned. He'd sent Scott after Virgil and Grandma, but Thunderbird 1's systems had started to fail just outside the city limits, and he'd been forced to turn back. All they'd been able to do then was wait.

"Apparently," John went on, "she coached Virgil through a Stone Age rescue, and then helped him and Lady Penelope stop some kind of luddite cult, all in time to get the lights back on for afternoon tea."

Dad shook his head, his lips twitching.

"I'll just bet she did," he said. He let out a bemused huff of air. "My mother, on a rescue. I would've paid to see that."

Him and John both.

"It's been good to have her on the Island," John said. "Although, there are definitely times when I'm grateful to be up on Thunderbird 5. Grandma has come close to poisoning us on more than one occasion."

Dad laughed. It had a slightly disused quality to it, but it was still a rich, booming sound that had John blinking away an abrupt wave of tears. He hadn't realized how much he'd missed that laugh.

"Yeah, it's a good thing your Grandpa was such a good cook, or I'm not sure I would've made it to adulthood," Dad said. "But there was no escaping the cookies."

"Oh believe me, there still isn't."

John treasured the sight of Dad's smile. It vanished in an instant though, and then Dad was on his feet, placing his body between the bench and the door that was just beginning to slide open.

John blinked and looked up, his stomach lurching. He couldn't see past Dad, who was standing protectively in front of him, as if he could shield his son from view and whatever was coming. But that wasn't possible, and John didn't want to face this cowering behind his father.

He stood as well. His legs were slightly unsteady beneath him, but they held, and he went to take his place at Dad's shoulder. There was the faintest trace of a distortion in the air, and John realized that the force field Dad had told him about had been activated. Through it, he could see the man standing in the doorway, flanked by armed guards.

John recognized Kingsley Barrett now. Scott was the one who had taken over as CEO of Tracy Industries after Dad's disappearance, but John oversaw the company's finances, and he helped his brother keep up to date. By necessity, John was always plugged in, always monitoring the globe and its billions of inhabitants. It wasn't too hard to narrow that focus to the corporate world when he needed to.

But Barrett was something of an unknown in that world. His company was usually a consistent earner, but it had never gained much of a reputation for itself. It'd had a few costly missteps in the last few years, investing in enterprises that were doomed to failure, and rumor had it that it was hemorrhaging capital. Perhaps that was why its owner had turned to such extreme measures.

Barrett glanced at John for a moment, his gaze cool and assessing, before focusing on Dad.

"Well, Jeff? This is your last chance to do things the easy way."

John spared Dad the pain of his answer.

"It's not the easy way if it puts the entire world at risk," he said, taking a step forward.

"Is that what your father told you?" Barrett asked him. "Oh, John, he's sadly misrepresented me. I mean the world no harm. I don't want weapons because I want to use them, I want them so that no one else can."

John fixed him with an unimpressed look. He had it on good authority (i.e. Gordon) that the expression was quite quelling.

"I thought you knew I was smart, Mr. Barrett."

Barrett shrugged and waved a hand behind him. He retreated into the doorway as the armed men strode past him into the cell. John heard the faint change in the ambient sound of the room that meant the force field had dropped again, and then the guards were upon them. Three of them grabbed Dad to hold him in place, while the others seized John by the arms. It was then that things seemed to become real for Dad, the moment he well and truly realized what was about to happen.

"No, wait!" he said urgently, tugging against the hold on his arms. "Barrett, please, you don't have to do this, take me instead!"

Barrett just sneered at him.

"We already tried that," he said. "It didn't work, remember? Like I told you, new methods."

He nodded at the guards, who started hauling John backwards, towards the door. John had told himself that he wasn't going to resist, wasn't going to make this any more difficult than it had to be, but his heart rate still spiked, and cold sweat still broke out over his skin as reality began to sink in for him too. He sought his father's gaze desperately.

"Be strong, John," Dad urged, his attempt at a reassuring expression marred by the fear and anguish that haunted his eyes. "You'll get through this, I promise. I'm here, son."

But then the cell door was closing, blocking him from view.

"Don't worry," Barrett told John. "He'll see you again quite soon. I'm afraid it will be some time longer before you see him though."

John wasn't sure he wanted to know what that meant.

He focused on his surroundings as they went. He was being marched through a harshly lit corridor, tubelike in design. A few doors branched off into what looked like laboratory facilities, workshops, a server room, all without any windows that would let him start to figure out where they were. Many of the rooms appeared to be empty.

"What's the matter?" John asked Barrett. "Couldn't find any real talent to work for you willingly?"

"I have plenty of people lined up for when your father finally starts cooperating, you spoiled little brat," Barrett snapped. "Until then, there wouldn't be much for them to do, would there?"

John thought it was a little rich to call someone who slept in a spacesuit and never got to finish a damn bagel because he spent every waking moment trying to save others a spoiled brat. Still, he'd been called worse because of his father's fortune, and it was hardly his greatest concern.

"With facilities like this, you could be doing some real work here," he said. "Now, I know my father is pretty impressive, but he's not the only innovator in the world. If you hired people to work on their own projects, I think you'd be amazed at the results you'd get."

Barrett just stared at him for a moment. And then he snorted.

"God, the whole lot of you really are smug, superior sons of bitches, aren't you?" he asked. "I can't wait to see you shut up."

A moment later, John was being tugged into another room, cold and barren. A metal table equipped with wrist and ankle restraints stood in its center, one end raised slightly higher than the other. John's eyes landed on the drain in the floor, and his heart jumped into his throat.

He had never been a fan of horror movies. Scott loved them, and Gordon had started watching them with him the moment he was old enough. But John had never understood the appeal, had never been able to keep himself from empathizing with the doomed characters. He'd always felt their fear and pain with them. Or at least, he thought he had. He was realizing now that he'd never been quite this scared before, on a deep, visceral level.

He spotted the row of gallon jugs beside the table, and this time he couldn't stop himself from starting to struggle.

Scott had been teaching him how to fight since he was eight and facing schoolyard bullies, but shockingly, none of his lessons had covered what to do when three dispassionate gorillas were trying to strap him down to be tortured. It therefore wasn't long before he was being wrestled onto the table, his wrists and ankles forced into the restraints. Memories long buried surfaced, and brought with them childish panic. He flailed, yanking at the unforgiving metal cuffs even as it earned him nothing but torn skin and bone-deep bruises. His breathing sped into desperate gasps, his heart thundering in his ears.

"Are you seeing this, Jeff?" Barrett's voice asked. "Remember, you can stop it any time."

John stopped struggling at the sound of the familiar name, his eyes darting around the room. His father wasn't there, but he spotted the beady eye of a camera in the ceiling overhead. A cold stab of horror pierced him as he realized Barrett was going to make Dad watch this.

"You're sick," he whispered.

"Maybe. But I'm also going to be the most powerful man in the world soon."

John swallowed hard, but didn't look away from this new face of evil. He took a deep breath, forcing himself once more into a state of calm. If Dad could remain strong through two years of this, then so could John.

"This isn't gonna go how you're hoping," he said. "I won't tell you anything, and neither will my father. And my brothers will find me soon, and we'll see how much power you have then."

Barrett just gave him a pitying look.

"Oh, Johnny. Your brothers aren't looking."

"You look like someone who could use a drink."

Virgil jumped, and dragged his stinging eyes away from the void he'd been staring up into. He turned his head to see Scott clambering out of the access hatch onto the curved roof of the observation tower, a clinking tote-bag slung over his shoulder.

Virgil didn't bother asking how Scott had found him. They knew each other too well, and Scott knew that if Virgil had really wanted to be alone, he wouldn't have come here. It was the highest place you could get on Tracy Island without climbing gear or a jetpack, and had always been the first place to look for John when he was on Earth but missing from the villa. It had been his sanctuary, his place to hide from the noise and gravity.

"I hope you're saying that because you intend to fix it," Virgil told Scott.

His brother smiled tightly and withdrew a sweating brown bottle from his bag. Virgil was tempted to ask for something stronger, but he propped himself up on his elbows and took the beer. It was one of the craft brews he liked, the kind he so rarely allowed himself to drink. Alcohol could be a scarce commodity on Tracy Island, where everyone had to be ready to drop everything and mount a rescue at a moment's notice. But there was no one to dispatch him on a rescue tonight.

Virgil twisted the cap off the beer and took a long draft, the liquid bitter on his tongue. He returned his gaze to the stars he'd been staring up at before Scott arrived. They twinkled benevolently overhead, uncaring that John was no longer among them.

The day had passed like a dream. Not the good kind, the kind you were sad to wake up from. Rather, it had been like a nightmare; the slow, creeping kind with no axe-murderers or jump scares, just the bone-deep, inescapable certainty that something was horribly wrong.

He said nothing as Scott settled down beside him. His brother uncapped a beer of his own, but he didn't drink. He just tilted his head back to follow the direction of Virgil's gaze.

"Looks emptier up there somehow, doesn't it?" he remarked.

Virgil said nothing. He'd broken down already, had sobbed out his shock and grief and guilt, and now he just felt empty, shattered. But it was a sharp, malignant kind of empty, consuming and cruel. He'd spent the day with his family, doling out hugs and bracing smiles and making sure his little brothers were eating. Taking care of others usually calmed something inside him, made him feel whole, but the piece of him that had been torn away by that explosion had rendered that impossible this time. He'd come into this world as part of a package deal, and he didn't know what 'whole' meant anymore.

"Have you slept at all?" Scott asked him after the silence had stretched on, his tone concerned now.

Virgil grimaced and took another sip of beer to give himself a pause before answering.

"I tried," he said finally. He didn't elaborate.

He felt Scott shift closer to him.

"Virgil."

Virgil suppressed another grimace. He had no leg to stand on, he knew. He was always the one pushing Scott not to bottle things up, to just talk about what was bothering him. He should've known he wouldn't get away with trying to turn the tables.

"We let him isolate himself up there," he said finally. "I know he liked being alone, I get that. But he spent way more time in space after Dad died, and we let him. We just let him hide himself away, even though we knew he was hurting, because we thought we had time…" His throat closed, and he blinked back the tears that rushed to his eyes.

"I know," Scott sighed. "We talked to him every single day, and I let myself believe it was enough, but it wasn't, was it?"

There wasn't much to say to that. A few minutes passed without words. Virgil listened to the ambient sounds of the island: the whispering rustle of leaves, the chirps and croaks and hoots of jungle life, the rhythmic crash of waves on the distant beach. It was nothing like the suffocating silence of space.

"I miss him, Scott," Virgil admitted at last, quiet. "It's only been a day, and I miss him more than I think I'll ever know how to deal with."

"Virg…" Scott's tone was different now, almost hesitant. As if he were steeling himself. "Something's not right."

Virgil choked on a bitter, humorless laugh.

"You think?"

"That's not what I meant. I don't mean things are horrible, I mean they're…they're fishy."

Virgil blinked. He sat up and turned to his brother.

"Fishy?" he repeated flatly.

"Think about it." Scott looked away from the stars and focused intently on Virgil. "John may have spent most of his time in space, but that doesn't mean he was less experienced, or didn't know what he was doing. If anything, he was the most experienced, because he listened in on every rescue, advised all of us. He shouldn't've gotten caught off guard. And I talked to Brains today. He's been looking over the pieces of the exo-pod we brought home, and he says the damage isn't consistent with something that would've vaporized a human body."

"Scott, we looked-"

"Everywhere, I know. So I talked to Eos to see if she'd managed to get in touch with anyone from Stelair Aeronautics so we could ask to the see wreckage they recovered, and she still hadn't been able to get through to anyone. So then I called the GDF and asked Colonel Casey about it, but she just called me back and said that no one could find anything about Stelair."

Virgil frowned at his brother. Scott's face was shadowed, his expression hard to read.

"What do you mean, no one could find anything?"

"Stelair Aeronautics doesn't seem to exist, Virgil. Apparently trying to trace it just leads back to a string of shell corporations with no actual people at the end of it that they've been able to find."

"Then whose satellite blew up?"

"That's a good question. And an even better question is why, because there was no meteorite activity recorded in the area at the time of the distress call to Thunderbird 5."

Virgil stared blankly at Scott, unable or unwilling to process what he was hearing.

"So what are you saying?" he asked reluctantly.

"I'm saying…" Scott took a deep breath. "I'm saying I don't think this was an accident. And I don't think we were ever going to find John's body up there, no matter how long we looked."

"You think someone…took it?"

"No. I think someone took him."

Alive, he didn't say, but Virgil could hear it nonetheless. Instinctively, automatically, his heart leapt at the possibility. But the very next instant, reality clocked him squarely in the chest. He'd already been burned by false hope, and he wasn't about to go through that again.

"Scott, don't do this to yourself," he said. "I know you want to believe-"

"I'm not in denial, Virgil," Scott interrupted. "I'm telling you that these are the facts. Whoever did this clearly wanted to target International Rescue, specifically our space operations. If they wanted John dead, they could've just blown up Thunderbird 5, but they didn't, they went to the trouble of the ruse with the satellite. Why would anyone do that, if not to make sure no one was looking for him?"

When Virgil still didn't say anything, Scott reached over to put a hand on his arm.

"Believe me, I know it hurts to hope, but if there's even a chance…"

He didn't have to finish the sentence. If there was a chance, then there was no choice, no deliberation. Virgil set aside the rest of his beer, took a deep breath, and met his brother's eyes.

"How do we do this?"

Jeff was in hell. He'd been there before, more than once, but this…this was in a league of its own.

He'd been pacing restlessly, but he found himself drawing to a halt, his gaze pulled to the empty air in the middle of his cell. For hours, an image had been projected there. The hologram technology had been cutting-edge. Horrifyingly so.

John had been so scared. That was the worst part. He'd been terrified, but had clearly been trying not to show it. He'd remained defiant in the face of his tormenters, offering them nothing but cutting looks when they…when they gave him a chance to breathe.

Jeff looked away again, his stomach turning. It was a father's job to protect his sons, not stand by and watch while they took torture meant for him.

The live feed of John had cut out nearly ten minutes ago, and Jeff hated himself for wishing that it was still on, because at least then he could see his son, could know that he was still more or less intact. Now, all he had was his imagination, and the memories…He grit his teeth and clenched his hands into fists, resuming his pacing.

For the first time, he was grateful to hear the familiar sound of the door opening. He whirled around at once, nearly knocking against the force field as it appeared. And then his gaze was locked on the figures entering the cell. John was suspended between two guards, his head drooping, feet dragging on the floor.

His hair was still wet.

Jeff's vision went greyish-red around the edges, and his ears roared. Barrett stepped into the cell behind his men, and Jeff focused on him. It felt like the strength of his hate alone should be burning through the force field between them.

"I'm going to kill you," he promised in a low growl.

He'd never made that threat before, to anyone. Jeff was an altruist, a believer in the good of humanity and the value of life, but God, did he mean it this time.

But Barrett just smiled.

"No, you're not," he said simply. "Because you can't. You've proven more than once that you're weaker than me. Now listen to me, Jeff. I've shown you what I'm willing to do. I'll give you three days to reconsider, with that in mind. After that, my men will return for your son. You've seen what happens then."

He left, and John slumped to the floor as the guards released him before following their boss. The door closed behind them, leaving Jeff alone with his son. John hadn't moved since he'd hit the floor, but he'd broken his fall with his hands, so Jeff knew he was conscious. He kept a hand against the force field, waiting impatiently for it to vanish.

"I'm here, John," he called. "Just hang in there, I'll be there in a second."

John didn't answer, but the hand closest to Jeff twitched in his direction to let him know he'd been heard. Jeff waited, but the barrier remained in place. He pushed against it more forcefully, but it didn't budge.

"No," he muttered. "No, no, no, come on. Not this."

He banged against the barrier with his fist, but all he got were bruised knuckles. John began to shudder, his pale cheeks tinged greyish green.

"You sick bastard!" Jeff shouted at the ceiling that held the holoprojector, which he suspected also served as a listening device. "Let me go to him!"

John flinched at the noise, and retching coughs started to wrack his body. He turned his head away, as if in an attempt to spare Jeff the sight of the watery fluid that came streaming out of his mouth. As if Jeff hadn't already watched in agonizing detail what had been done to him.

Jeff forced himself to search for calm. He crouched lower to the floor, modulating his voice.

"Just try to breathe through it, son," he called softly. "I'm still right here, I'm not going anywhere. Just breathe."

And slowly, too slowly, John's retching eased, his shaking slowed. His muscles went limp, his eyes closing for a moment. He was breathing like he'd run a marathon, and Jeff was alarmed by how well he could make out the sound.

"John?"

Finally, John turned his head to look at him. His weary eyes were bloodshot, making their already vibrant irises stand out to an almost surreal degree. The skin around his mouth and nose was raw, and wide bruises were purpling on his wrists from where he'd fought his restraints. And still, he tried to offer his father a reassuring smile.

"I'll be all right, Dad," he promised, his voice a ruined rasp.

Jeff felt his expression crumple as that one hit him like a kick to the chest, but he quickly got his features under control again. He did his best to smile back at his son.

"I know you will, John," he said. "You always were one tough cookie."

John huffed weakly and rolled his eyes.

"Dad, no one calls anyone over the age of thirteen a tough cookie."

"Call it a father's privilege."

John's expression flickered.

"Yeah," he said softly. "I guess I'm not gonna fight you on that one."

He hauled himself on trembling arms to the floor beside where Jeff was kneeling, until they were separated by scant inches and an invisible force field. John curled his body towards Jeff and let his eyes drift shut. He shuddered again.

"Keep talking to me?" he asked, sounding younger now, more like the boy who had crept into his parents' bedroom after nightmares.

Jeff's knees were screaming in protest, but he ignored them, settling more comfortably onto the floor. He rested his hand on the cool tile, so close to John's they should have been touching. He had no stars to offer his son this time, no blanket reassurances, but he would always have stories to tell, distractions from what waited in the dark behind closed eyes.

"Did I ever tell you about how your Mom and I got banned from every single Olive Garden in the world for life?"