In all the years John had known his brothers and his father, he'd only twice seen any one of them cry.

Jeff? Never. Of course, he'd been so young at the time of his mother's death he couldn't be sure his dad didn't cry then. But even if he had, John was sure Jeff had never let anyone see it.

Scott? One time: when they thought they'd lost Virgil in an apartment complex collapse. That rescue had been two years, five weeks and six days ago. No brother forgot a rescue like that, and from Thunderbird Five, via the vid screen on Mobile Control, John had seen a tear roll down his eldest brother's cheek.

Virgil? Not once.

Gordon? Nope.

Alan? Well, as an adult, only once: when Tin-Tin had told him they were through, packed her things and not two hours later moved to New York to work for one of the Tracy companies. The tears had been, John had presumed, more from frustration and anger than sadness. Yet they'd been there, spilling out of Al's eyes for a few seconds before he'd angrily wiped them away and fled to the solitude of his bedroom suite. That had been only six months ago, and Tin-Tin still hadn't returned to Tracy Island. The saga of Alan and Tin-Tin continued.

Now John himself had cried, most notably when losing his shit after nearly losing his life on Thunderbird Five a year earlier. After trying to ignore it, bottle it up and store it away behind concrete barriers, all his nightmares and fright and the horror of having nearly died yet not remembering any of it, finally took its toll on his psyche. Thank Christ he'd had the good sense to be alone in his room for that one. But by and large, he'd not cried throughout his lifetime any more than his brothers and father had. Not just because he'd grown up in a family full of jocks, but because it wasn't really in his nature to cry.

So many times he and his brothers had seen things on rescues that made them sorrowful. They each handled those moments in their own way. Scott was always wound tight as a drum anyway, even if he hid it well – but after seeing the remains of children, or a family huddled together in a last embrace as they burned to death, or after hearing the screams of a group of women as a building collapsed on their heads and killed them, he would become even more tightly wound, fairly crackling with an impending explosion.

Which was always defused by Virgil, whose way of handling horrible scenes and memories was largely a mystery to John, but without whom he knew – as they all knew – that Scott would never make it through even one bad thing, let alone a series of them.

Gordon always took on an air of sadness after witnessing something horrific. He was quiet; introspective about whatever it was he'd seen. And he often wound up doing for Alan what Virgil did for Scott: tempering Alan's tendency toward running off half-cocked to pull some crazy stunt in the aftermath of confronting the consequences of failure on a rescue.

Luckily, International Rescue was successful more often than not. But the lives lost before they could reach a danger zone would sometimes smack them in the face, a permanent reminder that there were always those they could not rescue from their fate.

Yet not once, in all that time, had he actually seen any of his brothers weep for the dead. He assumed that, like him, if they shed tears, it was done behind closed doors. Maybe with the brother they were closest to, maybe alone. It wasn't his business to ask, any more than it was theirs to ask him.

And then there was Brains.

For the longest time after John had first met the scientist, he'd have sworn on a stack of his grandparents' collection of antique bibles that Brains was nothing less than an android. He seemed to function like a computer, or a robot, in every single way.

So it honestly had never occurred to John, as oblivious as it might've made him feel afterward, that Brains had emotions which didn't revolve around delight or frustration about his inventions and experiments. He'd seen the guy literally giddy when he'd made a breakthrough. He'd seen him so frustrated that he'd thrown models, beakers and other equipment across the lab, shattering them into hundreds of pieces against the hard concrete walls. He'd also seen Brains so deeply entrenched in his own mind that bombs could've exploded to his left and right and he'd never have heard a thing.

And of late, as John had been spending more time with a man he considered a friend – even if they didn't talk about much of anything other than experiments, inventions or tweaks to Thunderbirds – he had seen a hint or two of genuine happiness in Brains' brief smile over something John might've said to him, or something he'd suggested in the course of a technical conversation.

At the best of times, John could carry on a pretty decent, linear conversation with the scientist. At the worst of times, he had to give up and leave because Brains either went non-verbal – from being so lost inside his own mind, John supposed – or he was spouting gibberish that went so far over John's head he doubted Thunderbird Three could reach it.

But of course Brains wasn't an android, nor any kind of robot, for that matter. While it was true that often he would blast off for an unknown quasar and leave John holding the rocket fuel, over the course of time John had to admit to himself that Brains was indeed a human being, made of flesh and bone and blood and not circuitry and oil and microchips. Still and all, other than the fleeting smiles and maybe once or twice when he'd see spots of red high on Brains' cheekbones from some off-color comment he or his brothers had made, there wasn't a whole lot of recognizable emotion that John could associate with his friend.

Until the wee hours of that Saturday morning.

John awakened bolt upright in bed, the possible solution to a problem he and Brains had been wrestling with right there, like the answer had been magically revealed to him while he slept. They'd been tussling with the problem of why accretion discs surrounding the nuclei of active galaxies emitted relativistic jets along their polar axes. And somehow, just like that, in the snap of a finger and the blink of a tired eye, he had what could very well be the answer.

He was so pumped to reveal his sleep-induced epiphany to Brains that he bolted from his bedroom suite wearing nothing but an old pair of plum-colored silk boxer shorts. He took the elevator all the way down into the bowels of Tracy Island, and from there ran the short distance to the lab's main door in a full-out sprint.

John used the keypad to gain access, figuring he'd find Brains either in the lab itself, or in the small nearby bedroom. He smiled as he realized he'd not even thought to check Brains' official bedroom suite on the first floor of the villa – but then, how often had he known his friend to actually use those rooms to sleep in? Brains always wanted to stay close to his work.

And so down the steps he went until he made it to Brains' second bedroom, off a large landing that featured, on the opposite wall, the very first sketch of Thunderbird Five's proposed design that the scientist had ever made. Jeff had had it framed and given it to John, who had in turn decided it belonged near where the genius who'd come up with it spent the most time.

That had been a mere three months ago, and only the third time Brains had given him a genuine smile. The moment had warmed John's insides in a way he hadn't cared to examine too closely.

Brains' bedroom door was closed, so John hit the request entry button on its keypad. But the door didn't open. Figuring Brains must be in the lab, John ran the rest of the way down the stairs, zooming through the doorway and stopping in the middle of the huge first room. "Brains?" he called out. There was no answer.

Room by room – seven in all – John moved through the gigantic labyrinth that was Tracy Island's laboratory facility, calling out for his friend but not finding any sign of him. Finally, with a frown, John lifted his wristwatch to his face and said, "Locate Brains."

Much to his surprise, the scientist wasn't anywhere near the lab. Or the villa, for that matter. "You're in the observation dome?" he said aloud, eyebrows raised. "Really."

The length of his search for Brains having cooled his initial excitement a bit, John realized a trip to the observation dome atop the tallest peak on the island would require a wee bit more attire than plum-colored silk boxer shorts. So it was back to his bedroom suite to change. It occurred to him, as he donned a clean pair of cotton shorts and a tank top, that he could just call Brains and tell him what he'd figured out…but the moment he had the thought, he hesitated. He didn't get to share the observatory, his favorite place on the island, with others very often.

The observation dome was probably the one place on Tracy Island that John spent the most time when he was planetside. From there, with the powerful telescope he himself had designed, he could observe planets, galaxies, stars and the tantalizing evidence of black holes that were beyond the range of many of the finest earthbound observatories the world over. He couldn't count the number of hours he'd spent there, sometimes alone, sometimes with Alan or their father, and sometimes with Brains. Most space-related observations that worked themselves into his published books came from right there in their own private dome. It was a place that John loved to be.

He wondered, as he jogged up the sand and dirt and rock-strewn path, why Brains would be there at that hour. Had the man finally stumbled upon something in their research on the accretion discs that he simply had to go and verify for himself by observing the primary active galaxy they'd focused their research on, AB29-832Y? It would make perfect sense to John if that were the case, and he found himself wondering if Brains had come to the same conclusion as the one that had woken him from a deep sleep not half an hour before. Imagine if they'd both come up with the answer at the same time! How completely weird and stupidly wonderful would that be, that moment when they realized it, began babbling to each other about it and started putting the new theory to the test right there in the dome together?

John's excitement grew.

Imagine if they could really prove beyond the shadow of a doubt, that microquasars were the end all and be all to the question of accretion discs! The stars swirling in a mass around the center of a galaxy were one thing, but instead of there being a black hole at the center, as had for so long been the reigning theory in astrophysics, what if microquasars were what were really what lay at the centers of galaxies?

And his excitement grew more.

He jogged across the relatively small clearing at the top of the path. The observation dome itself lived up to its name: like many other structures all over the world with the same purpose, it wasn't much more than a simple building with a dome on top. A retractable panel allowed the incredibly powerful telescope access to the heavens, its complex system of mirrors and lenses and microcircuitry even more sophisticated than most equipment standard astronomers had available to them, thanks to the involvement of John's genius friend in its construction. The observation dome was a purely functional building, with very few comforts, but it was a place John could lose himself in. And often had.

The door obediently slid open at John's key command, and at first he didn't hear a thing. But he did note, upon entry, that Brains was not seated in the telescope's gimbal-slung chair high above the floor. And there weren't even any lights on save the low level emergency illumination that was a permanent fixture in all their outbuildings, like Launch Control and the Roundhouse.

That was when he heard it. A sound so foreign to him that it took John a handful of seconds to place exactly what it was.

Crying?

As soon as that realization dawned, adrenaline started coursing through his veins. Because to hear that sound, knowing who the only other person here was, could mean only one thing: Brains was in pain.

It was hard to tell what direction it was coming from, thanks to the massive echo inherent in the way the structure was built. But pretty soon John managed to pinpoint the source as the far right corner of the building, just under sixty feet from where he stood by the front entrance. Slowly, quietly, he stole across the concrete floor. He didn't want to sneak up on Brains, but he also didn't want to scare the shit out of him by speaking. He was contemplating whether calling out to him might be the best thing to do, but realized that surely Brains had heard the door swish open. It wasn't like that was ultra-silent, thanks to the ever-present echo.

When he was halfway across the huge room, he heard a sniffle and then the sound of crying ceased altogether. He stopped. Perked his ears up. Heard nothing. "Brains?" he said quietly, his voice being batted back at him just as softly. "Are you okay?"

There was no answer.

"Hey, are you hurt?"

Finally, a response. "No."

John couldn't actually get eyes on his quarry, thanks to shadows that hugged all four corners of the room. But he heard movement, and so continued walking toward the far right corner until at last he reached its shadow. He looked down, finding the tips of his sandals at the very edge of the shadow, as though afraid to toe over a line that maybe they weren't meant to cross.

"Hey," John said, trying to get his eyes to adjust to the murky depth before him.

"Hey," Brains replied. His voice was uncharacteristically low and held a strange tremor, as though he was shivering.

He moved forward then, his head suddenly bathed in light. Startled, John took an involuntary step backwards. The scientist wasn't wearing his glasses, and his eyes were so red and swollen that for half a second, John wondered if he'd been at the whiskey. But no. Because the long, thick, dark lashes that surrounded Brains' pale blue eyes were wet, and that meant there was a far more basic reason that those eyes were so bloodshot. A reason John had heard when he'd first entered the dome.

John swallowed hard. Talk about being a fish out of water. The guy he'd barely started getting to smile at him was now sitting here alone in a dark corner at the furthest point from human contact he could pretty much get on Tracy Island, crying.

Why?

Moreover, did John want to know why?

He did. In that moment, as Brains' eyes moved down to the floor, John did want to know why. What would set Brains to weeping in the dead of night?

Swallowing hard again, John took a step forward, his arm disappearing into the shadow as his hand found Brains' shoulder. He squeezed it gently and left it there. "You okay?"

Brains sniffled, looked up at him briefly, then looked back down. John felt him shrug.

"You want to talk about it?" John asked, wondering what it would take to move Brains further along the edge of the room, to a place where he'd at least be able to see him without straining to do so. Like maybe to the dome's only concession to comfort: a simple couch placed against the wall.

"I don't know," Brains replied, simply and honestly. "Why'd you come up here?"

John smiled a little. He'd completely forgotten his excitement about microquasars in his concern for his friend. "I had an idea about that problem with the galaxies," he told him. "I went looking for you to see what you'd think about my theory."

"Oh," Brains replied with...was John reading this right?...disappointment.

Wait, Brains wasn't excited about a possible solution to the thing they'd been slaving over for the better part of three months now? What could Brains be disappointed about? Whatever it was, the engineer's ho-hum response took the wind out of John's sails and left him feeling a little empty.

"Let's go sit down," John found himself saying, but then had a little trouble making his feet actually move. At some point they started obeying him, even as his mind worked like hell to try and figure out what was going on here.

John could hear that Brains was following him, and suddenly felt kind of like he had the first day he'd gone back to school after the childhood illness that had kept him home-schooled for the better part of a year: out of his depth, completely unsure of what to expect, and wondering if it might not be a better idea to go crawl into a hole than walk into the classroom.

Well, at least there weren't twenty little kids here to witness whatever the hell was about to happen. And John knew something was...he just couldn't quite for the life of him put his finger on what.

So now they were both sitting down on the forest green suede sofa, Brains at the end nearest the corner John had pulled him from, and John on the center cushion. The engineer was now looking across the vast room at what was probably nothing at all, while John's eyes wandered and settled anywhere that wasn't within an inch of his friend.

This didn't happen often. "This," being John at a loss for words.

His mind churned.

Brains had been crying.

Crying.

It was a little unnerving and John couldn't help but fidget a bit. Hell, he'd known Scott since the day he was born, but if John had come across him crying, he wouldn't have stayed in the same zip code for more than two seconds. He would've been out of there like his ass was on fire, simply because he knew inherently that it would embarrass the hell out of his eldest brother to be caught crying.

Yet he hadn't run from Brains. Maybe because he didn't know how being caught crying made Brains feel? Or maybe because hearing Brains cry made John's gut twist in a way that it wouldn't have if it'd been Scott.

"What's going on?" John finally asked.

Brains sighed. Swallowed. "It's nothing, John. Really."

Nothing? John didn't believe that for a second, and the look on his face must've made that pretty clear if the color creeping up Brains' cheeks was any indication. "Come on, I mean...I've just never...heard you cry." John's voice faded to a whisper as the sentence progressed, as if calling out the moment in a normal voice was somehow disrespectful.

"Well, I've never seen you cry either. I-It doesn't mean you don't," Brains countered with, as always, his infallible logic.

Several moments of an uncomfortable silence passed.

"Have you ever?" Brains asked. John looked at him quizzically. "Cried," Brains clarified.

"Yeah," John admitted. "Sure I have. Not much, though."

"I suppose in your family the motto is that boys don't cry," he said quietly.

"Well, it's not really a motto," John said, thinking back on his childhood years. "I mean, Dad never sat us down and told us anything like that, and Scott certainly never did. It's just...I don't know, I guess it's kind of embarrassing to cry in front of your brothers. You know, like when Alan gets madder than a hornet, he tears up and then he turns red as a beet."

"Yeah, but that's not the same kind of crying," Brains stated, now looking at John again full-on. "I-I mean, tears of anger, of frustration of joy, of being in physical pain...they're different than tears of sadness. That's the kind of crying I mean."

He had a point. Hearkening back to his earlier thoughts about having seen his brothers cry, John realized that he'd been thinking all along about tears of sadness. Not, as he'd just mentioned to Brains, cases like how Alan's anger made him cry just because he couldn't help it. John also hadn't thought of times of physical pain, like when Virgil's shoulder had become dislocated and the agony of it caused tears to stream down his face. Or when Gordon had been teaching himself to walk after the hydrofoil accident, pain so devastatingly obvious in controlled sobs that wrenched themselves from his younger brother's gut with every step.

Brains was right. Of course he was, John groaned inwardly. He was always right, dammit.

"So you...were crying from...sadness?" John asked hesitantly. After all, it wasn't his business to pry. If Brains had wanted him to know he was crying, he could've come to John's suite, woke him up and proceeded to sit in a shadowed corner of his bedroom and start bawling.

As if.

Brains nodded.

"Well, what happened?" Now John was back to being insanely curious, and just about ready to punch out whoever had caused Brains to feel that way. A protective reaction, sure…but wasn't that what you did for your friends? Protected them?

"It's what isn't happening. Hasn't happened." Brains bit his lip and looked away. "Probably won't happen."

This conversation had just jumped into the category John defined as "at the worst of times" because Brains had veered off in a direction that didn't exist on any compass and it left John's gray matter swinging in the breeze. "You've lost me," he admitted. In fact, Brains was probably the only person who'd heard John admit repeatedly that he couldn't follow what was going on.

Just add this one to the pile, he mused.

Without warning, John felt a hand firmly placed on his cheek. Then before he could react to realizing it was Brains' hand, Brains moved in and suddenly there were soft lips touching his. And before he could react to realizing that Brains was in actual fact kissing him, the moment was over. Brains' hand was back in his own lap and his lips were a good foot back from John's. It left John's mind reeling, his senses on overload, and the sudden feeling that he quite possibly had just imagined that nanosecond of Bizarro Reality rather than it having actually happened.

John blinked.

Brains blinked back.

Reality check required.

"Did you just kiss me?"

There was no mistaking that now Brains was blushing like a schoolkid, his entire face crimson. "I believe that's exactly what I just did," he replied in a surprisingly even tone.

"Huh," was the best response John could give him. He couldn't quite make his mind work, like every neuron he had was so confused it was misfiring on a four-dimensional axis when it was only supposed to operate on two.

"At least you haven't punched me," Brains quipped. He blinked. "Yet."

That struck John as hilarious. Unfortunately, the weirdness of the entire situation made his laugh come out more high-pitched than he intended, and he clapped his hand over his own mouth to stifle it. The backs of his fingers were soft. His stomach went into acrobatics as he thought, Soft. Like Brains' lips.

John's hand slowly moved down to his lap as his already overloaded neurons decided they were being asked to do too much and promptly declared it was time for an extended leave of absence.

Brains' lips.

John looked at the offending lips. Watched as the tip of Brains' tongue came out to wet them. Watched as Brains' mouth moved, as he said, "That's the 'it' in question."

It? What?

Huh?

The 'it' in question, the...thing, the thing that was making Brains cry, the thing that was making him sad?

What isn't happening.

Brains wasn't even on John's radar for anything like that. At least, he hadn't been...until tonight.

What hasn't happened.

They'd never kissed before. Never even hugged.

What probably won't happen.

Them.

That's what the 'it' was.

Them.

"Well, this is new," John whispered, eyes wide as he stared at his friend. New...odd...and...well...he'd liked that little taste of 'them' just now, if he was going to be honest with himself about it.

He reached out, and this time it was Brains' turned to be surprised as John's hand moved to the back of his neck. He pulled Brains' face closer until he could feel his friend's breath coming in fast little spurts of hot air against his mouth. What the hell. Every hypothesis needed at least a dozen tests, any good scientist would tell you that.

John closed the gap between them, and as their lips met for a second time he found himself smiling into the kiss. He felt Brains smiling back, his hands sliding themselves up John's arms until they reached his shoulders where they held on just tightly enough that John knew this was real.

Opening his mouth, John marveled at how Brains' mouth opened at the same moment, as though they were already so in tune that they knew precisely when to make what move. John's tongue found Brains', and they slowly experimented, moving this way and that, heads turning, angling, tongues moving further to slide along slick white teeth and delve into the warmer and deeper nooks and crannies that John had never thought to explore within his friend's mouth.

John pressed closer to deepen a kiss that was already making his toes curl, warmth blossoming in his chest and spreading throughout his body like warm cocoa on a Kansas winter morning. He wrapped his arms around Brains' body and pulled him almost into his lap. But the moment was broken when John felt something against his cheek that made him pull away entirely, brow furrowed.

Tears were coming from Brains' eyes.

"Why are you crying?" John asked, fear and confusion threatening to dissolve the warm fuzzies that desperately wanted to stay where they were. "Not from sadness."

Brains shook his head, a goofy grin plastered onto his face. "No. From joy."

John grinned and moved in for the kill, kissing Brains so hard it was a wonder they didn't fall off the couch altogether. Now this, this was nice.

And John felt his own tears of joy prick at the backs of his eyes, because this was making him happy, too.

Boys do cry, John thought as Brains cupped his face in his hands and surged forward, pinning him against the back of the couch without missing a kissing beat. And John? Well, if this is what catching a good friend crying led to, then he was totally okay with that.