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When he rolled out of bed that afternoon, heated up some Philly Steak & Cheese Hot Pockets for breakfast, and then went to the office, Alec Hardison was not expecting to experience a paradigm shift.
Sure, they happened pretty often in his line of work, and Alec liked to think that he thought outside the box. But there was outside the box, and then there was outside the known universe, and today was about halfway to Milliways.
Alec was distracted when it started; he was catching up on The Daily Show on Hulu and searching his usual torrent sites for the extended version of the latest episode of QI, because they couldn't really put his prodigious technical expertise to use in a raggedy-ass pool hall that was a front for some bad usurious business. But apparently he still wasn't forgiven for oversleeping that one time, so he was stuck in an unmarked van for a few hours just in case somebody needed him to maybe google some shit or something.
Why anyone would borrow money from a dude named Lenny who reeked of Aqua Velva and still had a rattail, he didn't know.
"Two guys walk into a bar," Nate said over the comms. He was playing manager in the bar's back room and watching the surveillance cameras: one at the entrance, one over the till. "Watch yourself, Eliot. One of them is headed your way."
Eliot said, "Aww, hell."
Eliot was the one wearing the camera in his glasses, so all Alec saw was a tall dude with a goofy grin approaching. The guy called out, "Holy shit, Spencer, is that you?!"
And then Eliot's glasses flew off, landing on the green felt. All Alec could see was a close-up of the purple stripe on the 12 ball, and all he could hear were some messy wet noises, and sweet Jesus, was that a moan?
"Whoa," Parker said from her position behind the bar.
"I don't have a visual on you, Eliot. What the hell is going on?" Nate demanded on the comms.
"Um," Alec said, somewhat disturbed that his usual eloquence had abandoned him. "I probably should mention that we no longer have video?"
"What's happening in there? Parker? Eliot? Is someone going to answer me?" Nate asked.
"It's not like he can talk when his mouth is full of tongue," Parker observed.
"Okay, TMI," Alec said.
Parker snorted. "Please. You should see where his hands are."
"La la la," Alec said. "Not listening."
"Hey, all of you, get with the program. Our mark just walked in the door with Sophie," Nate said.
It took a minute for Eliot to extricate himself, promising tall dude (named Jason) that he had to go but he'd call, and giving out his phone number. His real phone number.
"Glad you're back with us, Eliot," Nate said.
"Oh, please, like you haven't run into an ex on a job," Eliot said.
"A little focus, please?" Nate said. "Before you all screw the pooch completely? That would be nice."
An hour after the entire job went down without a hitch, Alec was still finding new and creative ways to say "I seriously do not believe that you do dudes."
Eliot glared at him. "Are you this homophobic because you're," Eliot said, waggling his hand in an incredibly vague manner, "you know."
"You better not be going where I think you're going with this," Alec said, because although Eliot could kick his ass six ways from Sunday with just his pinkie fingers, some matters required throwing down.
"Because you're a geek. Boo hoo, the jocks tormented you and called you sissy names when you were in high school," Eliot said condescendingly, as if Alec wasn't always the smartest person in the room.
"Oh," Alec said, caught by surprise. "No, man. I went to a nerd magnet school. We didn't have prom, but if we had, I would've been king."
"Then what's your problem?" Eliot demanded.
Alec shrugged. "I don't know! You're this tiny butch action hero; it's like finding out Wolverine likes to take it up the ass."
"How do you know he doesn't?" Eliot asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Because he is canonically a heterosexual, that's why," Alec said. "He loves women. Many women. Many beautiful, badass women."
"Yeah, and he also spends a lot of time in skintight clothing wrestling buff guys."
Alec stared at him. "You are ruining my childhood right this very minute. Right now. As you speak."
Eliot grinned as if it was the best thing he'd heard all day.
"Will you two knock it off?" Nate asked as he walked into the conference room. He finished off a finger of scotch in one gulp.
"He started it," Eliot said.
"Oh, so that's how it's gonna be now," Alec said. "You don't want to hear about my honest emotions? Fine."
"I, for one, think it's wonderful that Eliot's bisexual," Sophie said.
"Why?" Parker asked.
Sophie paused, swirled the glass of red wine in her hand, and then shrugged. "I don't know. It's just something you say to be polite."
"Okay, you know what? The next person who comments on my sexual preferences gets punched in the neck," Eliot said. "It's private. It's my business. End of story."
They stared at each other.
"So what are we going to talk about now?" Parker asked.
Alec knew he shouldn't ask, but he just couldn't help himself. His inherent curiosity was strong with the Force. "What did you do when you broke up with Jason?"
"That's it. I'm going home." Eliot scowled and straight-armed the conference table, sending his rolly-chair backwards. Eliot leapt out of the chair and stomped out of the room. The rolly-chair continued its violent trajectory and crashed into the wall.
"It adds to the diversity of the team!" Sophie said suddenly. "That's what I should have said."
Nate winced. "I wouldn't mention that to Eliot if I were you."
Sophie lifted her chin and raised an eyebrow. "Well, you're not me, and I'll do whatever I like."
"I don't think chivalry will protect you from a throat punch if you go all PFLAG on his ass," Alec said.
A week later, Alec, Parker, and Eliot were in the back of a Peapod delivery truck running surveillance on some asshole who was the mastermind behind a Ponzi scheme swindling people out of their kids' college funds. Scumbag was taking money from babies. They were going to fuck his shit up.
Just as soon as the asshole came home from church in two hours.
"Maybe you could explain something to me," Alec said to Eliot. "What exactly is it that you find attractive about dudes? Because I just don't see it."
"Seriously?" Eliot asked. The truck was refrigerated, and Eliot was wearing a giant puffy coat and fuzzy earmuffs.
"It's difficult to take your menacing expression seriously when your coat has a fur collar," Alec said.
"Stop talking to me or I'm going to tear out your ribcage and wear it for a hat," Eliot growled.
"Okay, okay. What about you, Parker?" Alec asked.
Parker turned around so swiftly that her ponytail very nearly was a deadly weapon. "What about what?"
"What you like. You know, like boys," Alec said.
Parker looked at him blankly.
"Girls?" he prompted.
Parker leaned very close. "I like it when you don't ask me questions."
"I see we've exhausted that line of conversation," Alec said.
They were all silent for a good five minutes before Alec got bored.
"Look, sorry, man. I'm just trying to figure this out, you know? Trying to wrap my brain around it like a Snuggie." Alec gestured with his hands.
"What's a Snuggie?" Parker asked.
"Kind of like a blanket, but with sleeves," Alec told her.
Parker wrinkled her nose. "Why."
"And how do you know what a Snuggie is?" Eliot asked with a smile. He rubbed his hands and blew on his fingers.
Alec tossed him his spare pair of gloves. "Dude, there was a Snuggie Pub Crawl, all right? I'm not proud." When he turned back to his laptop, he saw that Parker had stolen his Tom Baker scarf and was wrapping it around her neck. "Am I the only one who came prepared for inclement weather?"
"You went on a pub crawl in a Snuggie," Eliot said. "Please tell me there are pictures."
"Of course there aren't any pictures, and even if there were, I could make them cease to exist faster than you can kick someone's ass. The answer is no, and also hell no."
"Did you wear kneepads?" Parker asked.
"Come again?" Alec said.
"On your pub crawl."
Eliot snorted.
"Uh," Alec said. "It wasn't that kind of pub crawl. I'm just going to, uh, get back to work. Right." Alec concentrated on his laptop screen, plugging in his earbuds. He had time for a fansub or two of the new Fullmetal Alchemist reboot.
Alec played World of Warcraft for three days straight after the Ponzi job ended, and on the fourth day, he realized a few things. One, that he desperately needed a shower. Two, that he also desperately needed food because his kitchen was empty of anything that could be microwaved or eaten directly out of the can. And three, that the man his Nana raised probably ought to apologize for being insensitive.
Freshly showered and still starving in spite of the giant bag of waffle fries he'd consumed on the way from Buffalo Joe's, Alec tackled the third thing on his list. He tucked the bucket of buffalo wings in the crook of his arm, transferred the case of beer to his left hand, and pushed the button next to Eliot's alias to buzz his apartment.
"What." Eliot's voice was gruff and distorted by the crappy speaker system.
"It's Hardison," he said. When the speaker crackled with dead air, he added, "You know I don't need you to buzz me in, right?"
Eliot didn't say anything, but the lock disengaged. Eliot lived in an older building without an elevator, so Alec jogged up the staircase to the third floor. The door opened at his knock. Eliot was wearing red plaid sleep pants and nothing else. His eyes were a little puffy and he was rocking a serious case of bed head.
Alec almost said, "Who's the slugabed now?" Rather than sticking his foot in it again, he held out the wings and the beer, and said, "I bring you a peace offering."
Eliot grunted and hitched up his pants. "What do you want?"
"To apologize?" Alec said. "And in doing so, to consume a pound of buffalo wings. Maybe catch the game that's coming on in twenty minutes."
"Fine," Eliot sighed. He turned and stalked away from the door.
Something about the broad expanse of Eliot's back and the curve of his ass caught at Alec's gut, and he found himself gaping like his jaw was hanging out with his knees and having a good old time.
It was an epiphany, and it felt like sneezing ten times in a row, but all at once and inside his brain.
Eliot glanced over his scarred, muscular shoulder. "What are you looking at?"
"Me?" Alec asked. "I'm just admiring your lovely lady locks, that's all."
"No making fun of a man's hair in his own house," Eliot said.
Okay, all right, okay. Sudden sexual identity crisis. He could roll with this.
Alec shuffled inside Eliot's apartment and shut the door.
"You got room in your refrigerator for the beer?" he asked.
"Yeah, should be. Just move some stuff around until it all fits," Eliot said.
Eliot's refrigerator was packed with all kinds of food. Eggs, defrosting meat, green vegetables, sauces, marinades, cheeses. A bag of lemons. A giant tub of sour cream. No take-out containers of any kind. Alec started shifting things around to make room for the beer bottles.
His Nana would say that the important thing was not to do anything until he knew his own mind. That a lot of bad decisions were made in the heat of the moment, when you were confused and maybe a little terrified of your own hormones.
Alec never, ever thought that he'd be recalling his Nana's sex talk in an attempt to calm himself down.
"How you doing?" Eliot said when he walked into the kitchen while still pulling on a T-shirt.
Alec startled and knocked a bottle of honey mustard across the floor. Eliot trapped it under his foot, then got his toes underneath the bottle and kicked it into his hands like a soccer goalie.
"You want some honey mustard sauce, or something?" Eliot asked.
Alec put the last beer in the refrigerator and stood, shrugging. "If you're offering, I won't say no." Then he thought about what he'd said, and how he actually maybe meant it. "I mean, uh..."
He lifted the bucket of wings, nodded at the living room, and then ran out of the kitchen like someone was gunning for his ass.
"Don't you dare get any sauce on my leather couch," Eliot yelled.
Alec put the bucket of wings on the coffee table. He turned on Eliot's television. And then he put his head between his knees and tried to remember how to breathe. Eventually the buzzing in his ears stopped, and he could hear Eliot making cooking noises in the kitchen.
He ate some buffalo wings, listened to the pre-game patter, and remembered to say thank you when Eliot sat next to him and handed him a bowl of tangy mustard sauce. They tore through the bucket of wings and watched football for a while without saying a word. They played Rock Paper Scissors for the last wing in the bucket. Alec lost.
"You're quiet today," Eliot said, sucking ranch dressing from his fingers.
"I'm contemplating. You know, working out some stuff in my head," Alec said.
"Huh," Eliot said. "Maybe you should do that more often."
When the game finished, Alec helped clean up and then went home, and very carefully did not think about the thing that he wasn't thinking about.
As God as his witness, Alec wasn't going to think about the Alpine job ever again, not even the parts with Parker wearing a dirndl and Eliot in a pair of leather lederhosen hotpants. There was a storm, and the Chalet that Sophie was pretending to own lost power. The backup generators failed. And it didn't matter that they had to huddle around a fireplace or that he was the filling in a Parker and Eliot cuddle sandwich, because one by one, his laptop batteries were dying. He couldn't get a cell phone signal, and when the last battery indicator turned orange and his LCD went black, Alec made a very undignified whimpering noise.
For the first time, he knew what it was like to be an addict.
"How can you look things up without the internet?" Alec had asked. "How do you find a restaurant or know what bus to take or check movie times or look up the proper spelling of 'sussuration'?"
"Sussuration?" Parker asked.
"Dictionary," Eliot suggested. He held his hands a few inches apart. "It's a book, about yea thick."
"Shut up," Alec said. "I'm not interested in your opinion right now, lo-fi. What I'm saying is that I can't work my magic from here! I can't find digital paper trails. I can't fake any documents or photos, access any remote systems, circumvent security, or any of the normal, awesome things that I do. I ain't got no wireless, no satellite, no internet, no power, and I'm bored with all the games I loaded on my cell phone. Okay?"
"Dial it down a notch, Hardison," Nate suggested quietly. Sophie was asleep on his shoulder.
"How am I supposed to do that?" Alec demanded. "This is like my worst nightmare!"
Parker petted his head clumsily, like a toddler petting a dog, or a very drunk girl. Eliot patted his shoulder and just left his hand there, his thumb pressed against Alec's nape.
Alec tried very hard not to think about all the information that was out there, currently being denied him. All his email, television shows, new comics issues, the games, and news about expansion packs. It was going to be impossible to catch up on all his RSS feeds if they didn't get power back soon. It was enough to give him the shakes.
"Pink elephants?" Eliot asked, his thumb stroking Alec's neck.
"Totally," Alec said, and shivered. It occurred to him that maybe he should think about the thing that he wasn't thinking about.
The first thing Alec did when the electricity came back was kiss his computers. Then he hugged them and whispered sweet nothings into their USB ports. Maybe he gave them a rubdown and called them baby, but nobody could prove it. And when he was safely back at home with all his doors triple-locked, he finally did some research on the thing he was thinking about maybe thinking about. He used one of the machines he could wipe and re-image on a moment's notice, and went surfing for porn. He found a couple of sites that didn't require registration, and just started clicking. He came to a few conclusions quickly.
One, the ebony thing was freaky and offensive, and he made a mental note to do something about it later, a nefarious kind of something. Two, some dudes should never be naked, some people should not be allowed to get tattoos, and regardless of how fond he was of his own, dicks were funny looking. Three, it was kind of hot.
Okay, so it was hot and it made him hard, and he got off on it. Twice.
A couple hours later, he put his pants back on, washed his hands, and dropped some Pop-Tarts in the toaster. He switched on the coffee pot and then went searching for his Kindle, because there had to be some books he could download. And maybe there were some things he could add to his Netflix Instant Watch queue.
And that's what Alec did for a while. He went to a club. He wandered around Boystown. He made himself go into Gay-MART. He got hit on by some dudes, and didn't freak out. Much.
It was time to shit or get off the pot, so Alec went to Eliot's apartment with a pizza, a bottle of blue agave, and some Family Guy DVDs.
He buzzed Eliot's apartment, and asked, "Are you gonna let me in?"
"Are you gonna mention the lederhosen?"
"Oh, hell no," Alec said.
"Good choice," Eliot said, and let him in. When he opened his apartment door, he said, "I would've had to go outside and kill you, and I hate moving."
"Take this," Alec said, bumping the pizza box against Eliot's chest. "And how can you hate moving? You travel all over the world."
"Yeah, travel being the operative word," Eliot said. "I like traveling. Moving sucks."
"Tequila?" Alec offered.
"Nice," Eliot said.
The pizza was a distant memory and Alec was just a tiny bit tipsy from the tequila; Eliot laughed at something Stewie was ranting about on the TV, his head thrown back and his posture loose, legs sprawling. He looked like he'd forgotten to be so pissed off at the world for once, and it seemed like a good moment try to something, so Alec leaned in and kissed him. Just a press of the lips, not leading with tongue or anything. Eliot's mouth was soft and his stubble was prickly.
Eliot flinched back. "Whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm not your bicurious experiment, buddy. We're not doing this."
Alec picked up the remote and turned off the TV. "Okay, no, see, that's where you're wrong. I have done my due diligence, here. I have watched hours of porn. I have read The Bisexual's Guide to the Universe and Bi Any Other Name, which I bet you haven't done, and I even asked myself if I thought my Nana would consider this a sinful act. My Nana."
"Okay, what about Parker?" Eliot asked.
"I like Parker," Alec said. "But she kind of scares me."
"I don't scare you?"
"Not to wound your manly ego, but nah, not really," Alec said.
"Okay," Eliot said. "What about --"
"Now you're just stalling," Alec said. "What, do you have a rule about coworkers? Or is it just me?"
"No! I don't... not like you." Eliot shoved his hand through his hair. "I just think this could be a really bad idea."
"We're pretty good at making bad ideas work for us," Alec said. He started to lean in real slow.
Eliot squinted, and then shook his head. "If you freak out on me, I get to punch you."
"Deal," Alec said. "Just so you know, if you break my heart I will destroy you financially and defame you on the internet."
"Can't say I wasn't warned," Eliot said, his voice low.
Alec kissed him again, and this time Eliot opened up right away; he opened up sweet, in that wet, slick, and confident way that had Alec pushing his hands in Eliot's hair. Eliot slid over and climbed onto Alec's lap, touching his arms, shoulders, his throat. They kissed, and Eliot's hair tickled his face.
Alec rubbed his hands up Eliot's thighs. He liked this, and kind of wanted to do it for the foreseeable future. "You best be getting rid of Jason's phone number."
"Make me," Eliot said.
And that's the official story of how they broke the coffee table. They pinkie-swore on it and everything.