'You don't even feel real anymore, Johnny' [GIF]

“It’s not fair though.” Alan cries; not caring that he sounds like a petulant child because, for once, he kind of wants to be ten years old again and perched in his brothers lap. He wants to cuddle up to John, looking up at the cosmos above them and having his big brother reel off the names of each and every constellation. It doesn’t matter that Alan has had them committed them to heart for years; ever since their first trips together, when he’d been too tiny to even hold the telescope properly and he’d smudged sticky fingers on John’s lenses and John had dealt with him with patient, warm exasperation rather than cold clinical professionalism.

But John is closer to the universe now than he is to Alan, and the distance between Thunderbird Five and their Mother’s star, nestled amongst the Tracy Quasar, light-years away, seems impossibly smaller than the distance between John’s Space Station and little old Earth does.

“You shouldn’t have to stay away all the time…” The youngest Tracy whines, his voice breaking because this is his big brother and where are the NASA trips and the star gazing nights and the warm hands on his shoulders anymore? He can’t remember how John’s arms feel when he hugs him or the solidity of his chest and Alan is uncertain what colours things like his brother’s eyes even are, when they’re not distorted by a hologram. Are they the same soft blue as his own, or did John’s verge more towards pool water cerulean? Or perhaps the ocean? Alan finds he simply can’t remember.