This is my next and (for the moment) last tag onto 'The Long Reach'. I know it's taken a while to get this up as well, and I apologise for that!

So, this one is a Trilogy of pieces and it's based on one of my favourite quotes from the episode! I've played around with my writing style a little in this one to (I think, anyhow, but let me know your opinions) suit this piece a little more as I had the perfect idea in my head of how I wanted the timing and the language and the to all sync – yes, sorry I went a bit poetry terms there, but they really do influence my writing sometimes. Each piece has its own kind of style too.

Let me know your thoughts and I hope you all enjoy!

P.S. The title came from the first quote, and the second quote is the from TAG, and the one which inspired all this.

"There is a difference between living and surviving. If you do what you need, you're surviving. If you do what you want, you're living." – Unknown.

"How did you do it, Dad? How did you last so long?"

"Surviving was easy. How did I last? Thinking of all of you. I knew you'd find a way. I never gave up hope."

Summary: Maybe surviving was the easy part.

Word Count: 1992

~ Part I – Surviving~

"There. We. Go!" With a flourish the last of the image appeared in all of its shining glory. Words may not be the man's strong point, but Jeff couldn't deny that he was almost as artistic as Lucy – a department in which Jeff himself was lacking the talent for. "We're all done."

Finally, he was allowed to open his eyes and really see what this was all about.

Jeff blinked. It didn't change the view. Lee stared back at him from the top of the LT – Lunar Transport for a proper name, but Lee had decided everything had to have far better names if they were going to be here for a while. It was like the base; Alfa apparently wasn't good enough – it was part of the NATO phonetic alphabet, and not really a name. It had taken some time to decide between Alicia and Alfie.

Safe to say, they went with Alfie.

"Well?"

Jeff was trying to think of the best way to say it. It wasn't that the artistry was a problem, it just wasn't what he had been expecting.

"The flames are… well, a bit much… don't you think?"

"Not at all!" Lee decreed, jumping down from the towering wheels. But then, Jeff thought, he would say that. His friend had just spent the past two hours painstakingly painting them to the exact detail. "Looks like a proper explorers transport."

Maybe. He'd reserve his judgement on that.

"Hopefully we won't need it for much more than little errands."

Lee shrugged. "Well, if we do, we do. But if we don't, it will still look cool!"

"I don't think that's the main point. It's meant to be practical."

"And the flames don't make it any less practical, Jeff. I'm thinking of putting some on my new jet pack design." Lee remarked, off-hand, like usual. "No one said practical couldn't look cool."

No. That was true. But 'cool' probably turned a few more eyes away from the intended purposes… or maybe that was just him, thinking as he was about his Mother and Lucy, and the family they hoped to start soon.

"What about those preliminary designs of yours? Pretty cool, practical rocket, you've got there."

"Yes, alright, Lee, point made."

Lee laughed, brash and loud. At least their quarrels were always in good humour. They were too good friends for anything else.

Still, it was good to get back into the base, back in with the truly safe and breathable air. The garage was likely fine too, but they never took that risk in the tunnels, what with it being so close to the outside range of the moon, and whatever neighbours may choose to cross their planetary backyard. They had plenty of work which needed completing too, not to mention that big thing called their book. As of yet, still untitled, of course. What with all the titles Lee thought up, you'd have thought that would be easy, but oh no.

Yet, that was what they sat down to do. And about time too, Jeff thought. The whole thing was practically finished, but it needed some serious editing and proofreading. Which was his task, of course. So, whilst he completed that, he'd left Lee with the job of title creating – ideally looking for something better than the original draft title: Lee and Jeff's Ultimate Guide to Survival in Space.

Lee thought that was cool; Jeff thought that was a bit of a mouthful.

"So how about DDM?"

"What?" That didn't indicate much at all. "For the book title?"

"No, no, our defence system."

Of course. Because their draft wasn't due at all soon, nor was it like it was currently – still – title-less.

"And what does that stand for?"

"Debris Destroying Machine!"

Jeff shook his head. Lee was intent on naming the system they'd created before the Leonids arrived. Why, Jeff wasn't sure, but he was happy enough to oblige at first, for it passed the time a little. Now he was obliging in the hope that completing that would allow them to focus on the real task at hand.

"No."

"I thought that one was good."

"I don't know, I feel like I've heard it before…"

"Ok…" Lee sounded a little disappointed at that. However, Jeff knew his friend would always take that on as a challenge, keep trying to find the way to be better.

Jeff put his attention back onto the pages. He still had hundreds to go.

"Orbiting Defense System..?"

"You made that one up on the spot, didn't you?"

"Hell yeah."

"Hell no."

"Good, I didn't really like that one either."

He let a chuckle pass his lips again, before retrieving his pen. "So about this opening line here-"

"Oh ok- I got!"

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. OMDS."

He let the pen go. That was definitely not a contender for the title of the book, so… Well, this wasn't going anywhere for a moment, not until Lee had another name down. And Jeff could run with that. For a minute longer. Then they needed to talk properly about survival, without Lee picking a string of words out of thin air to try and fit with a 'cool' acronym.

"OMDS?"

"Orbital Meteor Defence System. Yeah?"

"No."

"Oh, come on, Jeff. That one was getting there."

"Ok, so how about ODDM?"

Lee frowned.

"For?"

"Orbiting Debris Defense Module?"

"I can settle with that."

"At last! Now can we please finish chapter seven before we do anything else?"

"Right! Ur… what was chapter seven about again?"

Jeff laughed. That was Lee all over! The man was a far better talker than he was a reader. Always had been.

Chapter Seven was meant to be the guide of practical solutions to any dangerous or just incoming items in general, be in debris or meteors, or something unknown. Be it something affecting the very ground upon which you stood, or the infinite cradle of stars holding you. Together, they'd written a very coherent section on how to survive almost anything.

(Of course, Jeff did have to strike out the part about painting artistic flames to make your equipment look cooler, especially just in the case the worst happened. He didn't think that would be massively appreciated by their publishers as advice from well-named space explorers. That would be like a well-known celebrity suddenly telling younger viewers it was okay to do whatever such thing they thought was, and thus causing a nightmare for parents. No, it would not be well received and so Jeff removed it without Lee being any wiser… at the time, at least. He personally hadn't wanted to be the one dealing with the dog-eared explanation for why painting artistic flames to look cool was a good survival technique and worthy of being published for ages to follow).

Besides all that… palaver over that particular section, it did remain a fact that he (and Lee) wrote the guide to surviving in Space. And clearly it was one which did work, for he'd built Thunderbird Five with all those lessons in mind and she was still standing strong-

-he hoped.

Jeff longed to be back in the same galaxy to see it, to just see it orbit past him, and see the moon he recognised which had once been his home, and know there was hope.

He had hope, of course. It was in their survival guide, on around page ten; "whatever happens, never give up hope." It was the motto he'd taught to his sons, which they'd soon adapted into part of the International Rescue unspoken code of operation (or the 'IRUCO' as Gordon had taken to calling it, but Jeff struck a line through that in his mind too, just as easily as he had his and Lee's book's drafts.)

It still made him laugh though, those little things, respectively.

Here he was, working his way through everything he remembered being in the survival guide he wrote, and every point seemed to bring him back to his sons, or International Rescue, or the Island, or home. It was as if both worlds had become inexplicably woven between each other.

Maybe it was because he'd always taught to his boys (sometimes with other words or phrasings) so many of the lessons which appeared in that book… or maybe it was because the memories of his boys were helping him to survive. He wasn't exactly sure, and in the earliest days, he hadn't had the time to dedicate towards trying to work it out. He'd just been working his way through his survival guide.

Working his way through the list of priorities he and Lee had made for it;

Find yourself a sustainable source of breathable air

Keep a check of your stockpiles

Always keep your tools to hand

Always be mindful of the landscape around you

Memorise what you must always have on your person

There were many, many more, but he had them all memorised. And he worked through them.

And just like that, his survival seemed to be the easiest task at hand.

Of course, he thought for a while he'd been relatively lucky with where he ended up. It was a stable planetoid and the Zero X had crashed in something of a 'good' way. He worked every day until he was set up, his survival all but ensured for a while. And when that was done, he thought. Thought whether there was anything he'd missed – besides the obvious, of course. The things he was really missing, were the things he couldn't have.

So, he set himself up a base, and he tried to channel the skills Lucy and Lee had never been able to really teach him. It wasn't perfect. It was lumpy. That was what Lee would say – words, weren't his thing, remember? Lucy would say it lacked shading and texture. They'd both be right, and he knew they'd be right. Beyond that, he knew what it looked like. It would be Lee who said it first though, guaranteed. 'Did one of your boys do that, Jeff?'. And, he didn't care much for the thought right now; it made him smile, criticism or not.

It was meant to be the Island. Maybe one day it would be if he kept practising, kept going and tried to remember all the things Lucy had tried to tell him about art. Heck, Virgil had picked it up better than him and he'd been married to the woman- no, known Lucy, far longer than the middle child had been alive. So that said something.

His artwork might not be good enough, but his experience in space was going to be.

So he lived in his base, tried to keep himself busy by noting down eventual edits for the book (which had eventually been named 'The Space Survival Guide', with a long battle over taking out the word ultimate), and in trying to draw a version of the Island that Lucy and Lee would be proud of.

And he survived.

He never let himself be fooled, though: he lived ready for worse to come, but made sure to remember every word of that book.

It was a good thing he'd spent so long writing it with his best friend (and that his best friend was bonkers enough to put in things which Jeff would have to proof read a thousand times over to ensure 'yes, the publishers are safe to read this').

In some sense, Jeff supposed surviving, surviving after writing all that and going to Mars and living on the Moon, and being a part of International Rescue, and being thrown out into far away space… Yes, surviving after all that was actually the easy part.

The harder part, would be the question of how long?

Not, 'how long could be survive?'; oh no, because he could eek that out to some degree. More the question of: 'how long could he last?'