3000+ words of Gordon-Penny fluff
"Aww, awesome!"
The bar is a honky-tonk special: beer on tap, sawdust on the floor, pool table and light up jukebox. That they are deep in the Yunnan Province, that the posters on the wall show pretty Chinese girls wearing cowboy hats and selling Luckee Cola and Molboros, that the regulars are all looking at them like they are creatures from another planet, just seems to enchant Gordon more.
"Co-ol." He holds the door open for her with a little flourish. "Now, I know this isn't usually your scene, Lady P, but it's fun to try new things, right?"
One of the things that she finds so special about Gordon is his capacity to buy into the romance of a situation. A part of him must know she is not really a hot-housed English Rose, just as he must know that she knows he is not a simple mid-western boy. In a childhood of private schooling, intensive training and electives at NASA, the closest any of the Tracy boys had come to Middle-America is likely when they were flying over it to go skiing in Aspen. But in this moment he really believes it, that he's the charming cowboy, that she's the cosseted demoiselle.
"Why, thank you, Gordon." For his benefit she gazes around her a little timorously. "I suppose I could try one beer, if you think it's alright."
"When Parker's away the mice will play, eh? I get you." He grins that grin, the one that's a little cheeky, a little wild, a little secret, the one that would make a lesser woman's heart melt. "Then Miss Penny, I'd like to buy you a beer."
There had been a mudslide that morning. Before International Rescue had been allowed to assist, there had been a little unpleasantness with the provincial governor, who had laboured under the misapprehension that the farmers in jeopardy owed her an emergency tax, and that it would be a good idea to try and impede International Rescue until that tax was paid. Penelope had been called in to smooth over any diplomatic snafus. The farmers had been rescued and the governor was now on her way to Shanghai in the boot of FAB1.
There had been much grumbling from Parker but he had finally relented and allowed the Tracy brothers to chaperone her for a few hours while he dropped off his cargo, and she had been able to Gordon up on his offer to explore the town.
Gordon goes to the bar, and in halting, atrociously accented Mandarin, orders two beers from the waitress, a pale young woman with bobbed hair who stares at him in a sort of daze.
There are two other slight, pretty local girls sitting on stools at the bar, sharing a basket of chicken wings. Their eyes are round as coins as they watch Gordon, and as he leans up against the bar one of the girls stretches her hand out, almost unconsciously, to touch his sun bleached curls.
She snatches her hand away just before he turns to see. "Ni hao," He gives her and her friend a big thumbs up and returns to the table where Penelope waits.
"Cheers." He hands her a beer.
"Here's mud in your eye," she says, and clinks the neck of her bottle against his.
She sips, lets the tart, salty brew wash around the inside of her mouth, pretends not to notice that though he lifts the bottle to his mouth, he doesn't actually let any beer pass his lips. Gordon may love the romance of being a simple guy buying his girl her first beer, but he is as diligent to his duty as any of his older brothers.
He pulls out a chair for her to sit. "You know this reminds me of the time –"
"So, that's an hour for Scott to get back to Thunderbird 1. Another hour before he's home. Say forty-five minutes to load up the replacement coupler…"
Penelope is used to wearing false faces. In many ways she was raised to wear them. The guise and trappings of Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward are useful, almost as useful as the ability to slip them off and walk for a couple of hours in total anonymity. She knows how to make people look at her, and also how to make people look through her. Parker, likewise, can throw off the 'hExactly's and 'M'lady's as easily as he throws off a soiled shirt, and become, in the course of five minutes, utterly convincing in the role of German diplomat or American financier. But the Tracys can never be more or less than themselves. The greatest part of their father's legacy to them is not their wondrous machines or that vast fortune, but the ability to be unapologetically their best selves.
Their best selves are, on average, half a decibel louder than everyone else, which is why she hears Alan and Virgil before she sees them.
Virgil holds the door open for Alan, who is so busy counting out time intervals on his fingers that he nearly haymakers himself by walking into Virgil's outstretched arm. Like Gordon they've changed out of their mud-caked flight suits. Unlike Gordon, neither have gone for the salmon pink Hawaiian shirt with blue and orange scorpions option.
"Another hour before he can get back here and then seven hours to conduct the repair works on Thunderbird 2. Then two hours to fly home." Alan's eyes light up with giddy excitement. "You know what this means? I can't be called out for another twelve hours! I can have a beer. My first beer!"
"Nice try, Al, but a. How old are you? B. Seven hours, what am I? Drunk?"
"You could be…"
"And c. If Thunderbird 3 is needed we'll just have Scott or Kayo ferry you back home." Virgil puts a bottle of Luckee Cola into Alan's hand. "So, you're still on call."
Alan sags like a marionette whose strings have been cut. "You're getting to be almost as little fun as Scott."
"Well, I try."
Alan slinks off to fiddle with the jukebox. Virgil slides into a chair and seems to expand to fill every possible space. He covers his mouth to hide a dozy yawn. "'Scuse me." Then he gazes about him, "You know, this kind of reminds me of the dive you brought – "
From a young age her mother had taught her that a lady's greatest weapons were poise, courtesy and a pair of steel-tipped stiletto heels. Penelope is an old hand at the heel stamp, the instep crush, the calf bump. If Gordon had asked her for a critique of his technique she would have advised him that a sharp kick to the tibial aspect of the shin would maximise pain while minimising the appearance of disturbance. Instead he kicks much too high and nearly overbalances his chair and Virgil's.
Penelope feigns obliviousness to this piece of vaudeville and blinks at Virgil in a guileless fashion. "Reminds you of where, Virgil?"
"No place," says Virgil, caught somewhere between at least three of the seven dwarfs. "I reckon I imagined it. I reckon Gordon did too."
"Ignore him," says Gordon, "He's done five rescues on the trot. It makes his memory unreliable. One time when he got like this he insisted he saved a man from drowning in croutons."
"Waldorf Joe," says Virgil. "That actually happened." He stifles another yawn.
"Anyway, I was going to say, before I was interrupted, that this reminds me of the time we visited Oklahoma. Remember?"
"Not really," says Virgil. "My memory is unreliable, remember? Who are you again?"
Gordon turns to Penny and fixes her with his sincerest, most open expression, the one favoured by liars everywhere. "Did I ever tell you about the time I visited Bomont, Oklahoma?"
She knows she shouldn't encourage him. She does anyway. "A rescue in Oklahoma? I don't believe so."
"We-ell, it wasn't so much a rescue," he says, "More an intervention."
Over at the jukebox Alan's using his universal translator to try and decode the Chinese characters. "'Wake Me up Before you Yoyo?' 'I'm a Belieber?' 'Comrade Pepper's Group of Unhappy Pathetic People?'"
"An intervention?"
"You see in Bomont, Oklahoma," Gordon pauses, good and long, for dramatic effect. "Dancing had been outlawed!"
Virgil groans. "Oh man, you're really knocking the cobwebs off them today. Don't go boring Lady Penelope with that old chestnut. She'll only have heard you tell it a thousand times."
Gordon huffs up his chest like a bantam cock. "Excuse me, boring? Don't lecture me about boring Mr. 'Let-Me-Tell-You-All-About-How-I-Rewired-My-Engines-So-I-Got-An-Extra-0.3%-Power-Output'. At least my stories don't come with diagrams."
"Diagrams might improve your stories."
"Lady Penelope would tell me if she were bored. Right?" He looks at her with those big, appealing chocolate eyes. She once owned a Labrador retriever with eyes just like them.
As grifts go, it's a reasonable effort at an opening gambit. Gordon seems genuinely flustered and Virgil, whom she never particularly credited as being much of a liar, exudes nothing but the good-natured disgruntlement of a natural sceptic.
"I'm not boring you am I?" The lab's name was Kaiser. She would throw sticks for him to fetch and Nanny would get awfully cross because he would try to sneak into her bed with muddy paws…
Unaccountably, she finds herself flushing a little. "Not at all. Please, do go on."
"Hey Virgil, can I have a buck to play Excellent Tremors by the Shore Lads?" Alan calls over.
Gordon straightens up, speaks directly to her, doesn't even look as he tosses Alan a couple of standard credits. "As I was saying, in Bomont Oklahoma dancing was outlawed, banned, illegal. There was this Reverend, you see and he was… well he was well-meaning but he had this crazy belief that dancing could lead to loose morals in young people."
"Loose morals?"
"Oh, the loosest. Fighting, drinking in the streets, babies born with three heads, satanic rituals, the works. And he had this daughter, Ariel. She was… well she was okay looking, not my type, good bone structure, you know. She was rebellious. She wanted to dance. I was there because of… because of a fire."
"Grain store fire. Worst I've ever seen." Virgil has his eyes shut as if he's dozing, but his voice is clear. "Scott was about two inches away from having an exploding gasket go straight through his thick head. Not that this one was much help," he jerks a thumb at Gordon, "He was too busy admiring the Reverend's daughter's bone structure and getting into tractor races."
"It wasn't a tractor race. It was a game of Tractor Chicken, Virgil. God!" He clears his throat. "Not that I do that sort of thing. International Rescue, reputation to uphold. Highly unsafe and all."
He tugs at the threads knotted around his wrist. It's a nervous gesture she's seen him do sometimes when he's thinking, an obvious poker player's tell.
"Go on."
"What? Oh, yeah. So Arielle had this crazy, obnoxious boyfriend, who I beat in an extremely well regulated, very safe game of tractor chicken. But then the Reverend got wind that I had been involved. Obviously he didn't hear about the stringent safety procedures I had put in place because he forbid her to see me."
Alan gives the stubbornly silent jukebox a thump.
"And the youth of the town were feeling oppressed… or maybe depressed. Definitely 'pressed anyway and they looked to me to lead them. Which I did. And then after that we snuck off to a place just like this and that's where I had to teach John to line dance!"
At this, even Virgil, who must have built up an extraordinary tolerance for Gordon's stories over the years, opens one eye.
"John was there?" Penelope asks for clarification. "Or did you teach him to line dance in zero gravity?"
By now Alan is on his hands and knees looking behind the jukebox.
Gordon hesitates, then plunges on. "Of course he was there. As usual, Scott had had a freak-out and had called him down as backup because I was so busy with leading a youth revolt that I only had time to pull off the occasional feat of astounding heroism. But when he got down he was really upset about the not being able to line dance thing." A beat. "Don't ask me why. John is inexplicable. He likes space. His best friend is a talking toaster. He thinks spinach is an acceptable topping for pizza. Being an enthusiastic but frustrated line dancer is just a part of his milieu."
As if on cue, John pops up on Virgil's comm link. "Scott says he's four minutes out. He has the part you need."
"F.A.B." Virgil detaches the portable display from his wrist controller and sets his brother, doll-sized, down on the table. He seems wide awake now and his grin makes him look rather more like his younger brothers than Penelope had thought possible. He turns John to face Gordon and Penny. "We were just talking about you. Say hi."
"Good evening, Lady Penelope." John is always as precise and courteous about time zones as he is about everything else. "Thank you again for your help today. I've passed on your intel to the GDF. They've already got one of their top prosecutors working on the investigation into the governor's shady dealings."
"Delighted to hear it. But John, you never told me you were such a line dancing aficionado."
John offers one slow puzzled blink and then sighs. "Gordon, are you telling the story about the time you saved Oklahoma again? How many times is this now? And how is it you somehow always leave in the bits where I am a clumsy dancer and leave out the bits where I provided you with the quotes that convinced the Reverend to allow you to hold your silly dance." He pivots a little to face Penelope. "'David danced before the Lord with all his might... leaping and dancing before the Lord.' Samuel."
"John," Penelope can't help but laugh now, "I took you for a lot of things but not a… a scholar of biblical quotations."
John shrugs. "I just found the quotes. It was Gordon's impassioned delivery that swayed the council. Or so he tells us. The council meeting took place in camera. Meanwhile, while he was saving the town and expressing his feelings about it in empty warehouses, we had to deal with that tornado…"
"That fire," says Virgil.
"-That fire without him." John harrumphs.
"And so are you now able to line dance?"
Gordon leans over and his voice drops to a conspiratorial stage whisper. "I did try, but all that triple stepping and boxing proved too much for him." His voice drops even lower. "Space knees."
"I heard that."
The door swings open again and Scott enters. He's still wearing his flight suit, but has thrown a bomber jacket and a pair of aviators on, as if this will somehow allow him to blend in better.
He sets his sunglasses down on the table. "Hey. Part's in the hold. I set her down next to 2, so we should be able to use a pod to get her across. Hi, Lady P, thanks for the assist."
"My pleasure." And it is a pleasure. It's so rare that she gets to spend any time in their actual company. It's easy to forget how tall Scott is, how much Alan has grown, how Virgil's size can belay his delicacy and precision, what great company they all are, even when Gordon's building towers of lies, especially when he's building towers of lies. "Do you have time? Stay and have a drink with us."
"We have Luckee Cola or Cherree Luckee Cola," says Virgil. "Or you can be like Gordon and have a fake beer."
Gordon waves his still full beer bottle.
"I guess I have time for one fake beer." Scott pulls up a chair. "Oh, uh, thank you." The waitress has hurried across the room and placed a cherry cola and also a basket of fried dumplings down in front of him. "Thanks very much."
She bows and backs away, but Penny can see her watching Scott from under her hair.
"Gordon was just telling us about his heroics." Penny says to Scott.
He grins and turns to his brother in mock surprise. "Gordon, you've been heroic? When did this happen?"
"First time for everything," says Virgil.
Alan arrives to the table. "Hey, Scott. So Thunderbird 2 is grounded for at least another eight hours, right? And that means –"
"No."
"No, what?"
"No, you can't have a beer."
"But I -"
"No beer."
"Fine." He grabs Virgil and hauls him to his feet. "Come on, I can't get the jukebox to play. Take a look for me."
"Have you –?"
"Yes, I've had a look at all the fuses."
"What about –?"
"Yes, the selector's dusty but it looks okay. C'mon!"
Virgil allows himself to be dragged across the room.
"So what are these lies I hear about Gordon being heroic?" Scott tries a dumpling.
"You know," Gordon waggles his eyebrows. "That time. In Oklahoma."
Scott rolls his eyes and groans. "Oh Gordon, not the dancing story again. He tells this one every time we come to a bar. Look, did you teach that Reverend to love again? Possibly. Did you give the youth of Bomont back their hope? Probably. Did you save the dying spirit of an otherwise ailing small town? Okay, maybe. Did you allow that girl to quit her job as a welder and pursue her dream of –? hang on, sorry, that's Flashdance."
Gordon rolls his eyes. "I think what my big brother is trying to say is that he's mixing up the time I saved Bomont with the time I helped that highly intelligent young woman pursue her dream of being a structural engineer when we visited the town of Flassideuce."
"Flassideuce?"
"It's French-Canadian. Very small. Probably you've never heard of it. Anyway, we helped this young welder-person woman - was she a woman? - out by showing her how to apply for a Lucy Tracy Foundation scholarship."
"Your mother's foundation? It does such good work."
"Uh-huh."
"And I'm sure she'd be glad to know you're using it to meet strippers the world over."
That spluttering sound is Scott choking on his cola. The patrons all look up and the waitress lurches around the counter, as if she might just seize the chance to perform the Heimlich. "…Sorry… gah!… Sorry."
John has disappeared.
But Gordon simply says in a patient voice, "Strippers are people too, Penelope. Not everyone got our start in life and you should have seen her spin around on her head. Anyway, as I was saying, the reverend gave us his blessing, so Arianna and I could go to the dance in the barn on the outskirts of town. And then I defeated her evil boyfriend for all time and I rushed into the barn and I said, 'Hey, I thought this was meant to be a party. Let's – "
"Eureka!" Alan woops.
Virgil's finally got the jukebox working. The machine is lighting up and one of the records is sliding onto the turntable. A drumbeat and then a bassline begin to issue from the speakers, followed by a familiar guitar lick.
"Been working so hard, I'm punching my card. Eight hours for what? Oh, tell me what I got."
"Son of a-"Virgil has come out from under the jukebox so fast that he bangs his head on the base of it.
Scott's trying to sit on his wrist communicator because of the howls of John's muffled laughter that are issuing from it. Gordon looks thunderstruck.
"What?" asks Alan. "What?"
Penny stands, and even her most blue-blooded of ancestors might be intimidated by her sang-froid. "Gordon?"
"Yes." He looks crestfallen.
"If you don't dance with me this instant, I shall never forgive you."
And suddenly it's like the clouds have rolled back and the sun is shining, like a dejected Labrador pup has just heard her call his name. Like all that was bad was good again.
You can't. Says that voice inside her, the one that is always separate and sensible and other, the one that has saved her life more times than she can count. You can't be serious. You can't fall for this silly, brave, reckless fool of a boy. This boy who thinks life is a movie, despite every shred of evidence to the contrary. You'll only hurt him as well as yourself. You'll -
But then he sweeps her into his arms and spins her across the floor. And she can feel the thrill of his pulse under the fingers on his wrist and the strength of his hand on the small of her back as he pulls her close and spins her away. And it's easy and fluid in the way it's supposed to be, in the way they promise you it will be in movies when you are a little girl. The way it never is in real life. They dance until the song ends and she collapses against him, breathless and laughing.
And then Alan cues up another song just as cheesy as the last and then the waitress plucks up her courage and seizes Scott's hand and drags him onto the dancefloor and that he has three words of Mandarin and she has two of English seems not to matter, because they're spinning and jiving like they've been doing it together all their lives. Virgil, with a laugh, puts the tiny John on top of the jukebox to watch and offers his hand to one of the waifs by the counter and she spins into his arms.
Then Gordon gathers her in his arms again, "One more tune?"
And they dance and dance and it's good.
"You know," she whispers, as he pulls her close. "That was quite a story."
"You think so?" He grins that grin again, the one that absolutely, definitely does not melt her heart to butter. "Thanks. Wait until you hear about the time Virgil couldn't find a partner for the end of summer dance."
"Do go on."
He dips her. "You see, Virge had this job at a summer camp, teaching rich old ladies to dance the cha-cha, but he only had eyes for this one girl with curly hair. And I'm telling you, you don't want to know what Virge did when her dad put this girl in a corner…"