Not a day after his conversation with Gordon on the beach, the family's other blond gets into it with John, a proper fight. And it's awful. The things that get said are hard-edged and hurtful and dig like knives at the places where John's wrong. Gordon's never been one to pull punches, and he'd expertly taken his brother apart for the fact that sometimes he loses perspective, and made him face what his mistake would've cost their family. It takes Kayo and Virgil both to break the pair of them up and afterward the tension that hangs over the house is unbearable.

Alan knows Gordon a bit better than most anyone else does. It's his private suspicion that he'd gone and taken a run at John purely to demonstrate to Virgil why it would be a bad idea. Because Gordon knows Virgil a bit better than anyone else does, and if Virgil had gotten there first, then the aftermath would have been, impossibly, worse. So for all that Virgil's angry, he ends up taking it out on Gordon, who's more than happy to take the brunt of his older brother's misplaced anger. There's another shouting match in TB2's hangar, fingers get jabbed into chests and fists get clenched, and then when it's been wrung out of both of them, they get back to work, partners just the same as ever.

Alan's pretty sure a fight won't help him and John. He'd already come perilously close. At the time, even though it had felt like the burning black anger inside him just need to get vented out, as soon as he'd raised his voice to his brother the emptiness inside had been worse, the bitter ash of remorse. Alan's still sorry he'd ever shouted at John, on the worst day of his life.

So he finds himself hanging around Scott a great deal more often than usual, and the twelve year gap between them closes a little bit. It takes a few days before he realizes that Scott's deliberately been keeping him close and then there's a funny, warm feeling of gratitude that Alan doesn't expect. It's subtle, but something between them has changed. Because for the first time, Scott's actually, really talking to him, treating him like an adult. It's not that there wasn't respect between them before, but Scott's respect was always for Alan's raw talent. Scott's always been impressed by Alan, but this is new, and this is different. Alan, for the first time in his life, had made a hard call. And it had been a rite of passage.

Scott's no John, though.

But Scott's there, and Scott's willing to talk to him, and Scott helps. Alan works his way slowly through doubt to acceptance, and the fact that Scott's proud of him goes a long, long way. The eldest even lets him tag along on a few missions, once or twice, and there's a thrill to flying in TB1 that Alan's never given due consideration, before. It's not space, but Alan and Scott have rocketry in common, and suddenly there's a bond with his eldest brother that Alan had never known about. It helps. It helps a lot.

So for a week, on Scott's sage advice, Alan gives John a wide berth. Everybody does. That's everybody's advice, to leave John alone. It's the only thing that seems to make sense, and for a while it seems like it must be helping. It seems like what he wants. He doesn't seem to want to talk to anyone, he keeps to his room. The tension lessens, there are no further outbursts. Work resumes, dispatch being routed from GDF satellites on a temporary basis. Contract assignments, nothing too strenuous. It's, deservedly, a fairly quiet week.

But it's made quieter still by the fact that John's home. Though he's up and mobile and mostly patched up in a remarkably short span of time, he's just out of place in the house. For all the chaos of their lives, there's an order in the way they orbit each other, the routine paths that the boys take around their day to day. John's a black hole. Conversations hush around him, movement ceases. There's a sense of nothingness about the second eldest, even observed at a distance, especially the distance from which it seems safe to interact with him.

But that's the thing with black holes. They don't look like anything, they just distort the reality around their edges. You have to look at the way it draws the light from everything around it, the dark heart of a dead star.

And after a week, Alan finds himself being pulled inevitably towards it, towards the outer boundary of his big brother's grief. Alan knows a thing or two, where black holes are concerned. Mostly because John taught him everything that there is to know about them. He starts to wonder if maybe he's the only member of his family who knows what's important about black holes.

There's a singularity at their center, and it's a point so dark and intense that nothing escapes it. It's a place of crushing, incredible pressure, an entire sphere collapsed into a point of eternal nothingness. A point of impossible loss, a place no one sees.

John's not really a black hole, though. He's just a person, and after a week observing him from a distance, Alan remembers that he's maybe the only member of his family who knows what's important about John.

Because that's the thing with John. He keeps himself separate and he holds himself apart, and if he needs you, you have to go to him. He can't get out himself.

So it's a choice Alan makes, not an irresistible urge, to go to his brother. And he can tell it's such, because he has to muster up the courage to break out of his little orbit around the house, and to go down the corridor to his bedroom, and knock on his brother's door.