AT DAY'S END by BOOMERCAT RATED FRT

Author's Note: As always, many thanks to Sam for her encouragement and support. Also for allowing me to borrow a maiden name for Lucille. You're the best, Sammie!

I've always been an arrogant son of a bitch.

Even when I was a kid, I knew I was destined for better than the family farm. Couldn't say why I knew, but I did. My parents were hard-working, but loving, and they instilled some good, down-to-earth values in me, but still, I knew I was going to do more with my life than grub in the dirt.

My destiny became clearer to me when my dad took me to an air show in Topeka when I was ten years old. The jets roaring and tumbling through the sky were impressive to say the least, but what caught my attention were the pilots. I was drawn to the strength and self assurance of these young men, striding across the tarmac as if they owned it and the skies above. Watching them, I suddenly knew what I was born for.

From that shining day, I knew what I wanted, and I pursued it with single-minded determination, much to my parents bemusement, and sometimes dismay. I spent hours going over the requirements and perusing the service academy catalogs.

My entire junior high and high school career was aimed at an appointment to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Every class, every extra-curricular activity was planned for maximum impact on my application. One of my high school teachers labeled me 'The Juggernaut Express' and, I have to say, I took a certain pride in that title.

When the appointment came, my parents were jubilant. My dad had never had an opportunity for a real education. Despite being one of the brightest men I've ever met, he had to make do with occasional night classes at the local community college, and even then, the classes were geared to keeping the farm running. The fact that I would be getting a 'real' education elated him.

Mom was simply relieved. She had spent years trying to protect me from failure. She worried that my continued success would make what she considered the inevitable let down impossible for me to survive. It wasn't a lack of faith in my ability, rather a much better understanding of the world than I would ever have.

For my part, I felt neither elation nor relief, just a general satisfaction. When I arrived at the academy, I found myself in the midst of other young men and women with just as much brains and determination as my own. It was a far cry from being the big fish in a small pond at a rural high school in Kansas, but far from being intimidated, I relished the challenge of rising to the top amongst my peers.

And rise I did. The Juggernaut Express was right on track for a brilliant career. I was selected while still in school for advanced training that would eventually lead to astronaut training. I passed every test at the top of my class. I was right where I was meant to be.

Then the Express was almost derailed. My first posting out of the academy was at Edwards Air Force base in California. It was a perfect fit for me. I made friends and contacts that would advance me even further to my next goal, astronaut. It was one of those friends who introduced me to his sister's roommate, a beautiful young woman named Lucille Ballentine.

She was an amazing woman. Confident, smart, witty, and not in the least impressed by my uniform or rank. First time I laid eyes on her, in my supreme arrogance, I considered her a piece of tail, and started planning my campaign that would end with her in my bed. I thank God and all that is holy that it didn't happen that way.

What started as flirting became, over time, serious discussions about life, philosophy and everything else under the sun. I still can't pinpoint the moment when my lust became love, even though I can remember everything about those days with a crystal clarity that can still bring tears to my eyes.

Within a few months, I was ready to throw over all of my ambitions and dreams for a new dream of living the rest of my days with Lucy. It took her much longer to decide that I was the one. Waiting for her to decide gave me my first inkling of what my mother had been trying to tell me about failure. It was impossible by that time for me to contemplate life without Lucy, but as the days and weeks went by and still she would not commit to me, I had my first ever feelings of self doubt, and I didn't like them.

To this day, I don't know what I would have done if she had said no, but when she said yes, I can tell you my spirit soared to unbelievable heights. Amazingly to me, not only did she say yes, but she gave herself wholly to me and my ambitions. I would have become a ditch digger if that had been what she wanted, but what she wanted was whatever I wanted.

When I thought my life couldn't have gotten any better, she gifted me with a son. That first night holding my perfect little boy in my arms, I cried for the first time in years. He was so beautiful, with tiny pink fingers and toes, and blue eyes that acknowledged me from the very start.

One of the hardest things I ever had to do was to leave my love and my perfect son for the astronaut training that I had previously thought was so important. But Lucy eased the pain with her encouragement and love, and I threw myself into becoming the top astronaut in the field. Though I ate up the hard work, it was the time I could spend with Lucy and our son, Scotty, that made my life worth living.

After two and a half years, I finally was given the grand prize: a chance to fly to the moon to help establish a scientific research station there. I rushed home to tell Lucy the good news, and she surprised and delighted me with news of her own. She was pregnant again.

The next months were a blur of euphoria and fear. The thought of another miracle like Scott was beyond comprehension, but if everything went well, I would be in orbit around the moon when the baby came. I knew it was a boy from the moment Lucy told me, and I wanted to be there his first night in the world as I had been with Scott.

Lucy would have none of it, telling me that she was not going to let me throw away the work of years just so I could be in her hair when her daughter arrived. So it was that I first saw Virgil from a quarter of a million miles away. I marveled at my ability to instantly love that beautiful little reproduction of my Lucy.

When I got home and held him for the first time, the tears sprang to my eyes once again. Didn't know what the hell was wrong with me, but as I counted the fingers and toes, my heart swelled just as it had with Scott. I had to be the happiest man alive.

My career continued to soar until two years later when my boy John was born. It amazed me how different three babies could look. Before my own children were born, all babies more or less looked alike to me. But my own sons were each as different as the different planets orbiting the sun. Johnny was much fairer than either of his brothers, and though Lucy assured me of his health, he seemed somehow more fragile.

Maybe it was because I was older, with more responsibilities, but I became aware that my career, although eminently satisfying when I was younger, no longer had the same appeal. I had risen rapidly through the ranks, but still, I was a front line officer. It was a position that carried a certain risk. While I was an astronaut, there was no guarantee that a military deployment to one of the world's many hotspots wouldn't happen.

I wasn't afraid of death, but the thought of leaving my family to fend for itself with little more than a military pension terrified me. Still, I don't know if I would have actually left the service if my dad hadn't died that summer. Seeing my mom so bereft decided me, and with a certain trepidation, I resigned my commission and went to work for a defense contractor.

At the academy, I had discovered a bent for aeronautic engineering, and under the tutelage of a brilliant man at Pletco Industries, I blossomed at work. Our department started turning out designs that earned the company contracts worth millions, and I found I liked this work every bit as much as I did flying.

The best part was the time I had with my family. Scotty had gone from being a baby to being a little person in his own right, and I loved listening to him babble about his days. I worried a bit about Virgil becoming a Mama's boy. He seemed to delight in 'helping' Lucy with everything from feeding the baby to playing on the piano. I counteracted it as best I could, buying him every Tonka trunk in existence. Johnny was still in diapers, and forever getting into mischief. We had to watch him like a hawk, or he'd disappear, finally turning up in a kitchen cabinet, or a clothes hamper, giggling like a fool.

My life was good. We'd just put a down payment on a house, and Lucy was pregnant again, and even I was hoping for a daughter this time. But then, the presidential election was held, and a new administration came in, promising to balance the budget, and slashing government contracts across the board.

To the dismay of everyone, we found that Pletco Industries was a paper tiger. When the contracts dried up so did the company. I was shocked to find myself laid off in an industry that seemed to be going belly up before my eyes.

Lucy allowed me to wallow in despair for all of about thirty seconds before she kicked my butt, telling me to get cracking and start my own company. I was indignant at first, telling her she had no understanding of the situation. But once the seed was planted, the idea grew like a weed in a daisy field, as my dear wife knew it would.

I had a little bit of money set aside, and to that, we added money from Lucy's inheritance, and somewhat to my dismay, Mom took out a mortgage on the farm to help. I gathered the best and brightest of Pletco's laid off people and in my garage brainstormed a plan to get started.

It was actually a humble little fastener that I had come up with that was the foundation of my empire. I marketed it to the big aerospace companies, and by the time Gordon was born, I was out of the garage and in a small plant of my own.

My fourth son brought the same tears to my eyes as the other three. Even as I held him for the first time, he smiled at me, and I knew he was my own. Lucy dismissed it as gas, but I knew what I saw, and my heart grew just a bit larger that day to accommodate my little red-haired wonder.

It was scary how quickly my company, Tracy Enterprises, grew, but not nearly as scary as hearing Lucy tell me she was pregnant again. Gordon was still just a tiny baby, and I had this odd sense of foreboding. Lucy had no such concern, and sailed through the months of her pregnancy as serenely as she did through everything else.

I had no warning, no hint. Lucy was seven months along, and radiant as always as she dropped me off at the airport for my big trip to Washington. We kissed goodbye, and I headed to my destiny again. A crazed Malaysian warlord had attempted a coup in that distant part of the world. Though it was thwarted, and the warlord sent into hiding, the resulting instability in the region had grave consequences that brought about a bell change in Washington, and the government was ramping up for possible military intervention.

The opportunity for my first multimillion dollar contract had me practically salivating, and as I walked away from my wife, holding little Gordon in her arms, with Scotty at her side keeping Virgil and John in line, I barely gave my family a thought.

In Washington, things went far better than I hoped, and as I turned on my cell phone to give Lucy the good news, I was on top of the world. Before I could dial, the phone rang, and it was my mother, weeping, telling me impossible things, things that my ears heard, but my mind refused to accept.

My Lucy, my life, was gone. Just as quickly as that. Something had gone wrong with the baby, and Lucy had died before she ever even made it to the hospital. My son Alan was taken from his dead mother's womb.

I have no memory of the journey back to Houston. For that fact, I have no real memory of the following few months. Oh, there are snapshots; seeing Lucy laid out at the mortuary, wondering how people can say things like 'she looks like she's sleeping', when she was so obviously not there; standing at the graveside with Scott and Virgil looking utterly lost, and John chasing a butterfly, oblivious to the tragedy; the coveted government contract sitting unsigned on my desk. Mom said afterwards that she truly feared for my sanity.

My first new contact with my new, dimmer, grayer world was sitting in the living room, and Mom handing me the new baby. To my everlasting shame, Alan was all of three months old before I ever held him or even looked at him. As I sat there, holding that tiny wiggling mass of energy, I found myself counting fingers and toes, just as I had with his brothers before him. The tears that I shed that day were different than those I had shed for his brothers, but nevertheless, my broken heart painfully stretched itself to admit him to his place.

It was my boys that both kept me going, and kept me away. When I was at work, my thoughts were turning to my five beautiful sons constantly. But when I was home, all I would see was that Lucy was not there. Mother took me and the boys in hand, insisting that I move the entire family to the Kansas farm where I had grown up.

I know some would ask how I could leave Lucy behind so readily. When she first died, I had haunted the gravesite, wanting to be near her. But I came to realize that I never had a sense of her at that cold piece of ground. No, she was most with me when I was with my boys. They were all pieces of her, even little Alan who had never felt her touch or heard her voice.

I gave in to my mother's urging and moved the family to that lonely farmhouse, and it was there that we all began to heal, and to face life. For a long time, I felt hollow, and I only went through the motions of being a father.

It felt like the only thing I had left was my arrogance, and I put it to hard use, building up Tracy Enterprises into a global mega-corporation. I was reputed to be fair in my business dealings, but nevertheless I always got my way. But the business victories always paled in comparison to my personal victories. Without my boys, I might have become absolutely without a soul. But I was not without my boys. No government contract could compare with the smile on Virgil's face as he took his bows after a piano recital. The most brilliant design was nothing to the crayon-scrawled picture that Scott proudly gave me one Father's Day.

My boys were my life, and over time, the pain of losing Lucy faded to a dull ache, and I could face my destiny again. My destiny. When I was a kid, it was about personal glory. With Lucy, it was about security. As my boys were growing up, I began to see my true destiny was to save other men from having to go through what I had in losing Lucy. I began to dream of International Rescue.

Oh yes, I am arrogant. I came to believe that I, the great Jeff Tracy, could do what no one else had ever done. I could create an organization that would save people. Over the years, my idea got more and more grandiose. Everytime I heard of a disaster in the world, I added it to the list of things I would prevent, or if not prevent, I would find ways to save the people caught up in it. Avalanches, ferries capsizing, building collapses, I would find answers to them all.

One of the nice things about being one of the richest men in the world was, I could make my fantasies become real. I found the right people to help me, including an outsider engineering genius. I bought a secluded island as a base, and on one momentous day, I told my boys all about it.

I was arrogant enough to believe that if I asked, my sons would leave behind their own careers and join me in tilting at windmills. And God help me, after stunned silence, they all agreed. If I had had any sense, I would never have asked. I would never have allowed it. But the old arrogance showed, and I put my boys to work.

And we were successful. Within a few months of our first success in London, International Rescue was recognized as a major force for good in the world. I began to believe I had reached my destiny at last.

But then today, Virgil called me from the site of a rescue in the arctic, and I felt my blood freeze. Thunderbird One, with my beautiful, brave Scott, had fallen through the ice into the miles deep sea.

For the next four hours, I sat going through the motions of being the base commander, but it was only the motions. I had that hollow feeling all over again.

Scott was my first born, and his place in my heart was always the biggest. He was everything I could want in a son, brave, smart, caring. And I had thrown that all away in my need to be a hero. As I listened in to the tense voices of my sons Virgil and Gordon, trying desperately to save their brother, I realized that I could not go on.

It was my arrogance that had put my son in this position, and it was time for a little humility. As I sat there, I prayed to God, Lucy, and anyone else who would listen just to give me another chance. I would have begged on my knees if it would have done any good.

When Virgil finally called from Thunderbird Two saying Scott was alive and safe, if not well, I still felt hollow. What might have been was far too disastrous for me to contemplate. When Thunderbird Two finally returned to base, and Scott was carried out on a stretcher by his brothers, I had to fight to keep from crying out in my relief.

As he was carried past, I reached out and grasped his hand. He gazed up at me with glassy eyes, and smiled tiredly. I opened my mouth to say something strong, comforting, but all that came out was a little sob. His eyes focused a little more and he squeezed my hand. "It's okay, Dad. I'm fine."

I could only shake my head. It had been far too close a call, and his brothers were giddy with their exhausted relief. Scott was carried off to the infirmary to be healed by Brains and coddled by my mom. I would follow shortly.

For the moment, I returned to my command post in the lounge and sat heavily down. I considered telling my sons that it was over, that International Rescue was shutting down. I knew they would resist, but with my arrogance, I could force it down their throats. Perhaps it was not too late to find yet another destiny.

But sitting there, contemplating my future, I remembered my earlier prayer, and gave a thought to humility. Perhaps it was time to set arrogance aside, and consider a new path. Perhaps in concert with my sons, I could consider a joint future with them. With a deep sigh, I stood up, and with humble thanks, headed to my sons, and my new destiny.