There comes a time in a man's life when he just has to bite the bullet and deal with something he'd much rather not. Unfortunately for me, the time has come to do just that. I'm not exactly looking forward to this, and quite frankly it would seem almost juvenile if it weren't for the fact that it caused no small amount of embarrassment for me on the last rescue.

In my mind's eye I can just see the headlines in the news. I don't know if the others will have a clue when word starts getting out. None of them were anywhere near me when it happened, and that's probably a good thing, although I doubt I'll live it down for a while after they find out.

But it's not my fault, and that's why I absolutely have to confront him about this. I know we're in a rush when a call comes in the middle of the night. Hell, I have to do the same thing they do, and much more often since I go out by myself a lot without a crew. But this particular type of thing has never happened before, and while in the past I've just been able to clean it up myself and make sure nothing's out of place, this time I was too rushed, and the rescue too hairy, to do it.

That's how it came about that I exited Thunderbird 2 by foot after dropping Gordon, Brains and 4 in the drink, and was on my way to Mobile Control when a grimy recently-saved victim of the disaster pointed at my foot and started laughing. Why? Because looped around my ankle, there for all the world to see, was a pair of bright yellow underwear.

Gordon.

Stop laughing. Maybe if it'd been one of the times we sit around the pool and get drunk, I'd be laughing right along with you. But at the moment my head feels like it's on fire and I'm sure I'm red as a beet. Here we are, International Rescue. We're above reproach. We're near-gods to some of these people we save. We're mysterious and secretive. We have technology the likes of which make people like the Hood drool with envy. We perform seemingly super-human feats even though we're nothing more than men.

And then I leave Thunderbird 2 with briefs on my ankle.

I'm not even sure how they got there, but that's irrelevant. Maybe it's not irrelevant, but I'm too exhausted to wrap my mind around undershorts as my grandpa used to call them, jumping off the floor of 2's cockpit and wrapping themselves around my boot.

I honestly don't even know why Gordon would've taken them off to begin with. Usually it's just pants or shorts, shirts, jackets, maybe even light sweaters or the occasional wetsuit. The socks stay on, the briefs stay on, and most of us leave the tee shirts on at the very least when we pull our flight suits on. And Gordon didn't even go diving! Why the hell did he even take the damn things off, let alone leave them somewhere that wound up being in the direct path of my boot?

I stop at the door, clenching and unclenching my fists. There has to be an easier way to do this than to walk in, flip the briefs at him, and tell him to keep them where they belong. As the door slides open, I pull the offending garment from my back jeans pocket and shake it out to full-sized. Well, I wasn't going to go walking through the house with yellow briefs in my hand, was I? Gordon's in his bedroom with a towel wrapped around his waist.

I stride in purposefully, never breaking eye contact. "What's up, Virg?" he says, a strange look on his face. He's trying to see what I have in the hand hiding behind my back.

"What's up?" I say back, slowly pulling my hand out. Then I flip the briefs at him. His hand goes up and he catches them, then looks carefully at them. "What's up," I say again, "is that you need to be more careful with your skivvies in the future."

"Skivvies?" he says, looking back up at me with a frown. "But Virg, these aren't mine."

"Whaddya mean they aren't yours?" I ask, my anger slowly beginning to boil. "Nobody else has yellow briefs, we all wear white but you!" Well, I think we all wear white. Come to think of it, there are a few of us whose underwear I'm not sure I've ever seen…

Slowly I see a light bulb come on over his head. I wait, but he says nothing. Instead, his face starts to turn red. "Oh," is all I get from him.

Well, that's not enough, dammit. Not with that headline INTERNATIONAL RESCUE MEMBER WEARS YELLOW ONES! imprinted on my brain. "That's all I get? An 'oh' from you?" I ask quietly.

"Um," he responds, looking down and tossing the briefs onto his bed.

"Oh, um," I repeat. "Gordon, why the hell did you take them off? You didn't even get into a wetsuit thanks to the cold you have! And why were they not in the locker, but on the floor of my cockpit?"

Christ, I'm starting to sound like Scott when he's interrogating us during a briefing after we've done something he doesn't like on a rescue.

"They're mine," is all Gordon says. What the hell?

"Look, just either keep them on or outta my 'bird," is all I can think to say. I wasn't expecting this near-sheepishness from him, I was expecting an argument or maybe even an apology. "If I go out into the world with your briefs strapped around my ankle again, I'll kill you," I add to make my point.

"Dammit, Virgil, I didn't leave them there!" he says hotly. Okay, now this is more like what I was expecting.

"Well, who did, then?" I ask, just waiting for him to worm his way out of this one. Then I get a bright idea. "We don't wear each other's briefs," and of course that's not exactly true because more than once in the middle of the night I've put on Scott's and vice-versa depending on whose room we've crashed in after a rescue, and I'm not even sure if right now the ones I'm wearing are mine, "and unless you're going to tell me Tin-Tin left them there," after all, she did accompany us, but never left Thunderbird 2, "then stop trying to say you didn't leave them there!"

His eyes go wide and I think a moment to remember which word or words I said at the precise moment he started imitating a fish. Briefs…no…let's see…stop trying…no, before then…left them there, no, just slightly before…oh, my God. I feel my eyes narrowing and I take a few steps toward him. He swallows hard. I've nailed him right to the wall.

"Tin-Tin," I say with great certainty. "Sonofabitch." It comes out as in whispered disbelief. "Does Al know Tin-Tin's wearing your underwear?" My voice sounds high-pitched even to me at this point. "Jesus Christ, he's gonna kill you."

"No!" Gordon says, shaking his head. I think his face just beat out Rudolph's nose.

"No?" I repeat. "No?"

"No. This has nothing to do with her, don't even hint that to Alan or I'll kill you!"

All right, well, that seems to be truthful enough from the look on his face, and a pissed off Gordon is something I'm way too beat to deal with right now, but if it wasn't me wearing and discarding the underwear and it wasn't Tin-Tin, then the only other person, and one who got into a wetsuit, to boot, is—I can't think. Oh my God, I can't think. It can't be. It can't be. No fucking way.

He sees the look on my face. He knows that I know precisely how his yellow briefs wound up on the floor of Thunderbird 2's cockpit, even if no one will ever be able to explain them wrapping around my boot. I feel my mouth open but nothing comes out, so I clamp it shut. Gordon slumps down on the edge of the bed, half a cheek on top of the underwear that started the whole thing to begin with. He looks completely devastated and I look away, out the big sliding glass door to the brilliant sun-lit sky beyond. I think for a moment. I think hard. And I know before I even come to the conclusion that the secret is safe with me.

There's no real graceful way to exit in a situation like this, so I do the only thing that makes sense to me at that very moment. I bend forward, grab the elastic waistband of the bright yellow briefs, and yank them out from under his ass. I ball them up and stuff them into my back jeans pocket again. What, I can't walk around the house with them, what the hell would Grandma say?

I'm already through the bedroom door and into his sitting room when I stop to turn and look at him sitting miserably on his bed, looking like he's ready to just crawl under it and stay there forever. But he has nothing to worry about from me, although I can't tell him why, exactly…some secrets are meant to remain secrets.

"Sorry about the mistake, Gordo," I say lightly. "I'll just return these to their rightful owner. See you at lunch!" I give a short wave and leave his quarters. Once outside, I take a deep breath and head for the elevator.

Of all the…I never would have…holy Christ. I'd just left the bedroom suite of the wad of cotton's rightful owner, and I knew it. Now I was on my way to make sure the non-rightful-owner-but-one-who-was-wearing-my-brother's-underwear takes ownership of it. The situation, not the briefs.

Pretty soon I'm standing in front of another door. It slides open. The room's occupant is standing a couple feet inside and turns to look at me. I pull the stupid freakin' (and dirty, I remind myself) briefs out of my back pocket. They're balled in my fist; he can't see what I've got.

Then, as though it's the most natural thing in the world to have happened, because I know that's how I have to play this to keep him and Gordon from being red as beets every time they're around me, I toss it at him and say, "You left something in my 'bird. Don't ever do it again."

I turn and walk away, only imagining the look on his face. Well, now he knows that I know. So there you have it. I started out thinking I was going to have to give my younger brother hell for leaving his underwear scattered around like he and Alan used to do when we were all kids.

Now I'm walking away shaking my head, because while the bright yellow briefs do belong to Gordon, and it was Gordon who had been wearing them to begin with, it wasn't Gordon who put them on in the dark when the call-out came at 2 a.m.

I wonder how red Brains' face is right now…