Alan's exhausted by the time he gets EVA, by the time his job is done. Thunderbird 5 is drifting in orbit in pieces, dead, and Alan can only hope the same isn't true of his brother.
He has to break everything down, moment by moment, to keep from thinking about John and that last, cut-off cry of pain.
Alan patches into the exterior hatch on the gravity ring with Brains' instructions still in his ear, brute-forcing his way through the last remnants of 5's emergency systems. There's no hiss of air as the hatch opens-this sector has already lost pressure. It's dark inside the gravity ring-absent of any rotation, there's no simulated gravity, either, and Alan has to pull himself along the inside, slowly picking his way through floating debris. The only lights are deep, urgent red, the last of the auxiliary power has sealed every section of the interior. Alan has to shut each door behind him as he progresses, makeshift airlocks.
The first sector has lost pressure and vented its atmosphere, but readouts on Alan's environmental sensors indicate that there's still air as he progresses to the second. The concentration's dropped, it's down to nearly half of what it's supposed to be. But it's better than nothing.
One thing at a time.
Only the next thing is John, and he's just inside the door of the third sector, hanging lifelessly halfway between the floor and ceiling. Alan screams at the sight of John's face, blank and empty. The red light makes his brother look drenched in blood. His helmet is nowhere to be seen. The shift in pressure between compartments the doors open twists his body slightly, his limbs slack and unresistant to the motion, but it's all wrong, jerky, unnatural movement. Alan's first impulse is to scramble backward, reeling in low-gravity and scrambling to tuck himself up against the wall, curling himself inward, even as harsh, choking sobs wrack his body.
"Brains, he's dead," he gasps into his comm, and wishes for Scott and Virgil and Gordon and his absent father and his mom and just someone, anyone to be here instead of him, looking at John like this. Alan's giving in to grief and shock and panic, his eyes are welling with stinging tears that he can neither shed nor wipe away and he's nearly blind in the crimson dark. "John? John, oh no. No, he can't, no, please. Help, help, please-"
"...Alan," Brains' voice is gentle, soft. He's got the feed from Alan's suit-cam, though the low light must give him only the barest picture of what Alan's volume of his voice in Alan's ear increases, cutting through the sound of the youngest Tracy's sobbing. "Alan, you d-don't know that yet. There's still air and the l-loss of pressure was gradual. H-he may still be okay. You n-need to return p-power to his suit so I can run diagnostics. The bio-circuitry went offline wh-when he suffered an impact, b-but past that w-we don't know what happened. He needs your help, Alan."
"I don't want to touch him," Alan manages, gasping through his tears and struggling to clear the tears from his eyes. "I-I can't, if he's dead, Brains-my brother, h-he's my brother. It's John. I d-don't want him to be like this, he can't be gone, he can't just be dead, he can't."
"Alan." Brain's voice grows firm, taking on an edge of command that it never has. "Turn around."
"I don't-"
"Now, Alan. H-he needs you. You can d-do this. One thing at a time. Turn around."
It's the same firmness that Scott's voice takes on, when he gives an order. Alan swallows hard and slowly uncoils himself, one moment, one muscle at a time. He presses a hand against the curve of the wall he'd huddled against and slowly manages to look back, through the stinging blur of tears.
Nothing's changed. John still looks like nothing more than a shadow, empty and wrong, only now Alan's moving towards him. There's a distant sense of urgency-everything Brains said makes sense; good, rational reasons to hope, to hurry to his brother's side and try to shake him awake.
But Alan's been doing this a little too long to believe that it'll always be okay. He'd been too young to understand when he'd lost his mother. He'd been too young not to hold fast to naive optimism, even after weeks, months, a year without a trace of their father. Alan's old enough now, he's seen and done enough, to know that he doesn't get to save everybody. It doesn't matter how much they mean to him.
Dread is clinging to him like the darkness all around, trying to hold him back, but he's close enough to touch his brother now and he reaches out, tentative and still very, very frightened, to close a hand around John's wrist.
And in the sum of all hope, against Alan's despair and terror, there's a feeble twitch of John's fingers. In the thinness of the air, with his exterior audio inputs wide-open and straining against the silence of the dead station, Alan hears the very tiniest catch of breath and a faint, protesting whimper of pain. John stirs himself from stillness, only just managing to lift his head and stare at his baby brother.
There's not enough air for words, but Alan can read the helpless desperation in John's eyes-he's seen it plenty of times before now, and he knows exactly what it means.
Help.