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Lady Penelope's Christmas parties are infamously decadent. The grand ballroom of the Creighton-Ward manor house is strung with greenery and wreathed in candlelight, beneath which the great and the good and the faintly suspicious looking sup champagne and dance to the soft strains of the finest musicians.
Gordon isn't doing any of those things.
Gordon is in torment.
"I think you're being a little dramatic," Virgil says, not unkindly, as Gordon watches Scott spin Penelope around the dancefloor, pale yellow skirts billowing behind her, jewels at her throat glinting as she throws her head back and laughs. "It's only a dance, Gordon."
Gordon only tightens his grip on his cane and scowls.
He's been stuck like this for months now, long past the point when he might have imagined things would be somewhere close to normal again. He's had to accept that nerves and ligaments don't heal as well as skin and bone. He's had to watch as his 'bird and his brothers go out on mission after mission after mission without him. Smiled through every briefing and Kayo, take Four. Swallowed every invective. Sat, crippled and aching, in his own launch tube and screamed until his lungs are raw. He's coped, alright? He's tried.
But sitting here, his nerves burning, watching Penelope dances with every one of his brothers except him? Might just be an indignity too far.
He'd not wanted to come, not when he still feels like a stranger in his own body, but then the invitation had arrived, ivory cardstock and his name in gold, and Penny had asked for him. Penny had asked for him, and while there's breath in his body, he'll go. So it isn't that he wants to be here, not really. It's more that he doesn't know how to be anywhere else. It really is as simple as that.
Or it will be, anyway. After he's murdered Scott.
"Did he glower at me like that?" asks John from where he's leaning against the wall nearest the corner. "I'm surprised Scott hasn't just spontaneously combusted."
"Don't be an idiot," Gordon snaps. "You can't dance."
John pushes off the wall and rolls his eyes.
"Reel him in will you?" he asks Virgil, as though Gordon's ears are just as fucked as the rest of him. "This is painful to watch even for me."
The music stops and Scott bows and Penelope's laughing again and Gordon -- Gordon makes a decision. Because the thing is, the thing is, that if Gordon has a purpose, any purpose, outside of a little yellow submarine, it's to make Penny laugh.
And he doesn't need legs to do it, either.
---
He needs legs to reach her. That's proving difficult. Particularly when your every pathetic little shuffle across a frankly enormous dancefloor is dogged by your obnoxiously attentive little brother.
“Look, you’re gonna fall. Here, let me --”
Gordon shrugs him off, a spitefully sharp thing that sets his shoulder throbbing and sends Alan skittering backwards over the dancefloor, his hands raised in surrender.
“Jeez! Okay! I’m only trying to help.”
This is, absolutely and without compare, the very worst thing he could have said, because the kid clearly means it. He hovers there, rescue ready, as Gordon shuffles forward, keeping as much weight as possible on his good leg. So far he’s advanced maybe five feet. He can’t even see Penny anymore and this whole thing is just utterly, unbearably pathetic.
“Do you want me to get you some fruit punch?” Alan offers. It’s an olive branch.
Gordon’s had quite enough of sticks.
“I want a proper drink.”
“But you can’t --”
“I know!”
Can’t walk, can’t drink, can’t get the image of Penelope in another man’s arms out of his head. Even if he’s related to them. Especially if he’s related to them. And he knows that it’s ridiculous, and he knows that it’s petty, and he knows that he should be better than this.
He ought to be better than this.
“Do you want me to get Virgil?”
Alan is half a breath away from being beaten to death with a walking stick in the midst of a Viennese Waltz when his saviour swoops in.
“Mind if I cut in?”
Penelope smiles softly when she speaks, but there’s a steel to her spine that Gordon recognises immediately. Penelope does not ask. Penelope tells. Alan looks momentarily torn, so Gordon encourages him by shoving his cane into his hands. Possibly with a little more force than necessary, sure, but it’s been a long long night.
“Don’t let this misery ruin your night,” she tells Alan, slipping her arm through Gordon’s and allowing him to transfer his weight to her shoulder. Then, conspiratorially, “Don’t tell Parker, but I do believe someone has set up beer pong in the back pantry.”
Alan beams before his eyes flick nervously over Gordon again. He twists the cane between his hands. “You sure you’re alright?”
Gordon imagines the cane embedded in Alan’s skull and smiles sweetly. “Super duper.”
“I’ve got him,” Penelope says. “Have no fear.”
Alan’s shoulders drop in relief and he scampers off through the crowd. Penelope watches him go, her expression one of supreme satisfaction.
Perhaps she’s collecting the undying gratitude of Tracy boys. Everyone needs a hobby.
"How the hell do you know what beer pong is?"
"Gordon, I have a degree." She holds his arm a little more firmly and he’s grateful for it, he is, but he sort of hates it at the same time. “How does Alan know what beer pong is?”
“That’s top secret International Rescue business.”
“Of course, how remiss of me to pry.”
The waltz ends to a smattering of polite applause and Gordon realises two things at the exact same moment. He’s achieved his aim, and he has absolutely no way of doing anything about it.
“Is there really beer pong in the back pantry?” he asks. Avoidance. It's a skill.
“I very much doubt it, but it seemed to do the trick don’t you think?” She beams at him, gives his elbow a little squeeze. He tries very very hard not to wince. “Well?”
He feels like this is the point where there should be sweeping. Gordon has it on reasonably good authority that he's good at sweeping, but he's never swept Penelope anywhere -- not unless you count out of collapsing ancient tombs, which he does, but still --
He'd have liked to try. Now, when it's all candlelit romance and mistletoe. Now, when he thinks that maybe, maybe, she might let him. Might want. But instead his shoulder throbs and his leg burns and Penny's looking at him like he's got an answer for her. Like he's got a fully fit and functional version of himself hidden under his best suit.
It's a nice suit. It would have been great for sweeping.
Penelope narrows her eyes. “Are you planning to ask me to dance, or are we going to stand here all night like waiters?”
“Uh --”
Penelope rolls her eyes. "Oh for heaven’s sake.”
She pulls his good arm over her shoulder and wraps her arms around his chest, the height difference between them in her heels insignificant enough that he can rest his weight against her without straining his back.
It doesn't feel much like dancing. It feels like being pitied and propped up, corpse like, by the most beautiful woman in the room. The country. Hell, maybe the planet. It feels fucking awful.
Slightly less awful than the crack of agony as someone barrels into him from behind but goddamn.
"Oh I'm terribly sorry chum, terribly sorry!" The guilty party staggers off, his sharp suit and weaselly face blurred by the effort of trying not to cry out. His bad knee collapses and he wobbles alarmingly against Penelope, any pretence that she isn't the only thing keeping him from dropping like a stone betrayed by the way he scrabbles to keep his grip, hands full of lace.
"I've got you," she soothes, palm pressing gently between his shoulder blades as he struggles to catch his breath. "I've got you, darling. All right? All right now?"
The pain fades back to the lingering throb that he's still not at all used to, and he manages to nod.
"Yeah -- 's fine. I'm fine."
"Hardly," Penelope mutters, turning to watch his unfortunate assailant totter back to the bar. "I do apologise. I don't usually invite oafs."
Normally Gordon would make some joke here, something self deprecating probably, but Penelope's got murder in her eyes and it's kinda frightening. In a good way.
"Stop making that face," he says, because the guy's drunk and almost certainly doesn't deserve whatever's brewing behind those steely blues. "I'm fine. No harm, no foul, right?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about," she says archly, "I have a perfectly lovely face."
He can't exactly argue with that, only huff his displeasure against the crown of her head as she attempts to manoeuvre them into some approximation of a dance.
"Cheer up, you only have one left foot. You’re already doing far better than John.”
“That is an outrageously backhanded compliment, your Ladyship, and you know it.”
Penelope hums in agreement, rests her head on his shoulder, and Gordon entirely forgets the pain in his leg and the ache in his shoulder. He damn near forgets his own name. Slowly, agonisingly slowly, and with no conscious effort whatsoever on his part, the two of them begin to rotate on the spot. Over in the corner John raises a bruschetta in passing salute. Virgil, dancing with a middle aged woman who’s dripping in diamonds and drooling copiously, gives him a less than subtle thumbs up. Scott, on the other hand, looks as though he’s being held in his chair by the sheer force of their grandmother’s glare.
It’s strange, in the way that all apparent miracles are, that he’s been looking at her in other men’s arms all night and now she’s in his he can’t seem to look at her at all. There are things unsaid between them, though. Things he really ought to say because god only knows he's lucky to have the chance.
Wasn't god that saved him though, was it.
It was her.
"Thank you."
"No need, darling. I've been waiting for an excuse to look into dear cousin Freddie's tax returns for years."
"Not for -- jeez Penny, not for that!"
She lifts her head briefly to throw him a quizzical look. "Then what on earth for?"
For saving my life. For dancing with me. For being seen with me when I don't even want to be seen with myself.
"You know. Everything. Just --" he takes a deep breath, appreciates, just for a moment, the way her body follows his. Or his follows hers. That. It's almost certainly that. "Everything."
Penelope rests her cheek back against his uninjured collarbone, silent, and he wonders if he's given offence, but then her grip grows a little tighter, a little fiercer.
"You made me a promise."
"I know."
"I'm terribly cross."
He does wince at that, and not just because her hand is fisted in his jacket in just such a way as to pull on his bad shoulder.
"Yeah. I figured."
The music's ending, she's releasing her grip, pulling away, and this hurts. This hurts more than a torn ligament or a dislocated joint. Because he hasn't made her laugh at all. He's made her cry .
"Oh god, shit, I'm so sorry --" he looks round, frantic, for assistance. Parker, Virgil, Bertie, anyone. Parker will probably kill him. He probably deserves it. It's fine.
"Gordon!" It's a hiss more than a shout, meant to be hidden under the applause. Kept between them. "I'll do it again."
He blinks at her, at those huge blue eyes, at the high spots of colour in her cheeks.
"I shouldn't have asked that of you. I'm cross with myself because I know you can't keep a promise like that. It's not just what you do, it's who you are, Gordon Tracy, and I knew that."
People are milling around them again, a break in the festivities, but Gordon stands frozen, hanging, quite literally, onto Penelope for dear life.
"I promise you," she vows. "I'll do it again. And so, I expect, will you."
"Probably," he agrees, because anything else would be a bare faced lie and they both know it. "I mean -- hopefully. Not the nearly dying part, that sucked. Just --" He shrugs, as best he can. "Be nice to be needed."
The string players are resetting their instruments, the room rearranging itself around them, and Penelope smiles.
"Shall we carry on, then?"
And everything hurts, everything, and he can hear Scott's blood pressure rising from here, but he just nods, let's the thrum of her satisfied little sigh straighten his spine and steady his weight. He can't sweep her off her feet, not even a little bit, but that's okay.
He suspects she was always the better dancer, anyway.