Chapter Text
This shower’s bigger than his entire bedroom aboard Thunderbird 5, all impeccably clear glass walls and sleek marble tiles and six different showerheads positioned throughout, gleaming chrome. And, improbably, there’s a bench running the length of it—polished, slatted teak—that’s wider than his stationside berth. John can’t remember ever actually having a problem with his bunk aboard TB5, but it’s starting to look a little spartan in his memory.
No showers in zero-g, either.
Well, not technically. A Plexiglas chamber with pressurized jets that provide a scant quantity of recycled water on a four minute timer, and a stripped down routine that equates to about a three-minute shower on Earth. Just another task, necessary. But it’s not like Thunderbird 5’s interior gets dirty, so it’s not like there’s much to wash off. The environment is temperature and pressure-controlled, and John’s suit wicks away even minimal perspiration and gets dry cleaned in a special module at need.
So John’s not used to feeling grimy in his own skin, feeling sweat and the atmosphere of the hospital still clinging to him. He’d spent three days running a ridiculously high temperature, he’d needed to be put on a saline drip to make up for the fluids he’d lost to fever. Probably by now he should be sick of dense, oppressive heat and inescapable moisture.
Apparently not, though.
John turns every tap on full and fills the room with heat and so much steam it’s almost hard to breathe. But the hot water hits his skin and the steam fills his lungs and some of the ache starts to go out of him. He goes about it slower than usual, but it’s still only about five minutes before he’s clean, although soap that actually lathers instead of just acts as a mild antiseptic and surfactant is another thing he forgot about Earth. But by then he’s feeling the exertion of standing, and he lets himself drop onto the bench and take a little longer. The place is all white noise and heat, and John closes his eyes and studiously avoids thinking about anything.
After a while, as the steam and the warm air open up his pores, he rubs his palm over the line of his jaw, itchy and uncomfortably stubbled. The hair on his face comes in patchy ginger and bright blond, all at different rates. But the razor beside the sink isn’t electric like he’s used to, and his hands are still shaking too much to chance it. Scott could probably pull off a beard, but long years of military training prevent it from appealing to him even remotely.
Scott. John hadn’t seen Scott in almost three years. Scott had looked older than he did in holograms, his eyes a little shadowed, his hair slightly tousled, and wearing a suit and tie instead of his IR blues. When John had seen him in the hospital—when Scott had pulled him into a tight, almost painful embrace—Scott had been in uniform. Scott looked like he hadn’t shaved in a few days either, pulling off that scruffy, five o'clock shadow the exact way that John can’t.
John’s already forgotten most of what he talked about with Scott.
It’s like it just didn’t quite stick, none of the words between them had snagged on the surface of his brain. It had been an argument, though Scott hadn’t once raised his voice. John had been the one to get angry. The last thing Scott had said had been the suggestion that John take a shower and clear his head. It seems like he’s cleared it a little too well.
He remembers stumbling slightly across the threshold of the bathroom. He remembers the way he’d been shaking, the way he’d stood in the middle of the room for a little too long with his eyes hot and threatened by the pressure of tears. There’d been a muddle of anger and grief and fear and he’d just drowned it all out in heat and white noise and pressure, and let the words wash away. And now he’s here, with stubble coarsening his jaw and hot water pounding on his slowly recovering body and deliberate emptiness inside his head.
Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, and a crisp knock on the door, calling him out of another little cocoon of warmth and safety and numbing silence.
Okay.
“Quite all right in there, Master John?”
“Fine,” he answers through the door, even as he starts to turn the water off. There are towels stacked on a bench by the shower door, big and thick and fluffy. On Thunderbird 5, his towel is microfiber and rolls down into a compact little package for storage. This one could almost wind twice around his narrow hips and hits the middle of his shins.
Parker’s been the very model of care and courtesy, but he also keeps a polite distance. He’s glad it’s Parker, because otherwise it would be Scott. John’s glad for the lack of Scott at his elbow as he tucks a towel around his waist and reaches over the sink to swipe steam off the mirror.
But it’s the bandages that draw his eye, still wrapped tight around his wrists and fingers. He doesn’t reach as far as his shadow in the mirror, he catches himself with his hand trembling, trying to grasp those threads of red pain. Probably he shouldn’t, but he does anyway, tugs the tape free and unwinds the gauze and can’t help a short, sharp catch of breath at the sight of his unbandaged fingers. The scars are ugly and the worst runs from the tip of his first finger to the palm.
The magnets in his fingertips had been wired in, electromagnetic coils connected to a biofilament that drew power from catalytic batteries in his wrists. All of this has been pulled out, and in a messy rush of emergency surgery, to prevent interference with the MRI. John’s still not completely sure why he needed an MRI, but it’s neither here nor there at this point. His wrists look slit open and stitched back together, raw and painful.
It feels like a violation. Almost more than anything else has so far, it feels like violence. Almost more than the actual violence. They’ve taken something that was vital and important and his and left him scarred and at a loss. John’s always been particular about his hands, with their long, pianist’s fingers. Everyone’s always surprised that it’s Virgil who’s musical, because Virgil’s hands are blunt and calloused. John’s got the elegant, slender fingers, but he’s also a little bit tone-deaf. But where Thunderbird 5 had been concerned, John had been a maestro. He’d been the one and only true master of his station.
At least, until EOS had come along.
EOS had hard-coded herself into TB5, belonged there in a way that was realer and purer than he ever had. He was a foreign object, the same as the magnets and batteries and biofilament he’d wired into his fingers. And they’ve ripped her out, torn every part of her systems free and sequestered her on some GDF server, some mainframe that was never built to handle her. His station is as empty and useless as his hands feel, absent their secret sixth sensation. And it’s only a fraction of what she would have felt. His fingers clench against the scars and he has to put EOS out of his mind, because he can’t help her like this. John takes slow, deep breaths of the still-warm, steamy air and forces himself to focus. Like everything else, he has to put it out of his mind.
John swipes a hand across the clouded surface of the mirror and stares hard at his reflection. It’s been long enough that he sometimes believes his eyes are supposed to be the bright, gleaming green of his contact lenses. But looking past that. Past the bruising, past the ginger-gold stubble, past way he’s gotten a little gaunt. Nothing’s changed. Nothing’s really changed, illness and injury aside. His usually unbreakable composure is enamel-thin, and it’s been cracked from the inside out. That’s no good. John can’t function in a world where he lets himself lose hold of his emotions. He needs to pull his armor back on, needs to regain control of what people see from the outside.
Well. There’s a logical place to start that process.
The robe that Penelope had sent hangs on a hook on the back of the bathroom door. It’s a princely thing, rich and warm and plainly expensive. But it’s not the most valuable thing the Lady had sent. The robe had been a gift, her bodyguard is on loan. Parker’s a resource, and it’s time John started to make use of him.
So he shrugs the robe on again, shoulders the bathroom door open, and pretends his eyes are green. Pretends he can still see all the extra information, augmented reality layered over the world in front of him. Information has always been John’s means to exert control over the world, and more than anything else, he needs to regain control.
Parker’s waiting, as expected. He nods briefly to John, deferential. “Miss Kyrano is waiting for you, Master John.”
John had been supposed to clear his head, get his story straight, because Kayo’s going to want to know what happened. Kayo’s going to stare with those agate green eyes and her stern, serious tone and she’s going to be all hard edges and sharp questions about a place and a time and an event that John doesn’t want to cast his mind back towards. It’s done, it’s over. It’s old information. He doesn’t know any of the answers, doesn’t want to dwell on what’s already happened—those four points of bruising on his throat, where he can still feel calloused fingers and tight, awful pressure. It’s like Parker had said. Best not to dwell on it. Best to move forward. “I’m not ready to see her yet.”
“Of course, Master John. In your own time. Is there anything I can do—?”
“Yes, actually.” John squares his shoulders, stands as tall and straight as Scott always forgets he is. As tall as Parker remembers him. It takes effort. It’s going to take a lot of effort not to let himself slip backward with the pull of remembered trauma, fear of the people who’ve made a target of him. But the walls are going up, the way they did three years ago, and John’s marshalling himself behind them. People had needed him then. His family had needed him to be strong and implacable and self-possessed. Someone needs him now, even if no one else believes she does, even if everyone else is willing to give her up for lost.
You don’t give up on your family.
But first things first. John nods to Parker, gestures towards the robe he’s wearing. “Before anything else, I need a pair of pants.”