At last, I am finishing this one. This is the third installment of The Bittersweet Symphony series, following Gordon (An Aquanaut Walks into a Bar) and Scott (Yellow Sky). Alan's trust issues here, post-Legacy and as a small boy.

Each of these stories looks at a present day incident with one of the Tracy boys and then offers Lucy's perspective on an earlier incident that provided the precedent.
I hope you enjoy!

Thanks again to my partner in Tracy worship and wonderful beta, Soleil_Lumiere.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Geoff stood out in the paddock, head up, watching.

Lucy watched him in turn, from the big old kitchen in the Tracy family farmhouse, and voiced her not-so secret worry.

"Is it going to be that kind of storm?"

Behind her, Alan continued whining in the way that three year olds invented millennia ago in order to grind down their mothers' resistance, a bleat of peculiarly penetrating power seemingly summoned at exactly the moment when Lucy's equanimity was at its lowest ebb.

"I don't wanna storm."

"Ah, come on, Allie. Storms are cool." Gordon looked up from where he was colouring with more enthusiasm than accuracy at the kitchen table. "Mom, do you know there can be storms with fish in them?"

"Pleased to hear it."

"I don't know," muttered Ruth, coming to stand by Lucy at the window. Ruth, Kansas born and bred, laid claim to the Kansan weather sense that detected tornadoes in thunderous skies in a way that east coast city-born Lucy could only envy. "The weather channel's saying it's likely. Got alerts out for the whole county. I'll be glad when those boys are home."

"It's not nice for the fish, Mom. They get splattered."

"Then I'm not pleased to hear it. I think I should bring Geoff in now then, don't you?"

"Probably be for the best." Ruth gave an involuntary shiver, and even more than the lowering sky and nagging sense of wrongness that kept Lucy glancing outside, it was Ruth's obvious disquiet that had her spooked.

That, and the efforts of Tracy Number Six, currently turning slowly and creating his or her own little whirlpool of nausea in her belly.

The kitchen felt stuffy, the day long and tiresome and somehow increasingly ominous, a kind of deep-seated, building fear that resisted reason and kept her wishing for all her boys to be here beside her.

Silly, really, to have her essential calmness disturbed so much by a fluctuation in the weather, but Lucy feared tornadoes. The Tracy's had the best shelter money could buy and Jeff's team of engineers could devise, prepared and stocked to withstand the Zombie apocalypse cheerfully predicted by Scott as a dramatic six year old, so many years ago now. The weather warning systems were significantly more accurate than they were even in her own youth, and the efforts towards climate control meant that the truly devastating seasons of thirty years ago just didn't happen anymore. Still. People (children, her children) could be caught away from shelter. People (her husband) could be caught in the sky. It still happened. And there was something about the notion of it, the thought of being whisked away into shredding nothingness, that terrified her city soul.

"Alright. Boys, behave."

Gordon nodded, perfectly cheerful in the darkening kitchen. His tongue stuck out between his teeth as he obliterated what seemed to be a drawing of a firefighter in a flurry of haphazard red. The automatic light hadn't yet come on, so Lucy reached over to manually flick the switch. Immediate warm orange glow made her feel marginally better, made the kitchen look homey and comforting again.

"Do you think we'll have a tsunami?"

Alan detected the kind of ghoulish delight that prompted the question, a bizarre boy trait that her Gordon seemed to have developed to a gift. The whine shifted a notch higher.

"Don't wanna soo-nummy. What's a soo-nummy?"

"No, we won't have a tsunami." She gave Gordon a glare that, as usual, he remained utterly impervious to. "You need an ocean to have a tsunami. Kansas is in the middle of the United States. No ocean."

"Could be a big one. Biggest one ever. Could be a comet one. Could be a hundred feet high."

"In which case I'd get out surfboards and we'd ride to California."

That idea lit up Gordon like a paying poker machine. "Awesome!"

"Good, well, keep your brother occupied. I'll just be outside for a bit."

Alan wailed. "Don't wanna be octopus."

It wasn't really his fault. Her poor little man was coming off a week long bout of tonsillitis, and his eyes looked too big in a face too pale for her liking. Lucy sighed.

"Come here," she said, taking a seat at the table, and Alan wriggled onto her lap, snuggling against the swelling that six months of growth had produced in her body. Alan, just as Gordon and each of his brothers before him had experienced in turn, was fascinated by the weird thing inside Mom. "Now, sweetheart, what will we make for your brothers' supper? Hmm?"

Her youngest turned his head into her shoulder, hiding his face from a world she knew was just a little too much for him today. She could empathise. The thought came to her of burying her own head in someone's shoulder, and the pang of loneliness and need that claimed her almost at once did nothing to make her cope with the day any better. Ruth came over to pat her shoulder.

"I could make a quiche or two?"

She'd become expert at hiding the winces that Ruth's cooking evoked.

"Oh, that's kind of you, but the boys have football training tomorrow night, need something solid. I've got chuck steak thawing, thought I'd cook up some Irish stew."

"Huh. Alright. I know when my culinary talents are unwanted." But she said it with a smile hidden in her voice, and once again, Lucy thanked whatever fate gave her this strong and sweet woman for a mother in law and friend.

"Don't wanna stew."

"Hey, Allie, you know what they put in stew?"

A warning. "Gordon…"

"They chop up trolls and carrots. Chop, chop, chop. Every little bit of them. Even their noses. Chop, chop, chop."

Alan's head came up from her shoulder. Her rebuke of Gordon died as she saw the way Alan's eyes suddenly sparkled.

"Do they?" He turned to his mother. "Do they, Mommy?"

"Do they what?"

"Put trolls in stew?"

"I imagine it depends on the butcher."

"Do we have trolls in our stew?"

She glanced at Gordon, and caught the tiniest of nods. He was reassuring her, guiding her. Sometimes, such moments of adulthood in her sons could catch at her heart, make her want to clutch them tight in their boyhood and keep them forever hers, and safe. Sometimes, the glimpses of the men they would become made her reel. Sometimes, she was just infinitely grateful, and she returned the nod.

"Oh, yes. Your daddy loves troll stew."

A giggle, and Alan's mood shifted again.

"Did Daddy chop them up?"

"No, I did." Ruth grabbed the old cleaver that hung above the dresser and advanced on Alan, waving it. "Chopped them up, one by one. And they roared and they yelled, but I didn't stop chopping."

Now the giggle was a shriek, but a happy one. Lucy looked across the table to catch Gordon's eye, but he was already ahead of her.

"Come on, Al. Let's go get some trolls." Gordon reached out, and Alan took his hand before clambering down, too big now for his brother to lift him as he'd once done. He managed to elbow Lucy in the gut as he did.

"Thanks, Al," she muttered, but the boys were stomping away to the hall and the stairs, and she was left to give Ruth a twisted grin.

"Trolls. Last week he was terrified of them."

"Now he wants to eat them. History of the human race, right there."

She heard Gordon singing in an off-key voice, something about going on a troll hunt, and Alan's uncertain piping coming along, as he did, a few steps behind.

It was marvellous to her, that her two youngest boys got on so well. In her own family of four girls, her next youngest wanted nothing to do with the baby of the family. An age gap of three years meant that her sister India was beginning school while her youngest sister Callie was still mastering speech, and India entirely associated herself with Lucy and the eldest, Charlotte, always in a hurry to grow up and catch the others. Any effort to lump the two youngest together was met with violent protest, and it was Lucy herself who more often than not looked out for little Callie.

Whereas Gordon had been fascinated by Alan from the moment he was born. The biggest problem was stopping him co-opting a non-verbal toddler into efforts at climbing roofs and trees or swimming across ponds. On his first day at pre-school he rushed home to set up a blackboard and instruct Alan in everything he'd learned that day, knowing their storybooks well enough that he could pretend he was reading them, proudly drawing a wobbly A and informing his little brother that that was his name, just as Gndo was his.

She smiled, fondly, then stood and stretched.

"Alright. Better go get Geoff."

Ruth nodded, drawn once more to the dramatic sky. "And Virgil's cages. I hate to think what that boy would say if his critters got blown away."

Lucy hummed agreement, then grabbed her old coat from the back of the kitchen door and headed outside.

The wind was coming in sudden, disconcerting gusts. The barn door stood open, from when her father in law Grant had taken the tractor out in the morning. He wouldn't be back until after dark, and for all that he could be grumpy and occasionally downright irascible, there was a solidity and unwavering loyalty to him that she could do with today. He was another she'd be glad to see safely under the family roof.

She couldn't hope for Jeff. He'd been much better at working from home these last few years, or at least within an easy commute in Kansas City, but this week he was unavoidably away. Somewhere in Europe. For a woman like Lucy, used to loving a travelling life before marriage and children, hearing the details of her husband's adventures in Milan or Prague or London didn't exactly thrill her - Jeff had learned to keep details of food eaten and sights seen to himself. Today, she'd put up even with the irritation that vicarious jet-setting brought her if it meant he was home.

His namesake was at the furthest corner of the field. Of course. Geoff the Clydesdale was a refugee from a farm sale nearby, one Lucy didn't have the heart to turn away, and one beloved of her boys. They could all fit on his back, even now; Alan on his withers, John holding carefully to him, Scott next, Gordon wedged between Scott and a Virgil who had clear instructions to keep a firm hold on child number four. A photo of the Tracy boys on horseback hung over the fireplace in the living room, and it made Lucy smile every time she looked at it.

Geoff was patient and kind and today she wished for half his quiet strength.

Her efforts at renaming the big old horse were met with consternation and downright refusal. For all Virgil's insistence that "It's his name, he'd get confused," and John's declaration that they'd promised him a home and therefore couldn't retrospectively insert clauses and conditions about his identity, and Gordon's bizarre theory on mummy horses naming baby horses, she suspected it was all simply so that her boys could hop up on his broad back and yell, "Giddy-up, Geoff!", or "Whoa, Geoff!" or, in Gordon's case, "You've got a big, fat belly, Geoff."

Ah, well. A little harmless subversion never hurt.

She trudged across the field, the long spring grass catching at her legs, her voice lost against the wind blowing straight at her and whipping her hair back and across her face, Alice band be damned. Ordinarily at the sight of a human marching towards him Geoff turned and began ambling to meet them, but today he watched her as if he'd never seen any such creature before, and as she got nearer he tossed his large head up and down, expressing surprise at her existence.

"I just want you up in the barn, Geoff. Out of this weather. Come on, big fella, how about it?"

In answer he swung away and trotted past her, neck arched, legs high, forgetting he was a sedate seventeen year old in the excitement of a windy day.

"Oh, no, Geoff, don't be perverse. Not today."

Well, if he was heading past her he was heading towards the barn, so she waved her arms and slogged back the way she came, praying this was a once-around-the-paddock deal.
Of course, it wasn't. For an animal who usually displayed such good sense, Geoff had obviously decided that he didn't like or trust anything today – not Lucy, not the sky, and not the sight of the open barn door ahead of him, with all its attendant comfort. He wheeled and snorted and finally Lucy simply stood and watched him clomp past her, again, as frustrated and tired and ready to burst into ridiculous tears as she'd ever felt in her life.

A banging by the barn caught both her and Geoff's attention, and with a satisfied whicker he barrelled past her to where Lucy saw Ruth bashing the feed bucket against the barn door.

That she had missed this obvious and time-honoured trick just added to her misery.

"Get inside," Ruth called to her, faint in the wind. "I'll get him."

Lucy shook her head. "I'll get the boy's critters."

Ruth waved her agreement and Lucy headed around back of the barn to where an assortment of hand built cages sat snugly against the wall. First John and Virgil, and now John, Virgil and Gordon populated them with animals in need of care, found by the roadside or in their excursions through the small woods down by the old mill pond. Today there were only two occupants; a box turtle with a broken shell now mended with duct tape, and a baby raccoon, found beside its dead mother in the tumbledown mill itself. Lucy lifted each cage in turn to bring it into the shelter of the barn, finishing just as Ruth closed the loose box door on Geoff, who was still too agitated to settle with the treat of oats with which Ruth had lured him. Together, she and Ruth wrestled the barn door closed, sliding it home even as the wind banged it in its track.

"I don't like this." Ruth stood with her hand up shielding her face, squinting into the wind as she studied the sky. "You see that? That kind of green look, over the Kennedy's way? That's not good."

"Should we call Grant to come home?"

"No." Ruth linked her arm through Lucy's and took her back towards the sole patch of warm light emanating from the kitchen window. "Grant's closer to McCready's, he'll stop there if he thinks the sky and the warnings warrant it."

Lucy looked over her shoulder once more at the massive clouds hanging above them. In the wide, flat landscape their own little farmhouse and the cluster of trees about it seemed an impertinence about to be struck away by the green-grey swirls that filled her vision. She bent her head and hurried alongside Ruth.

She wanted her boys.

Inside, the sound of the approaching storm was less loud but somehow more eerie, whistles and moans born of old wood and metal meeting fresh force.

"I'll put the kettle on." Ruth steered her to a seat before grabbing mugs and milk. "Hot tea and feet up. That's what you need."

"No," Lucy answered, honestly. "What I need is my boys all safe and home. Will they keep them at school, do you think? If there is – if the weather looks like getting worse?"

She couldn't even say the word.

"Honey, Kansans have been living with tornadoes forever. Corinna at the middle school has a good head on her shoulders, she'll make the right call. That school will be tracking the weather to the second, those buses won't be leaving unless they get the all clear." Ruth set the square container still called a kettle to boil, an almost instant process in the fusion unit. "I remember one time Jeff got stuck at school in the shelter and some of the parents were on the comms demanding their kids be sent home to get chores done. Just a storm, they said, and this was November, not tornado weather, but Corinne Klovesky knew better, she kept those kids back and sure enough, a twister came through and took out half a dozen houses down the Oskaloosa Road way."

It was meant to be comforting, Lucy knew, but the thought of children that close to obliteration through ignorance sent another twist into her belly.

"I'll go check on those two," she said. "I'll get my cup of tea when I make sure they're fine."

Ruth just nodded, a sympathetic shrewdness in her look. But before Lucy could head out for the staircase, a call came from somewhere on it.

"Lucy, could you join me for a minute?"

It was Jeff, precise to the intonation and wording if not the pitch, and Lucy gasped.

"The little monkey. Gordon! Come here if you want to talk to me."

In her peripheral vision she saw Ruth was stifling giggles, so no help there. Gordon eventually appeared in the entrance to the kitchen, an air of injured innocence that made Lucy groan. Injured innocence on Gordon was always a giveaway of trouble poorly hidden and imminently revealed. She could do without it today.

"Two things. You do not call for me like that. And where is Alan?"

"But Lucy's your name." The term 'barrack-room lawyer' was invented for Gordon.

"Yes. And I don't mind you calling me Lucy. But there are only five people in the world who can call me 'Mom', and I love that you're one of them."

Score one for Lucy – that worked. She could almost see the wheels of flattery working with his own inherent kindness to create an instant shift of opinion.

The blatant mimicry of his father she'd leave for another day.

"Now, where's Alan?"

"I don't know."

"Have you looked for him?"

"Yes!" indignant. As if this wasn't the same boy who asked his mother only this morning where his shoes were after declaring he'd searched 'everywhere and God's elbow' – his grandfather's saying, shorn of expletive – only for her to find them in seconds, a bare yard from where they were meant to be.

"Did you look with boys' eyes?"

A twisted mouth met that one.

"Uh-huh. Maybe go and have another look, but this time with your best eyes, okay?"

"Your mother needs a rest. Scoot." Ruth had seen too many little boys with aggravation on their minds to be patient with this one.

Gordon left, glowering. As he did the farmhouse was suddenly rocked with the blattering sound of hail striking its roof, its windows.

"Oh my!" Ruth said, turning to look outside once more. A muffled shriek announced Gordon's hasty return, as he grabbed the first legs available to him and almost toppled her over in the process.

"Sakes, boy, it's just hail." She reached one hand down to ruffle his thick, blond hair. "Just noisy bits of ice, that's all."

"It sounds real," Gordon said, into her thigh, and that shook a laugh from Ruth. But Lucy was standing up, her head lifted, listening past the drumming.

She needed her baby.

"Where did you last see Alan?"

Gordon turned his head sideways, obviously reluctant to leave his grandmother's shelter and the gentle petting of his hair.

"We were in Scott's room."

"Gordon, how many times have you been told not to – oh, never mind." Scott was of an age when hand-scrawled signs of 'Keep Out!' featured heavily in his decorating choices, and Lucy was beginning to support him in his need for occasional privacy now that it had moved beyond territorial posturing. "Why did you split up?"

"Hidey?"

Ah. The question mark of doom. Lucy unclenched her jaw and fought for patience.

"What kind of hidey?"

A slow blink as Gordon calculated the depths of his iniquity, and then a sigh as essential honesty indicated he was too deep for equivocation.

"Hide from the storm monsters?"

"I see. Your invention I take it? And what do these storm monsters do?"

"Stormy things? Alan was scared that… "

"Alan was scared what?"

Gordon turned his head back to the safety of Grandma's legs.

The hand in his hair stopped stroking, gripped gently but firmly and lifted his head so that his face was up towards the two women who loved him unquenchably but who also knew a guilty conscience when they saw one.

"Gordon, I need to find Alan. You're his big brother, you should be looking after him."

"I was! I was telling him stories."

"About storm monsters?"

"It didn't start about them." Gordon's big brown eyes, so like her own, widened even further to convince her of his sincerity. "But Alan kept asking about why you went outside, so I told him you were fighting the storm monsters and you would keep us safe."

Lucy closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

"Right. I'll go and find him, you stay here and help Grandma. And next time, think!"

As parental injunctions went, it was lame, but she had nothing better to offer. She exchanged a long-suffering look with Ruth, ignored the cowardly little spike of reluctance that hated leaving the warm, bright kitchen, and headed upstairs, calling Alan's name as she did so.

Scott's room was empty, as she expected. So was John's and Virgil's, next door, and Gordon's and Alan's. The noise from the hail was even louder up here, and she matched it with her voice. The bedroom she shared with Jeff was next, checking under beds and in cupboards, racking her memory for every special place that might attract her little space boy. Was it Alan or Virgil who liked getting behind the big old armchair in the library downstairs? Which of them always chose the bath to hide in when playing hide-and-seek? Which one crawled up into the airing cupboard in the laundry? So many wet or snowy Kansan days, so many boys' feet rumbling up and down the stairs, shouting and laughing and crying and shrieking.

Now it felt as though she was alone, looking for her baby as the nightmarish sky growled at her, flung ice and wind and thunder at her, as prematurely darkened rooms transformed into some place alien and unwelcoming. Her feeling of wrongness grew, the sense of catastrophe lurching toward her.

Her boys. Her boys. She wanted them home.

"Alan! Sweetheart, where are you?" She bent to peer under an old bureau on the upstairs landing. "Mommy's here, baby boy. Alan?"

And now lightning lit up the landing, dramatic and sudden, accompanied almost at once by a bang of thunder so loud it shook the house.

Ruth called from the kitchen.

"Lucy? You alright?"

"I can't find him!" It was imperative now, there was danger here in this dark house, alone on the great flatland of Kansas.

Her mother-in-law appeared in the doorway below, her face obscured by the light behind her.

"I'll look down here, honey. He can't be far. He's got to be in the house."

Until Ruth said it, she hadn't even thought of her baby going outside into this malevolent weather.

"Of course – of course he does." She caught the catch in her voice, upbraided herself for it. Her other son was sitting alone in the kitchen. He didn't need to hear fear in his mother.

"Gordon, stay put."

He came to stand where Ruth had just left.

"I can help look."

"No thanks, Grody. Just stay put. That would be a big help."

"Okay, Mom." Like Ruth, his face was hidden by the brighter illumination behind him, but the worry in his voice didn't need any facial expression to be clear. "I didn't mean to scare him. I don't want him to be scared."

"I know. I know. Just stay there where I know you're safe, okay?"

The wrong thing to say, she knew it even as the words left her mouth, because Gordon was often unsubtle and frequently reckless, but he loved his brothers with equal abandon. His tone went up an octave.

"Alan's safe!"

"We're all safe." Ruth's no-nonsense voice came from the library. "You'd think there'd never been a storm here before. Get back in the kitchen, young man. Your mother's got hormones as an excuse, you've got nothing."

"What's hormones?"

"I'll tell you later. Go get yourself a pop from the ice-box and finish your colouring."

Gordon disappeared back into the kitchen. Five minutes later Ruth came out to the hallway to look up at Lucy.

"Well, he's not down here, as far as I can see."

"He must be. He's got to be in here somewhere." Lucy jumped as another lightning strike sounded nearby.

"Basement?"

"Can you? I'll check the attic. He shouldn't be able to get in either…" She left the shrug earned by any mother of five boys who knows very well that 'shouldn't be able to' is as unstable a proposition in parenting as any quantum physics theory.

Climbing up to the attic trapdoor meant climbing towards the storm. When she released the trapdoor the immediate increase in noise made it seem like she was under the heart of it, with the hail hammering onto the old tiles and the windows vibrating in their casements. The thought of her little one up here caused her to scramble upwards as fast as she could, pulling herself up to stand amongst old chests and boxes full of long-abandoned books and toys and sports equipment.

"Alan, baby? Alan, are you up here? Answer me, sweetheart. It's Mommy."

But even as she half-heartedly pulled aside old clothes and broken furniture she knew he wasn't up there. The attic felt empty and hollow, a fragile shell to protect the family below.

"Oh, where are you?" She made her way through the clutter to bend and peer through one of the shaking windows, gripping the casement as if to hold the house together, two frail hands willing strength into its timbers. Much closer now was the grey mass that had so alarmed Ruth, a giant swirl of ragged cloud that swallowed up the sky leaving a thin strip of brighter, greenish light at the horizon. It was horrible, a thing of menace, and she cast a quick look through the streaming window towards the road, hoping to see it empty, to know that her three school aged children were being kept in the secure confines of the elementary and middle school shared auditorium.

It was only chance that led her gaze to stray as far as it could around the southern end of the house towards the rain-battered barn. A sudden impulse to double check the barn door was closed, perhaps, or maybe a flash of red against the hail-whitened yard that registered to her eyes before her brain.

She gasped and then cried out. Even as she did she saw another little blob of colour, this time green, rush across the white to join the red.

Frantically she pulled at the windows, missing the latch twice before lifting it and then finding nothing but wood swollen into tight resistance. The windows wouldn't budge, and she screamed her futility and terror at them before turning and throwing herself across the junk strewn attic floor, down the ladder, down the staircase, saving her breath now for the fight ahead.

"Lucy! What on earth – "

But Ruth was ignored, brushed aside as she plunged out into the wildness to where her two little boys were huddled on the ground, beaten down by the storm above them.
It was only as she got to within mere feet of them that she could hear Alan's screaming over the shrieking wind.

"Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!"

Gordon she now saw was not huddled but bent over his brother, trying vainly to lift him, calling his name in a pitiful urging to help him help them both. Alan was almost rigid with fear, too big to be lifted but too little to stand against the wind that had her doubled over in order to fight her way through it.

She reached them both, grabbed Gordon's arm and shook him to get his attention.

"Inside!" she yelled, and with one quick last look at his brother, Gordon staggered a few steps before the wind blew him sideways and he hurried back to grip at her jeans belt. Lucy reached behind her, briefly, to pull him in tight against her before bending lower to lift Alan, still screaming, up into her arms. His face was icy against hers.

One hand back to gather Gordon to her side and then she yelled, "Come on, run!"

Awkwardly the three of them scrambled back across the crunching ice of the yard, pieces of the maple tree by the barn snapping into her face, hail hitting and sticking into her hair, the pain of it disregarded. She looked up to see Ruth standing at the back door, gesturing to them, and she lowered her head and ran for shelter.

They tumbled into the warmth of the kitchen together, Gordon sobbing, Alan screaming, Lucy panting and gabbling at Alan, nonsense words of calm and love and over now, all over now.

"Good grief." Ruth took one moment to do the quickest of triages, then nodded decisively. "Gordon, stop that noise. Come with me to get towels and blankets for your mother and Alan."

It was almost comical, the way Gordon's tears stopped in mid-howl. He blinked first at Grandma, then at his mother, then released his grip on her belt to follow Ruth out to the hall and ultimately the downstairs bathroom – but not before sending one last checking glance at Lucy and Alan, now sitting at the table, Alan's head buried once again in Mommy's shoulder.

"Shhh, baby boy, shhh. Oh my goodness, what were you doing out there, my heart? Why were you out in the storm, baby?"

"You got losted," Alan sobbed. "You got losted."

"No I didn't, sweetheart. I was always here."

"You got losted."

"I'm right here," Lucy said again, lowering her voice to a croon now that her own heartrate had come back from its frantic pace. "Look, Alan. Look, we're back in the kitchen, and I've got you, Mommy's got you."

Alan pulled back and his tiny hands, white with cold, gripped each side of her face. She winced, but held still as he stared, naked in his distress, into her eyes.

"Mommy," he said, telling her something, but she didn't understand, couldn't translate what a three year old vocabulary and an overwhelming existential terror were trying to convey to her. She could only stare back, all her love for her little boy there for him to read if her own words weren't enough.

"I'm too little."

"Too little?"

"The storm's too big and I'm too little." As if to underline the disparity in power another gust shook the house, sending rumbles up through the floorboards, rattling the walls.

"That's why we stay inside, little man," Lucy said, one hand wiping his wet forehead where a small bruise was beginning to form.

"But you didn't! You went outside and the storm monsters were getting you."

"No, honey, I was outside to put Geoff in his house, all nice and snug and safe like we are. And I put the turtle in the barn and the baby raccoon in the barn."

"Ralph," said Gordon, coming back with two towels. His own hair was sticking up in crazy spikes, the obvious result of Ruth's vigorous efforts. He handed one towel to Lucy.

"Ralph?"

"Ralph is the raccoon. It's a good name because it's got a capital R in it."

"Hmmm." Lucy took the towel and began gently drying Alan's hair, now darkened with rainwater and flat against his head, its soft yellow lost. His hands had left her face and were now tight against his own chest, trapped against hers. "So what's the turtle's name? Tony? Tilly? Terrence?"

Gordon looked at her as if she had two heads instead of one aching one.

"Eric."

"Of course. You did tell me. There, that's better, Alan. Is Grandma getting blankets, Gordon?"

"Yeah. One for me and Ally, and the big patch one for you."

"That sounds nice."

Gordon nodded. Already, she could tell, the fear in the storm was fading for Gordon. Her little cork-boy, popping back to the surface, resilient to a fault. But ready to run out into a maelstrom for his little brother, don't forget, she told herself.

"Gordon, I told you to stay in the kitchen, didn't I?"

"But Moooom…"

She draped the towel around Alan's shivering little shoulders and spared one hand to lift a warning finger.

"No buts. You need to do as you're told, Gordon. It wasn't safe outside."

"But Alan was outside and I saw him and – "

"What was the smart thing?"

Now he was looking at the floor, abashed, and it broke her heart a little to see his bravery curbed like this. But she knew it was what Jeff would do, and she knew why. Of all her boys, Gordon was the one most likely to overdo anything or everything at any given time. For a brief second, and with frightening clarity, she saw teenage Gordon hurtling across the water at terrifying speed, and it brought a sharpness she didn't feel to her voice.

"Gordon?"

"Find you?"

"Exactly. Now off you go, get out of those wet clothes."

"S'Alan coming?"

"I'll bring him along in a sec. Off you go."

With a heartfelt sigh Gordon turned and headed off for the bathroom.

"Now. Let's look at you. There. All better."

But Alan shook his head.

"You promise, Mommy."

"Promise what, sweetheart?"

"You promise."

"I need to know what you want me to promise. It's not good to promise if you don't know what it is."

Alan looked at her, his child's face solemn.

"I'm too little for storm monsters. You need to wait till I'm big."

For a moment she thought him satisfied, but when she checked again, the shadow in her littlest son's eyes was still there. As the youngest of five Alan was sometimes lost to her among the mayhem that his brothers brought, a sweet and needy bundle who tagged along and tugged at her heart but who had yet to fully define himself in the way his brothers had. Now, here, was a moment of just such definition. She understood, in the way such insights would suddenly make themselves known, that this was her child; ready to take on the forces of the world if he needed to for his family's sake, but achingly aware of the limitations age and size inflicted upon him in a way that older children were spared. He would not compare himself to adults, knowing that they were other creatures and not really to be aspired to as a child. No, he would always have children as his yardstick, but children bigger and faster and smarter than he. Like him but always ahead of him, a Sisyphean torment.

She knew this in the same way she knew that Scott was an ordinary boy who wanted to save the world, one problem at a time, with an idealism that was anything but ordinary; that John needed order and love in his world, and was always confounded and distressed by cruelty; that Virgil would always watch and worry but was the most genuinely realized of all her children; that Gordon's wildness might take him to extremes but that kindness, in himself and others, was always his true north.

Did she bring this to her little Alan? This fear? This need to protect beyond his capacity? Was it her weakness, on this stormy day, which prompted a three year old child to face the elements in order to save her?

There would always be storm monsters in Alan's life. With brothers like his, with a father intent on shaping the world to his own demands, however altruistic, there would always be challenges earned and unearned for him to face. How could she make such a promise?

"Sweetheart, do you know what trust is?"

Alan shook his head, slowly, one tuft of newly dried hair rising like a fluffy banner on his head.

"It's when you know that the people who love you will always be there for you and look after you. Daddy will be here, I'll be here, Scotty will be here, Grandma and Grandpa and John and Virgil and Gordon will be here to look after you."

"You'll be here, Mommy."

"Yes, darling, of course I'll be here. That's what trust is, knowing that everything will be alright in the end."

"You promise."

"I promise."

It was a lie. Of course it was a lie. But her baby boy needed it, and maybe the lie would help him to grow strong, maybe it would soothe those childhood fears when they grew too big for him.

For now, he sighed, and leant forward into her arms again, pressing against her belly, causing Tracy Number Six to kick back in annoyance.

"Too many monsters, Mommy."

"Maybe. But lots of Tracys too, Ally. Remember that."

He made another little sound, something like a question, and she shushed him, quietly, as the sky tore itself into shreds above them, as the light held true, and the little island in the middle of the wheat fields stood strong against all the storm monsters in the world.

Notes:

Yes, I know there's not a sixth Tracy. That's coming up in the next installment of this series, Virgil's.