DIZZIED by EMERALD QUEEN RATED FRC

Written in response to the Tracy Island Writers Forum 2006 Fic Swap Challenge.

Fic Swap Request: Tintin walks in on Brains and discovers his secret. The secret can be anything, as long as we haven't seen it in other stories before (i.e., "Insanity"). The goal here is to be original.

Yawning, Jeff rubbed his hands across his eyes and jerked his head up just before it hit the desk. Squinting at the small clock through the fuzziness of sleep, the patriarch just managed to make out the time; almost four thirty in the morning.

The mission, a call-out to Uvs Nuur Lake in Siberia, had been agonisingly difficult, with little progress for many hours. It was only through some strange, divine influence and the fortunate intervention of Lady Luck, Scott had wearily argued in his last call, that everyone had managed to survive. After almost thirty-eight hours of toil, therefore, Jeff knew better than to expect any sight or sound from his sons until sometime much later the next day.

Kneading his knuckles into his eyes again, he bit back a yawn and pushed himself to his feet, avoiding the temptation to simply shut his eyes in his chair and nap for a few hours at his desk; something he had found happening with distressingly increasing frequency.

He nodded a silent goodnight in the direction of the sofa, where Tin-Tin had been following the painstaking progress of the latest mission. She smiled fondly in return as he ambled in to the thick darkness, and tugged her dressing gown tightly around her shoulders.

Stretching contentedly along the cushions, the young Malaysian stared at the ceiling, a dreamy smile lighting up her face. She sighed, thinking happily of her beloved Alan and his somewhat precarious performance at Uvs Nuur Lake, before awkwardly twisting on to her stomach. Sleep, she knew, would be impossible until he returned home, even if she had felt the slightest inclination to close her eyes. Despite the lateness of the hour, however, her eyes shone brightly in the darkness, and restlessly she pushed herself into a sitting position, sighing loudly as she stared up at the clock, knowing that it would be some hours yet before she could hope to see Alan again.

As the seconds trickled slowly into the unreachable eternity of the past, she reached a decision and stood up, stretching stiffly. Padding softly in the direction of Brains’ lab, she wrapped her pink dressing gown around her shoulders and wondered with anticipation what diversion the scientist had been working on. The upgrades for Thunderbird Four which Gordon had requested, perhaps? Or maybe an entirely new design for another machine to go in Thunderbird Two’s pods? She had, after all, overheard a conversation between Jeff and the island’s scientist which suggested that such a juicy treat may well be on the way.

Daydreaming about what fantastic surprises could be waiting in store for her in Brains’ lab, Tin-Tin quickened her step until she was almost moving at a run, thoughts of mechanical treats and design flaws to help solve flashing rapidly through her imagination. Just as she ground to a stop outside the door, her hand resting on the handle, she felt a strange vibration tickling the soundproof door, causing a shiver to leap down the length of her spine.

Pausing, she ran her tongue over her top lip with delighted anticipation as the certainty that upgrades for the Mole would be the order of the day. Closing her eyes, she allowed herself a childlike moment to dream of the world of possibilities inside, before she could no longer contain herself.

When she threw open the door, Tin-Tin was shocked, to say the least.

Although the lab still looked the same, with its stacked jumbles of higgledy-piggledy projects scattered across the overflowing benches, she was unable to draw her eyes away from the swaying spectacle in the centre of the room. Stunned and astounded, she couldn’t even notice even the recently accumulated clutter around her.

Large designs with scribbled corrections and intricate additions pencilled in lay amongst small bits and pieces of scientific experiments and miniature prototypes of whatever machine Brains had been working on before being struck by the most recent splash of creativity. Dotted around the disorganized room, larger projects loomed; sections of an engine; recent developments in mechanical engineering; bizarre experiments which had occurred as a result of challenges between scientific friends on the mainland; unearthly concoctions which had bubbled and fizzled for weeks. Suddenly, none of it seemed to matter.

Brains was dancing.

Unable to move, Tin-Tin stood frozen in the doorway, blinking dizzily. Her jaw hung open, slack with shock, and she was dimly aware that, if anybody had ever whispered to her about the sight in front of her eyes, she would never have believed it. Not in a million years.

This distressing thought was closely followed by the numbly upsetting knowledge that nobody would ever believe her, either. Her father would shake his head sadly, Alan would laugh, and Grandma would disapprovingly suggest that she was too old for such malicious games. If she walked away now, a little voice in the back of her mind told her that, by the morning, she wouldn’t even believe herself.

Slowly, she began to realize that the vibrations she had felt through the doorknob were not caused by the testing she had incorrectly assumed was taking place, but by the music which echoed around the room, bouncing and reverberating against the walls. It was an old sound, swinging shakily from the early depths of the previous century; through the mists of disbelief, Tin-Tin thought she recognized the ‘Tiger Rag’ by Art Tatum from Virgil’s beloved music collection, but her knowledge of historical music was disgracefully poor.

As the initial impact began to fade away, Tin-Tin watched with growing embarrassment as Brains jiggled around with his eyes closed in the middle of the scientific medley, shaking his hips and springing around on the balls of his feet with an energy she had only ever seen in frenzied moments of the scientists’ newborn ideas, his tongue poking between his lips as he frantically scribbled preliminary notes in his little book. The tongue had emerged now, a little triangle of pinkness between the widely grinning lips. Beads of sweat were streaked across his forehead, splashing to the floor as he twisted and span; his elbows jutted out at odd angles, accented by the erratic shaking of his hands.

Aware that she had intruded on a highly private moment, and not wishing for Brains to know she had seen, the young woman began to move slowly backwards, hand clutched on the doorknob as the delightful sound of the piano keys hurried up and down the scales. Just as she was about to creep over the threshold, the music slowed marginally and gushed down the tripping keys, and Brains sprang into a pose reminiscent of the ancient ‘Saturday Night Fever’ movie from almost a hundred years ago. His right hand was pointed dramatically above his head; his left hand strained, quivering, towards the floor; weight thrown on to his right leg as the left one locked into a bend. Head thrown back, his chest heaved as he gasped for breath, and his eyes snapped open with exhilaration.

They froze as their stares clashed, and the moment of silence drew out, prolonged into a miserable challenge, each daring the other to make the first move.

Hesitantly, Tin-Tin prised her hand from the door, and clapped jerkily. The lonely sound trailed off for a moment, before a smile burst across her face and she began to laugh merrily, clapping wildly. The expression quickly became mirrored in Brains face; a mixed wave of relief and pleasure that Tin-Tin was applauding for him, not laughing at him, as he had clearly feared.

Finally relaxing from the infamously dramatic pose, Brains began to shake slightly as he bowed. Slowly, the stringed sound of the next track began to jiggle across the airwaves, and Brains proffered his hand. Hesitating for only a second as her ears pricked up, Tin-Tin cautiously crossed the room, wordlessly accepting the invitation.

Although his palms were sweating uncontrollable and his face was red as a beetroot from all the effort he had put into his wildly flung grooves, as soon as she reached the centre of the room, an electric shock seemed to bounce through Tin-Tin’s veins. It felt almost as though she had stepped straight into a nightclub, or perhaps some wacky Broadway musical. Bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet, she barely managed to keep herself from slipping as her unexpected partner span her around the smooth floor in a flurry of fast movements.

As the world span around her, Tin-Tin gasped with surprise, her breath whisked sharply from her lungs. She skidded, clinging to Brains’ arms with more force than she had initially intended, but then she had never suspected in her wildest dreams that he would be such a . . . an intense dancer. As the music leapt up a scale she felt her feet flying uncontrollably from the floor, and an instant, uncontrollable terror coursed through her veins. Brains, apparently oblivious to her fear, whirled her through the air until the room became an indistinguishable blur, whizzing past her eyes in a spin of colour and lights.

Just managing to break away in time to avoid being flung into one of the tables Tin-Tin tripped across the room, distancing herself from Brains, who carried on kicking his legs to and fro, waving his arms above his head. She suddenly realized that his face had glazed over with exactly the same ecstatic, highly concentrated expression which accompanied his erratic bouts of scientifically inspired genius.

Holding her hand to her head as the world continued to twist into distressingly odd shapes, the young Malaysian staggered a little way before regaining her balance, grabbing hold of a desk as she did so, almost forcing her to crumple to the floor. Her feet slipped on the ground, even as she steadied herself and tried to catch her breath. Gaining a firmer grasp on the table, Tin-Tin squeezed her eyes shut to stop herself from throwing up, and pulled herself unsteadily on to the smooth surface.

Contenting herself with swinging her willowy legs back and forth through the heavy air, the young woman shook her head quickly, as if to dispel the unbearable dizziness, before the laughter encased in her chest burst away, blossoming into the air to meld with the vibrating music. She clapped her hands frenziedly as Brains leapt magnificently into the air and tumbled into a roll. Springing up again, he wiggled wildly, head bobbing up and down as though he was little more than an oversized rag doll, shaking in the wind.

As the seconds flashed into minutes, and the minutes bounced into hours, despite the tumultuous volume of the jazz and Brains’ boundless energy, Tin-Tin found her eyelids beginning to droop. Her wide grin fell unwillingly into a yawn, and she ran the back of her hands across her dark eyes. Yawning again, barely able to reach the top of her breath, the Malaysian caught a sight of the laboratory’s wall clock; almost six thirty in the morning!

Blinking, she fixed her eyes once more on the dancing scientist, whose untamed moves were still being flung together with as much boundless energy as when she had first walked in on the odd spectacle, before she slipped gracefully from the table and slunk unnoticed from the room.

Hurrying down the corridor, the rising sun caught her eyes, and more than once she almost stumbled in her growing desperation for sleep. Initially, she had thought of going to her room, before remembering that her Alan would not be back yet; sleep would be as impossible as it was two hours ago.

Tumbling into the lounge as the sun’s early rays peeked over the horizon and poured in through the wide glass windows, a cloudy trail in the sky caught the corner of her eyes. Smiling faintly, she collapsed on to the sofa. As her eyelids sank, her mind filled with just one thought; dear Alan, he would never believe her.