Chapter Text
He almost pulled the plug on the game. He almost did. It finally occurred to him that Nate had rigged the game, and Eliot almost pulled the plug on it because of that. Nate had probably not come up with the children-and-dragon plot to fuck with Eliot; no, that probably started out of Nate’s own issues surrounding the matter of kids. But after the way things had gone down back in Boston, the night they returned from San Lorenzo - that was probably the turning point after which Nate started tailoring the game around Eliot, and Eliot’s demons.
Eliot really wanted to stop the game over that. For about five minutes. Then he remembered that Sophie was in with Nate on the whole thing, and Sophie had tried to keep him from playing, that night the day after DC. Nate couldn’t have planned for them to find the Prism, to face the dilemma of bringing the dragon into the library, when Eliot should have been in bed, on morphine, because he had three GSWs. That part was all on Eliot; and if not for that part, well - Eliot probably wouldn’t have been as torn up.
There was also that this was not Eliot’s first time on that particular train, and he knew episodes like that took more than a day to recover from. It was best to not do anything one might regret later until that was done wearing off, and there was a non-zero chance that he’d regret calling the game off when there were only one or two more sessions left on it. Hardison’s kicked face would be insufferable, for one.
So Eliot only almost called the game off, and judging from the way Nate was eyeing him, the guy knew exactly how close a call that was.
“We take the collapsible portal to the point just outside the dragon’s wards,” Parker said.
“The dragon seems to have adjusted his wards,” Nate replied. “You appear by the concealed tunnel’s entrance.”
“You have returned,” Nate said in the dragon’s voice once they reached the lair.
“We did promise,” Hardison said.
“Have you acquired everything?” Nate asked.
“Have you?” Hardison countered.
“Of course I have.”
Yeah, playing a conceited, asshole dragon fit Nate just fine.
“So have we,” Parker replied. “We also found something else. A Prism of Meiornyl.”
“That will greatly enhance the odds of the spell performing as required.”
“You’ll need to change into a human form, though,” Parker said. “Or we can’t take you there.”
Eliot really hoped that the dragon really could turn into a human. He figured that he probably could; there wasn’t much trauma for Nate to mine by making this a problem.
“Before your eyes, the dragon’s massive body shrinks and shifts, until only a man remains, standing on top of his hoard. He seems ordinary enough, except his hair and eyes are both steel-grey,” Nate said, giving them the narration. A hand gesture indicated that he wasn’t done yet. Then he said, in a voice somewhere between his usual voice - well, any of them - and the one he used for the dragon, “Your trust is acknowledged, and appreciated.”
Of-fucking-course he looked straight at Eliot as he said that.
Getting the dragon to the Prism went uneventfully, other than the dragon still being an asshole.
“Ready to return home?” Parker asked.
“Happily,” Nate replied in the dragon’s voice, then continued in his own: “The dragon steps into the sphere. Merely setting up the spell takes up most of an hour; the casting takes considerable time, too. Eventually, though, the glittering rainbows pull back from the center of the sphere. At first, the clear space is so small you’re not even sure it’s really there. Ever so slowly it grows, and you realize that must be the portal. It grows and grows, until there is barely room enough left in the Prism for the dragon to stand. The dragon turns his head to look at you.” Nate switched voices. “I am most grateful.”
“Tomorrow we find out if he lied,” Eliot said conversationally. “We need to go back to the village.”
“We will,” Parker replied.
“The dragon didn’t lie,” Nate told them. “The day comes and goes, and the children go on behaving as children do; no one dies. The village is safe.”
It was a nice morale. It was just a pity that life didn’t work this way. Eliot almost said that out loud, but Hardison was looking at him as if he knew exactly how Eliot felt. Parker’s words echoed in Eliot’s head, This also applies to the way Hardison sees things and Alec is our team. Then an image, fuzzy, a memory he hadn’t thought of in a while. Their first job after taking down Dubenich the first time, that hospital doctor, the one who was so protective of their client, staring at the truck full of cash and saying, The world doesn’t work this way. Eliot hadn’t heard what Nate had said to her in reply.
He actually managed to miss their party returning to the damned library. He only tuned back in at Hardison asking Parker why they’d done that - which was the stupidest thing he’d heard Hardison say in a while.
“Because we haven’t found the loom yet,” Parker said, stating the obvious.
“Girl, it’s going to take us a year to search this place. At least.”
“I think I know how to find it. I go through the library atlas, back to back. I read the entire thing, I don’t skip a page. I don’t care if it takes me a month; we’re no longer on a deadline.”
Parker hated rolling for research. There was no missing that part. Apparently she really, really wanted to find this fairytale loom. Luckily, though, it didn’t take a month of game-time to find the Artifact Archive in the atlas, despite Nate setting the target number at 15; it only took a week. Then, with all three of their characters searching that corner of the library, it wasn’t long before Nate announced:
“Hidden in the very back of the twelfth room you search and covered with burlap, eventually you find the loom.”
Hardison let out a whoop of joy; Parker was even louder. Eliot didn’t bother to hold back the smile that sprung up at their enthuthiasm, or to refrain from the round of hugs and backslaps. He already knew: the loom and the characters were fictional, but the emotions were real. He could be an idiot sometimes, but he wasn’t idiot enough to pass up genuine joy.
“We made it, guys,” Parker said. “We made it.”
“Congratulations,” Nate said.
Hardison wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Parker was blinking. And Eliot was clearly still banged up from the last couple of weeks, because seriously--
“Well, it’s a good thing I restocked the tissues,” Sophie said.
“I’m going to tell Amy to bring a round of beer back here, because this definitely calls for a toast,” Hardison declared. He put a hand on Eliot’s shoulder on his way to the door, and Eliot satisfied himself with glaring instead of slapping Hardison’s hand away. “Eliot, you okay, man?”
Annoyingly, he actually needed to swallow before he could say: “Yeah. Yeah, I think I am.”
“‘Yes’? You said ‘Yes’ to the man?” Hardison demanded. “Nate, are you out of your damn mind?”
“We are running the White Rabbit,” Nate said, as if those were the magic words the would make everything fine, instead of those words being a sign of everything that was wrong about Nate taking this case on.
“The White… What?” Hardison sputtered. “No, Nate. No. That’s not what we do.”
“That’s what I said,” Eliot said. He’d just returned from the kitchen with two bowls of popcorn. He put them on the table, then sat down with the team. “We wreck the bad guys; we don’t turn one kind of guy into another kind of guy.” It felt as if they’d just got thrown back in time to the year before Nate’s arrest, when he’d exchanged adrenaline for alcohol. And just like then, Eliot was sure, this was going to end badly.
“Wait, what is the White Rabbit?” Parker asked.
“It’s the ungriftable grift,” Hardison said, “it’s impossible.”
“Yeah, but we do impossible,” Parker countered.
“No, Parker, not like this.” Hardison was talking with his hands again. “For this, you have to get inside the mark-- like, inside the head, inside their dreams.”
“Can’t be done,” Eliot muttered.
“That’s not true,” Nate said. “There’s a grifter sitting right here among us who has successfully pulled off the White Rabbit. Sophie?”
Because of course she had. And of course Parker had gotten them talking about the pragmatics, when the grift being ungriftable wasn’t even the fucking problem here; Nate’s sense of entitlement was. But talking about the pragmatics, plus Sophie, got at least Parker hooked in, and where Parker went Hardison would follow.
Eliot made one last plea. “This guy hasn’t broken any laws, all right? He’s not skimming; he’s not mobbed-up. Why are you thinking of doing this?”
“Look, we’re not God, Nate,” Hardison said. The unexpected support got to Eliot; pretending otherwise was just not fucking safe. “Why do we get to choose what kind of a person he gets to be?”
“Guys, if you think about it, every job that we do, every single job, we’re kind of playing God,” Nate said.
Not the same thing, Nate, Eliot thought. He’d say it out loud if he needed to.
“We’re not doing it for payback,” Nate continued, the speed of his words picking up as if he was making this up on the fly. “We help people. We save people. And I think this guy can be saved. I think this town can be saved.”
Eliot’s palms flattened against the table. The best grifter at the table wasn’t Sophie, he thought: it was Nate. Nate had never learned to not con his team, and he was so good at it that none of them left. And even if the thing about saving the town wasn’t enough to make Eliot at least reconsider, there was still the fact that Nate had managed to talk everyone else around; and if the entire team was in on it, Eliot wasn’t going to walk out. That just wasn’t his job.
He just hoped they could all live with themselves after.
And then it turned out the whole thing, Dodgson’s whole thing, was about Patience Mortell. Patience Mortell, who’d been his best friend, who was dead, and you didn’t need to be Sophie to figure out that the word guilt fit in there. Eliot didn’t need to work out the whole story to know that much, and he also didn’t need to be there to watch Nate and Sophie pore all over it as if it were a broken pocket watch.
Hardison followed Eliot outside.
“So, it turns out that Dodgson--”
“Blames himself for Patience’s death. Yeah, I figured that out,” Eliot added in response to the look on Hardison’s face. “You needed Sophie to tell you that?”
“Actually, Sophie needed Nate to tell her that. And also, you’re being mean,” Hardison said. He raised his hands up to the sides in a gesture that was probably supposed to be pacifying, or some shit. “I’m not going to walk out, but I thought you should know that.”
Was he being mean? He was too tired to be sure. Too tired, and too rattled; he hated that he couldn’t trust himself. “Go away, Hardison.”
“Just told you, I’m not gonna do that.”
Maybe he could run Hardison off; he probably could, if he tried. Problem was, he’d feel like shit after. “Fine. But I’m driving.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I’m not hanging out here until they,” Eliot waved in the direction of the warehouse, “are done with whatever it is they think needs doing tonight. I’m going back to the hotel, and I’m going to sleep. This damn con will still be there tomorrow.” He left the word unfortunately unsaid. “Now, you wanna sit on me, you’re gonna have to come with.”
The longer it took Hardison to think about it, the more Eliot thought that Hardison would change his mind and turn right around. Instead, when Hardison spoke, he said: “You know what, you’re right. Last I heard, Sophie was saying something to Parker about a makeover; that’s probably going to take the entire night. Nate’s never going to leave this warehouse so long as they’re here, plus the security I installed on this place is second only to a Steranko, so there’s no need for either of us to sit on them also. One change in plan, though: I’m driving.”
“The hell you are.”
“Eliot, you were just genuinely mean to me and then decided to turn around and leave before everyone else is done for the day. Night. Now, be level with me, bro: would you let you drive?”
Dammit. When did Hardison learn to think like that? Parker was the one hanging out with Sophie on her downtime. Then again, Hardison was dating Parker, had been for over half a year. He probably had to up his game, to make that work: keeping up with Parker required the mental ability to take really tight turns at really high speeds.
Here and now, though, it meant he was glaring shit at Hardison in the dark and trying to gauge whether Hardison would give if Eliot lied well enough. Ultimately, though, Eliot growled: “Fine. But I pick the music.”
He woke up to Parker sitting cross-legged on the tiny hotel-room desk, eating fortune cookies.
Eliot stared at her, then turned around in bed and dramatically put his pillow over his head.
“You know, people do that to smother other people,” she said through a full mouth. “How do you breathe in there?”
“Go away, Parker.”
“Want some fortune cookies?”
“I mean it!”
“Or what, you’ll throw a knife at me?” Parker asked. The tone of her voice made it clear how ludicrous she found that idea.
“Maybe,” he said, trying to make the threat credible.
She didn’t dignify that with an answer.
Eventually, he gave up. Trying to outstubborn Parker was a bit like trying to outstubborn a sniper, a real sniper, the kind who would lie in wait for two weeks without moving from his perch: you could do it, maybe, if you were really committed, but odds were you’d start doubting your commitment along the way and once you started doing that, you lost already. So Eliot took the pillow off, turned back around and sat up so he could glare properly at Parker, who - of course - didn’t even blink. “What do you want?” he growled.
“Why did you agree to take this case?”
“What?”
She didn’t repeat the question. She just kept waiting, and kept eating her damned fortune cookies. He was probably lucky that she was so locked on target - the target being him - that she didn’t read the little notes out loud, just piled them next to her on the desk.
“I mean, you hate this con,” she said. “Obviously. So why did you agree to take it?”
“What was I supposed to do, say ‘No, I’m going to tank this job’? Risk all of you being out here without me?”
“That wouldn’t have happened,” she replied without blinking and without hesitation.
“Which part?”
“Us going without you.” She cracked another cookie open, pulled the note out and put both halves in her mouth. “Wouldn’t have happened.”
“Ew, Parker.”
She swallowed the half-chewed cookie as if it were a mouse and she were a boa constrictor. “If you’d had stayed on the ‘no’, Hardison and I would’ve backed you up.”
He stared at her.
“Didn’t occur to you, did it,” she added. It wasn’t a question; it sounded more like a confirmation of something she already thought she knew.
He didn’t have any good answers, here. “What do you want, Parker?”
“Got it.”
“Great.” He laid back down, turned on his side and pulled the blanket all the way up to his armpits. “Turn the light off on your way out, would you?”
She did. But he didn’t fall back asleep anyway.
Second day back from Oxford, OR, Parker and Hardison were both still around at last call. That was pretty normal for Hardison; they’d come a long way since the days he’d skip the job to play video games, and was present for closing shift as often as not. Parker, though - she wasn’t involved with the day-to-day management of the brewpub, and she didn’t have a habit of waiting up for Hardison; they’d had the place more than long enough for Eliot to know that.
So he wasn’t entirely surprised that, when he finally stepped out of the kitchen, both of them were waiting on him. Eliot took one good look at their body language - Parker leaning against the wall, Hardison with his hands in his pants pockets - and headed for the back; it didn’t seem like this was going to be the sort of conversation he’d want to have on the street, or with the shift staff overhearing. He didn’t look back, just listened for Parker’s and Hardison’s footsteps following him.
He only turned around after he heard the door close behind them. “What?” he demanded.
“We were thinking about the Dodgson case,” Hardison said.
Eliot turned around and started in the direction of the back door.
“We didn’t play God,” Parker called after him.
Eliot stopped in place, but didn’t turn around. “How do you figure that?”
“Because we gave him a choice. A choice he wouldn’t have had otherwise.”
He still didn’t move. “Yeah? How do you figure that?”
“He was having panic attacks, man,” Hardison said. “Now I never had one myself so I can’t know for certain, but from the outside they look pretty nasty. DE was giving him panic attacks, so he needed to get rid of it.”
“Not ‘wanted’; ‘needed’,” Parker said, drawing the word-choice out and putting emphasis on it. “Keeping the company wasn’t an option; it was literally making him sick.”
“Guilt was making him sick,” Eliot corrected her automatically.
“And his doctor managed to miss that for three whole years,” Hardison said. “And since he didn’t know what was broken, he couldn’t fix it.”
“Oh, I think he knew what was broken, all right.” Eliot turned around because he wanted to see their faces, but he didn’t step away from where he was, halfway to the door. “It ever occur to you that maybe he just didn’t want that life, anymore?”
Parker still had her default expression on. Hardison had some reaction, though. “You drove the guy around for a week, Eliot. You spent more time with him than any of us,” he said. “He looked happy to you?”
Eliot gave him the look that kind of a question deserved. “More like his doctor should’ve added depression to his diagnosis.” More like the attempt to get rid of the company was an act of symbolic suicide, taking an axe to the foundation of Dodgson’s identity. Eliot knew that, but that didn’t make what they had done something else than what it was. “He still didn’t ask for an intervention.”
“He was drowning, man,” Hardison said. “And if you say you wouldn’t jump in after a drowning man, you’d be lying to my face.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t,” Eliot said; he didn’t bother checking the viciousness in his voice, “if he jumped in.”
“You would’ve.” The way Parker said that was deceptively plain. “You were right there trying to fix Nate with the rest of us.”
“Actually, you were first in line,” Hardison added. “Reached out to him before it occurred to any of us to try.”
That-- could be true, actually. Eliot remembered trying to talk to Nate, all the way back, that first time in Chicago, and goodness knew Parker and Hardison weren’t the kind of people to do that sort of a thing, back then.
They were now, though. They were doing it to him.
“You said, if I stood my ground against this job…” Eliot said quietly, letting the sentence trail.
It was Hardison who replied. “We would’ve backed you up.”
Eliot knew exactly how humorless his smile was. “Aren’t you glad I didn’t, then?”
Hardison raised his finger the way he was prone to do. “If I need to choose between you and a job?”
“You’re more important than the job,” Parker added. “Any job.”
“You said it yourself, the guy would’ve ended up in a ditch somewhere or eating lead, if we didn’t get involved.”
“Now who thinks we’re God?” Hardison demanded.
“Just because we can help doesn’t mean we have to,” Parker said. “Once we got involved, we had a responsibility to see it through. But we didn’t have to step in.”
“And yet you’re trying to tell me how taking this case wasn’t a bad thing.”
“Are there winning options here? Or are you just determined to make yourself feel bad, man?” Hardison asked.
“I learned that from you,” Parker said abruptly, changing tack.
“Learned what?” Eliot asked.
“That we can only move forward. That just because we can’t go back, doesn’t make what we can do worthless.”
That was what she’d told Dodgson up on that roof, the words that convinced him to not sell the company, to reopen R&D, to reclaim his life.
Eliot closed his eyes, breathed very evenly. “Now that,” he told her, “was a sucker punch.”
“You’re my friend,” she said. “And I need you.”
That got Eliot to look at her. Those were the exact words she’d said to Hardison, when she was trying to talk him out of a panic attack, that time he got buried in a coffin, six feet under and covered in dirt: You’re my friend, and I need you.
She met his eyes calmly. So, for that matter, did Hardison. They both of them had the looks of people who knew exactly what they were doing.
With a little bit of luck, one of them actually did.
Eliot closed his eyes, blew out a long breath, then opened them again. “All right,” he said. “All right.”
Their next job was wonderfully simple, in comparison: just a crooked weapons dealer turned winery owner, who was getting his workers killed. Eliot was picking grapes off the vine under an asshole with a very punchable face for a week, and it felt like a vacation. Plus, the person from the team he interacted with the most on the job was Parker. She was the easiest person in the team to work with: methodical, well-organized, and direct in communication. Bee Meadow Winery was just the thing, after the month Eliot had.
The toy job, that was a bit more of a mixed bag. Jobs with kids got to the entire team; the only one of them they didn’t know had Issues about that was Sophie and it was, actually - and contrary to her reputation - dead easy to drive Sophie to distraction by messing with the rest of the team. They got lucky, though: the job had less of a kid component than one would think given toys. The closest any of them got to actual kids was Eliot playing a single father, and most of his interaction was with the other mothers on the playground. The mothers were cool.
Then Nate dropped the black book bomb on them.
Ironically, going for the black book meant they had that much more free time. Most of the work was Hardison’s work, anyway; he was taken up with that, and then Sophie was full-time directing her little theater group. They weren’t going to take on any jobs with just the three of them.
Some of Eliot’s time was taken up wargaming with Nate and Parker; a lot of what was left he spent training. That still left him with more free time than he was used to, though, and he spent all of it in the brewpub, riding herd on the kitchen staff. Parker was at the brewpub even more often than he was, albeit running the floor: someone needed to take up the duties Hardison had far less time for while he was busy hacking a goddamned Steranko.
It was a good month. War was coming, that was true, but war Eliot knew how to deal with; the brewpub was running like clockwork. Put the two things together, and it was practically soothing.
“Totally,” Parker agreed, one night after last call, when he mentioned that to her. “Everything has a purpose.”
His small smile was mostly involuntary, and also mostly not really amused. “They don’t get it.”
“Mm.” Parker shook her head a little. “Hardison sort of does.”
He gave her a dubious look.
“Well, he gets that it works for us. And he gets why it works. Like, sure, it’s not the way it works for him, but - he gets it.”
“If you say so,” Eliot said, raising his hands to the sides.
She shoved his shoulder, just hard enough.
By the time the front floor crew were turning over the chairs and mopping the place, the kitchen was already spotless. Eliot sent his crew home and picked up a mop; the day was rainy even on the Portland scale, and mud abounded no matter how many times they mopped up during opening hours.
Parker looked at him, then sent home everyone else they had working closing shift: it would take forever for people to return home in that weather, and she and Eliot could manage what work was left.
They were almost done when Hardison emerged from the back, bleary-eyed. “You planning to drive in this rain?”
“No, I’m going to take the tube. Of course I’m going to drive in this rain!”
Hardison didn’t rise up to Eliot’s bait; apparently, he was that tired. Instead, he said: “I checked the weather radar. Give it 30 minutes, worst of this storm’s gonna pass. It’s still gonna be rainy, but at least you’ll be able to see more than 10 feet ahead. Come on back and have a hot cocoa or something.”
Eliot almost said something about that, but Parker perked up. “Ooh, hot chocolate,” she said. “With marshmallows?”
“Teeny-tiny ones,” Hardison acknowledged.
“All right, fine,” Eliot said, “I’ll make us hot chocolate.”
“You don’t have to make the hot chocolate, man,” Hardison said.
“You use pre-mixed power, man. Shut the hell up.” Hardison and Parker exchanged a look, so Eliot added: “Both of you.”
Fifteen minutes later found them in the back of the brewpub. Hardison had a kitchenette installed in that place, but Eliot refused to cook on any stove that wasn’t natural gas, so he kept a field stove in one of the cupboards. Presently the stove was set up on the coffee table by the couch, and the hot chocolate was almost ready.
The rain was still going on strong, the sound of it falling on pavements and dumpsters a background roar. Eliot was, maybe, a little bit relieved that he didn’t need to drive in the downpour.
“Hot choc’s ready,” he called out softly. Parker was sitting to his right, but Hardison was still sitting at the bar, working. At Eliot’s call he closed the laptop cover with a click, came over and settled down on Eliot’s left. He and Parker had been doing that for a while, now, bracketing him like that, as if they were trying to keep him there. It was completely unnecessary; not bad, exactly, but decidedly distracting. Eliot would’ve gotten them to stop, except he didn’t know how to do that without talking about it.
He wasn’t going to talk about it.
Parker pulled her knees up and curled up with her back against his side. Eliot transferred his mug to his left and put his right arm over her shoulders, because that was the only way to make that comfortable. Who knew why she chose to curl up against him and not against her boyfriend? Parker was like that, though, and mostly it wasn’t worth it to try and think through her reasons. In the meantime he had a ball of warmth tucked into his side, and that wasn’t an uncomfortable feeling.
Most of the times he touched people he was committing violence against them. It made him treasure all of the other times.
He was, maybe, hoping that the rain would take a little longer to calm down.
“This is nice,” Hardison commented.
“Yeah,” Parker agreed lazily.
A few minutes later, Eliot commented, “30 minutes, huh?”
“Hey, meteorology’s not an exact science, man,” Hardison protested. Well, sort of: his tone was too mild to really be called a “protest”.
“Did you even check the radar?”
“Hell yeah.”
“Because I’m not sleeping on this couch, man.”
“You can always drive in the rain later,” Parker said. She sounded a little bit more awake than the last time she spoke. “Right now it’s nice.”
“Yeah,” Eliot agreed after a moment. “Yeah, it is.”
“Oh good, then we agree,” Hardison said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing, man,” Hardison said. “It’s just that you make it real hard to find out what you like. You know that, right?”
Something about the way Hardison said that was - wrong. Didn’t belong. “When people know what you like,” Eliot told him, “they’re gonna try and give it to you. And before you ask why that’s a bad thing, I want you to think good and hard about what we’re doing.”
“But it’s us,” Parker pointed out.
“It’s habit, Parker. I don’t even think about this crap.” The time it took him to say that was enough time to think about what she just said, put it next to Hardison’s question, and ask: “All right. What’s really going on?”
There followed several seconds of silence, long enough that Eliot wondered if they were going to lie. Then Parker said, in a different tone of voice: “I told you it wasn’t going to work.”
“You did,” Hardison agreed.
“Told you it would make it worse.”
“You did that, too.”
“Guys!” Eliot said. He removed his arm from around Parker and put his mug on the table. Parker and Hardison did the same with theirs. “What the hell is going on?”
“Yeah, that’s a little bit complicated,” Hardison said.
“I don’t like complicated.”
“Yeah, I don’t either. Well--” Hardison added hurriedly, correctly interpreting the expression on Eliot’s face as Are you fucking shitting me. “When it comes to this stuff, I don’t like ‘complicated’.”
“And what is ‘this’ stuff?”
“You’re gonna have to just do it,” Parker said.
Eliot turned around to look at her.
“I was talking to Hardison,” she added.
“Yeah, I got that,” Eliot said through gritted teeth, then turned back to Hardison. “Well?”
“All right, so - first of all, I’d kind of appreciate it if you didn’t punch me in the face,” Hardison began.
Eliot gave him the kind of a look a statement like that deserved.
Then he remembered the last time Hardison had used that figure of speech. They were sitting on this couch then, too; that was probably why he remembered it at all.
“Second of all,” Hardison began, but Parker continued.
“You can say ‘no’,” she said. “Actually you should totally say ‘no’, because if you say ‘yes’ when you mean ‘no’ we’re going to find out, and everyone’s going to get hurt. And that includes not just you but also Alec and me, so we need you to really think about that.”
“You’re not making any sense,” he told her.
“Remember,” Hardison said; he sounded nervous. “No punching me in the face.”
“What the hell--” Eliot began, but then Hardison put his face very near Eliot’s, and Eliot stopped in place.
Hardison put his lips against Eliot’s. He had to be applying lip balm when Eliot wasn’t paying attention because his lips weren’t chapped at all, but the only flavour on them was faint, and menthol. If Eliot let his lips part to breathe Hardison in, he also tasted of cocoa and of however many hours had passed since he last brushed his teeth.
“It’s not the two of us and then you,” Parker said as soon as Hardison pulled back, before Eliot could ask What the hell again, before he had to hear what his voice would sound like after this little stunt. “It’s all three of us. Whatever you say, however we go on from here, that’s not going to change.”
“We had a lot of time to talk about it, man,” Hardison said. His voice was soft, and his pupils very wide. “And we’re very, very clear that we want you in our lives. But what exactly that means, that’s totally up to you.”
Eliot almost turned his head to look at Parker, then remembered the way she’d been curled into him until he broke it off. The past few months came rushing at him, every little thing that Parker and Hardison started doing differently, everything he couldn’t make sense of so he shrugged and accepted because the core things, the important things, those hadn’t changed.
Or so he thought.
Their little joint speech about his right to say no made a lot more sense now, but it was still ridiculous. They were his team; they had to know what that meant. That he wasn’t going to turn away, wasn’t going to risk-- to risk everything. To turn away right now would mean taking that risk, no matter what they promised. That just wasn’t how people worked.
That’s not how the world works. He could still see that doctor’s face. This wasn’t the same thing, though. This was--
If you say ‘yes’ when you mean ‘no’ we’re going to find out, and everyone’s going to get hurt. Could he lie to them? Could he make it convincing enough? Probably not. Both of them would hear the wrong note eventually, and Parker wasn’t wrong - then, everyone would get hurt.
No, he didn’t have the easy way out, here. He couldn’t just roll with the punches, perform to expectations. He had to come up with something honest.
And if he was honest--
He grabbed Alec’s face with both his hands, moved so that he planted his knees of either side of his thighs, was practically sitting in his lap and kissed him, kissed him with lips and tongue and teeth.
Because if he was honest with himself, the only reason he hadn’t wanted this all along was because those two had been obvious from the start, and it hadn’t occurred to him that this was a possibility, too.
When he finally pulled apart, he realized that he still didn’t believe it, not all the way down.
“Hey, man.” Hardison lifted a gentle hand to his face, almost-but-didn’t-quite touched his cheek. “Are you going to have a panic attack on us, man? No offense to your manliness. You just kind of look like it.”
It was completely stupid, having a panic attack over a damn kiss, except it wasn’t, not even one bit. Because if this went wrong, if this went any kind of wrong, Eliot didn’t know that he could survive it. Didn’t know that he’d want to.
“Eliot. Hey.” Parker put her palm between his shoulder blades. “I need you to take a deep breath for me, okay?”
And it wasn’t stupid that that worked, either, even if he hated a little bit that it did.
He sucked in a deep breath, counted to four then let it out. It was easier to keep breathing, after that.
“So I don’t know whether to believe the part where you just kissed me, or the part where you flipped your shit about it,” Hardison said.
Eliot glared at him.
“He’s still sitting in your lap,” Parker pointed out. “And he hasn’t punched you.”
“Yeah, I could still use some words, here.”
Eliot closed his eyes, took another steadying breath, and grit out: “Dammit, Hardison.”
“I think that means--” Parker started, but then Hardison put his still-hovering hand on Eliot’s shoulder, and she stopped.
One more breath. He was beginning to get some moisture back in his mouth, finally.
Parker shifted, reached back towards the table. The next moment she pushed Eliot’s mug into his hand. “Here; this’ll help,” she told him. Next she handed Hardison his mug, and finally she picked up hers. The entire time, her right hand didn’t move from the center of his back.
“I think I’m okay now,” he told her.
“Maybe I like touching you,” she replied. She met his eyes when he looked at her, and added: “There’s not a lot of people I like to touch. It’s nice.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “It is.”
The next day Sophie’s theater group moved into the Dolan Theater’s basement, and that was the end of Parker’s and his free time. They needed to make a way from the theater’s basement to the Shanghai tunnels and from there to the Highpoint Tower’s elevator shaft. That was hard physical labour, which he and Parker were best suited for.
Kitchens were noisy places; Parker and he didn’t need to talk much to work well together. Having spent that much time in the brewpub’s kitchen, working with only her felt like a fast of silence in comparison. Speech became utilitarian, keeping each other safe during the demolition and keeping Nate out of their hair by updating him on the comm.
Hardison was on the comm, too. That way he was always home when the two of them took a break so they could get their minimal amount of sleep. Going to Hardison’s meant no risk of Sophie or Nate wandering through; Hardison’s completely ridiculous bathtub was a bonus, for all that he pretended to be horrified at the ice that Eliot filled it with.
Or at least, Eliot was pretty sure that he was only pretending. He was too tired and too off-kilter to tell for sure.
He hadn’t had a relationship intended to last more than three months in a long, long time. He’d never had a relationship that involved spending that much time with the person - in this case persons - he was involved with. He hadn’t had a relationship in which he was more-or-less honest about his life since Aimee, and she’d been his high school sweetheart.
Wanting what Parker and Hardison were offering, that was easy; it was too easy, terrifyingly easy, the kind of ‘easy’ that meant it’d be easier to cut his own hand off than to stop wanting what he now did. Wanting it that hard made it possible to keep trying, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t fucking it up in the time it took to get from “trying” to “succeeding.” He was sending mixed signals, and he knew it.
The first week of the new routine, Eliot spent about one in three nights at his own place. Then he spent three consecutive nights there because the way he was driving Hardison up the wall was driving him up the wall, and he needed to break that goddamned cycle. The fourth night, Parker got in his car when they left the theater and - when he tried to glare her out - gave him the sort of a look that said if she left the car she’d just break into his place later.
“I talked to Hardison,” she said ten minutes into the drive. “He gets it better now.”
“You and Hardison have a good thing,” he told her. “Putting me in the middle, maybe that’s not such a good idea.”
“Is that what you want?”
That she could even think that sent a spike of fear through him. “Dammit, Parker, that’s not--”
“Then why did you say that?” she asked plainly.
She wasn’t hurt. She wasn’t about to quit, either. He couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice as he demanded: “What do you want me to say?”
“The truth.”
Of course that’s what she’d want. This was Parker. He should’ve known that. “The truth is, I’m going to be like this for a while.”
“Okay.” She said that very plainly, too. After a beat, she added: “And Hardison waited three years for me. He can do this, too.”
He bit back on saying Not the same thing, Parker. She’d just ask him to explain how it wasn’t the same thing, and if he did that he’d just feel crazier than he already did. That wasn’t a good feeling, and he was in no hurry to make it worse. And besides--
And besides, the reminder did make him feel better. Holding on to that feeling was the best thing he could do, if he wanted this to work.
And he wanted it to.
The night they finished making the way, he let Hardison talk him into sushi. Eliot was pretty sure that Hardison had been sitting on that idea for several nights at that point, but had assumed - correctly - that Eliot would shut him down and cook something instead.
The thing about sushi was that there was only one place in Portland that made sushi Eliot actually liked, and Aki’s didn’t do either takeout or deliveries. Or rather, Aki’s didn’t usually do that: just about anywhere would if you offered them enough money, and given their financials “enough money” was little enough Hardison wouldn’t think twice about spending it, might not even think once. Eliot wasn’t entirely sure that money was real to Hardison, that he didn’t think it was just like the scoring system in one of his games. It was real to Eliot, though, and while he didn’t have anything in principle against takeout he didn’t like to do that.
Hardison had pitched the idea of sushi as celebratory, given they had - as of that night - finished all the prep for a job that Hardison, at least, had been working on for about a year. Eliot agreed for two reasons - or maybe one and a half, as one influenced the other considerably. The first reason was that he could tell how much Hardison wanted to order out, and decided he didn’t feel like arguing. The second reason was that while he pretty much always wanted to cook - it was a bad sign when he didn’t - he was also pretty fucking tired. It was entirely possible - likely, even - that that was why Hardison wanted to order out.
That Eliot was tired influenced his willingness - or lack thereof - to get into an argument, which was why it counted only as half a reason; but it wasn’t the only or even the primary reason he didn’t want to argue, which was why he didn’t just fold it in and called it one reason for caving in and was done with it. No; the reason that Eliot looked at Hardison’s face and decided not to argue - well, that was two reasons also. The first was that he knew he was going to lose that fight: Eliot wasn’t much good at standing up to people he loved, and he knew that about himself. The second was that he had a fair idea of how much he’d been upsetting Hardison, and the idea of arguing about something pretty much guaranteed to make Hardison happy made Eliot feel sick.
So he had a fair list of reasons against arguing. He’d just forgotten that there were reasons for agreeing, too, right up until the first of those reasons hit him in the chest: Hardison’s genuine, huge smile. That right there made agreeing to Hardison’s idea worth it.
They set the table while Parker - who was quicker - took her turn in the shower. By the time Eliot emerged from the bathroom their food was already there. The smell alone made Eliot realize that Hardison had been actually right: Eliot was in the habit of cooking for himself pretty much no matter what, but that was relief he felt at the realization that food was just there.
“Second thoughts?” Hardison asked; Eliot had kind of stopped at the end of the hallway.
“Kind of the opposite,” Eliot admitted. That won him the second Hardison smile for the night. Eliot’s caution of “Don’t let that get to your head,” was only half-hearted.
“Yeah, it’s a little too late for that,” Hardison said. “Now c’mon; I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.”
The job went without a hitch. That was rare: usually reality threw at least one spanner in the works and Nate had to adjust the plan on the fly. This time, though, the only unpredictable factor was Nate himself when it turned out that, true to form, he elected to not share part of his plan with them.
For once, Eliot was inclined to write that off.
“Will you marry me, Laura?”
“Yes,” Sophie replied in a whisper. “Yes.”
Hardison catcalled as Nate rose up from his knee and he and Sophie kissed. Parker was a little more sedate, with a “There you go.” Both of them were clapping. For his part, Eliot leaned back against the bar and tried to gently set aside the tangle of his emotions. This wasn’t the time to work through that; this was the time to dredge up a genuine - if closed-mouth - smile, and be happy for his teamma-- No.
Be happy for his friends.
This was going to take getting used to.
“I mean, just think about it,” Hardison said, “Leverage International,” talking about the plan for the harddrive that Parker and he apparently simultaneously came up with in the moments since Nate’s declaration, because Eliot knew for a fact they hadn’t coordinated any such plan before.
Coming up with the plan, that wasn’t Eliot’s job. It would be Parker’s, maybe; God knew that nothing good ever came out of letting Hardison be responsible for that. Hardison was maybe the only one of them whose job would not fundamentally change. With the knowledge that Nate had planned this since before they made camp in Portland, Eliot understood why Nate had him join that many client interviews in the past year-or-so.
Eliot pushed himself up. “You know,” he said as he approached Nate and Sophie, “this was your crusade. Now it’s our war.” And it would be war, from now on, particularly if this Leverage International thing stuck. There was a difference between one team waging guerrilla, and an organized force with large-scale intel. With the black book, they really could change the world.
Sophie reached for his upper arm. “Promise me,” she said, and there were tears in her voice, “you’ll keep them safe.”
There was no question of whether Sophie knew of the change that had taken place over the past couple of months. “Till my dying day,” he promised, and his voice wasn’t much above a whisper, either.
“You know, Eliot,” Nate said, “I’d say ‘call if you need anything’, but you never-- never need anything.”
Sophie had known all along but Nate, Eliot was willing to wager, was only figuring it out that moment.
“Yeah, I did,” Eliot replied, because that was true. A whisper was all he could manage. He turned his head to look to the side, where Parker and Hardison still sat. Parker’s smile was twin to his, closed-mouth and soft. Hardison wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
This was Eliot’s world, now: these two.
He was all right with that.
Three months after that found them still in Portland, neck-deep in vetting any crew or individual who wanted a stab at one of the names off the black book. Hardison had been right: everyone wanted in with them, but the team’s agenda meant that not anyone would do.
“Ugh.” Hardison massaged his neck. “Why did I think this was a good idea, again?”
“Because it is,” Eliot said shortly.
“Otherwise it would take us a decade to clean house,” Parker elaborated. “Some of this intel would expire before we could use it.”
“Well, it’s still going to be years,” Hardison said. “You know what we need? We need a hobby. All work and no play is not good for any of us.”
“You brew beer,” Eliot said.
“Nah-uh. That’s not a hobby, that’s a side business.”
“To-may-to, to-mah-to.”
“You know what I miss?” Parker said suddenly. “I miss the game.”
Hardison’s face lit up. Then he frowned, and turned to look at Eliot, who didn’t need words to know what the question was.
“Just keep Nate off my back,” he said. “I’m not doing that again.”
“Done,” Parker said, simultaneously with Hardison’s “Which is very understandable.”
“You think Nate’ll agree?” Parker asked after a brief pause.
“Girl, everyone needs a hobby,” Hardison said. “And if he doesn’t realize it?”
“Sophie will,” Eliot said. “By now they probably both realized that retirement can get kind of boring.”
“Now Sophie, she’s got the theater thing,” Hardison added. “But Nate? Is probably driving her crazy.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure why he wanted to retire,” Parker admitted.
Eliot and Hardison looked at each other. Eliot shrugged.
“All right,” Hardison said. “I’ll set it up.”
Parker stared at the bar. “Is this all necessary?” she asked.
“I may have gone a little overboard,” Eliot admitted.
“Oh, no,” Hardison said, pulling the second syllable a little, “an abundance of delicious, delicious food. What will we do?”
“Eat until we’re sick, probably,” Parker said.
“That question was rhetorical,” Hardison replied.
“It’ll refrigerate well,” Eliot said. “Except the cookies. They don’t keep so well.”
“Nomming all the cookies is a priority, duly noted.”
“Is that even a word?” Eliot demanded.
“I like that word,” Parker said. “Ooh! Look at the time!”
They all moved towards the stools.
“Time to make Nate jealous,” Hardison said.
“Why would he be jealous?” Parker asked.
“Because he only gets to look at all this food.”
“All right.”
Hardison toggled the remote. The screen lit up, showing Nate and Sophie.
“You guys ready for a new campaign?” Nate asked.
“Oh yeah,” Parker replied.
“We most definitely are,” Hardison added.
They left Eliot the last word. He smiled, and said: “Bring it.”