#crash dive

Due to some force he can’t name, Alan has spent the least amount of time in the med bay out of everyone—and that includes John, who racked up a lifetime’s worth of injuries in the few years before he became TB5’s primary operator. Maybe it’s because he’s still technically the newest member of the rescue squad and hasn’t put in the same number of hours. He’s certainly stuck on standby enough to account for a serious lack of opportunity, when it comes to getting his ass kicked on the same level of his brothers, and when he does get called up, his missions are usually neat, tidy things that don’t include much risk. Fact is, he’s usually the guy hovering over the med scanner, not the guy laying on top of it.

Which is how he knows exactly what to do, when the machine lets out a prolonged chirp to indicate a complete scan. “Huh,” he says, locked on to a blinking red warning that radiates from the shoulder of his miniature digital duplicate. “Ouch.”

He doesn’t actually need the scan to tell him that his shoulder is fully dislocated—anterior, ligament strain significant—because he can feel the tendons spasming across every square inch, taught like rubber bands trying desperately to spring back into shape. On top of that, there’s plenty the scan doesn’t register. An unseen tension spreads down the entire left side of his torso and bursts upward around the side and rear of his neck. Prickling, invisible numbness creeps into his last two fingers and there’s a persistent, instinctual voice hidden away in his head, telling him something is wrong, wrong, wrong.

He probably didn’t actually need the scan, but the habit got the better of him.

Alan has seen this same injury across dozens of different bodies, so the pain strikes him sideways, by way of secondhand sympathy that is stored in his memory after years of rescues. He grits through phantom pains before there’s even a hint of real discomfort. Dislocation hurts, which is a fact he knows because people have told him so, through tears, and whimpers, and shocked cries for help, and—

Fucking ow, though.

It takes a significant effort to sit back up, his entire back clamping against the movement. There’s nothing like a traumatic joint injury to remind a person of just how interconnected the muscular system is. His shoulder blade is tied directly to his spine and it pulls everything into an involuntary arch. His collar stretches into his lungs and robs him of his deeper breaths. A warm, dull pulse of pain expands into everything Alan’s got, and he wants it to stop.

Thankfully, he knows exactly how to make that happen. Between his brothers and the people they rescue, Alan’s reduced enough dislocations that he could fix this one with his hand ties behind his back—or with one shoulder firmly dislodged from its socket, as the case may be.

Half of his body is dead weight, but the other half operates on hours and hours of meticulous EMT training. The order of operations appears in his memory before he has to consciously recall it, starting with step one—he takes his limp wrist and tenderly tucks it between his belt and his breast plate, immobilizing the joint across his chest for steps two and three. These are cutting through sleeve of his blues and finding a vein, respectively, but he needs extra tools to complete either, and he’s not risking more ligament damage in the meantime.

In the med bay, everything is kept at an arm’s reach, because this is the kind of spot where equipment placement matters. Alan doesn’t have to stretch too far to reach a pair of silver trauma shears, snapped into place overhead, but even the smallest bit of movement is met with contractions up and down his side. “Yeah, I get it,” he tells his body, apparently blind to the fact that he’s actively trying to resolve the situation. “Just gimme a fucking—ow.”

The spasms jump up toward his jaw, fighting back against his words, and his teeth grind against the sudden shift to acute, shooting pains. That’ll teach him to give himself attitude. “Alright.”

The sharpness gives way to soreness once more, but he’s losing feeling in all five fingers now, so he doesn’t waste any more time. From the surrounding equipment, he plucks an isopropyl prep pad, a roll of pale Coban wrap, and a preloaded hydromorphone capsule, then places them all in a neat pile beside his shears. Each twist and reach becomes harder than the last as the swelling balloons against red, raw nerves. It’s all wrong, wrong, wrong.

With the lightest touch he has, Alan loops his wrist back out of his belt and places the length of his arm along his lap. The limb seems to belong to someone else as he strips away his wrist plate and positions his palm facing up, which actually makes the whole ordeal a little easier to approach. He’s done this with rescue victims plenty of times. How different could it be on his own arm?

His suit is made up of unbroken, space-rated Kevlar, and Brains is always warning him about a weak spot right at the seam of his glove. This is where he lets his shears go to work, snipping through a small section at first, then using the slim hole as leverage to tear straight up the sleeve and reveal the skin below. In one swift movement, Alan slices through 1.2 million dollars, but this fact barely registers among everything else. For him, suits are already disposable, given that he rotates through new measurements every three months and dooms anything with older, slightly shorter measurements to the island’s recycling center. This set of blues will just get added to the pile.

Forearm exposed, Alan trades his sheers for the prep pad. The automatic flow of his training is interrupted when he realizes he can’t rip the packet open with a single hand, so he brings the top of it to his teeth and tears the tab away. The sting of alcohol jabs straight into his nose and coats his lips, teasing an involuntary sneer out of him and wreaking havoc against his throbbing jaw.

When he hears the hatch door open, Alan flinches hard enough that his whole body answers with more cramping spasms. 

“What the hell are you doing?” Virgil’s always had a gift for sounding disapproving. If Gordon got Dad’s blind determination, and John got Dad’s skill for systems, and Scott got everything else, then Virgil got the commanding, no-nonsense voice that’s best suited to scoldings and lectures. “Lay down.”

Alan spits the little aluminum tab from his mouth. “Don’t you have a plane to fly?”

“John’s piloting remotely,” says Virgil, the hatch slamming shut behind him. “And you’re waiting for a hospital.”

“John can’t land remotely in the middle of some Grecian city,” Alan bites back. The pad is cold against the soft skin of his inner arm as he wipes a spot above the faded blue of his vein. “And there’s nothing a hospital’s got that I don’t have right here.”

“How about a sterile environment, for one.”

“It’s a dislocation—not open heart surgery.”

“In that case, how about x-rays? MRIs? CT scans?”

“S’what the med scanner’s for.” Alan’s heartbeat is building at the center of a joint that temporarily doesn’t exist, pounding against each individual fiber of stretched out tissue. “I don’t need to take up space in the ER—I’m handling it.”

Virgil’s already crossed the cargo hold and planted himself in front of the med scan, flicking and spinning through the black, white, and red rendering of Alan’s mangled body. It’s habit for him, too, and Alan wonders what kind of sympathy pains Virgil feels right now. “Handling it, huh?” he says, zooming in on the scan of his shoulder. “Alright, hotshot. How are you gonna create enough traction to pop things back into place with only one arm?”

The following pause is long enough to send a rosy red heat into Alan’s throat, jaw, and cheeks. He busies himself with the disposal of the prep pad to hide the fact that he hadn’t actually thought that far ahead. Rather than admit this aloud, he simply changes course. “You don’t make Gordon go to the hospital when he dislocates things.”

Whatever disapproval rests in the reserves of Virgil’s voice, it’s found a place in his silent, brooding glances too. Alan’s tactic does work, but only because Virgil allows it to. “That’s because Gordon’s a hypermobile freak of nature who’s joints are more rubber than muscle,” he says. “A week of icing and he’s back in business after something like this.”

Alan tries to sit up taller against the comment. This is a mistake, and it shows in the way his posture breaks and squirms. “I could be a freak of nature—you don’t know.”

“If you were a freak of nature, your shoulder would have already bounced back into its socket,” Virgil informs him. “Instead, it’s hanging sideways in your spacesuit and swelling to ten times its usual size.”

“Which is exactly why I’m trying to put it back sooner rather than later. If it keeps swelling up like this, it’s gonna take hours in the ER.” At his side, Alan reaches for the little blue capsule. “Is that what you want? Your poor baby brother in pain, screaming at the top of his lungs—I hate you, I hate all of you, if only my big brother had reduced the injury sooner—”

“Christ almighty, alright.” Satisfied with the reading, Virgil flicks the med scan out of sight, to be stored in TB2’s short-term system memory and uploaded to Tracy Island’s systems upon landing. “We’ll do what we can. But you’re not injecting your own painkillers—gimme that.”

Alan’s got the quickest reflexes out of all of them, so it should be easy to dodge when Virgil reaches out to grab the capsule. The fact that Virgil successfully takes it on the first attempt is a sign that Alan absolutely misses, and Virgil absolutely doesn’t. “Oh, weird,” says Alan, matter of fact. “Do you suddenly know more about the position of my own veins than I do?”

This earns another stern glance from Virgil. “You’re running on enough adrenaline to mobilize a small army,” he says, cool and even as ever. “Right now, I know more about the position of your own head than you do.”

“I can do it—”

“Shut up and give me your arm.”

Alan doesn’t give Virgil his arm, so much as his arm just sits there, unresponsive, and waiting for someone to come along and fix it. Virgil answers the call, examining Alan’s vein with the kind of featherlight touch that is cultivated after years spent manipulating sore and injured bodies. 

As he inspects the injection site, his hands absently unwrap the hydromorphone capsule. It’s a flat, ovular device developed specifically for use aboard TB2, concealing a small needle and a measured dose of concentrated painkillers. Virgil peels back the waxy paper that protects the surrounding adhesive pad and lets it flutter to the floor of the module. 

The device hovers over its own shadow as Virgil lines it up with the kind of precision that only comes with experience. He lowers it carefully into place and runs a finger along the edges to ensure the film sticks to Alan’s skin. A single button rests along the flat top of the device, positioned just below a small IR insignia, and Virgil presses it once, twice, three times to apply the correct dosage for Alan’s weight. 

Alan jerks when the needle pricks into his bloodstream and though he knows it’s not true, he swears he can feel the warmth of the injection as it oozes up his vein.

“Fifteen minutes,” Virgil declares, wrapping the Coban around the capsule to keep it secure. “We should land by then, and the doctors can get started on you before the swelling locks the joint—”

“Wait, hold on,” says Alan, holding out his good hand. “You said we were taking care of it.”

“I said we’d do what we can,” Virgil corrects. “But I’m a pilot with basic EMT training, and I’m not going to piece you back together in the back of a moving vehicle when we’re minutes away from a full orthopedic team. I’d like you to have a functional shoulder joint when we’re done here, thank you very much.”

“There’s real people who need to go to the ER, Virgil.”

“You’re real people, Alan.”

“We both know that’s only technically true.”

“We got a jumpstart on the painkillers,” Virgil says. “So there’s not going to be any wasted time. No excess swelling. You’ll be in and out.”

“Virgil, bud, if you don’t put my shoulder back where it’s supposed to be in the next ten seconds, I’m gonna rig up one of the grapples and find a way to tear the whole damn arm off.”

“No you’re not.” Virgil gets this tone from their father too, and it’s been said that their father got it from Grandpa Grant. There’s an absoluteness to it. A sense of certainty. As though all Virgil needs to do is speak it, and it shall be done. “You’re going to lay down, and you’re going to let the drugs do their thing, and then you’re going to be nice to the ER doctors when we land.”

Any rebuttal Alan might have—and these are limited, as the adrenaline begins to die down—is interrupted by the familiar, two-tone chime of an incoming communication. Without hesitation, Virgil flips his wrist into position and John flashes into view. “Thunderbird Two,” he says. “How is he?”

Virgil glances up at Alan, and answers, “He’s fine.” Then, to Alan, “For what it’s worth, you’re a god awful rescue victim.”

“I’m in pain, be nice to me.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have let a rock take you out.”

“Hey,” says Alan. “It was a big rock.”

Virgil ignores this, switching to a new tone of voice—this one specific to older brothers, talking about their younger brother as though he’s not even in the room. “Anterior dislocation of the left shoulder, likely tearing in the surrounding ligaments. We’ll need an MRI to be sure. I just started him on hydromorphone, so maybe the drowsiness will kick in and he’ll stop trying to save himself.”

“FAB, I’ll let the hospital know,” says John, hands swiping through new information as it comes. He sounds like Thunderbird Five, because John’s only got the two voices—on duty, and off duty. And sometimes even those get muddled up into one. “They should be ready for intake as soon as you land—three minutes out. I’ll need you to reclaim controls shortly.”

“I’m on my way.” John blinks into silence as Virgil lets his arm drop, already starting toward the hatch door. He locks a finger on Alan as he goes, with a warning point that can’t be crossed. “Stay away from the equipment—I’m serious. If I find so much as a cotton ball out of place down here, I’m pulling you from Two’s roster until you’re forty.”

“Just so we’re clear, you’re my least favorite brother right now,” Alan calls out, but the hatch is already squealing to a close, leaving him alone in the belly of TB2.