Chapter Five
"Why are you covered in blood?" Alan demands, his voice torn between terrified and exasperated. And wasn't that a charming way to greet your poor shaken-to-death oldest brother. "Come on, let me see him." Alan is pleading and it's only then that Scott realises he's been clutching at John's body in a death grip, his knuckles tense and white, bunched in the blankets and bandages and refusing to let go as Alan tries to pry John away and Scott just tries to remember how to breathe.
Uncoiling his limbs, which, Scott is absently surprised to note, are shaking uncontrollably, he forces his fingers to uncurl and Alan pulls John away, gently laying their brother flat and leaning over to check his breathing and pulse.
There's silence except for Scott's horrible raspy breathing while Alan winces and fusses over John.
"You ok?" Alan asks after a moment, looking up at his oldest brother. He's obviously found John's vitals steady enough for now, and Scott can't quite seem to find the words around his rubbery tongue to create a coherent reply. "Oh Christ, you're not." And if possible Alan has goes even paler as he notices the greyish green of his eldest brother's face and the way his eyes are blank and sluggish as they move. Plus he's covered in blood. The blood is a big clue. "Hang on Scotty," and then his baby brother is leaning over him, fingers at his pulse point and Scott somehow doesn't manage to command him to get off and see to John as it slides out from between his lips sounding a lot like 'hlarjabwaharr'. Alan gives him an incredulous look for that one, softening off as his eldest brother's eyes don't quite manage to focus on his face.
"John!" There's a surge of relief in both brothers chests as Virgil's voice reverberates around Three's hull and how did Scott not hear the pounding footsteps before, because suddenly he's there; Gordon and their Father hot on his heels. Virgil freezes as he spots Scott, slumped ungracefully against Three's hull, ashen and bleeding profusely from a head wound and he snarls "Scott, what the hell have you managed to do to yourself?" as he stops to stare at his big brother.
"J...ohn..." is the only reply that tumbles out of Scott as a long, harsh groan. Virgil seems to shake himself, sharply re-assessing his priorities as he crouches down at John's side with steady hands and a renewed sense of urgency. Virgil leans over their unconscious brother, fingers already rapid over John's cold skin, taking his vitals manually before hooking him up to one of their small, portable medical sensors. Virgil pales at the readouts. Their Father silently goes to his knees beside him, crouching close with his hands hovering, fluttering over his middle son's still body as if he's uncertain what to do.
Taking a few seconds for himself, Scott uses Alan to push himself further towards upright, blinking lots to try and clear the cobwebs in his pounding head. But it's right then that Alan decides to roughly press a gauze pad to his forehead, taping it firmly over the wound and to Scott it feel like being smacked across the head with a sledgehammer. Hissing fiercely in pain as his face screws up, he snarls semi-incoherently at Alan, throwing in what sounds like a rainbow of the USAF's finest expletives (that he is so lucky his Father doesn't seem to hear) as his head burns and his vision whites out. Alan, the little shit, looks mildly amused as he comes back into focus.
Scott pushes the kid aside a little rougher than he would have usually done (and has to quash the wave of guilt as Alan, not expecting the blow, topples). He scoots forward on his knees, wobbling and getting close enough to Virgil that his brother will be able to hear him. Virgil looks up at his approach and the sheer fear for John in his face is staggering as Scott quietly lists off;
"Depressurisation, I'm not sure how bad... not sure how long it was before he got a helmet on. Hypothermia for sure. His ribs are broken and his shouldy... shoulder is dislocated. Dehydration. I've not given him anything for any of it yet... strapped up his arm and stuff best I could though." Vigil swears softly, already carefully loading up a syringe of something and checking it for air bubbles with a sharp tap before he slides it into John's skin, forcing out the contents into his brother's bloodstream. "There was blood in his mouth. He wasn't breathing for... for maybe ten minutes or so." Scott rambles on, his face grey and his eyes squeezed shut as the world wobbles around him. "Maybe longer I don't know how... I thought he was..."
"And you?" Virgil cuts across him, eyes sharp as he takes in the bloodied gauze pad Alan taped to their brother's forehead and the wide crimson trails all over his face. His hand comes up to gently steady Scott's forearm, squeezing reassuringly.
"Might be concussed." Scott finally concedes; his admission soft. "We got thrown across Three on takeoff." Alan inhales sharply, guiltily somewhere behind him and Virgil's surgical glove-covered fingers are on his face, gently lifting the pad and peering at the wound. "I'll be fine until after you've seen to John." Virgil, after an assessing moment and noting how big and blown-out Scott's pupil's look, nods sharply before leaning back. Scott supposes the fact he's still conscious is the winning factor, as much as he's starting to wish he wasn't.
"Alan," the boy scrambles as Virgil calls his name, "think you can get Scott down to med-bay?" Alan nods determinedly, ever helpful, and Scott finds his little brother under his arm, trying to heave him upright. "Father." Jeff, who had been frozen, lost in his own world, jerks at the soft call and he looks up at Virgil with red-rimmed eyes. "I need you and Gordon to get a stretcher so we can carry..."
Silently their Dad shoulders Virgil aside and slides one firm forearm under his little boy's head curving it around his shoulders and cradling John close. His head lolls limply onto his Father's shoulder, the oxygen mask over his nose and mouth pushing hard against Jeff's throat as he presses his lips, quick and dry, to the top of his son's head; just under where the soft, pale strands are stained with thick, scarlet blood that is more likely Scott's than his. He follows it up by slipping his other arm under John's knees and then he lifts his son, blankets, monitor, oxygen and all, into the air. He cradles John to his chest like the boy weighs nothing at all, his feet planted solidly in the ground and his arms curled tightly around his son. Jeff's salt-and-pepper brows scrunch together in a frown, the question why the hell is he this light is plain their Father's expression and once more thoughts of his little brother being perhaps malnourished flash across Scott's exhausted mind.
Gordon, after noticing how John is shivering, is the one to tuck an extra blanket over him; pulling it gently up to his big brother's chin. John's skin-tone is an ugly grey and Gordon has to tear himself away to take up the weight on Scott's other side; seeing how Alan is struggling to keep their eldest brother, who seems to be having balance issues, upright on his own.
"Med-bay?" Their Father finally speaks, his voice hoarse, and Virgil simply nods; his eyes big and sad and that warm, soft brown.
"We're not taking him to hospital?" Scott croaks from where he's suspended between his two littlest brothers. Gordon is making a show of how heavy he thinks Scott is by pulling faces at them all.
"A hospital won't be able to do any more for him than we can here," Virgil shakes his head and follows their Father through Three's crew hatch, "and I don't really want to move him any further than med-bay, especially with his ribs. But we might need to fly in a specialist, Father... It'd all be hard to explain though..."
Scott privately thinks that no-one in the world could possibly be specialist enough for their crazy family, but as the world is spinning around him as he tries to take a single lurching step; he wisely keeps his mouth shut. Nausea is rolling his stomach and he doesn't trust himself not to throw up right now. Yeah, definitely best keep that mouth shut.
He can feel Alan trembling under his arm and Scott, feeling all too powerless and just a little bit venerable, is aware that poor Gordy is the one shouldering most of his weight. He's going to get teased to hell about that later, he can just tell. Alan's fingers curl tightly around his elbow and Scott frowns. He's still just a kid. Scott swallows thickly and brings his hand up to lock loosely around Alan's wrist; a comforting gesture for them both more than a stabilising one.
...
By the ridiculous amount of time it takes the trio to hobble down to med-bay, John is flat on his back and Virgil has him hooked up to what looks like a bazillion different machines; all bleeping and whirring and keeping their brother firmly on this side of the pearly gates. Their Father is bizarrely, conspicuously missing from the picture, but Brains is there, flitting about the machinery like an anxious hummingbird and speaking with Virgil in low, urgent tones as he shows him something that looks like an X-ray on his holographic tablet. Alan and Gordon dump Scott's sorry ass into a convenient chair and they skitter away to crowd their other injured brother, demanding answers from Virgil, who has to explain patiently to Alan exactly what the ventilator John is on is doing to help him breathe, as he works around them.
Scott forces his exhausted, shaking body upright, so that he's sat up in his chair rather than sprawled out as he'd been dumped. He feels shaky; all disconnected and dizzy as his vision blurs in and out and he does his best to clamp down on the sick feeling that's still turning his stomach. He absently notices himself marvelling at how Virgil's hands remain so steady as they slip a cannula into John's wrist, taping the needle there firmly but letting his digits linger over his brother's cool skin. The line leads up into where Brains is suspending an IV bag on a pole and Scott numbly watches the steady drip of warmed saline (and probably a high dose of the good old Tracy drug supply) trickle into his brother's veins; trying to combat the dehydration and pain.
They have John unbundled from Scott's hasty packing-tape approach to keeping him warm and have stripped him of his space suit and t-shirt to bare the swathe of bandages and tape that Virgil has used to bind John's ribs up properly. Awful patches of blues and purples ride up out of the bindings; John's skin is mottled and so badly bruised that it makes Scott wince in sympathy. Something must have hit him real hard to cause that. John's shoulder has been put back into socket and immobilised in a proper fabric support-cast and sling and someone has racked the temperature up in here to compensate for the astronaut's loss of layers. Their brother is still trembling away all the same, plagued by shivering, but his lips, fingertips and eyelids are slowly loosing most of that awful blue tinge. The temperature read out on one of John's monitor's shows his body temperature (the pair of digits red and flashing at 32.4°C/90.32°F) as being roughly two whole degrees higher than it was when Scott had taken it earlier aboard Three. In a roundabout way, Scott manages to communicate this fact to a very patient Virgil, slurred speech be dammed. Scott isn't sure if his brother looks relieved or more worried by the poorly-imparted news.
Looking across, Scott sees that their baby brother Alan, who has been through so much today, has tucked himself up against John's skinny side, his head pillowed on his arm and his eyes peacefully closed. The youngest of them had piloted Thunderbird Three incredibly well under pressure tonight, that god-awful burn be dammed, and he had gotten them all back home as fast as he could. Scott feels a surge of pride, watching Alan's sleeping face and he finds his own features morphing into a smile that would probably look more like a grimace to anyone watching. Gordon, now perched on John's right, has been uncharacteristically quiet; pale and shaken ever since Scott had first seen him. On their wobbly, slow limp to med-bay, his little brother had been abundantly clear about how he'd thought that John simply wasn't going to be coming home alive. Poor Fish had been obviously terrified.
And Scott still has no idea how John had been alive. Not after thirty minutes without oxygen, floating in the abyss of space. Virgil suggests, softly, that perhaps the intense cold had slowed his heart rate and metabolism right down - so much that it had reduced his need for O2. Scott finds that an unlikely answer; perhaps it would have kept him alive for a few minutes, maybe even as long as five, but he finds half an hour under such conditions almost impossible for anyone to survive. He'd really thought Johnny wouldn't be coming home.
"...How you doing Scooter?" Scott hadn't even noticed Virgil move, but there he is, a solid comfort squatting down in front of him, eyelevel and warm, his fingers, now clad in clean latex, probing at Scott's forehead again as he winces. The worry lines Virgil's his brow suggest that this isn't the first time he's asked that question and Scott blinks owlishly at him, trying to shape his mouth into a reply.
"M' fine." Scotty mumbles and Virgil barks out a slightly-crazed laugh at that, wiping a tired arm over his face before pulling a clean dressing out of nowhere to set about changing the one Alan had hastily applied to Scott's head earlier. He does it with a lot more care than their littlest brother had shown. He takes a soft cloth, wetted with warm water, and begins to meticulously, but gently, clean the blood off his older brother's weary face. There's the soft press on fingers on his jaw as Virgil tilts his head to the side and the tepid heat of the cloth over his cheekbone and lips is a comforting one as his head pounds.
"Like hell Scotty." His brother chastises him, not unkindly, for his response and he makes a soft clucking noise under his tongue in disapproval. "You should have seen your face; you looked as green as Two under all that blood." And Scott has no real reply to that so he stays quiet. "This doesn't look like you'll need stitches," Virgil tells him, examining the gash closely, "Head wounds do tend to bleed an awful lot, and you're still looking almost as pale as John over there, so I'm thinking a transfusion and 30cc of morphine to try and take the edge off that headache, ok?"
Scott vaguely feels himself nodding and drifts in and out as Virgil hooks him up surprisingly painlessly to a cannula of his own and a half a litre of his own blood, from the stock. By the time Virgil has run himself out trying to check the size of Scott's pupils and his heart rate and his levels of nausea to gauge how bad his concussion might be, Scott's head is pillowed on his own shoulder and he is fast asleep.
Sighing, Virgil steps away to bring up one of his piano recordings on the input panel set into the wall, and he lets the floaty, calm rhythm of his fingers on the keys fill the silence he's surrounded with. He sets an alarm to remind himself to wake Scott every hour to check his definite concussion and throws another blanket over John, before he finds himself slumping down, exhausted and stressed and so goddam hopelessly drained, on the corner of John's bed. Wearily, he asks Brains to keep an eye on his brothers for him and to wake him if John changes at all. Then his head goes down, pillowing on Johnny's blanketed thigh, just above his knobbly knee and the sounds of his piano lulls even him off to sleep.
...
Author Notes:Yey! Another chapter! Thankyou guys so much for all your encouragement, you're all brilliant! 3
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