#looks like i found a new shiiiiip

[poetryinmotion-author]

Was rereading the Akallabêth for Rings of Power and...

Look all I'm saying is that if this man doesn't break down the doors during the sham wedding and yell I OBJECT and declare his undying love for Miriel......like I don't even know guys

[tsarisfanfiction]

Grounded pt3

Fandom: Thunderbirds Rating: Teen Genre: Hurt/Comfort/Family Characters: Scott, Virgil, Kayo, John

Next instalment.  A bit shorter than the others, not quite 4k words, but I haven’t yet figured what direction it’s going in after this, so have what I’ve got so far.  Vaguely proof read.

Part 1 | Part 2

A flash of blue and the spider was gone, stuck inside a jar he was fairly sure was supposed to contain medicine, but he wasn’t really looking at that.  He was more interested in where the spider had been; he hadn’t noticed earlier, but it turned out that multiple falls and probably more importantly being bashed around underwater could wear neoprene down, just a bit. The sleeve was worn down, just a little, where the spider had stopped.

His arm flopped down, unwilling to stay extended any longer as something a little like pins and needles started.

“Scott!” Virgil cried again, catching his arm and scrutinising it closely.  He saw the exact moment Virgil realised the neoprene was damaged as his usually tanned brother went sheet white.  “Please tell me it didn’t get through.”

“While I’m really wishing I imagined the pricks, the pins and needles aren’t giving me much hope,” Scott admitted.

“There isn’t any more antivenom,” Kayo reminded them, her voice high with badly-concealed panic.  Scott knew that, had been panicking about that same thing earlier when he’d realised Virgil had had a too-close brush with the spider.

“Well we’ll just have to- woah.”  His attempt to reassure them was interrupted by his equilibrium taking a sharp shift, his head rolling down until he jerked it back up.  Oh, that really wasn’t good.  Nor was the fact that Virgil seemed like he had two-one-three heads, all looking at him in sheer horror.  He blinked, trying to get the world to stop shifting in and out of focus.

There was a clunk, familiar but its cause escaping Scott, and then there were hands on the safety belt around his hips, yanking it open before warm arms scooped him up.  He squinted up at Virgil’s face – faces, if the world could stop spinning and duplicating, triplicating things that would be really useful – as he found himself being laid down on, oh, that had been the clunk.

His bitten arm hung limply over the edge of the stretcher; it was uncomfortable but Scott didn’t even try to pull it up.  Keep the bite below the heart, slow the venom’s spread as much as possible.  Basic first aid.

Virgil moved back, away from his eyeline, and he realised what had been bothering him.

“Helmet,” he demanded. They didn’t know how many spiders there were; this made at least two to have invaded the Thunderbird.  Virgil’s uniform was thicker than his, better padded against the heavy lifting he did, but the spider had been on course for his bare neck before he’d intervened.  Kayo, too, needed to cover up.

There was a tugging on his arm, bracer unclipping and falling to the cockpit floor with a thud.

“No,” he protested, moving it out of reach and gritting his teeth when the movement burned.  “Helmet first.”

“Scott-” Virgil started, but Scott shook his head.  The movement made him feel nauseous.

“Helmet on,” he ordered. They had to, had to protect themselves against any more.  “Please.”

Virgil hesitated, clearly torn between checking the wound and calming him down, but Kayo intervened.

“Here,” she said, placing Virgil’s helmet on his head without his permission.  “Scott’s right,” she added, drowning out his protest.  “If there are more, we can’t risk being bitten as well.”

“More?” Virgil asked, his voice strangled, and Scott realised he was panicking, hadn’t even realised the danger.

“I’ll do a full sweep of the craft,” Kayo told him.  “You focus on Scott.”

“Careful,” Scott insisted, fixing the blur of duller blue he assumed was his sister with a look that was supposed to be commanding.  Whether it came out that way, he didn’t know.

“I will,” she promised. “Worry about yourself.”

Worrying about himself meant first accepting what had happened, and Scott knew enough to know that panicking would do more harm than good, spiking his heart rate and pumping the venom round faster.

Virgil had reclaimed his arm and pulled his glove off while he was talking to Kayo, and a distinctive shiiiiip told him his sleeve was being cut away.

“John,” Virgil called, voice still tight with panic.  “Thunderbird Five, I need you now.”

“What’s happened?” John’s voice was a welcome sound, calm and reassuring.  All International Rescue here, we’ll fix your problem.  He’d always been good at that.  “Virgil, your heart rate’s unusually high.”

“I need antivenom for a Creeping Banana Spider bite,” Virgil bit out.  Scott felt his sleeve peel away from his arm all the way up to his shoulder, exposing the site of the bite to the cockpit air.  “Where can I get it?”

“What happened?” John repeated, some urgency slipping into his tone.  Scott couldn’t see him, but he knew John would be pulling up every supplier in the world.  “There-”

“Scott’s been bitten,” Virgil choked out.  Warm neoprene gloves pressed against his elbow, near the bite, and Scott couldn’t help a gasp as pain flared up.

John didn’t swear, but Scott was fairly sure that if he was any less in control of the words that slipped from his mouth, he would have done.

“Okay,” he said instead, sounding like he was forcibly projecting an air of calm.  “Rio hospital hasn’t got a new shipment yet.  What’s the time frame?”

“Two minutes since the bite,” Virgil told him, his hand sliding down Scott’s arm to his fingertips and giving his hand a quick squeeze.  It could have been for reassurance, but Scott recognised it as a test and squeezed back, gasping as he did so.  “No signs of nerve damage yet, but he’s in pain and I don’t think he can see me properly.”

With Virgil down below his eyeline, he couldn’t see him at all without moving, and moving was probably a bad idea.  Scott focused on breathing, keeping his breaths deep and regular and glad he’d already taken painkillers so his ribs weren’t kicking up a fuss as well.

His siblings would do everything in their not-inconsiderable power to get him the antivenom in time. He just had to trust them, and he did. He trusted his siblings with his life every time he went on a mission, and this was no different; the fact that he was literally going to die if they couldn’t save him did nothing but increase that faith.

“Head for home,” John said after a few moments.

“We don’t have antivenom at home!” Virgil protested.  “If we don’t pick any up it won’t matter where we are!”

“Head for home,” John repeated, more forcibly.  “There’s nowhere you could get to in time.”

“I’m not giving up!” Virgil spat.  “There-”

“I said nothing about giving up,” John overrode him.  “Trust me: head for home.”

Scott felt Virgil’s hesitation, his frustration at being powerless, and squeezed the hand still holding his again.

“John’s right,” he managed, taking another deep breath as the nerves in his arm bubbled with fire.

“Scott!” Virgil finally stood up, returning to his eye line.  There were somewhere between three and four Virgils looking down at him in open concern and guilt, and Scott smiled at all of them.

“It’s okay,” he told him. “Let’s go h-ah-home.”  John had a plan, he knew he did.  John always had a plan, and Scott hadn’t survived twenty-seven years by ignoring his younger, smarter brother.  Virgil was blaming himself, even with several fuzzy versions of his face in his vision, Scott could see that clear as day.  The multitudes of Virgils frowned, but they moved. Too-familiar straps lassoed his body, keeping him firmly on the stretcher, and then he couldn’t see any Virgils.

“Kayo, hold on to something,” he heard his brother call.  “We’re moving.”

“Holding on.”  Her voice came out of a comm somewhere, probably near the console.  Thunderbird Two’s VTOLs roared to life beneath them, Virgil’s ‘bird screaming her displeasure at the situation as she took to the sky far faster than Virgil usually let her.  “What’s the plan?”

“We’re going home,” Virgil told her, tone clipped.  “John’s orders.”  The powerful rear engines took over, exploding with the noise that gave the Thunderbirds their name as Virgil gunned his ‘bird as fast as she would go.

“Where are we getting an antivenom?” she asked.  “Even at top speed it’s an hour and a half to Tracy Island from here.”  They all knew that – it was how long they’d taken to get to the rainforest in the first place.  It felt so much longer now.  So, so, much longer.

“John didn’t say,” Virgil ground out.  “He just said to trust him and go home.”  Virgil did trust John, Scott knew that, but he could also tell that Virgil was unnerved at the lack of what he considered the most vital information.

“So that’s what we’ll do,” Kayo said firmly.  “I’m not seeing any more spiders, but keep your helmet on just in case.  I’m coming back.”

Scott didn’t know if he should be reassured or not that she hadn’t found any more.  No spiders was good news, but it left him with the paranoid feeling that Kayo just hadn’t found one.  His siblings were protected by their undamaged uniforms and helmets, but there was part of him – mostly buried because if he paid too much attention to it he’d start panicking – that realised he was still vulnerable to another bite.

“How’s Scott doing?” she asked.

“About as well as expected.” Virgil’s voice was flat.  “There’s not much we can do without the antivenom.”

The door swung open and Scott blinked at the dull blue blur that walked through.  As Kayo approached him she gradually gained definition, but multiplied.

“How are you holding up?” she asked.  Three hands reached for his shoulder but he only felt one rest there.

“Holding,” he rasped, trying to give her a reassuring smile.  A throb of pain from his bitten arm turned it into more of a grimace. From the look he thought he could see on her face, she wasn’t at all reassured.

“Virgil, I’ll pilot,” she said, squeezing his shoulder briefly before letting her hand drop. Scott watched her leave his line of vision, heading for his brother.  He didn’t expect her to succeed in getting Virgil away from the controls – no-one got Virgil to surrender the controls of Thunderbird Two if he was already piloting.

No more words were exchanged, but he blinked and Virgil was there in front of him, all blurry four-three of him.

“Right then,” Virgil said, his hand resting where Kayo’s had been a moment earlier.  “How are you really doing?”  Scott scowled at the insinuation that he wasn’t being truthful, but didn’t protest as Virgil pulled out the medical scanner again.  His multiple faces frowned.  “Your blood pressure is dropping.”

“That’s not good,” he muttered, and Virgil shook his head in agreement.

“I don’t want to compensate it too much otherwise there’s the risk it’ll jump too high, but I can’t leave it to keep dropping,” he said, rummaging around in the cabinet by Scott’s feet.  He knew that cabinet but didn’t like it, closing his eyes rather than watch the drip being prepared and inserted into his unbitten arm.  Scott couldn’t say it made him feel any better, but he suspected the best he could hope for was to not feel worse as the venom circulated through his body.

After a moment, he opened his eyes again only to find his vision had blurred further.  Blue and green told him his brother was still by his side, but he couldn’t make out his face.

“Scott?” Virgil asked. He sounded worried.  “Are you back?”

“Didn’t go anywhere,” he protested, but it came out sounding more like dingowhrrrrr.  And he felt sick.

“You passed out on me,” Virgil informed him.  “Try not to do that again, okay?”

“I did?” he asked, swallowing painfully as nausea grumbled and bile threatened the back of his throat. He didn’t remember passing out, but he also hadn’t been feeling this terrible.  “Sorry.”

“Not your fault,” Virgil insisted.  Well, no, it was the spider’s fault, but that didn’t mean Scott didn’t feel bad about panicking his brother.

“How long?” he asked, trying to look around for some clue.  His eyes refused to co-operate, giving him nothing more than the green blur of Thunderbird Two and the blue of his brother’s uniform.

“About fifteen minutes,” Virgil told him.  “How are you feeling?”  It was a pretty redundant question, considering he’d been bitten by a venomous spider some, what, twenty, twenty-five minutes ago, and was presumably no closer to receiving the antivenom he needed than last time he’d been aware.

“Been better,” he managed, trying for some levity but aware it was falling flat.  The fact that he was struggling to string together more than two words at a time didn’t escape him, and he had a feeling it wasn’t escaping Virgil either.

“Scott.”  No, he wasn’t fooling his brother at all.  “I know you can’t see me, and that your blood pressure’s low.  What else?”

“Can,” he corrected.  “See you.”  He vaguely attempted to gesture in his direction with his unbitten arm, only to find it captured by a warm gloved hand and gently pressed back to the stretcher.

“Don’t avoid the question,” Virgil scolded.  “Nausea? Pain?  Losing sensation anywhere?”

“Yes,” Scott admitted, pulling a face.  “Yes… No?” Unbidden, his voice slid up a few notes at the end, turning his assertion that he hadn’t lost feeling into a question.  Frowning, he tried to move his fingers.  His arm flared up, but he felt the digits twitch.

Virgil cupped his fingers in a warm gloved hand, kneading them gently.

“Let me know if you stop feeling anything,” he instructed, although it sounded more like a plea.  “Do you think you could stomach some water?” Scott considered it, but the bile was still there in his throat and the idea of throwing up all over himself was decidedly unwelcome.  He gently rocked his head from side to side in a no.

“Okay.”  Virgil didn’t sound happy about that, and Scott winced. The blue got closer and a hand touched his forehead.  “I wish I could do more, dammit.  I hate this!” Scott tried to give him a reassuring smile.  “No, you don’t get to smile like everything’s fine,” Virgil snapped.  The hand left his forehead and rested on the pulse point on his neck instead.  “If we don’t get that antivenom soon you’re going to die, Scott.  You’re dying and there’s nothing I can do about it!”

Scott didn’t stop smiling, blinking to try and clear his vision just a bit.  “Trust,” he rasped.  “I trust… all of you.”

“But-” Virgil protested. The hand that had been kneading his fingers shifted its grip, holding his hand firmly but gently.  Scott squeezed his hand with as much strength as he could find.

“You’ll find a way,” he told him, his voice faint even to his own ears.  John had a plan; he didn’t know what it was, but he knew he had one. “Don’t give… up.”  His eyelids were heavy again, and this time he could feel the grasping hands of sleep reaching out for him, clinging to him firmly and dragging him down.  He could have fought them, struggled to remain awake, but the battle would spur his body’s adrenaline into action and he was still conscious that the less he fought himself the longer his body would hold out against the venom.

There wasn’t much he could do to help his brothers, but he could buy them time.  The hands tugged and he let himself fall.

When he next opened his eyes, everything looked just as it had done earlier.  Thunderbird Two’s green dominated his vision, with a blur of blue leaning over him.  Despite that, it was clear that some time had passed; fresh air cycled around his mouth and nose, the light pressure of a rebreather sealed across his lower face, but more alarmingly, he couldn’t feel anything past his elbow.  Attempts to twitch his fingers ended with no apparent success and for the first time the panic he’d been keeping at bay crept past his barriers.

“-running out of time, John!”  Virgil sounded terrified.  “His blood pressure’s through the floor and I don’t have anything left to try.”

“I’m working on it, Virgil.” He didn’t raise his voice, but Scott could hear the stress seeping through John’s words regardless.  “How much longer do you think he has?”

“At this rate, he won’t make it home,” Virgil snapped.  “I don’t know if it’s because he was already injured, or if he’s reacting to it, but he’s deteriorating faster then Dr. Furnier did.”

“It’s likely that Dr. Furnier had built up some resistance considering his line of work,” John acknowledged.  “Keep doing what you can.  Don’t give up; you know Scott’s fighting with all he’s got.”

“I know,” Virgil muttered. “I know.”  The blue blur shifted, then Virgil gasped.  “Scott!  You’re awake?”

The rebreather didn’t give him much of a chance to talk, but he attempted to nod, only to wince as his head rebelled at the movement.

“Easy,” Virgil soothed. A gloved hand slid underneath his head, raising it slightly as the rebreather was removed.  “Better?”

“Yeah,” he rasped.  “How long?”

“Half an hour this time,” Virgil told him.  That made it an hour, more or less, since the bite.  The recording of Dr. Furnier’s dramatic I don’t mean to be dramatic, but I don’t think I’ve got forty-eight minutes, he’d heard in the debrief sprung to mind. In the end the scientist had lasted almost an hour and forty-eight minutes before they’d managed to get the antivenom to him.   Scott was determined to last as long as he had to, but if the conversation he’d just overheard was right, he wasn’t going to match Dr. Furnier’s resilience.

He didn’t let Virgil know he’d heard that.  Whether it was fact or simply a terrified brother deep in the throes of panic, there was nothing he could do about it except do his best to prove it wrong.  If the brother was Alan, he might have attempted some reassurance, but Virgil didn’t like meaningless platitudes.  It had been a long time since Scott had been able to blindly reassure him, and he wouldn’t do that to him now.

“How are you feeling?” Virgil asked him.  “Any change?” Scott didn’t get a chance to answer before there was a concerned intake of air.  “You can’t feel me, can you?”

There was no point lying; with Virgil a single blue blur he couldn’t even tell for certain where he was touching, although if Scott had to guess – and hope – he’d say he was once again holding the hand of the bitten arm.  “No. Where?”

“Your hand,” Virgil confirmed, and Scott sighed in relief.  Not that not having feeling in his hand was good, but it meant there wasn’t another dead spot he hadn’t noticed.  “Anywhere else?”  Light touches danced across his shins, apparently no longer protected by their greaves, and his other arm.

“Still there,” Scott assured him.  “Feel you.” It was Virgil’s turn to sigh in relief.

“Okay, that’s not so bad.” A hand landed on his shoulder.  “We’re still half an hour from home.  Hold on til then, okay?  John’s working on something.”

“Not giv-ah-ing up,” Scott promised, even as a fresh wave of pain coursed through him from his bitten arm, determined to remind him that he was in trouble.  A lot of it.  Unbidden, his body tensed as it passed, and Virgil gripped his still-feeling hand reassuringly.  Scott clung to him with what little strength he could muster, but as the wave passed he felt his strength waning again.

“Scott?”  Virgil squeezed his hand lightly but he couldn’t return the gesture.  Not this time.

“Tired,” he admitted. The claws of sleep dug into him again – already, but he’d barely been awake a minute! – but that wasn’t what filled his bones with a deep-set exhaustion.  Sleep was good, gave his body time to throw its undivided attention at kicking the venom.  But that exhaustion scared him.  Somehow he knew that if it dragged him under, he wouldn’t surface again.

That wasn’t sleep. That was something darker, stronger. Something he wasn’t ready to face. Not now, not when they knew Dad was alive, when they had a plan to save him.  For the first time since he’d been bitten, reality crashed into him, no longer pacified by fake smiles and pretty words.

The spider’s bite was fatal. He was dying and they didn’t have a cure.

He was going to die.

No, he couldn’t do that. Not now.  Couldn’t do that to his siblings, his grandmother.  Dad, waiting in the Oort Cloud for him to lead his brothers there.

He fought it, the bone-deep exhaustion seeping through him with promises of the stars and Mom.  He threw everything he had at keeping it at bay, the panic and terror he’d been supressing coming to the fore at the realisation time’s up.

“Scott!”  Virgil sounded terrified and there was air rushing around his mouth and nose.  Pressure all down one side of his body and a warm hand cupping the back of his head.  That all meant something, something important, but Scott couldn’t tell what.  “Keep breathing, Scott, come on.  You said you weren’t giving up so don’t you dare.”

Giving up?

“Virgil, what’s happening?” the voice was shrill.  Scott couldn’t place it.

“He’s convulsing!” Virgil yelled.  “And he’s stopped breathing!  Come on, Scott!”

Stopped breathing?

No.  No.  He wasn’t giving up and he was not dying today.  He was supposed to be fighting, helping his brothers help him.  Buying them time.

Time was not up, and death was not taking a Tracy today.  He pushed back again, spurred on by the determination not to leave his family. Mom could wait a while longer.

“That’s it, Scott,” Virgil’s voice encouraged.  “You can do it.  Breathe.”

All at once, air rushed into his lungs, and his vision focused on the blue blur in front of him.  Awareness seeped through him again and he realised he was laying on his side, rebreather firmly affixed.

“Are you with me?” Virgil asked.  “Scott?” He couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t promise Virgil death wasn’t taking him so easily.  “Scott!”  But then he heard it, the promise that everything was going to be okay.  A rumbling like thunder, roaring through the heavens and bringing hope to everyone that heard it.

Scott’s eyes slipped closed to the lullaby of his Thunderbird’s engines.

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