So, as well as the usual post donation snacks and drinks, today I was given a pin, a certificate, a gym towel and a block of rocky-road chocolate as a thank-you gift!
(My actual total is 52 donations, but two of those were in the US!)
Knowing FishTank week is May 13-18, in about a month, when would you like to see the prompts? Are you a plan ahead and wait to share kind of person? A quick inspo during the week kind of person? Somewhere in the middle?
Many thanks to @onereyofstarlight, @idontknowreallywhy, @womble1 and @sofasurf for all their amazing support of my writing.
Here we continue with the fic about Gordon, but this bit focusses on Johnny and a little backstory.
Sorry for the delay in writing. I will get there eventually.
I hope you enjoy.
-o-o-o-
John was beside himself. Cóic’s thoughts were a turmoil and her heart anguished.
“It was not your fault, my love.” He reached up, ever so glad of his lanky height to reach her eyebrow feathers and rub her gently. “You know Gordon-“
She snorted, warm breath catching his long hair and tossing it about.
“Yes, he has a history of rapscallion-hood, but you know his heart. He would not have acted any other way, even should he have known this outcome. He did this for us.” He let his forehead rest against her white and gold cheek feathers, soft in their strength. “As did our father.”
That was a raw wound in his heart. Losing their father and king, his strength…all because…
It was Cóic‘s turn to interrupt his train of thought, sour that it was. He reached his fingers to his left temple, closing his eyes as her mind enveloped his.
It truly was magic. To be held like a child in the arms of a giant. Cóic had inherited the memories of the Ages, those who had come before, and the wisdom that entailed. But she was still young, unable to access it all until she was fully grown. Kyrano had spoken of it as a burden and part of John feared his beloved dragon would lose some of herself the day she came into her knowledge.
And feared he wouldn’t be good enough.
His father had spoken to him from a very young age about the importance of the gift he had been given, the honour it was to help guide a Matriarch into adulthood.
His mother’s family had been stewards of the great dragons across the Western Ocean and when the Matriarch of the tribe chose him to be the companion of her unborn child, the O’Treasaigh family had been ever so honoured.
His mother had held him in her lap telling him stories of the old ones and legends of their tribe leading back into the darkness of the past. How the tribe had grown strong and safe with the dragons, the great Thunderbirds. And how, in each generation one was chosen for the next Matriarch, the next great Thunderbird. Chosen for his mental prowess and agility, his strength for love and for kindness.
The Matriarch had chosen John.
And Gaat had not agreed.
John hadn’t been aware of it at first, until one day their father announced they were returning home.
As far as he and his brothers were concerned, they were home. The land of the Matriarch was all they had ever known. They were, of course, aware that their father was from across the ocean, very far away indeed. And they knew the story of how he had entered these lands held in Óen’s claws, a half-dead bedraggled mess - Kyrano’s words, not John’s.
The tales of Ériu, a land of eternal green and bounty, of their grandfather, Flaithri O’Treasaigh, king of their lands, and their grandmother who had trained in the Temple and knew all the medicines and was so kind to their people.
It would have been harder to leave if Gaat hadn’t forced the issue. John was still young when it all happened, but he remembered the fires and the screams. His mother grabbing him and Cóic, still in her egg, and bundling them up in furs so warm.
Of Óen’s bellows and fire, all the family’s dragons taking to the air in the darkness, his mother’s reassuring words as she held him close, his father’s voice firm and strong.
John shook himself. He often drifted when held by Cóic. He suspected she had interest in his memories and his point of view. They were so different, yet together they were one.
The family had returned to Ériu to great fanfare. The Flaithri was over joyous to have his son not only return, but with a wife and three strong sons.
The revelation of dragons took a longer time to settle, but eventually the O’Treasaigh family settled back into a new comfort, a new home that was as full of history as their previous.
The Kyrano family had travelled with them, their mother’s brother exercising the right to ensure her safety. Scott had once confided in John claiming Kyrano wanted to get away from Gaat as much as any of them. Gaat was a half-brother to both their mother and Kyrano, and a half they could both do without.
But as time passed and they all settled, it was good to have another family from across the Western Sea to share memories with.
Gordon and Alan were born one after the other and the Flaithri doted on both the young children. Five strong sons were cause for as much celebration as three.
The day Cóic hatched, John’s life changed.
He had slept with the egg every night, kept it warm as his mother instructed. It had so long been his companion, it was second nature to keep it safe. Until early in the morning dark, he had been awoken by movement and shattering eggshell.
She had bowled him over in eagerness, landing on his chest, still dripping with egg fluids. He had been bewitched by her beautiful turquoise eyes - to this day, he still was - though it had taken some time for her gold-tipped white feathers to fully come in. As a hatchling she had been rather scrawny, more like a bald bird than a dragon.
The wave of fond mock-offence had him smiling and he suspected that his response was her purpose in sending it.
It also brought him back to the present and separated him a little from her embrace. Today was one of mourning but in it there may be hope.
Cóic rumbled deep in her throat.
John startled. “Have you a response?”
The matriarch had sent out a request, across dragon minds seeking one willing to give everything for a heroic young prince. One willing to make the sacrifice to save him.
How the dragons saw his people, why they served, associated, and loved their human counterparts was not clear. While Cóic never hesitated to share her thoughts with him, there was seeing and feeling, but understanding was not a given. Dragonkind had its mysteries and its purpose and it was other than what humans pursued or recognised. It was also something John could only accept and trust.
But the call out across the seas and the land looking for one willing to give everything for a stranger…only clarified dragon difference. It was a hope, but it was also a terror, an unknown.
Cóic warbled, her heart lifting. She touched her great head gently to John’s.
She had an answer.
Her reassurance was a boon. Gordon could be saved.
As his fingers drifted through her neck feathers and he climbed into her saddle, his hope was joined by fear and his heart ached.
You may be repurposing a bit hard when this is your set today.
I made both keys pieces… The typewriter one is bought.
Yes, newer key on bracelet but tied to where I am and doesn’t work anymore - lock changed years ago by person who gave it to me. Wanted me to use a piece of “home” when I’m working new place.
i'm conducting an experiment. everyone who's from an english speaking country state your country, regional area and what you call the following images. i need to see something
That was the first thing Penelope noticed as she slowly swam back up to consciousness. A flutter caught her attention and Penny absently touched her hand to her belly, feeling her babies do their usual afternoon shift and wriggle. Then the events of earlier came flooding back and Penelope forced herself to fully wake up. She kept her eyes closed however, straining her ears to sense if anyone else was about, then detecting no one she sat up to take in her surroundings.
“Well, this is distressing,” Penelope murmured. She only let herself dwell on that for a moment however, before she looked around and tallied up her surroundings.
She’d been placed on a camping stretcher bed inside a rundown wooden shed of some sort with cracked floorboards and sheets of cobwebs in the corners of the lone window. Her shoes were gone and a length of reddish rope of some sort had been looped around her left ankle, the other end bolted down to the centre of the concrete floor. Other than a sleeping bag and thin pillow, the only other features of the place were a couple of jugs of water beside the stretcher bed, a chemical toilet, and what appeared to be a handful of runes carved into the walls. A check showed her compact was gone, along with her watch, but her wedding set had been left on her hand. The smells of the place told her she was on a farm of some kind, and the lack of noises told her it was isolated.
“Time to get cracking.” Penelope first turned her attention inwards, tapping on her link to Gordon and the web of familial links that connected her to the Tracys and Kyranos.
Nothing.
Usually tapping on the links was a sensation not unlike plucking at the strings of a harp, but this time it was like tapping on concrete.
“I presume those runes are to thank for that,” she observed, scowling at the deeply incised marks. They were well out of her reach, and whilst she might have been able to contrive something to reach them with the supports of camp stretcher, if she could gouge them enough to ruin their effect without drawing undue attention to herself was another problem. Penelope turned her attention to the rope next. On closer observation it wasn’t a rope, but thin metal links woven together in a Byzantine-style chain. It also, to Penelope’s dismay, had no discernable end where it was wrapped around her ankle. In some sort of Escher-like effect the links somehow blended into each other and into the length that stretched out to the bolt in the middle of the floor. That didn’t stop her from having a good tug and twist at it though, to see if she could detect a weakness that she could exploit.
She was about to take the camp stretcher apart to use the legs to make a lever to try stretch the chain when there was a scratching from outside and one of the planks that made up the wall became loose and was moved aside by a dark paw.
To her surprise a brown and cream wolf slipped in through the gap in the planks, then shifted and became a woman with brown eyes and a waist length braid of black hair, barefoot and wearing a simple, knee-length blue cotton dress.
"Please, don't cry out, I am here to help you," she urged. Crouching low and speaking in a hushed whisper, she looked around furtively before turning back to Penelope. "I am she who is sister to your Virgil."
"You'll forgive me if I am somewhat skeptical," Penelope fired back in a hiss. "Why should I trust you? Virgil has told us all about the meeting."
"Because I now know that she who whelped me was wrong," the were-wolf answered. "I am now a mother too, my pups are the same age as hers were when she abandoned Virgil. I didn't want to understand it then, at the time of the meeting, but I do now. She and our sire had other options: food banks, homeless shelters, charities, that sort of thing, but in her and our sire's pride…" She shook her head in disgust. "She was convinced that we lost our territory because we had become ‘too human’. When our food ran low, she wanted to remain 'pure' and hold to the ancient ways and ancient traditions, so she refused to accept handouts from humans and chose to sacrifice one of her pups instead. She doesn't see the hypocrisy of having a human identity and using human things like vehicles, weapons and technology, but not partaking of humanity's charity. When this plan was hatched, I and others spoke against it, but she and he remained firm."
“What plan?” Penelope demanded.
“To capture one of Virgil’s fae brothers and draw off his power, then use it to empower our warriors to retake our ancestral territory,” was the hushed answer. “You were taken as bait to draw out one or both of the fae, you have been kept as insurance - my parents thought you would be easier to manage being both human and pregnant. Something went wrong with the ritual to steal the fae’s power, I do not know what. My sire and my dam are meeting even now to decide what to do.”
“Was this the plan all along?” Penelope demanded.
The woman looked down at the floor, shame staining her cheeks. “Yes. We had hoped to entice Virgil to assist us willingly and get at the fae that way. When he did not, this plan was made instead. We had to find other things for it first, learn certain skills, which is why we have only come back now.”
“My mate, my sister and my guardian?” Penelope asked next, steeling herself for the worst.
“The males were left alive to delay the cat-sister, we knew that killing them would risk invoking more ire than we could handle.”
Penelope did not let a trace of her relief show. “So what now?”
The were-wolf pointed at the chain. “You will not be able to break it and it won’t come off without cutting off your foot. I will try to find out how to get it off you. Once that’s done, I can create a distraction and you can slip away.” There was a distant howl and she looked over her shoulder. “We are being called together, I will come back when I can.” With that she shifted back into her wolf form and slipped back out the gap, taking care to put the plank back as she’d found it.
Not one to simply sit and await rescue, Penelope didn’t waste a moment, flipping the stretcher bed over so she could pull off one of the legs. Eyeing the bolt in the floor, she started to grind the end of the W-shaped bit of metal against the rough floor. “To paraphrase Parker, a lock is only as good as the door it’s fitted into, a door is only as good as its frame, and a frame is only as good as the wall,” Penny reminded herself as she filed the metal down into something she could either use to pry the bolt out of the floor or hack at the runes, “and it seems these were wolves need an education on how ‘easy’ a Creighton-Tracy-Ward is to handle.”
0o0o0
Standing beside one of the stretchers in the medical bay on Two, Lucille stroked her second son’s brow and let her family’s memories wash over her in time with the throb of Thunderbird Two’s engines.
She and Jeff had dreamed big dreams, dreams that had seemed impossible until she’d put a stylus to her drafting screen and spun those dreams into the first schematics of what would become the TV 21. Then Brains had come along and refined those dreams into something that, even constrained to holograms and simulations because of the lack of capital, was close enough to reality that she’d felt fate pluck at her elbow every time she looked at the plans.
In her absence their dream had not only taken flight, it had taken flight and then been surpassed by something that she had never even dreamed of.
And that dream, brought to life in six parts, wrought in fire and steel and cahelium alloy, was magnificent.
“Lucy?” A touch at her shoulder was Sally letting her know she was there.
“What is it? Has the blood chemistry come back yet?” she asked, half turning to face the older woman. John still hadn’t shown any signs of waking further and a reddened needle mark had been found under the collar of his spacesuit, blood staining the skin where the shoulder met the neck, and the fibres of the material warped and twisted where someone had cruelly yanked it down.
“Yes, it’s a mixture of wormwood and something else, Indra is still running simulations on it.” Sally nodded to the computer station in the far corner where the botanist was dancing her hands through holograms with consummate skill. “Dear, are you okay?” Sally asked, her wise eyes taking in Lucy’s state. “You’ve had quite the day, and that’s putting it very, very mildly.”
“I’m fine,” Lucy tried to bluff, but Sally crossed her arms and raised one eyebrow.
“Lucy,” Sally began, “do you have any idea how often I’ve heard that from all of my boys?”
“Enough times it’s had the spots worn off it?” Lucy cracked a half smile in an attempt to lighten the mood and divert attention off herself.
“Worn down to the bare metal,” Doctor Tracy replied, then pointed to the second stretcher. “Lie down and I’ll set you up a glucose IV, we got a peek at your memories too, remember? I know you’ll have burned a lot of energy back at the barn, and something tells me that you’re going to be burning a lot more before this day is done.”
“I think you’re right,” Lucy told her, obediently taking a seat on the stretcher and rolling up the sleeve of her blouse, “I hate to say it, but I have a feeling that you’re very, very right.”
Pictures associated with the first Gatchaman sequel pitch, featuring G-6 and a headshot of Joe's brainwashed villainsona "Space Joker".
Ippei Kuri allegedly drew several pieces for the planning, but "several" could even just mean as many as these ones + the one of Jack in the 6 shirt...or maybe more. We may never know for sure, unless more ever show up somewhere.
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Thunderbirds Are Go (Cartoon 2015)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: John Tracy & Virgil Tracy, Lady Penelope Creighton Ward & John Tracy
Characters: John Tracy, Virgil Tracy, Penelope Creighton-Ward
Additional Tags: Family, john tracy centric, john and penny are bffs, john loves space he’s just in his Feelings, Gordon is Gordon, also space ace john
Summary:
John’s feeling a little introspective upon a return to Earth.
(or: my attempt to separate out about 20k worth of inter-connected john fics - more to come)
This is the Tūī that Gordon tamed and taught to say ‘Virgil! Virgil! Virgil!’ :D He’s sitting on the one harakeke plant (New Zealand Flax) Grandma has managed to keep alive on the Island 😁
This took me all day to glue and edge. Did my threads continually get caught on the flowers? Yes, yes they did. Am I a little less sane than I was this morning? Possibly.
Ooh, this is very cool! It's very evident that a lot of hard work went into this.
I love how you've woven them all together.
Happy Gerry Anderson day!
Glad I could finally get this idea done (it's been in my head for 2 years now how awful), thought I should actually do sommat for GA day (mainly cause I've been so focused on other stuff it's nice to go back to it) but also not to be a sop but without GA and the shows created I would not have many friends at all, I've met so many people via these shows (mainly tbirds obvs) and I'm so glad for it! So love y'all and enjoy Ur day!
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