Work Text:
Nate learns early that he knows what’s going to happen, so it’s best to do things himself. His father leaves and returns and holds court on a barstool at the local pub, and it’s from him that he gets his talent.
His is just a little too different to be much use to his father.
He’s taught to plan, to plot, and these aren’t quite the lessons his father wants him to learn – reinforced by the card tricks his father plays with (on) him. His father is an obscurer, clouding the future, so only he can see the result.
Nate, in the privacy of his own mind in later years, will think himself a sword, no longer a beam of light working for the white hats to cast justice on those working on the other side of the law.
(He later learns to be a sword of justice, acting from the morally grey space between the two, the softness of night with the harshness of the noon sun, and his plans are what cut through the murkiness between.
Hardison says that he has control issues – and Nate would laugh, but that would give the game away. Besides, if he can’t do everything himself, at least when he directs his people, he has a sense of if things will go to hell in a handbasket.)
~IiI~
Her parents are never around.
They flit and flutter at parties – once literally, to show off their talents at distortion and shifting.
She is the perfect blend of both, and knows enough, now at the age of seven, that she wants nothing more than to be a wallflower to these kinds of parties. It’s so much better to be unseen, but she’s not talented that way, so she practices by displaying certain mannerisms with one man, others with his sister, pretends to be the belle of the ball with the children, and the younger ones follow her in a protective entourage as she spins stories of dragons, and diamonds, and duels.
As she grows up, she focuses more on the diamonds and treasure, plays many a role and wears a thousand – a million – expectations for people and cameras alike.
She never knew who she was – how could she, when all she is, is a reflection of other’s desires?
(She pieces herself together, a patchwork quilt when she could be stained glass, and smiles with lips the color of the harvest moon when she’s approached by the latest mark.)
Years later, she finds herself with a group of people who try to have no expectations of her – they see her through the eyes of their marks, then through their own, and it’s always been a headache trying to act around multiple people, but she’s perfected the art, can switch her voice when she focuses on the one she’s listening to, if they’re in her range.
(Everyone is in her range, if she can reach them – cell phones have been a wonderful advantage to her, with their rise in popularity in recent years.)
She finds that the name ‘Sophie’ is the one she answers to best, even if it wasn’t the name on her birth certificate. Who knows, at this point, if what was written there was real, after all?
She finds pieces of what could be herself – could be ‘Sophie Devereaux’ – and while she tries to run away once, piece herself together on her own, she’s never been capable of that, not the way she thinks she should be able to, anyways.
So ‘Sophie’ returns from the dead, grifts and teaches her way through con, after con, after con – journalist, representative, fiancé – and settles into the role of ‘Sophie Devereaux,’ a woman who loves expensive shoes, and taking care of “the kids,” and might possibly love Nathan Ford.
There are many of book that says you shouldn’t build yourself around people, but for Sophie, that was never an option, no matter how hard she tried to deny it.
It’s a relief, then, that this latest reunion con has let her, in some small way, thank the people who’ve become her family, by letting them know her talent.
~IiI~
The boy who becomes Elliot Spencer, hitter and retrieval specialist, refuses to speak for a year, once.
He’d had a fight with his father – it wasn’t enough that he had (relatively) good grades, was on the football team, went and acted as normal as any non-talent, which was important when you were a guy and didn’t have something like super-strength. He was supposed to take up the running of the Hardware store, and use his talent to get it back in the black.
(“There’s no money in this town anyways! No one can pay!”
“So pull in the people who can!”
“You’re not listening to me!”
“So make me, then!”
“You’re going to die in this town – why not make it sooner rather than later!”)
It wasn’t a direct order, there was nothing specific, but anyone with talent can tell you that emotions do interesting things, and that, with mind and people-based talents, intent is sometimes all that matters.
(“No, Dad, no! Stop!”
The gun and the finger on the trigger freeze.
“Put the gun down, and forget that this evening existed. You came back from the hardware store, we had our usual fight about me taking over the store, and I told you I wouldn’t and left the house. Mom is still away visiting her sister; Kelly is sleeping over with a friend. Jack is still at the library, working on his science project. You are going to drink a beer, and go to bed, and wake up tomorrow morning, with those memories of the evening.”
His dad puts the gun down, and wanders into the kitchen to grab a beer. Eliot snatches the gun up, unloads it, and hurries it back to its regular resting place, before bolting out the door and to the stable, spending the night with horses who don’t listen to him, because his talent is only for people.
His dad thinks he’s proving a point, by not speaking for a year. Eliot lets him think that, and then he leaves and joins the military, and it’s not his orders that people have to follow, for a while, it’s an officer’s, and that’s enough for him.
(When he breaks from the US military, finding that someone doesn’t have to have a talent to make you do things you regret, or draw the line at, all you need is a cause and some blind faith – or a refusal to look past the veil over your own eyes.
He breaks into the world of hitting and retrieval, does some time as an assassin, or something not too far removed, because that’s how he got acquainted with this part of the world, but he never gets into torture.
Many of his employers think his has a talent for luck, or martial arts, or something along those lines, and it’s a convenient assumption.
Eliot knows that a talent like his wouldn’t result in a world many could live in, so he generally keeps his mouth quiet, avoids words when he’s angry, and generally tries to keep everyone as far away from him as possible.
It works, until Moreau.
(He has so many regrets, and one of them is Belarus, and there’s nothing that can drown the sweetness that was turning the charm on, after keeping it locked down after so long. Somehow he manages to make it look like his talent didn’t have anything to do with what happened, and he thanks a God that probably distains him for it.)
It works, again, until he takes a job in Chicago, and somehow there’s a team of loners, that he might want to stick with, so he does, and keeps his mouth shut, or shouts, “Damnit, Hardison!” because there’s nothing there, but something that becomes a fond phrase after too few utterances.
He gets lulled by the lack of necessity for his talent when it comes to finding information, settles himself as a hitter, and that’s all.)
He finds himself a family of criminals that ask him to grift, and he can, but it hits a little too close to home. He gets coaxed and persuaded and then suddenly they’re on the other side of the US, and he might be getting coaxed and persuaded into a relationship with Hardison and Parker, if the way Hardison keeps buying him things for cooking, or things to hit, and the way Parker keeps asking for new food things she makes Hardison look up on the internet are anything to go by.
Somedays, Eliot has to lock his words behind his teeth, because otherwise he’ll ask them what the hell they think they’re doing, and he’s too invested in this thing to not turn on the charm, as his Ma would call it, when he tried it on her, only to have it deflected right back at him.
He’d turn on the charm, and they’d have to answer, and it wouldn’t be in the right way, so some days all he does is cook and grunt and occasionally exclaim, “Damnit, Hardison!”
He’s content, might even be happy, some days.
It’s good.
And then the job goes south, and it’s like the air is rushing right out of body, like he’s got the wind knocked out of him, but he lets the lock loose and he hopes he doesn’t lose anyone (anything) because of it.
~IiI~
Hardison finds out the hard way, putting a tiny fist through the wall when he’s aiming at a kid who’s trying to steal his food and has been picking on him all week.
It doesn’t look good – the other kid knows how to work the system as a non-talent, and while they’re supposed to test the kids in to better place them in the system, Hardison is a sport – neither of his parents, from what the system knows, were talents, so there was no precedent to test him.
He gets tested, and he moves.
(He doesn’t say goodbye to the people in that home, there’s no point, and no love lost anywhere in that house.)
He moves, and some kid overhears the meeting with his new principle, or maybe it’s one of the other kids in the house who rats him out, since the social worker had to tell his new foster parents that he had one prior incident of violence, which is how they’d “discovered his talent.”
They fail to mention how he put his fist through the wall, and part of the wall came down, too.
The kids at the new school vary between wary and ready to pick a fight with him – if a non-talent could best a newly found talent, that’d be the highlight of the year, a victory for the underdog.
He doesn’t have as thick a skin as he’ll develop, and he breaks a person’s arm.
Alec moves.
There’s another school, another fight – this time with a fellow foster kid, over some accusation or another about stealing his stuff – like Alec wants his stuff, and it becomes a pattern.
Its one seen all over the US, all over the globe, and it’s just worse that Alec is black, too.
He starts getting the warnings from the social worker after the second school, and the talks only get longer and more frustrating, because Alec never asked for this, and yeah, he reacted, but it’s all bear baiting anyways, and doesn’t that have to count for something, somewhere?
(The answer’s “No,” until he gets to Nana, who understands, encourages his love for computers, after getting a taste of what they could do in one detention, and paves the way for Alec Hardison to take the internet by a storm.
It’s the age of the geek, and no one on the other side of the computer knows that his talent isn’t for tech, but for beating people up in an effort to protect himself, and only getting more beat down in the process.
It’s a safety net, the screen, and it’s one Alec reinforces with titanium and the latest hardware, when he gets access to the money to have it.)
It doesn’t seem relevant to the team, when it’s already got a damn good hitter.
It doesn’t seem relevant, that one time Eliot takes him with him to go find out what happened to Father Paul – he’ll stick with hitting the injured, when there’s Eliot to take the rest of them.
It doesn’t seem relevant, not when he’s really that bad with a gun (he already had super strength, why would he need another thing stacked against him?).
It doesn’t matter to Parker, when they get together, because it’s mostly cuddling and some kissing, and a part of Hardison is happy, because conscious control is one thing, but most of his practice at the unconscious is either from overtiredness or in his sleep, and that’s not something he wants to test on a person, not unless he can get a better idea of his control.
(He bugs Eliot for tips, and while he earns himself an odd look, but also some suggestions, and that’s the perfect opening to get Eliot to stay over later that week to help set things up, as a way to get him to stick around longer, like Parker and he had talked about a few weeks ago.)
It doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t matter, and then it matters, and he gets to test some of that control he’d been working on, some of the moves Eliot has shown him to disable and knock a guy out, and Hardison really, really hopes he didn’t hit of them too hard – he’ll check on their hospital records later, once they’re clear and the ambulance he auto-called comes to check on them.
~IiI~
Parker hears the voices all the time, and she thinks her parents talked back with them, and that they never really spoke in her house. Her bother needed her words, even if she didn’t need his, and she remembers what he thought when the car came, and she thinks something broke, then, because he might’ve been in her head, he might not’ve, because they were tied together like the stripes on a candy cane or the barber pole, and then he was gone and there was a hole, a half a stripe of candy cane, a twisted Parker and nothing to support her.
Then there were homes, other homes, that didn’t fill the hole the way her brother would have. There were angry thoughts – those were easy, muttering about stupid girls, and mouths to feed, and beer or other drinks. Sometimes they were about other kids, sometimes they were about their partners, and sometimes they were about work.
She learned that there were angry places inside everyone, even the really nice old ladies who gave her cookies that she didn’t have to steal.
She learned she had one, too, and when that one foster dad took her bunny and told her to be a better thief, well, she knew where Mr. Bunny was already, so she took him back, and read somewhere that you can make a bomb if there’s a flame and flour in the air.
That man smoked, and there was always at least a bit of flour in the pantry, so she took it one step further to being the “evil, delinquent, devil child” that man had thought of her as.
There was fire in Hell, right?
She went to the streets, and had quick fingers, and a mind able to find when people were distracted from her pinching things off them. She knew when the other kids would try and find hideouts, when the police, or the bad, icky people came. She could find the people, and keeping track of them would keep her safe, so she honed her talent and her fingers, got better at mentally figuring out how much people would have, and who wouldn’t fleece her for her goods.
Fleecing was a fun word, but it wasn’t fun when it happened to her.
And then found a man who could be undistracted right after his pocket was picked, and then she had a new place, and another reason to use her mind – sometimes Archie planned things in advance, and she could get a sneak peek at what lock she was picking, safe she was cracking, place she was casing.
It wasn’t often, but it gave her an edge sometimes, when he timed her, and she trained herself to keep a brain out for Archie at all times, so she could grab the information from his brain sponge and have it, too.
Until, it was just her and Mr. Bunny and all the jewels and money and paintings and money she could get for herself and she was free to jump off buildings and let the wind whip through her hair and the voices to nearly vanish in a rush of speed.
Parker never mentioned the voices – they’d just wanted to ship her off with her brother at first, because she could get him to stop crying and projecting his misery, and then no one bothered to check her, busy handing her off, or being angry, or being at work, or teaching her and then playing family, and Mr. Bunny already knew.
She was a thief, not mind thief. She liked money, not minds, and it was boring to follow a person around all day and all night, keep a brain on them, and then not get to steal from them.
(She tried, once, doing both – keeping a brain on the woman for another person and stealing from her, but that turned out to be more of a bother. It was good to know, though.)
Money, various jewels, heists around the world, and then she was bored and took the job in Chicago and something happened to make her want to help people – it was like all their relief turned into a freefall in her head, and it was maybe a little cool to work with people who could flash and think and wouldn’t distract her with too many random thoughts, unless Hardison was around, but half of that was numbers and those were soothing to fall asleep too, so Parker didn’t mind too much.
Sure, Nate was sometimes a little fuzzy, and Sophie was like looking at a sheet of glass, or a very shiny silver platter, but she’d poke and then Sophie was still there. Eliot sometimes got weird about words, but since she didn’t need them, she knew what his grunts all meant, and what “Damnit, Hardison!” and “crazy” came to mean, when they were applied to her and Hardison – or at least she thought she did.
They were working on stealing themselves an Eliot, and then the reunion job came and went south and Parker realized she had people to tell about the voices now, and how handy her talent would be if Eliot was going to go back to doing a lot of grunting, and Hardison burying himself in the computers for a few days, as if to prove he hasn’t lost his touch by hitting people.
But Parker is a Mastermind, now, and she twists the puzzles and problems the way she does best, and it’s an easy solution for her, because she trusts these two, maybe loves these two, so if her talent makes things easier for a bit, she’ll let them in on it.
That's a wrap. Today's (well, yesterday's) will be up in a bit and then I'm collapsing in bed, if my roommate doesn't kill me for being up this late when she's sick.
Kudos, comments, concrit welcome. Responses to earlier comments are coming, I promise. Poke on tumblr, I'm fins-illusion.
~Fins