Chapter Text
That’s it, I’ll have his hide for this! “
International Rescue’s commander was as mad as Virgil had ever seen him. He had been ranting ever since he’d extricated his brother from Thunderbird Two’s cockpit. Not that Virgil wasnt grateful for Scott’s shoulder to lean on as he limped out of the elevator and into the infirmary.
Scott elbowed the door open with unnecessary force and then deposited Virgil to sit on the bed while he went in search of the medscanner. He kept up a running tirade as he did so, opening and slamming drawers as he went.
“He’s completely unprofessional! Tying up the comms in the middle of a rescue by singing! Singing!”
“Now Scott, it wasn’t like that. Those kids were terrified and he got them smiling and relaxing by...”
Scott talked over him without listening.
“First rule of field operations, keep your mouth shut and listen to your commanding officer. Keep the radio clear unless you’ve got something relevant to say! You don’t make flippant comments and jokes in the middle of an operation, for God’s sake!”
Scott had found the scanner by now and ran it over his brother.
It was no surprise to Virgil that it flashed amber over his right ankle, indicating a bad sprain.
“... And this is what happens when you have no respect for the chain of command - people get hurt!”
“Now wait a minute Scott, this wasn’t Gordon’s fault. I just put my foot down awkwardly on some debris ...”
“ ... That you wouldn’t have done if you weren’t having to rush over unstable ground to pull him out of the building I told him not to go into!”
finished his brother.
“ Maybe not,” said Virgil quietly, “ but then those children would be dead right now.”
“ Virge, you know as well as I do that good command decisions aren’t determined by the outcome. They are good if they are based on solid conclusions from the information available to you in that moment! Yes, Gordon saved those kids and I’m glad they made it, of course I am. But all the intel pointed to the fact that that building was incredibly structurally unsound and shouldn’t have been entered until we had some way of stabilising it. It was sheer dumb luck that Gordon found those kids so close to the entrance, or they wouldn’t have been the only ones that died when the whole thing collapsed!”
Virgil said nothing.
After long seconds, Scott rubbed his face tiredly with a dirt covered hand.
“This isn’t the first time, Virge. Gordon’s been an active member of IR for two months now and it’s been a catalogue of flippancy, disregarding directives and downright reckless behaviour. There’s a complete lack of discipline.”
Virgil was frowning and shaking his head.
“Scott, no. I know he’s not settled in fully yet, and he’s made some hasty decisions, but that’s not how it feels when I’m working alongside him in Two...”
Scott gave an angry wave of his hand.
“You’re too soft on him Virgil, you always have been. If a trainee pilot in my squadron had behaved like Gordon does, they’d have found themselves scrubbing latrines for a month! “
Virgil gave his brother a considering look, wondering where this was going. He said pointedly,
“But he’s not a trainee. He’s your kid brother.”
Scott stared at him for a long moment, and seemed to deflate. He picked at some peeling paint on the infirmary wall. Virgil waited quietly. Eventually, Scott shook himself free of his reverie.
“Look, when we first took over International Rescue, after... after we lost Dad, it was hard. You know it was.”
Virgil nodded his agreement.
“But you and John both knew your roles and you took them seriously. You don’t question my authority and you follow my lead.”
Virgil frowned and opened his mouth to point out that he could think of a number of times when both of them had questioned his decisions or done something on the spur of the moment. But Scott talked over him, firing up all over again. “ It was only yesterday that Gordon argued with me over how to approach that sunken sub!”
Again, Virgil opened his mouth to point out that Gordon was in fact the team’s trained aquanaut, only to be steamrollered by Scott.
“... and two days before that, he’d got too close to that chemical fire in Stockholm. A week before that he was making jokes while we attended that nightmare of a rescue in Japan and a couple of days before that, you remember how he pranked you when you’d barely left the hangars from those godawful back to back rescues at the beginning of the month!?”
Virgil did remember and had to quickly quell the beginnings of the smile that came when he recalled the incident. In the time it had taken him to finish his post flight checks on Two, and drag his weary carcass from the pilots chair, Gordon had managed to skip up from the hangars. He had somehow dressed Max and two other workshop robots in Virgil’s civvy clothes and programmed them to burst out of his locker when he opened it, performing a high kicking routine to the old Monty Python song of “I’m a Lumberjack and I’m Ok!”
This had resulted in all of his changes of clothes being ripped when the unlikely chorus line had dropped into the splits as the routine’s big finish. Virgil had laughed ‘til he cried and hadn’t minded the collateral damage.
But Scott had. He gave Gordon a thorough dressing down over the prank, accusing him of immaturity and disrespect to his work colleagues. Gordon had stood silent and increasingly mulish as the reprimand dragged on, finally snapping off a sarcastic salute before spinning on his heel and leaving.
Virgil dragged himself back to the present as Scott continued,
“When it was just the three of us, there was order and discipline - two words that seem to be lacking from Gordon’s vocabulary!”
Virgil was taken aback by the vehemence in Scott’s words. Gordon had always marched to the beat of a different drummer, and he could see how his humour and flippancy could be taken the wrong way if you weren’t with him and seeing with your own eyes that his words belied his focus and reliability.
But it wasn’t like Scott to make hasty judgements. Virgil had been aware that his eldest brother had been riding the family fish hard ever since he had become an official member of IR. Actually, it had surprised Virgil because Scott was usually extremely patient and encouraging with the two youngest.
Scott had been a rock during the last year as Gordon, oh so slowly, recovered from his accident with the WASP hydrofoil. In those horrific early days he had held not only Gordon together, but the rest of the family too. Everyone was strained to breaking point by the likelihood of yet another unbearable loss, and then the only marginally better news that Gordon would live but be paralysed. Miraculously, Gordon’s indomitability had overcome the odds, aided in no small part by Scott’s unwavering support.
The second youngest Tracy had proved the medics wrong. Whilst he now sported more bolts and plates in his body than a small naval vessel, he could walk, run and swim, and function mostly normally. It hadn’t been enough to satisfy WASP though, and he was discharged on medical grounds. Gordon had been devastated.
However, as soon as he could walk a few halting steps, he had begun pestering Scott to join the Thunderbirds. Scott had agreed that if and when he passed the physical devised by Virgil to test his roadworthiness, he could join the team. Gordon set-to with a vengeance.
Two months previously, and nine months after the accident, he had met that standard.
So, watching Scott take such an unforgiving a stance over the past couple of months had set Virgil’s spidey sense tingling. He hadn’t even asked for an opinion from Virgil, who had worked with his younger brother almost exclusively in Thunderbird Two.
“ That’s kinda harsh don’t you think, Scott?” he said carefully. “Sure, Gordon doesn’t work in the same way that we’re used to, but honestly, he’s learning really quickly and he’s bringing his own skills to the mix.”
“He doesn’t know how to be a team player! He can’t be relied upon in high pressure situations!”
“Now Scott, that’s not fair, he’s done plenty of growing up in the last couple of years. Just think, WASP took him on as their youngest ever recruit. Remember they let him join at sixteen, a whole year younger than the official entry age? They wouldn’t have done that if they didn’t think he had the right stuff would they? And for all that I wish to God he’d never seen that infernal machine, he must have really impressed them to be chosen for that hydrofoil trial.”
Scott replied immediately, seemingly without thinking, “ But that’s just it! He wasn’t accepted because he had the right stuff! He was chosen because. ..”
The moment the words were out of his mouth Scott looked guilt stricken. He choked off what else he was going to say and turned away.
Virgil was staring at him.
“Scott? Scott what are you talking about?”
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“ You can’t say something like that and then tell me to forget it!”
“It was a mistake. Just... just let it go Virgil. Please. “
“What do you mean, he wasn’t accepted because he had the right stuff?!”
Scott banged his head back against the infirmary wall and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Virgil was still staring at him in a way he recognised only too well. There was no way Virgil was going to let that statement go without an explanation.
Damn, damn, damn.
Scott let out a breath. “ I shouldn’t have said anything. I didn’t mean to say anything. “
Virgil’s expression said quite clearly that, be that as it may, he had said something and he was going to explain it or else.
Scott blew out a long breath. “ I know that Gordon wasn’t recruited and chosen to be part of the trial on merit because I was privy to inside information.”
Virgil stared at him.
“Lieutenant Hargreaves, my friend from the the Air Force flight academy, transferred across to the Fleet Air Arm a while back and was assigned as personal pilot to Commodore LeCroix, one of the Navy’s top brass. His job involved flying the commander’s jet and it meant he got to pick up scuttlebutt from HQ and onboard meetings.”
“ I bumped into him when he was on leave and I was in New York on Tracy Industries business. I stopped at the Manhattan Club after a day’s auditing. James happened to be coming out of the door as I was going in, and we ended up having drinks together.”
“ We chatted about old times and then James told me that knew my kid brother had been recruited to the World Navy, that he had made quite the name for himself. I thought he was going to tell me how well Gordon had done, but he was laughing. James said that Gordon had become notorious for being difficult and playing pranks on senior officers, who had been infuriated by him.
“James had first overheard LeCroix talking to Gordon’s commanding officer back in the winter when Gordon had been in the basic Naval training programme for about four months. Apparently, the officer was saying that he knew they had only recruited Gordon because he was supposed to be a poster boy for the service, a cute, all American, blond, Olympic swimmer who was to be used for PR purposes.”
“You’ve got to remember how he used to ring home and go on about some fancy event or other that he’d attended? It was like he wasn’t in the military at all, just some kind of playboy looking good in a uniform.”
“Anyway, Gordon’s commanding officer told LeCroix that Gordon was not a team player, was far more trouble than he was worth and that they should get rid of him. LeCroix told the man that he didn’t care how much trouble the brat was, they were to suck it up.”
“ LeCroix apparently said that they’d not let him join early just because the kid could swim and was photogenic. He was a Tracy, and they had every intention of using him to get an in with Tracy Industries because of our cutting edge maritime research and development department. They were waiting until our new laser technology was perfected to approach us. “
“The data we’d shared publicly to date suggested to the Navy that the system held potential to be weaponised, he said. LeCroix knew that we didn’t sell patents for military applications of our tech and was going to use Gordon to pressure the company.”
Virgil just stared at him.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
Scott stared back at Virgil, a bitter smile pulling at his lips.
“James told me he had also been there when the Commodore took another phone call about Gordon, shortly after the first incident. Apparently a request had been submitted for Gordon to transfer to WASP.”
“LeCroix had approved the move, saying that since that was what the brat had wanted all along, it would kill two birds with one stone. It would keep him sweet and mean that he could wreak all the havoc he liked since it wouldn’t be his, LeCroix’s, direct problem any more. But he told Gordon’s commanding officer to pass on to WASP that no matter what he did, the brat had to be kept on and pandered to until November at least.”
“Why November?”
Scott looked away from Virgil for a long moment, then looked back.
“Because that was when trials of the new hydrofoil were due to begin. James said LeCroix had explained that if the Tracy kid was onboard for the test run, he could be flattered into persuading Tracy Industries to sell them the patent for the laser tech on the grounds that it would be used as part of the hydrofoil’s navigational system.”
Virgil looked aghast. “ But that... but that means....”
“It means that Gordon was only on that boat because the Navy wanted to get its hands on our research.”
“Oh God. And you couldn’t say anything....”. Virgil felt bile rising in his throat.
“Because I couldn’t raise it without making it obvious that Gordon had nearly died, nearly been permanently paralysed, that all of us had gone through hell, for nothing - worse than nothing. He wasn’t on that boat due to his own merit, he had just been a pawn in a game with Tracy Industries. I could never tell anyone. I never meant to tell anyone and you can’t either.”
Virgil shook his head dumbly. Words were beyond him for the moment.
“There’s nothing to be done about the crash. It’s past and it’s gone, and he survived, thank God. What bothers me is that now he’s officially a Thunderbird, Gordon’s behaving just as James described. “
“Worse than that, though, he must believe he earned a place on that boat, so he’s acting like he’s an expert, challenging my orders. If he carries on this way, he’s going to get someone hurt, hell, he’s already got you out of action!”
“The thing is, when Dad talked about setting up International Rescue, he saw it as a family business. You, me and John, we were older and he knew what he was getting. But the tinies, well they were still just kids, he couldn’t know how they’d mature, who they’d be years down the line.“
“Virge, I hate to say it, but from what I know about Gordon’s track record and his performance on missions to date, I just don’t think he is cut out to be a Thunderbird”.
Virgil was speechless.
Neither of the brothers caught a glimpse of blue and yellow as a figure, who had been stood by the open door, moved away down the corridor.