#not me forgetting override also makes the machines fight with you. oops

[nejackdaw]

Just got emotional playing Zero Dawn bc. My cow he. I get to the gate and there's monsters, so obviously I want him to be safe because he's my baby. I deal with most of them but the huge one wanders close to him trying to find me and my cow KICKS ITS ASS. Like. VIOLENTLY. Knocks the bastard over twice in a row. I wanted to keep him safe...... I forgot he also wants to keep me safe. That's my son 😭💞

[tsarisfanfiction]

Desert Sands: Part 4

Fandom: Thunderbirds Rating: Teen Genre: Hurt/Comfort/Family Characters: Scott, John, Alan, EOS

Oops, been a little while since I last posted anything so I thought I’d chuck some more of this one out into the void...  I’m still not done writing this one but that’s the fault of the other fic I’m attempting to work on (which keeps throwing me into stumbling blocks at the moment, which is super annoying). 

<<<Part 3

John’s knees jarred when he made the jump from the top of the space elevator to the hot sands below.  In front of him, the large monstrosity of an EMP generator loomed and he stumbled across to it, running his eyes over the control panel.  No Thunderbird Five, no EOS.  No communications at all.  It was just John and the EMP generator, alone for over a hundred miles in each direction. By the time Thunderbird Two returned, he had to have it disabled, otherwise their third and final Thunderbird designed for atmospheric flight would join her sisters in the sand.

No pressure.

The inelegant solution would be to smash it, but it was huge, towering far above him, and John didn’t have the strength nor the tools to break the entire thing.  Gritting his teeth, and wishing he had gecko gloves, he started to climb.

Behind him, the space elevator retracted, travelling at a much faster speed than it had dropped him.  Thunderbirds Five and Three must have been out of time; he’d been hoping the elevator would have been able to stay until he’d dealt with the generator, but apparently not.

He was going to need retrieving as well, but with no working communications he couldn’t contact his brothers to organise that; he’d just have to trust that they wouldn’t forget about him with the overriding priority of Scott in the fore of their minds.  At the very least, EOS shouldn’t forget about him.

But no-one was going to be retrieving him until the EMP was gone. Armed with a selection of short-circuited tools and his own brain, John reached the control panel, which glared at him tauntingly.

You can’t stop me, it jeered.  You’ll fail and die and with no-one to reach Scott, he’ll die, too. Thunderbird Two will crash, and then Alan’ll be the only one left.  International Rescue is finished.

Unfortunately for the control panel, John had long since learnt to work through doubts, facing down the odds over and over again because if there was one thing he loved more than space, it was his family, and he wasn’t going to let them down.  Not now, not ever.

They didn’t call him a genius for nothing.  A selection of short-circuited tools and his brain was all John needed to break it.

And time.  With no gear, John didn’t know how long it took before the thing gave a pathetic whine and powered off.  Just to be sure, he awkwardly scaled the entire thing, watching for fail safes and backups, breaking anything that looked remotely like it could be used to repower the EMP.  Only once he was certain the machine couldn’t possibly restart did he back away from it.

Job done.  Thunderbird Two could reach Scott now.

He flopped down onto the sands, letting gravity have its way because that was less effort than fighting it.  They were hot, even through his uniform – his short-circuited, no longer temperature-controlled uniform – and John belatedly realised he didn’t have any water with him.

Well, nothing to do now except stare at the sky and wait to be retrieved.

His retrieval was nothing like he’d anticipated.  He’d thought Thunderbird Two would fly overhead, pausing just long enough to collect him, before they carried on towards Thunderbird One and Scott.

The sight of a giant red rocket landing in the Sahara despite her pilot being told numerous times that he was going nowhere except home was a surprise, although given the situation, John couldn’t scold Alan too much.

“Drink,” his little brother ordered the moment he succeeded in clambering into the cockpit, shedding the dead exosuit and his sand-encrusted helmet. He watched Alan climb around his cockpit, fastening the discarded gear and handing him his spare helmet from Thunderbird Five as he emptied a water bottle.  “Strap in, we’re going to get Scott.”

“What about Thunderbird Two?” John asked, obeying.

“Thunderbird Two is still thirty two minutes away from Thunderbird One’s location,” EOS informed him coolly.  “Thunderbird Three will make the journey from your current location in four point eight minutes.”

“So we’re going on ahead,” Alan said, firing Thunderbird Three’s retros to get them back into the sky.  “Hold on, this might get bumpy.”

Bumpy was one way of putting it.  Thunderbird Three was most definitely not suited to flying so close to the surface of the Earth, and John watched as his youngest brother wrestled with the controls, keeping her barely on course until they reached EOS’s co-ordinates for Thunderbird One.

The expulsion of the Vernier jets blew away the light covering of sand as they passed overhead, revealing the damaged Thunderbird in all her glory.

“She’s belly down,” he observed, frowning.  That made things more awkward – with both the pilot exit and the cargo doors buried, access would have to be done by the dorsal hatch.  More clambering, wonderful.

Alan set them down alongside, and John immediately disembarked, trawling through the sand to the other Thunderbird.  Her hull was scorching hot to the touch, even through his uniform, and he grimaced as he clambered up, using dents as hand and foot holds until he reached the dorsal hatch.

It was jammed shut because of course it was.

Behind him came a clunk, clunk, and he turned back to see Alan using his magnets to clamber the hull, a bag over his shoulder.

“Here,” the blond said, nudging him out of the way.  “I’ll cut the hatch.”  In his hands was his hand-laser, usually referred to by the teenager as a tin opener.  He wasn’t calling it that this time, clearly as aware as John that it was one of their own ships they were slicing open.

As soon as the dorsal hatch surrendered, John was through, dropping down into the confines of Thunderbird One.  He was dismayed to find that the air inside the ship was just as hot as outside, if not more so – clearly the EMP had knocked all of Thunderbird One’s temperature controls out, leaving the metal hull to conduct and amplify the unforgiving heat of the desert even inside.  It was also pitch black; even the emergency lighting had fallen victim to the EMP.

John fumbled with glowsticks, snapping them and illuminating the interior of the Thunderbird in a sickly green glow.  That observation, however, paled against the unmoving form slumped underneath the pilot seat, face down.

“Scott!” he exclaimed, picking his way forward and crouching on the broken glass that had once been the viewing window-come-pilot access.  His brother didn’t react, and with a sinking feeling he realised that the visor of the helmet had broken.  Blood had congealed on Scott’s face, the source unidentifiable from John’s angle, but more concerning was the sand invading through the broken window and helmet, peppering Scott’s lips and plastered to his face.

Scott’s eyes were closed.

“John?”  Alan dropped in behind him, and made a noise of shocked distress.  “Scott?”

“Did you bring a medical scanner from Thunderbird Three?” John asked, not daring to take his eyes off his fallen brother.  One appeared in his view, the gloved hand that held it not quite steady, and he accepted it, immediately setting it to assess Scott for injuries. “Find out how far out Thunderbird Two is.”

He tuned Alan out as the teenager started talking into his comm, glaring at the scanner and willing it to work faster.  Out of all of them, he had the least medical training – there was less of a need for it when he so rarely took part in rescues – but it was clear even to him that Scott likely had a concussion, and considering how hot it was inside Thunderbird One, they’d be lucky if they only had to worry about heat exhaustion.

Even heat exhaustion would be bad enough, but before John could touch him he had to make sure there were no other injuries – especially internal ones – that could be worsened by movement.

While he waited for it to finish, he glanced up at the seat above them. The restraints should have prevented Scott from falling out of his seat, even if he’d fallen unconscious, but they were lifted.  That was odd, unless…

“Scott?” he called again, resting a hand lightly on his brother’s left shoulder as the medical scan showed up nothing majorly wrong with it – some nasty bruising was in Scott’s future, if it wasn’t already starting, but that was all. There was still no answer.

“They’re ten minutes out,” Alan reported, coming up next to him and crouching down in the broken glass.  “How is he?”

“Scan’s still working,” John shrugged, watching the holographic copy of his prone brother appear piece by piece above him, red warning lights flashing up near the right shoulder.  Oranges and yellows dotted the rest of his body; to John’s relief, his bleeding head was only flagged yellow – whatever impact it had taken had obviously been mostly absorbed by the broken helmet.  Heart rate was also flagged up as too slow, while his body temperature declared one oh four and still rising.

“I’ll get a blanket,” Alan said, standing back up and heading for one of the many lockers that decorated Thunderbird One’s interior.  John heard the hiss of the manual release and then Alan was back, laying the blanket down next to their brother.

“Good thinking,” John praised, zooming in on the results of the shoulder and wincing.  Right, that made things a little more complicated, but they needed Scott on his back to best fight the heat exhaustion.  It was only the one issue, however, and John sent a quick prayer of thanks to their Mom for Scott’s comparative lack of injury before directing Alan to Scott’s legs.  “Roll him on three.  One… two… three!”

Scott wasn’t the lightest fairy in the world, and John was hyper aware of the broken collarbone as he guided his brother’s torso over, keeping an eye on the suit for any sign that the bone had broken the skin.

There was a quiet groan as they got him settled on the blanket, John carefully detaching the remains of the helmet and clearing broken fragments away from his face.

“Scott?” he tried again, lightly brushing the sand away from where sweat had stuck it to his brother’s face.  Eyelids fluttered, but didn’t open.  “Alan, we have to get his temperature down.”

“Already on it.”  A cutter was pressed into his hands.  “Get as much of his uniform off as you can while I get the cool packs working.”  John didn’t stop to think, the powerful tool sheering through the baldric at the shoulder, hip and thigh to remove the grey material and reveal the full extent of the blue flight suit Scott wore.

Considering the relative minority of Scott’s injuries, John was very grateful to that flight suit.  However, it had done its job, and he didn’t hesitate to pull the zipper down and re-engage the cutter to lop parts of the uniform off.  It was sticky with sweat, despite Brains designing it to be anti-sweat, and John sacrificed a moment to remove his own gloves from his dead suit. Scott was cool and clammy to the touch, but it was easier to feel the rise and fall of his chest which, even if it was rather slow, reassured them that he was still with them.

John had every intention of making sure he didn’t leave them.

Part 5>>>