Chapter Text
It started with a beanie hat, roughly pulled down over his ears as he was putting the finishing touches on a new set of fake IDs for them all.
Actually, that's a lie. It started with a stalled snowmobile and Hardison's teeth chattering over the comms and Nate cursing up a storm because of course we hotwired the snowmobile without fuel in it, Parker, you're gonna have to jump in for Hardison, how's your Swedish?
But for all intents and purposes, it started with the beanie hat, two days later, a soft, dark blue affair that sat snug against Hardison's forehead.
"What the hell, Parker?" Hardison asked, spinning round to glare at... Eliot?
The hitter said nothing, just raised an eyebrow, reached out to adjust the hat slightly, then nodded approvingly.
He made a move to leave, and Hardison scrambled to catch him before he turned back to the knives he was cleaning, or whatever the hell he was doing before he decided to play dress-up.
"Eliot, what is this?"
The hitter frowned, as if that should be obvious.
"It's a hat."
Hardison rolled his eyes. So he was gonna be like that.
"I know what a hat is, Eliot. What I wanna know is why I get a hat?"
Eliot shrugged.
"You were cold. The other day. Ergo, hat."
Oh. That.
He'd said already, it was fine. Eliot had been tied up, quite literally, Parker was needed to play Hardison's role, and Nate and Sophie were already distracting the mark, so they couldn't just disappear to rescue him from some mountainside. None of them had been free, it was as simple as that.
Only Eliot didn't seem to think so, which was stupid. The hitter appeared to have taken it as some kind of personal failure, as if getting jumped by Swedish hitmen was something you could predict ahead of time.
Hardison sighed.
"Look, I already told you, I'm fine. It's fine."
But Eliot wasn't buying it.
"You were out for almost two hours, and when you got back you were hypothermic, Hardison. Take the damn hat."
He was fixing Hardison with a stare that conveyed a silent "or else", so Hardison shrugged and left the hat on. No skin off his nose, if Eliot wanted to be a mother-hen about it.
The hitter turned to leave, for real this time, but as he was halfway out the door, something else occurred to Hardison.
"Eliot?"
He stopped, clearly irritated.
"What now?"
"Where did you get the hat from? We haven't exactly had time free to go shopping."
Something Sophie had been very annoyed to find out. If she found out that Eliot had snuck out to go shopping without her...
"Knitted it," Eliot said, deadpan, as if that didn't raise a thousand more questions, before sweeping imperiously out of the room.
Hardison frowned. Eliot was joking, right?
He pulled the hat off to get a better look at it and shook his head. No way had Eliot knitted that. Nuh-uh. It was... fancy, for lack of a better word, with some kind of braided pattern on it. Eliot had bought it somewhere, he just didn't want to incur Sophie's wrath, surely.
Then again, there didn't seem to be any kind of label on it that would suggest it was store-bought, and more than that, it just had a feel to it. It felt hand-made, in some weird way that Hardison couldn't quite explain.
It was the same kind of hat that Nana had made him wear as a kid, he realized, and that should have been an instant turn-off, but for some reason, he found himself pulling the hat on again, moving to catch his reflection in the window.
It looked good.
It was just the right side of hipster, fitted him like a dream and - Hardison realized with a sinking feeling - was really, really cozy.
"Dammit, Eliot."
A faint giggling filtered down from the vent above him. He frowned.
"Parker? That you?"
She hesitated for a few seconds.
"No?"
Hardison raised an eyebrow.
"Okay, yes, it's me, you can stop doing that with your face."
He didn't ask how she could tell. Parker just knew these things, somehow. He stopped.
"Parker, did you know that Eliot could knit?"
A muffled rustling could be heard from above - Parker shaking her head, he presumed.
"No, me neither," he murmured. "This sucks. Or it doesn't suck, which is the problem."
Parker said nothing, but it was an inquisitive kind of silence.
"If it sucked, I could just not wear it and nobody would have to know," he explained. "But this is genuinely nice, and I just know I'm gonna wear it and Eliot's gonna be all... Eliot about it, and everyone'll know."
Silence.
"Parker, you gotta help me out here."
A hum from the vent this time, mostly sympathetic, but with an undertone that Hardison didn't quite trust.
"Hey, that was your scheming hum, why are you doing the scheming hum?"
No answer.
"Parker, what are you scheming? Parker!"
But she was gone, leaping down from the vent with a deliberately loud thump before dashing off downstairs, making a carefully calculated racket.
Hardison made towards the door to run damage control, but it was too late.
"Guys, guys, guys, Eliot knitted Hardison a hat!"
And damn it all, Sophie was cooing, and Nate's voice had gone all weird, like he didn't want anyone to know how sweet he found it all, and there was Eliot, with his smile and his charm, pretending like it was no big deal, I just did it like my momma taught me, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Hardison rolled his eyes and pulled the hat off. Immediately his head felt colder, his ears less protected. A chill ran down the back of his neck - was there a draft in here that he'd just never noticed?
He heard footsteps on the stairs - Sophie, by the sound of it, coming to see Eliot's handiwork for herself. And - oh - Nate was with her, too. Great. Just peachy.
Hardison bit his lip, missing the warmth. In for a penny, in for a pound, he thought, finally, and pulled the hat back on.
If he had to stifle a smile as the wool slipped back over his ears - well, nobody needed to know that, did they?