Chapter Text
He’ll never forgive himself for not believing it at first.
It’s just—an emergency code from one of his brothers’ ships is designed to override everything else aboard TB5. Everything. John’s entire station alters itself around him, without warning. Everything else gets remanded to a lower priority, proverbially put on hold, and the center of his focus becomes whichever of his brothers needs his help. Because if one of them trips their emergency code, it must be an emergency.
But it’s all relative. TB2 has literally been on fire and hobbling out of the sky, and Virgil stubbornly hadn’t keyed his code, nor ditched his bird in the ocean. TB1 has been in a tailspin incline dive, and Scott had just grit his teeth and fixed it his own damn self, with only a little advice from Alan. Gordon’s had his bird nearly torn in half around him, and all he’d done was bail. Promptly. And then immediately picked a fight with a literal Goliath of a submersible mech over a hundred times his size. But it’s not as though that was a real emergency.
It’s possible that this job might have skewed their perspectives. Just slightly.
But Gordon’s also the only one who’s ever triggered his code without it being a practiced drill. On a sunny afternoon, with TB4 parked securely inside its hangar and John occupied with backing up Scott and Virgil in the midst of earthquake evac, suddenly his commsphere had flared into high alert around him, and John had nearly had a heart attack. It was the first time in years that an emergency had felt like an emergency, and suddenly he’d been new to the job again, desperate and panicking, and afraid for one of his brothers until—
“I just wanted to make sure it worked.”
“…to…to make sure it worked?”
John remembers the way adrenaline had been bitter in his mouth and his heart had been pressing against the back of his throat and he’d been almost dizzy from the whiplash of discovering that his little brother was fine, actually. Parked at home on the island, just doing some standard maintenance.
He hadn’t even had the decency to be ashamed. “ Yeah! Just, you know. Just checking.”
“Of course it fucking works!”
John can’t remember the last time he’d gotten as angry as Gordon had made him then, just by pushing a few harmless buttons in a particular order. Incandescent, almost unbelievable shock and outrage.
Gordon had just shrugged, far from as apologetic as John thought he should be. “Well, but I didn’t know that. Few hundred feet under water, I get into some shit, I don’t wanna just take it on faith that the magic buttons do the thing. I was just thinking about it. I wondered. Now I know.”
“I knew! You could’ve asked! Or you could’ve warned me, Gordon! We test these things, of course we know they work! Jesus, I thought you—”
“Well, but I was just thinking about it. And now I also know you handle it kinda poorly, John. I could’ve been dying down here. C'mon. Get your act together.”
John doesn’t remember how he’d closed the call. He might’ve just hung up. He remembers needing to pause and take some slow, deep breaths to even his heartrate back out, to calm back down and get back to Scott and Virgil, and a real emergency. And the way that the false alarm had been the scariest thing to happen to him since they’d lost their father, and he hadn’t even had his father to go to for reassurance.
He’d done it again a few months later. This time Gordon had sworn up and down that this second time was an accident, put it down to stress and overwork and the fact that their emergency codes are exactly that—codes, random combinations of certain function in their Thunderbirds, which when entered in sequence, trip the personal emergency alarm aboard TB5. It’s for situations when their own personal safety is at risk—if one of the Thunderbirds were ever hijacked, or in the event of a crash or injury that required urgent intervention. Even after the first time, it still ranks among John’s greatest fears, and an emergency call, even if it’s a false alarm, is just absolute hell on his nerves.
“One of these times I’m not going to answer.”
Gordon had just scoffed. “Liar. Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I hit blue when I meant to hit red. It’s been a long day down here. But I’m fine! And I’ll be honest—it might happen again.”
Even if he hadn’t meant it to happen—even if he’d been hoping for the opposite—Gordon had planted just the tiniest, mustard seed of doubt in his brother. Even years after the fact, even in the circumstances, the first thing John thinks when TB4’s emergency code blares around him is that it must be a false alarm. John’s not much for superstition, but he’s always been oddly susceptible to the idea of things happening in threes. It seems to make sense. Third time’s the charm.
Because there’s nothing on the sensors. There’s too much interference in the area, TB4’s current readouts are just a standby loop of what they were when John last had a good connection, reassuring, green across the board. The same debris clouding the waters and preventing the Chaos Crew from discovering TB4 are likewise muddying TB5’s connection, preventing all but the most basic readouts. He has the ship’s depth and location and a patent commline, he knows TB4 still exists and that Gordon’s still inside—but one of the only things that works when everything else fails is a tripped emergency code.
Still, there’s that grain of doubt. that moment of memory for the last time his station had blossomed around him, urgent red with the warning that something was wrong. He’d almost been proud of himself, in the moment, that he’d learned from experience and his heart hadn’t leapt directly up to his throat, his pulse spiking and adrenaline coursing into his system. Instead he’d paused a moment. Toggled the comm back on, and cautiously informed his brother, “Gordon, you’ve activated your emergency code.”
“…Gordon?”
“Gordon!”