Chapter Text
Eliot’s chest burned. His throat too. Like he’d been inhaling knives and smoke. Which he hadn’t been . Not since the last time he’d been in Nigeria, anyway, which was too long ago to be doing anything to him now.
The burn started a tickle in the back of his throat, and he closed his eyes and breathed deep. It wouldn’t do to cough now, not when it was so pivotal to keep quiet. A cough would give away his location.
Not that he could remember what he was supposed to be hiding from in the first place.
Wait, was he even hiding?
It was so dark that he couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed. It was hot, and he was lying on his stomach on top of a soft surface, and there was a fairly even pressure pressing over the contours of his body.
It was with a jerk that he realized he was in a bed, and then he slowly remembered the other details.
A hotel. That’s where they were. They, because it was him and Nate and Sophie and Parker and Hardison and they were on a job. Some… rich guy? It must have been a rich guy; they didn’t run cons on anyone else. But who…?
The blanket was ripped off of him, and his instinct was to flail out and strike whoever it was that disturbed him. He stopped himself just before his foot made contact with Hardison’s groin.
“Woah! It’s just me! Don’t do that, man!”
Eliot pushed himself up as Hardison grumbled about being attacked. He glared.
“I don’t know what you expected, waking me up like that,” he grumbled. “You’re lucky I stopped when I realized it was you.”
“Yeah, yeah. Listen bro. Nate needs you to…”
Eliot lost track of what the other man was saying as he stood up because of the way his vision swam when he got upright. He figured it didn’t quite matter enough to ask him to repeat himself, and he instead pushed his way past Hardison to get into the bathroom.
He could hear Hardison yelling protests at him, shouting about how rude it was for him to refuse to listen, but he blocked it out in favor of stripping and climbing into the shower. He was sticky with sweat from sleeping so completely under the covers, and his hair, at least, needed a wash to look even halfway presentable.
He usually wasn’t so particular about cold or hot water in the shower, but the burning in his chest had developed into a sort of heavy ache, and he thought steam might do it some good, and so he turned it on hot and silently hoped it would help.
It was a rich guy, he recalled as he ran the hotel soap bar over his arm. A rich guy who was the CEO of a pharmaceutical company and was using company funds to fuel his gambling addiction, laying off more and more innocent staff, and hiring thieves to steal his own drugs while they were on route to the hospital, collecting on cargo insurance, and then turning around and selling the drugs on the black market.
Sophie had been sent out to grift him the day before, gaining his trust and inviting him out of the office. Today, Parker was using the absence of the boss to crack the safe in his office for records of the misdeeds. All in all, not an all too complicated job. Barring, of course, the way things were likely to go wrong, as they usually did.
He rinsed quickly and stepped out of the shower. He didn’t have time to do anything with his hair, he figured, and so he tied it back while he dried off. The room was empty when he exited the bathroom, but he took no chances, keeping the towel tied around his waist while he retrieved a change of clothes and took it back into the steamy bathroom. Parker had a habit of barging into rooms unannounced, and he didn’t want to get caught with his pants around his ankles.
He did a quick brush of his teeth after he dressed, and wiped a spot in the mirror clear so he could check on the development of the cut through his eyebrow he’d received a few days previous. It was doing fine, it seemed, but he sure didn’t look like he was. He looked pale and tired and almost ghostly gaunt, but when he steeled his eyes, he looked halfway back to normal, and he thought he could successfully get everyone else to ignore it if he glared hard enough.
He inhaled as much of the leftover steam as he could manage before coughing a couple of times in hopes of relieving the tickle still present in the back of his throat. Finally, he let himself exit the bathroom and, key card safely tucked as deep in his jeans pocket as he could get it, made his way out of the room and across the hall to Nate and Sophie’s.
They’d gotten three rooms for this job, booked by Hardison semi-legally. They were paid for, at least. He’d gotten lucky and got to room alone. Or, at least, he preferred to think of it as luck, and not as everyone else being coupled up and him being all on his own. If he was really honest-- No. Best not think about such things. (Don’t think about only two rooms, about sleeping between them, about tangling legs together and--)
Parker opened the door when he knocked, and gave a manic grin.
“Hardison says the safe in the office is unbreakable. A Flatley AG-3500.”
Eliot smirked. “How many times have you broken into one?”
“Twice. Would’ve been more if Nate had let me near the one in Salem.”
“I get it!” yelled Hardison from inside the room. “I was wrong. It’s not unbreakable. Can we stop rubbing it in now?”
Parker let Eliot step into the room, and he dropped into the armchair in the corner. Parker moved his hand off of the arm of the chair and perched herself there. Hardison was by the table, on his computer, with Nate standing behind him, looking over his shoulder, and Sophie sat up against the headboard of the bed.
“Eliot,” Nate addressed him. “Did Hardison tell you the plan?”
He shrugged. “He spoke. Can’t say I listened.”
“I told you, man!” Hardison complained. “He’s just rude! Won’t listen to anything I say! Is it really too much to ask for some goddamn respect round here--?”
“Hardison,” Nate barked out a warning, and obediently, the other man’s mouth snapped closed. Nate addressed Eliot once again.
“We were wrong about his personal assistant going with him to lunch with Sophie,” he said. “According to the phone call she just got, Ms. Gailey is staying in the office to catch up on paperwork. We need you to distract her while Parker does her thing.” Nate’s gaze turned critical. Eliot could feel him cataloguing his paleness and lingering on the still healing cut in his eyebrow. “Think you’re up to it?”
Eliot scoffed instead of answering, rolling his eyes while he did. “Because it’s so difficult to flirt with a young, hot PA.”
With the way fatigue was starting to weigh on his limbs, it actually might have been difficult. But he was fine. Definitely…
A coughing fit ripped it’s way out of his throat before he could think about trying to resist it, and he buried his face in his elbow. He felt Parker give him a couple of thumps on the back, perhaps harder than was strictly necessary.
Finally, he was able to stop and catch his breath. Parker had moved from hitting him to absentmindedly rubbing between his shoulder blades. Nate, Hardison, and Sophie were all staring at him.
“You good, man?” Hardison asked.
Eliot shrugged. “I’ll be fine.”
“That wasn’t the question,” Sophie pointed out, and Eliot kind of wanted to slap her.
“It’s just a cough. I can do what needs to be done. No problem.”
His words didn’t manage to stop Sophie from coming over and laying a hand on his forehead anyway, which he only just barely tolerated.
“You feel a bit warm, Eliot.”
“If I start feeling worse, I’ll let you know. Until then…”
Both he and Sophie looked at Nate, and the mastermind gave him a searching look before nodding. “You know your limits, Eliot. Give the word and we’ll pull out. In the meantime, make yourself presentable. You’ve got some flirting to do.”
He resented the idea that he didn’t currently look presentable, but Parker was still rubbing his back, and he couldn’t get up the energy to be upset about much of anything while she was.
Sophie sent him one last concerned look, before flouncing off back to the bed and pulling out a bag, rifling through it and pulling out various makeup products he wasn’t bothering to try and catalogue. It wasn’t like he was unfamiliar with makeup products either, but the amount of tubes and compacts and vials that were emerging from the bag was both endlessly perplexing and ultimately concerning.
Nate headed for the coffee bar to fix himself a cup, but Hardison didn’t move. He was still looking at him. Or, more accurately, him and Parker. He was just… watching. Like he wanted to stand and come over too, wanted to-- no, but that wouldn’t make sense.
Still, the intensity in his eyes was unsettling, the concern palpable, and it made him unsure of whether he wanted to snap at him and make him stop or kiss the look off of his face.
Eliot didn’t fully realize he was staring back at him until Sophie ended up in front of him and blocked his view. She was juggling what Eliot recognized as two different tubes of concealer, an eyebrow pencil, and a blush compact.
“If you’re going to be doing this,” she was saying, “you’re at least going to look like a normal, healthy person with normal, full eyebrows.”
He raised one of said eyebrows at her, and then suddenly there was a sponge being pressed to the cut.
Eliot submitted himself to Sophie’s ministrations, while Parker, now bored, stood and wandered over to where Hardison was sitting. He didn’t miss her hands on his back.
He didn’t.
It didn’t take Sophie all that long to finish up, and once she did, Eliot removed himself from the room and went back to his, putting on a more professional appearing outfit and brushing out his hair to put into a more put together ponytail.
He investigated Sophie’s work in the mirror. He wasn’t quite sure how she’d managed to do it, but he no longer looked quite as tired, nor as beat up as he had when he’d surveyed himself after his shower.
Before meeting up with the others once again, he sat on the edge of his bed, eyes closed, and tried to take stock of how he actually felt.
The burning and tickling in his chest and throat weren’t going away. He was tired and run down and sore and overall… well, sick. But considering the states he’d pushed himself through before, he felt positively peachy.
As long as it didn’t get any worse...