Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When she was fifteen, Parker died for a little while. 

She’s never been good at dying though. It didn’t stick for long. 

It was her first winter in New York, and the building she had been sneaking into at night abruptly upped their security system, her fault probably, stealing a few too many packages from the lobby. There was a deadbolt and a padlock and a bar across the door on the inside and she wasn’t good enough to get through all of it. Yet. 

It wouldn’t be the first night she spent outside though, and the roof itself seemed safer and cleaner than some other places she could try to sleep, so she pulled her hoodie up and tucked her hands into the sleeves of her heavy coat and curled up for the night, grinding her teeth down hard so they wouldn’t chatter. 

The rest of it seems like a dream in retrospect. Waking up sometime in the middle of the night, but not truly waking up, like half a dream. Feeling like she was sliding through the city, lighter than she’d ever been, looser, without any grasp or presence in the world as she breezes over and down to ground level, forward and west towards Central Park. She moves silently and motionlessly past clumps of trees and baseball diamonds until she’s in front of a pile of rocks protruding from the earth. 

There’s an opening, carefully hidden by the distraction of chaotic rock edges. Parker is good at recognizing hidden entryways and things no one else pays attention to. She slips a little further, in through the cave and down beneath the earth. 

And down and down and down. 

The cavern she finds eventually is mind shatteringly large, the kind of space that makes you realize there’s a limit to how far you can see, that makes you feel small and insignificant. It’s grey. And it’s filled with people, standing clumped across flat rock, pushing forward inch by inch in a line that goes on forever and ever into the dark. 

She slips down and starts to feel her toes again just as they brush the ground, feels a sudden dull ache spread up through her body, feels an emptiness and a tiredness and a great loss of something electric within her as she’s shuffled along into the line. 

It’s bad. She swallows hard and uses more strength than she should need to, all of the little strength she currently feels like she had, to bend her knees and draw her toes away from the ground. 

She peeks around the room, searching the way she always does for the closest exit, the closest thing that can be considered an exit, any place she can squirm through and out because she knows this place is bad bad news. She looks up and sure enough, in the rocks far above, there’s a thin little crack, the faintest little sliver of the night sky all the way beyond. She pushes towards it, on the very tips of her toes, squirming past all the other bodies until she reaches the nearest wall and grabs hold of the slight edges and heaves herself up. 

Climbing is easy. It always is. She does it fast and quiet, as easy as any building in the city, if not easier for all the natural divots and foot holds in the rock. She reaches the top and wiggles her way out and catches her first glimpse of the park. 

And then she wakes up, on the roof in the same place and position she was before. Her body burns with the cold, her shivers violent and jarring. She pulls her threadbare coat a little tighter around herself. It doesn’t get colder, but she’s too cold to fall back asleep so she curls tight and counts the minutes until morning. 

Time moves on. 

She thinks about it sometimes but like most events from before the team, it’s just a thing that happened, something she didn’t feel either way about. She tried to tell Archie about it once and he called it a dream. She tells Sophie about it, over the phone one night right after she left, after she faked her death because in conversations you’re supposed to offer relevant anecdotes and it feels like a relevant anecdote. Sophie doesn’t really believe her, she can tell, but she listens intently and hums curiously and tells her gently, “Well, I’m very glad you were only dead for a little while, Parker. And I’d rather you don’t do it again.” Which is funny. She laughs. Sophie does too, at the same time and Parker hugged the phone to her chest. 

She never tells Eliot or Hardison. Not for any reason it just hasn’t come up yet. But she thinks she will someday. 

—

It’s rare that she’s the first one awake. She really likes sleeping, especially when there’s a bed, especially when the bed is this big and the sheets are this soft, and especially with Hardison and Eliot close and warm and safe. It makes her feel like this old picture book she stole from a bookstore when she was thirteen, the frayed cover with a hand drawn picture of kittens sleeping in a little row. Her and Eliot and Hardison in their little row, bundled up in a line together, warm and wiggly like kittens. She hasn’t told them about that yet either, and she definitely will because Eliot will make a Face at being compared to a kitten and Hardison will get all curious and track down the exact book title that she’s long forgotten and probably have a copy for her by the end of the week. 

With feelings that great, sleeping is easy. 

But Eliot likes waking up early and going for runs and cooking and making use of the quiet hours of the morning where there are less people. Hardison doesn’t care as much about having an edge, but his brain is always buzzy and sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night with an idea and has to go do something. 

He definitely woke up at some point after they all fell asleep last night because he was in the middle but now she is and his arm is half outstretched towards his phone on the nightstand. 

But they’re both asleep now, and it’s just her, with her eyes open, watching them in the blueish early morning light. She feels the pull to go back to sleep. They have the Job today, the big one, so she won’t get much longer, every minute counts. But she wants to stay awake. 

She likes them like this. Hardison’s mouth is half open against the pillow, his nose brushing lightly against her temple. She can hear him breathing, as it scrapes at the inside of his throat. His breath is warm, but his fingers against her hip are cool. 

Eliot’s hand is brushing his there, on her bare skin where her shirt (Eliot’s, she thinks because of how much space there is around her shoulders) has ridden up. She can’t wrap her mind around the sight and can’t tear her eyes away from it, their hands half intertwined in their sleep and against her skin. 

Hers. Somehow. She wakes up in bed with them like this. Often, now that Eliot is getting more comfortable with cohabitation instead of his weird slow and proper courtship rituals. 

It’s a little hard sometimes for her to see how she fits. They’re both wonderful. They do so much for her, listening and waiting and protecting and understanding. And then they do the same thing for each other, care and protect. Hardison with his words and his gadgets. Eliot with his food and his body between them and danger. 

She doesn’t really know what she does, what she offers, what she gives them that’s comparable to what they’ve given her. Because she doesn’t give. She steals. 

But they don’t seem to mind. They let her steal and then they give her more, like they’ll never run out, like they need nothing in return. 

She places her hand carefully on top of theirs, her thumb against the edge Eliot’s hand, pinkie against Hardison’s. It’s easier to not question it. Just like it’s easier to not wake them up, to just watch them, bask in how beautiful they look like this, asleep, and all hers. 

The alarm will go off eventually. Hardison’s. And Eliot will wake up perfectly on time five minutes before like he always does, specifically so he can gripe to Hardison about how the alarm is stupid and unnecessary. And then they’ll get up and get ready and head into positions for the job and that’ll be the day. 

After, she’ll wish she woke them up as soon as she did, so she could tell them finally how much she loved them, tell them all the stories she was holding onto to share about her past, finally ask them what she was bringing to the table, why they loved her. After she’ll wish she curved more fully into Hardison’s side, wrap her arms tight around him and held on. After she’ll wish she spent those five minutes kissing Eliot over and over again, feeling his tender touch against her back until he forgot about pushing Hardison’s buttons. After she’ll wish she didn’t hop out of bed once Hardison was fully awake to go brush her teeth and get dressed for the day.

After she wishes she had stayed in bed with them all day and never left for anything, because what else did she need. She could sustain herself on them alone. They were always enough. 

But their biggest job is waiting, and she believes all so foolishly that there’s nothing they can’t pull off together.  So she gets out of bed and they followed her after a couple moments, and off they go to disaster.

—

The first night. Their First Night. When they put their cards on the table and one by one showed their hands like it wasn’t the most nerve wracking thing in the world, like it wasn’t scarier than any jump she’s ever made, like it wasn’t harder than any con they’ve ever run, when they realize that they’re not playing against each other, that together they were holding a winning hand, all their hearts in that jackpot, pulsing and beating hard and oh so delicate but together, a prize they all got to claim. That night, she wakes up hours before dawn is even a concept, and finds Eliot sitting up against the headboard. His legs are crossed and his hands are flat against his knees and he’s staring down at them with Expressions on his face that she can’t fully make out in the pitch black of the room. 

Hardison is still fast asleep, cradled in her arms, his fingers loosely weaved through hers. She clings to him, hugs him tight to her chest like she can pin and keep him there. She can’t remember which side of them Eliot was on when they fell asleep, but he’s on her side now, at their backs. (Always, a nice good voice whispers in her head. He’s always gonna be there.)

She keeps her grip carefully around Hardison’s waist as she rolls onto her back to better face him. 

“Eliot,” she says. It comes out as a whisper and she realizes just how much she likes his name, the way it feels in her mouth, the way she can say it in a whisper and know he’ll hear her calling for him and turn right to her. 

He startles just a little, blinking down at her like coming out of a trance. 

“Hey,” he says, also whispering, rough around the edges. “Hey, angel, go back to sleep.”

He reaches out, ghosting the back of his fingers along her shoulder and she feels a tingle like a purr build in her chest. 

She shifts up gently, smoothing her hand down the back of Hardison’s neck to soothe him, and exchanges her pillow for Eliot’s thigh. His boxers are soft against her cheek, and she presses her nose into the crease of his hip, closing her eyes.

“What are you doing?” she asks, wrapping her free hand around his calf. 

He sighs, and his hand runs through her hair. “Just taking in the view.”

She peeks one eye open and glances around the room. Still dark, but she can sort of make out the shape of the bookshelf on the far wall. 

“I was talking about you two, gorgeous,” he says, with a little chuckle of an exhale. 

She pokes at his knee. “You don’t need to flirt with me. We just said we were dating.”

“Parker,” he says. “If I’m not telling you how lucky I am to have you as much as I possibly can, then I’m doing something wrong here.”

She has to think about it for a second, but nods. “Okay.” It’s a little weird the things that Eliot has been saying all night, very different for Eliot, and very different from Hardison’s romantic words. It’s all very soft, not grumpy and prickly the way Eliot usually is when he’s saying that he loves them. It’s all the things that he doesn’t say with his mouth, but that she can read in his eyes sometimes. It’s just weird to hear it out loud in his voice. 

But weird isn’t bad. 

“I don’t know if I can do the words as well as you and Hardison,” she says. She hopes he’ll be okay with it like Hardison is. “Sorry.”

“Not a problem, darlin,” he says. His hand closes around hers. Hardison likes to slot their fingers together but Eliot’s hand just folds around hers. He tugs them up and leans down, pressing his mouth to the center of her palm and inching down to her wrist. 

She can’t do the pet names either. She likes them, likes them from Hardison and from Eliot, because it feels like a secret language, like Alice, she can step into these other names, babe and baby girl and darling and sweetheart and angel, and be those things, even if it still is just her at the end. But she needs them to be Hardison and Eliot, and can’t think of anything better for them to be, anything more intimate to call them than their names because that’s what they are, that’s exactly how she loves them. 

“Are you thinking?” she asks Eliot after another moment of contemplating words. 

He sighs. “Yeah, Park. ‘Course I’m thinking.”

“Well, are you over-thinking?” she prods. “Because Hardison was worried that you’d think your way out of dating us.”

It took her a while to realize that her worries were different from his, that when he said dating, she heard loving. Because that’s what she was more worried about, that Eliot would think his way out of loving them. (That Hardison would too. More likely since, no offense, he was better at thinking than Eliot.) 

She wonders which one Eliot hears. If he can read her fear underneath Hardison’s. 

His fingers stroke along hers. She keeps her hand still for him even if it feels odd to. It’s the sort of thing she wants to understand now, these little things that Hardison and Eliot do with her that make them happy. 

“Maybe I’m not the one who should be thinking,” he says after a moment. 

Which is a more normal Eliot answer, but it makes her a little mad, along with what he’s saying. Because he knows that she wouldn’t, couldn’t be here if she hadn’t thought about it, if she hadn’t made sure. And he also knows that Hardison is better at thinking than both of them. And yet they’re still here. Tonight still happened. That should be enough. 

She wants the weird Eliot answer, the overly romantic reassuring answer that’ll melt on her tongue like chocolate or snowflakes, sweet and smooth. 

She pulls her hand back, pokes firmly at his chest to signify her displeasure. 

Eliot sighs and catches her hand again as he slips down the bed to lay down again. That’s a good thing, she thinks, that he’s back down with them. Symbolic or something. 

He’s warm. Warmer than Hardison. She has to close her eyes for a second because it feels almost too hot, having him so close, and having his eyes on her. He settles against the pillows and shrugs the blankets up, but he pauses before he reaches for her. 

It starts a steady tingle in her chest. Because it’s the sort of thing Hardison does so easily, read her and wait and give her the reins. It’s the only reason she’s even here, that Hardison had done it enough times for her to trust that this wouldn’t spiral out of control, that she got to define the limits and set her boundaries. 

She trusts Eliot, but different. She’s trusted him with outside stuff, with protecting her and catching her. She trusts his body, the way she trusts Hardison’s mind. 

And she likes that he can do this too, pause, wait for her; without her having to dreg up words to tell him to stop, to tell him what’s wrong, to explain all these things that make sense in her head but feel weird and stupid when she says them outloud. 

“Eliot,” she says, when she feels less hot, when all the tingles in her body settle. 

And he gets that too, moves forward and drapes his arm around her waist, his hand settling on the dip of Hardison’s hip and slotting them all into place. 

“You gonna go back to sleep now?” he asks. 

“Maybe,” she says slowly. “Are you?” Because she probably won’t until he does. 

He sighs, like he knows exactly that. “Sleep, Parker.”

“Will you be here when I wake up?” she asks quickly. The first time she and Hardison slept together, he woke up before her but didn’t leave the bed until she woke up too, and it had been so weird and so nice to know that he didn’t leave, to not wake up all alone, to see him before anything else, to kiss him before brushing teeth, to be all tucked up in him and in sheets warmed by their bodies. She wants that with Eliot, too, with both of them. She thinks she’ll still probably wake up last but that means they’ll have each other to talk to and make out with until she’s up. And that’ll be better than any sunrise, she thinks, to wake up to them. 

Eliot’s lips press to her forehead hard, leaving her a space to burrow against his throat where she can feel his heartbeat and smell him, all sweat and day-old cologne. 

“Alright, darling,” he says. She traces the feeling of the words on her skin. 

“And, after that too?” she asks. If Hardison was awake she probably wouldn’t, he’d probably give her a reminding look to go easy on Eliot, to not scare him off. But he’s promised her to the morning now, he can’t just run away. “Tomorrow night? Will you stay?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, tomorrow, and the day after and the day after, you don’t gotta ask. I know…” She can feel his jaw work near her face as he thinks. “I know where I’m headin’, in the long term, I know that if there’s a hell, it’s waiting for me at the end of this thing.” She holds her breath and doesn’t say anything, doesn’t protest it the way Hardison would, because she wouldn’t know how to, because she thinks Eliot knows himself better than she does, because she never believed in things like hell and doesn’t know where she thinks she’d end up if she did. “So I’d have to be more than a fool to let go of any type of heaven I can touch.”

Oh, she thinks. It scares her, how much Eliot loves them. She doesn’t know how to be loved that much. But she can learn. She wants to learn. 

“Okay,” she says, flinging her free arm around his waist, gripping his shirt tight between her fingers. “Then stay forever.”

He nods, his head bumping against hers. “As long as I can.”

It’s still conceptually flawed. If Eliot is going somewhere after all this, after they die, then they’ll need to find a place where they can all go together. Hell sounds bad no matter what though. Hardison definitely wouldn’t belong there, she wants to protect him from that. 

But maybe they’ll find a way to live forever. Maybe they’ll invent some way to be together for longer, forever, until time itself stops. Until then though, Eliot’s not going anywhere, so she settles into the mattress and closes her eyes. 

—

Time goes wrong when they’re in the van. Her shoulder burns and burns and burns, sharp mind-numbing pain that distorts her vision in sudden starry bursts. 

The moment freezes. Time stops. 

It’s the only explanation she can come up with because Hardison’s chest stops moving and Eliot won’t squeeze her hand back. 

Her own breath is caught in her throat, won’t come in or out, just sits heavy right there. 

If the car is moving, she can’t feel it. If the noise of the chase continues, she isn’t hearing it. 

Everything in the world is concentrated down into the back of the van, to Hardison and Eliot. If they're frozen, if time has stopped for them then it’s stopped for her too, then she’s frozen too, then she won’t breathe either. 

Together, together, together. It’s her favorite fucking word. 

Whoever they are, wherever they go, it’s together. They wouldn’t leave her. 

They haven’t ever left her. 

So time is just stuck. Pain is just being tricky, slowing the world down around her, distorting her perception. It’ll pass. 

She clings desperately, to Eliot’s hand, to the moment trapped, to the stubborn belief that everything will be okay. She can’t let go of it. She can’t let the moment slip and let them slip with it, she has to hold on as tight as she can. 

If she doesn’t she’ll break, she’ll spiral, she’ll lose. They can’t leave without her. 

Her mind rattles around all of the things she should have done, the dozens and dozens of missteps she’s made with them as they fumbled their way along in a real and proper relationship. There are so many things she should have done differently, so many moments she could redo to strap herself closer to them. Why did she want any space? Why did she ever want to be less close to them? Why take the chance that they could… slip away, that they could go without her? Why didn’t she… why didn’t she…?

Time starts again when the van hits the water. 

Like the movie Hardison took her to see for their eighth ‘normal people’ date. A kick out of dreams. But she doesn’t wake up. 

Something in her does, something vicious in her jolts up, and she can’t see, but her body moves, fighting and clawing and flailing up she’s out of the van, until her head breaks the surface of the water, until she’s bobbing in the river and gulping in air, the water stinging in her shoulder, all alone, always alone. 

She’s never been good at dying. It never felt like a bad thing until right now. 

Chapter Text

Hardison is the one who comes to find her. 

It makes her grin before he even sits down next to her, kicking his long legs out in front of him along the cool tiled floor of the brewpub’s kitchen. 

“Hey, babe,” he says softly, slipping his hand out to rest on the floor between them. She bypasses the offering, scooting over until their hips bump, dropping her head to his shoulder. 

“You always know where to find me,” she offers thoughtfully. She’s not particularly hiding, and she knows Eliot is over by the doorway, posing casually like he’s keeping an eye on the empty restaurant. 

Hardison rubs at the back of his neck with his other hand. “Well, I checked the roof first but—” Yeah, she’s had enough roofs for the night. “You alright?”

She shrugs aimlessly. “Yeah, I think so.”

He slips his arm around her, tugging her into his side and she goes easily, like falling, stretching and folding into all the negative spaces along his body. And when that’s not enough, she buries her face in his neck too, basking in all those good sensations, his stubble scratching gently against her forehead, the steady thumping of his heartbeat. She wants to burrow here, like a small rodent, to nest in place and settle, to dig deep into him and plant roots. 

Hardison brushes his fingers along the ends of her hair, and the talking part probably isn’t done, even though she’s pretty sure she’s said everything she needed to. 

Hardison sniffs and clears his throat, and it’s just ever so slightly along the line of over-exaggerating for her to know it’s for her benefit. 

“I love you,” he says. It's very weighty. Which is weird, it's not the first time he’s said it. He says it a lot, actually. More than she expected. 

“I know,” she says. Because it’s the truth and because it’s like the scene in the Star Wars movie that makes him pretend to have allergies. Indoors. In the middle of the night. 

And because it makes him happy. (Maybe happier than if she said something more boring like, I love you, too.)

She’d be fine to leave it there too, but Hardison likes his words. 

“That was… amazing,” he says, slow and soft. “What you did up there.”

She shrugs, half-heartedly. It didn’t feel that amazing. Talking Charlie off the edge. The roof, the wind in her hair, the promise of a fall, all twisted up in her, all something dangerous for someone other than her. There was a solid ache in her gut and for one of the first and few times in her life, she looked at someone and saw a spark of herself, a lonely silhouette against a rooftop. She didn’t really think about the rest, the con, the team, any of it. 

“Hey,” Hardison says, bumping his side into hers more firmly. “It was. You saved his life.”

“That’s… what we do,” she offers. But accepts the light kiss to the top of her head. 

“You’re incredible, Parker,” he says. That’s something she knows too. She’s the best thief in the world. That’s incredible. But it means something different when Hardison says it. Everything’s always different with him.

She wants to be even closer to him, shifts and wriggles around under his arm until she’s straddling his lap, pressing up tight against the warmth of his chest, her nose against the curve of his jaw. He hums a small grunt and brings his other arm up to settle around her waist. 

“I think…” she says, and takes a slow breath like she’s lowering herself down a wire into a thin pressure-sensitive vault. “He’s going to leave me in charge.”

There’s this weird thing normal people do, where they ‘talk around’ an issue. She thinks that’s what’s they’ve been doing with the fact that Nate’s leaving soon. Maybe it’s supposed to be a secret. They haven’t been good at keeping secrets from each other in a while. She’s not sure if the rules of ‘talking around’ allow her to say this, but she really needs to, she needs to know. 

“Are you mad?” she asks. She spreads her fingers wide against his ribs, to get a better grip on him, grounding the weird tickle in her brain telling her to run. 

“Baby girl, I could never be mad at you,” he says, rubbing his temple against hers. It’s a lie. You can’t control feelings and you can’t promise things like always and never, not really. But she takes it for what it is, a reassurance that he isn’t mad at her now, and that he doesn’t want to be. Which is nice enough. 

“Are you mad at Nate?” she asks. Because he specified. 

He shakes his head. 

“But, mad?” 

“At myself,” he admits, quiet and quick like he’s trying to sneak it by her. “For not being smart enough. Yet, I guess.”

“You’re smart,” she says, an itchy urgency beneath her chest. “You’re smarter than me. And Nate. You’re the smartest person ever.” It sounds stupid when she says it like that, makes her wince. She doesn’t know how to say it though, the way she feels about his brain, the way she trusts it almost more than she trusts herself, the way he is magic, plain and simple. His brain can do anything, it can crack her faster than she can, it can solve any problem, it protects them, it provides for them. She loves Hardison, the whole of him, his eyes, his smile, his fingers, his voice, but she believes in Hardison’s brain like it’s a deity, she has faith in it. 

His hand strokes along her spine, and he turns gently to kiss her cheek. “There’s different kinds of smart.”

He’s every kind of smart though. He’s… Hardison. 

He’s too smart, maybe, to think in plans. 

More and more lately she’s been able to feel the breadth of their cons, been able to almost see the faint lines of Nate’s plans sprawling out ahead of them. And it’s finally clicked, what he does, the key to his creepy mind control-y things. 

“It’s not about being smart,” she says, decisively. “It’s about being scared.” It’s about being scared enough to plan for anything, to write out every minutia of fear into new plans and sub-plans, no matter how unlikely. It’s about stealing control, over people and over situations, because it’s the only way to keep yourself and anything that matters safe. It’s about being too scared about what failure means, what it looks like, how it would stick to your soul, that you simply can’t let yourself. 

“Are you scared?“ Hardison asks. She loves his voice like this, slow and deliberate, low and slightly strained like he’s tensed up and ready to do anything to make her feel safe, to make her feel comfortable and happy. 

She shrugs. “Sometimes. But it’s different than it used to be when I was alone.” She’s been thinking about that a lot tonight, about what it was like when she was alone, how she pulled all those things that people called crazy and wrapped it around herself again and again like barbed wire to protect the tiny soft things inside of her. How it stayed like that, keeping people out, and keeping herself in, until Hardison, until his brain and his careful fingers easing it all apart carefully, and showing her how to do it herself. 

She’s not alone. She doesn’t want to be ever again, doesn’t want to slip back into that dark place, hide behind the worst bits of her to keep people out. 

“Never gonna be alone again,” Hardison mumbles into the strands of her hair. He hums, shifting them gently back and forth, a slow sway. “Sorry, babe, you’re stuck with me.”

She smiles and pokes his side. “That means you’re stuck with me, too.”

“I dunno, sounds pretty perfect to me.” 

“Me too,” she agrees. “Though I think it might make Eliot’s head explode.”

“I figure we got a decade or two before that happens.”

She hides her smile against the side of his neck, curls in tight and close against his front. He’s a particularly good hiding spot, there’s this way that she fits into him that always feels right. Eliot is better at surrounding, at encompassing her, but Hardison is better for twisting into, for tangling up in long limbs. 

Either way, it makes her feel like she’ll always have somewhere to go, a place to settle and curl up and be held. Which is new. To know that she won’t be that person again, alone on a cold rooftop with no one, with no home.

–

Parker crawls out of the riverbed and gets her feet under her again. She’s soaked to the bone and her shoulder burns, but her body doesn’t know how to stop moving with the sounds of sirens in the distance, fast enclosing. 

She trudges towards the nearest back alley, slower than she should be, too slow. But she isn’t caught, and it’s second nature to slip through the city like a ghost. 

Maybe she is a ghost. She doesn’t feel real right now.

Her heart is still beating steadily, but there's a tightness in her chest, a deep deep ache, and a burning in her eyes, water that’s not from the river. She knew she had gotten soft, gotten dependent on the team, but it had been a slow descent, it had been well tested, that they would always be there, that she could fall back on them. She thought she wouldn’t have to do this again, go to ground in the fallout of a bad job, longing absently for someone to hold her hand, to patch her up and kiss her better. 

Instead, she presses into corners and flings herself over fences, skirts around the edges of buildings, and leaps between window sills, putting as much distance as possible between her and the sirens. Again. 

She doesn’t know where her body is taking her until she slides into a familiar vent and follows it all the way down and tumbles out into the backroom of the brewpub. 

Home. 

She’s dizzy from the blood loss and fully waterlogged. Her knees shake and she makes it to the center console before slumping down and curling into the tightest, smallest ball she can fit herself into behind it. 

Time passes. She feels it slip out from beneath her as she presses one hand hard against her shoulder, leaning into the pain of it. Everything aches, everything in her body but everything in her too, brain and heart and soul. 

She knows. She knows what just happened, but she can’t bring herself to think it, can’t even approach the thought of Hardison and Eliot without her breath ratcheting up and her heart speeding, and her stomach dropping out in a sickly nauseous way. The only thing she can bring herself to do is wait for the world to right itself, wait for her body to wake up, and put her safe and warm in bed between them.

Instead, she snaps back into herself and finds Amy crouched in front of her, eyes wide and concerned, saying her name like she’s been calling her for a while. 

“What?” Parker asks, her voice cracking and creaking over it. She lets out a wet cough and blinks hard to unblur the world around her. 

“What happened?” Amy repeats shakily. “Is that… blood?”

She attempts a nonchalant shrug and nearly passes out. 

Amy disappears and then she’s back again a few blinks later with Chicken Parm in tow. They’re talking to each other, a fast volley back and forth that she can’t fully wrap her brain around. They uncurl her carefully and Amy tugs her button-down sleeve away from her shoulder. There’s a clawing animal desperation in her that wants to swat them away, that flinches back from the touches and the noises, the sharp sting of disinfectant, and the pinch of stitches. She’s so tired though, and she’s gotten too used to trusting people, she doesn’t want to hurt them, to lash out like a feral cat when they’re only trying to help. 

She breathes heavily, swallows every shout and yelp and whimper that creeps into her throat. 

Amy holds her hand and gently flattens her stringy damp hair until there’s a bright white bandage settled against her skin, and Parker doesn’t even try to stop the slow stream of tears that slip out. 

“Should I call someone?” Amy asks, as Chicken Parm cleans up and puts everything neatly back in Eliot’s big emergency first aid kit. Parker blinks and takes a quick stock of the situation, of how cleanly everything has been handled. She thinks when she can feel things again, she’ll be pretty impressed and deeply grateful. 

She shakes her head in response to the question, glancing urgently around the room, searching for what’s next, what to do, what to respond to. 

Amy touches her shoulder lightly. “What about Hardison? Should I try to find him? Is he in today?”

And it’s like all the air disappears from the room. She can’t breathe, presses her back hard against the wall and tries inhale after inhale to pull something into her lungs. 

“Parker?” Amy asks. 

She shakes her head almost violently, wiggles her shoulder out from under Amy’s hand because it suddenly burns. 

Amy looks predictably concerned but takes a slow step back. “I’ll, uh… how about I close up and, uh…?” 

They shouldn’t close, they’ll miss the dinner rush. Though, maybe they should. Hardison swears by that article he read about exclusivity driving perceived quality in the upper echelons of the restaurant industry. But Eliot had rolled his eyes and insisted it was bullshit and they were a brewpub, they should be focusing on more than just perceived quality. And back and forth and back and forth, but they had never actually decided on anything because she had slid across the room and given Hardison the hearty nudge he needed to give up pretense and just kiss him.

So she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what to do, because it had never mattered to her, what mattered was wrapping her arms around Hardison and flattening herself against his back, being as close as she could as they loved each other, like warming her hands in front of a fireplace. 

She doesn’t know what to do and the air is still gone. 

Amy makes a tactful retreat with Chicken Parm, taking the first aid kit and probably moving to put it back in its little corner in the kitchen. Before she gets back, Parker scrambles back into the vents, follows them up to the apartment, and settles in the corner, peering down into the living room, towards the front door, and waits. 

—

It had started with Hardison. 

Or maybe it had started with her. With her feeling something for the first time in years. With her following her simple feedback loop of want and take, until suddenly what she wanted was to curl into bed with him and sleep against his side. 

And then Eliot, and a brand new plethora of configurations for them. (It had been a long long time before Sophie had had to sit her down and gently explain that when people said ‘sleeping together' they meant sex, because Parker couldn’t conceive of something more intimate to do with someone in bed besides sleep.) It was nice. She liked it most nights, and they had each other for the nights she didn’t. 

The problem was Portland. And living together, probably. 

In Boston, they had had their places before they were a thing, so they kept their places and could stay separate some nights. 

But not in Portland. Now it was their apartment. With all their stuff, with this presumption that this is where they slept every night, that this was home. 

It was home. It had more comforts and more love than any other place she’d ever called home before. 

But home really always meant one thing for her: Bunny. 

She had a lot of safehouses, she slept a lot of places, she was scattered across states and countries and continents, but she would always come back to whatever place she had secured for Bunny, that was home, that was where she planned, where she slept best, where she kept her softest pajamas and the first diamond she ever stole and the slowly yellowing photo of her as a toddler in a daisy-patterned onesie that has somehow shuffled through life with her in hoodie pockets and the bottoms of go bags. 

Home means Bunny on the bed when she’s not there and Bunny in the bed, under the covers with her when she’s going to sleep. And now… home also means Nate and Sophie and Hardison and Eliot, their big wall of screens, orange soda in the fridge, fancy cast-iron pans in the cabinets. But it’s been separate. Team home and her home. 

She doesn’t have another place in Portland though. It’s just the apartment, and it’s not just hers. It’s theirs. 

So she folds her pajamas in the drawer even though these days she mostly steals Hardison’s nice silk ones or Eliot’s worn ratty t-shirts. She places her diamond in the high-tech vault that Hardison built himself with her insight, so complex, even Hardy couldn’t crack it. And she lets Eliot and Hardison stare at her photo, all wide eyes and soft coo-y noises and gentle reverential touches to the paper and to her. (She explains how it’s basically indestructible, once survived a swim through the Seine with her without so much as smudging, and they agree to hang it on the fridge beneath a McRory’s magnet. She pretends not to see Eliot smile every time he passes it.)

And she sets Bunny on the California King in the big bedroom. 

Hardison takes it in stride. “Cute,” he says with an easy smile. “Does it have a name?”

“No, nothing,” she says quickly, shrugging. “I dunno. Bunny, I guess.” 

Eliot shoots her a look but doesn’t ask any questions. 

For some reason though, four bodies in the bed are more complicated than three. The boys move a lot in their sleep. Compared to her she thinks everyone probably moves a lot, since she’s trained herself to sleep anywhere, holding any position. But they always wake up a little differently than when they fall asleep, moved around, reconfigured, shuffled around like Nate’s three-card monte. 

And when she wakes up, tucked up against Hardison’s shoulder, she can’t find Bunny and feels a panic so sharp in her chest she gasps out loud. 

It’s a blur of frantic searching after that, waking Hardison and Eliot and she goes, tearing up the sheets and pushing around all the limbs in the way, yanking pillows up and tossing them off the side until she finally finds Bunny, slightly smushed along the edge of the mattress. The relief is crisp and sweet and she tugs Bunny carefully free and to her chest. 

“Elbow,” Hardison wheezes and nudges her gently back to her side of the bed. “Oof, that’s a way to wake up, I guess.”

“Jesus, Parker,” Eliot grumbles, rubbing a knuckle into his eye and grimacing at the pillows on the floor. “Don’t you think the rabbit’s a little fucking weird?”

It shudders right through her, and she hurts her teeth, digging her nails into her fists. 

“Well,” she splutters, pressing Bunny tight into her chest. “I’m weird, Eliot.”

He huffs out a tired breath and lets his hand drop from his face. She makes a tactical retreat. 

The next three nights she sleeps in the vents with Bunny. It’s not exactly comfortable, but it’s far from the worst place she’s ever slept. The boys sleep like shit, too, which is a sad sort of consolation prize from this dumb little game. 

Nate and Sophie notice and give them all reproachful looks from time to time when the thread of tension becomes too palpable in the room. But they don’t say anything. To her at least. They might have had some input in the eventual olive branch, breakfast for dinner that Eliot makes even though he has a thing about meal distinctions and carbs after sundown.

Eliot touches her shoulder while he’s putting the food on the table and she leans into it hard for a second. 

“Okay,” Hardison says in between bites, like it’s all so casual and easy. “So we strategize, right?”

Eliot sighs deeply, squinting at him. “This ain’t one of your computer games, Hardison.”

“Man, I know that, I’m just saying–”

“Four bodies is too many,” she says definitively. “Too much smushing.”

“Does it have to be four?” Hardison asks slowly. 

“No, I just–”

“Cuz I don’t remember you sleepin’ with a stuffed animal before,” Eliot adds, gentle but in a way that’s intentional. 

She focuses hard on the plate of pancakes. 

“She stays at home,” she says. “I sleep with her when I’m home.” 

She stares at her plate for an additional second before sneaking little glances at them, Hardison first because his face is open and soft and safe. His eyebrows quirk slightly, like he’s puzzling something over carefully, but that’s not a problem. Explaining this to him isn’t the problem, whatever she’s thrown at him over the years, he’s always been able to catch it, take it in stride, and keep their fragile little ball rolling. She swallows and glances over at Eliot, who meets her gaze, unblinking and unflinching. 

And he can probably read everything else she doesn’t know what to say. That this is a physical manifestation of her past. Like his dog tags, like the hard drive Hardison keeps in his own special safe with the answers to all the questions they never ask him about his past. This is her laid bare, and if it doesn’t fit here with them, then she doesn’t fit. 

She wants it to fit. 

Eliot and Hardison glance at each other, have some small conversation in the light tilt of their heads. 

“Alright,” Eliot says. 

“We might have something,” Hardison offers. 

Something is halfway between a shelf and a cubby, built carefully but quickly into the headboard by the boys after dinner. 

“This work?” Hardison checks in a couple of times, gesturing fancily to the space of shelf-cubby. She tilts her head like she’s considering it, like she isn’t warm all the way to her core by them, by them doing this. And by the little pillow they make out of spare stuffing from one of Hardison’s fancy pillows and a tattered torn t-shirt of Eliot’s. 

Bunny gets set carefully in the perch, and Parker settles into their bed, guided slowly to the middle, Hardison and Eliot brushing up against her, close but still giving her enough space to breathe. 

“No more sleeping in the vents,” Eliot grumbles in the dark. 

“Yeah, girl, it’s dusty as hell in there, you’ll mess up your lungs,” Hardison says with a light shudder. 

“You don’t gotta sleep alone,” Eliot clarifies. He kisses the side of her head firmly, and Hardison takes her hand and squeezes. 

“And we got a nice as hell guest room,” Hardison adds, yawning deeply. “The couch ain’t too shabby either. Lots of comfortable places for you to sleep, with whoever you want.” 

She nods, even though it’s dark, even though they’re dropping off. It’s enough that she knows, there’s a lot of places for her to sleep. 

She falls asleep in her bed, in her home. 

—

The air flow in the vents dries her slowly and leaves her cold. The water from the river is sticky on her skin, makes her feel stiff and achy as it all evaporated. Her hair is less stringy, more frizzy, and the clothes she still has are rough against her skin. 

She crawls out, slow and dazed, to an apartment that’s quiet and empty and dark. Her slacks still leave an errant drip or two along the hardwood. She gets to the bedroom and strips them off, kicking them into the corner and dropping her shirt there afterward. 

Goosebumps rise along her arms. Her eyes bounce off the room, the amassed collection of their lives along the nightstands and bookshelves and the headboard cubby-shelf, before she can’t look at it anymore. She hurries across the rest of the room and slips beneath the sheets. They’re too cool, hardly warm her up even as she pulls them up to her ears. 

And the bed is too big. No matter where she tries to settle there’s far too much space on every side of her, an endless abyss of space, an empty vacuum pulling at her edges. It’s not a bed meant for one person. 

She’s not someone used to sleeping alone anymore.

She squeezes her eyes shut as tight as she can, and digs her fingers hard into her sides, every muscle in her body tensed until she finally hits that wall, until she can’t hold herself awake any longer, until her exhaustion crashes over her like a wave and drags her down and under.

Chapter Text

She wakes up to the sound of footsteps in the living room. 

Her heart skips a beat like skipping a step, that sudden rush of adrenaline in her veins, because she should have been up by the time there were footsteps in the hall, by the sound of the apartment door being opened. She’s too used to feeling safe. She’s too used to relying on Eliot’s keen senses to wake him up, which would wake her up, so she could poke Hardison in the face until he woke up too. 

Fuck. 

What did she use to do when she was on her own? 

She rolls off the side of the bed away from the door, grabbing the knife Eliot keeps stashed under the mattress and gripping it tight. There’s a tablet on the nightstand that she slips to her lap as well, flicking quickly over to the app Hardison set up with the security cams. 

Two silhouetted figures in the dark, making their way across the room, calmly weaving around the couch, freezing when they spot something on the floor, water or blood or mud that she’s tracked over the carpet last night. 

Hardison hates when there’s dirt in the house, and hates when there’s blood anywhere. Eliot would hate it, too since he’s the one who’ll probably have to clean it up. Nobody ever taught her how to use a mop and Hardison would complain about the cleaning spray bothering his sinuses. 

The scene plays out right before her eyes before the people on the screen start moving again and she finally catches a glimpse of their grim wreaked faces. The illusion pops like a balloon, one terrible deafening noise that she has to grit her teeth through. She drops the tablet back down to the bed but keeps a loose hold on the knife as she tiptoes towards the door because there are grooves worn into the handle, grooves in the shape of Eliot’s fingers and it’s the closest she can get right now to holding his hand. 

Nate doesn’t seem too surprised to see her or the knife when she opens the door and slips out into the room. Sophie does, or at least puts on her little show of it, breathing a shaky, “Oh, thank God,” before she clasps her hands over her mouth. 

She knew she had to come out here, but now that she is, now that she’s looking at them and feeling that crack right down the centerline of everything they’re supposed to be, feeling the fact that there’s supposed to be two more people in this room right now, feeling that this is all wrong, she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do. She knows that Nate and Sophie are a safety net as sure as Hardison and Eliot, knows that they are family, any of them, in any configuration, knows that this should be good, that this means she isn’t alone, not really, not like before. 

But it doesn’t feel like that. It doesn’t feel like any sort of relief the way it really should.

She steps forward again and lets Sophie march the rest of the way over and hug her. 

“Oh, Parker,” she says like her heart is breaking. Her shaky hand combs through Parker’s hair loosely, and it’s meant to be comforting, it’s meant to be for her benefit, she knows that, she knows now about hugs and strokes and comfort the way she never ever had before, and how it’s just people trying desperately to tell you without words that you’re not alone. But it doesn’t make her feel better, it seeps into her stomach like a poison. 

She realizes why, as she stares over Sophie’s shoulder at Nate and can’t look away. He stares back at her, his eyes wide, his jaw tight. He looks like he’s drunk, or no, like he used to right before he would get drunk, really drunk. He looks like he used to five years ago. Like someone broken, someone beaten down by the world. Like someone who has lost it all. Like how she probably looks right now. 

And that’s the problem. They’re here. And gone is any plausible deniability, any ability to play pretend, any shred of hope that this isn’t happening. 

They’re a mirror of the grief she doesn’t want to touch just yet. She’s standing on the edge of her own ruin. Or worse, she’s already falling. And with them here, she can finally see the ground.

“I’m so sorry, darling,” Sophie breathes, voice choked. And maybe this hug was for her because if Sophie wasn’t holding her, her knees would give right out. 

—

She’s not used to her body being in pain. It’s different than the general soreness that comes from a particularly challenging heist. It’s all sharp specifical spaces of discomfort, a catalogue of places she was hit. On her cheek, her shoulder, her side where her ribs feel bruised. Her knuckles spit and bloodied. 

But it doesn’t really matter because she trudges back into Nate’s apartment and Hardison and Eliot are right there with her, worse for wear but fine. 

The job had gone wrong. Sort of. The job usually goes wrong on the way to going right so she doesn’t think it counts. But this job, in particular, had gone scary wrong. Eliot had gone down hard in the fight while watching Hardison’s back, and she had been shaking a little, listening to it over the comm and having to picture the two of them in danger, real bad danger. 

Her gut had rebelled against following through with her side of the con while all of that was going on, while something terrible could be happening to Hardison and Eliot, so she threw Nate’s plan out the window and ran for them instead. Her brain felt empty and electric, not thinking just moving as she yanked the guys away from Eliot on the ground, took up the fight on her own to keep them away from him and away from the server room door Hardison was behind. 

It was messy and fuzzy with adrenaline and she felt this thin precipice she was dancing on, felt the razor's edge of taking on more than she can chew, of starting a fight she didn’t know how to finish, but she couldn’t stop and couldn’t run. Eliot and Hardison were behind her, needing her. So despite all the risk and the fear and the moments where the balance would shift ever so slightly against her, she didn’t run, she planted and took the hurt and swung and kicked and shoved back until they were on the ground. 

(She wondered if this is what Eliot feels, if this was the exact measure of how it felt for Eliot to love them, fighting, protecting, love birthing fear and anger and violence. Warmth turned up hot and heavy.)

The rest is a relieved blur, once the fight is over. There are hurts, all over, but they make it out, worse for wear but whole and victorious. 

Hardison dotes on her in that way of his. It used to be something so overwhelming for her, she didn’t know how to even process the whole of Hardison’s heart when it was thrust at her like this, how to trust it, how to trust herself with it. Now, as he brings her ice packs and blankets and chocolates, as he peppers kisses on her and rubs her back and holds her close on the couch, she melts under his attention, she drifts on the wave of his endless care. 

Eliot, after checking her over three whole times with an inscrutable look on his face, goes off to lick his own wounds in private. He needs to do that sometimes. Hardison has gotten better at not pushing about it and has her this time to double down all his energy onto, so she’s not too worried. 

When she wakes up from a nap, tucked neatly into the couch under a blanket that smells like Hardison and popcorn, Eliot’s sitting in the armchair watching her. She grins at him as she sits up, and his mouth twitches but he doesn’t smile back. 

She frowns. “What?”

“That was stupid,” he says gruffly. “Don’t do it again.”

She crosses her arms tightly over her chest. “I knew what I was doing.”

He shakes his head. “No, Parker,” he says. He leans forward, reaching his hand out to brush a thumb over the bruise on her cheek, so light she almost doubts his skin actually touches hers. “You were supposed to be trailing the mark. And there was a window in the server room, you could’ve pulled Hardison out through there. You weren’t thinking.”

Her forehead wrinkles. “I was,” she protests and feels a million other protests and defenses rise up in her throat. But she bites down on them and looks up from her hands fisted on her lap to see Eliot, and see Eliot, past his own furrowed brow and grumpy frown. “I wasn’t just trying to help Hardison.”

“I didn’t need help,” he insists. “I was fine.”

“They shot you with a horse tranquilizer,” she shoots back. 

“Ain’t the first time,” he says, hackles raising. “I was fine.”

They could argue about this, about what constitutes fine. But what it really comes down to is whether or not Eliot could have handled it. She doesn’t want to argue that. She trusts Eliot, that he knows whether or not he could have handled it, that he wouldn’t lie to her now after the fact for the sake of something as stupid as pride. So she doesn’t try to argue any of that, she just exhales slowly and lets her eyes fall to an absent point on his chest. 

“I was scared,” she admits, through a clenched jaw that even still balks at being this vulnerable with her words. “You… you guys scared me.”

It seems to catch him off guard, that she’s not going to argue him on it. He makes a soft noise, sliding off his chair to kneel in front of her. His hands land gentle but heavy on her knees. 

“Sorry ‘bout that, sweetheart,” he says, each word careful because he doesn’t lie to her but he’s not really sorry. She’s not really asking him to be. They do scary things. She’s used to it most of the time. But it’s harder now that they are something. Sometimes she just wants to wrap them up in packing paper like they’re fragile delicate artifacts and place them carefully in a hidden corner of one of her warehouses where they won’t be stolen or broken or seen. 

The urge is stronger with Hardison, but she felt it for Eliot today too. 

She lets her hand slide onto his, stares down at the flex of his fingers, the fresh bruises against his knuckles that match hers. 

“I don’t want anything to happen to you,” she says. But that’s a given. She needs more. “You can’t die or anything like that. Alec needs you.” She exhales shakily. “And I need you.”

Eliot brings her hand up slow, pressing his mouth to her knuckles.

“I won’t die,” he says, even though it’s not true. They’ll all die one day. But he winks at her and draws his fingers in an X over his heart, an impossible promise just for her that she knows he’ll find a way to keep, just like all the other impossible things he does for her. 

She slips off the edge of the couch and drops onto Eliot’s lap, hiding her face against the warm curve of his neck where she can feel his pulse point against her nose. 

“Thank you, Parker,” he says, even though she can tell he still wants to insist that he was fine and that he could have won the fight easily and that actually he’s built up an immunity to horse tranquilizers. His hand is big and warm as it spans her lower back, as he holds her. 

“You’re welcome,” she says, and smiles against the collar of his shirt when he grumbles. 

—

Nate and Sophie watch her with emotions she’s all too familiar with being regarded with, nervousness, concern, confusion. 

She flits absently around the room, not wanting to sit on the couch (too empty, too empty, too empty), not wanting to sit on the floor, not wanting to stand, not wanting to look at them, but not not wanting to look at them just in case they disappear too. 

Disappear. It’s a gentler word. It’s not the truth. She never used to do that, never used to do that people thing of hiding the hard truth in something soft. She would have said it four years ago. Die. They didn’t disappear, they died. 

But die is such a harsh word. It pulls at her throat, it bites at her teeth. Why would they make the word so sharp anyway? 

Nate gets bored of watching her first. He gets up and heads to the kitchen. Sophie seems to have some deep reserves of nervousness she’s been saving up for this moment. Her eyes— wet, she hasn’t stopped crying but it’s something she’s doing idly, like she isn’t even aware— track Parker as she closes the window blinds and moves back over to stand by the TV for a second before she catches a glimpse of her reflection in the dark screen, sees the whole of the room behind her and the too few people in it before she has to move again. 

Nate comes back to the couch with a drink in his hand and they don’t say anything, none of them. 

Nobody says anything at all. 

They’re waiting for her. She knows it. That’s the last thing that was said. “Parker, do you want to talk about it?” And she had wanted to talk about it, but also she didn’t want to talk about it at all or ever. She wanted to open her mouth and scream until she couldn’t anymore, but the thought of making a single noise made her head pound. 

She doesn’t know what to do.

She drops to the floor, curling up tight, down where for a second the terrible things in the air can’t even reach her. She breathes in and breathes out, and for a second can hear the way Hardison’s breaths would match hers exactly, an old comforting habit neither of them could shake. She wonders if it’s real or not, that phantom sound. She wonders if ghosts are real, if Eliot and Hardison will haunt her. 

She wants them to haunt her. 

“Please God, let them haunt me,” she mouths, low and silent, for herself. And for God, if there is one. She never really believed in that. She still doesn’t think she does, she just needs to give a name to the big cold universe that she’s trying to bargain with. 

She gets caught on the thought though, and suddenly knows what to say. 

“Where are they?” she asks Nate, looking up to meet his eyes. Her voice feels and sounds like broken glass. 

“State police have custody of the bodies,” he says clinically. Sophie inhales sharply, stifling her own small sob, but it’s easier to hear it like that for Parker. 

“That’s not what I meant,” she says. 

“We’ll have to get them back,” Sophie says fiercely. Parker starts for a second, because she thinks maybe that’s what she meant, or where she was heading. “We have those FBI identities, correct? From earlier? We need to— we have to—” The bodies. She’s talking about the bodies.

“Calls,” Nate says, with the resignation of someone who’s done this before. “There are people we need to call. Family.”

We’re their family , Parker wants to say, or maybe scream. I’m their family. I’m theirs. I shouldn’t be here. I should be with them. 

“That’s not what I meant,” she says again, a little louder. “Where are they?” 

Sophie looks Concerned. Like she has a bunch of slow leading questions to figure out what’s going on in Parker’s head and it’s usually helpful because usually Parker doesn’t know what she’s trying to say when she’s making everyone else confused, but she knows what she’s asking right now. She goes back to staring at Nate and waits for him to get it. 

“I don’t know, Parker,” he says. 

But that’s not the answer she wants to hear. 

“You were a priest,” she says accusingly. 

“I was never really a—” He stops with a sigh. 

“Shouldn't you know?” she asks, feeling an impotent sort of anger rising in her chest, not at Nate, not at anybody, maybe not even at herself. “I-isn’t that the point?”

“I don’t know, Parker,” he says, again, slower, and finishes off the rest of his drink. “Nobody knows.”

“But… faith,” she says. “You said people have faith.”

“That’s not the same thing as knowing,” he says with a shrug. “Nobody knows.”

That’s not good enough. That’s not an answer.

“I don’t… I don’t care,” she says. “It doesn’t matter where they are, it doesn't matter if it’s… if they’re…” She gestures wildly with her hands and wonders if they can read the rest of it. Heaven, hell, whatever else there is. The light in Hardison’s eyes when he smiled that was so bright she used to think it was his soul because what else could shine like that. The way Eliot called her angel ever so often, the look on his face when he said she and Hardison were heaven. 

She doesn’t know the worst thing he ever did. She never asked, ever. But now she wishes she had, if knowing will just help them do some magical calculus that can tell her exactly where he is right now. 

“I don’t care,” she says, not even to Nate anymore, just to whatever is out there. “It doesn’t change anything. I just need to be there. I just…”

She has to stop talking because she can’t really breathe anymore. There’s a ringing in her ears and her whole body still aches from the crash. Her chest is too tight. She listens for Hardison’s breath, pleads for it, for a sign, for a ghost, but nothing comes. 

Except. 

Nate leans forward and drops his hand to her knee. It looks like an uncomfortable angle for him, and even still, even now all these years later, he still so rarely touches them. He still looks as destroyed as she feels, but he’s touching her knee just barely and she looks over at Sophie, who’s still crying but sits as tall as ever even in all their grief, and she remembers that she still has some people to breathe for. 

So she does. 

“They were mine,” she whispers after a moment. It’s almost a confession. They were never really hiding their relationship, but they never said anything about it either. She didn’t think it ever needed to be said before, but it’s different now. She does need to say it. “Nobody’s ever been mine before. Not like that. Not even a little. But they were mine.”

Sophie nods, and Nate hangs his head. 

I was theirs , she should add. Except that’s wrong. She’s not dead. I am theirs.

That won’t change. 

For better or worse, they agreed to change together. They promised. Maybe it was an impossible promise, but she’s the one who’s left to keep it. 

And she’s choosing better. 

—

She pretends to be sleepy after the movie so Eliot can carry her up the stairs. 

It makes him feel good, useful, she can tell from the line of his shoulders. She hadn’t liked it for the opposite reasons, it made her feel bad and useless, her cast leg swinging out aimlessly, her ropes hanging sad and droopy from the ceiling. She wanted to prove that she was fine, that she could pull herself up her ropes and move around just fine. 

But that doesn’t feel like as much of a question now, after stopping a kidnapping mostly by herself and down a leg. 

He puts her down on a stool at the kitchen island, but the second he moves around to the stove she hops up to sit on the counter. He rolls his eyes but doesn’t protest. 

“What are you doing?” she asks as he opens the fridge. 

“Girl, don’t get him started,” Hardison says. He shuffles up to the counter, and she spreads her legs so he can settle between them. His hands drop easily to her waist. She breathes in and then out and he matches her. “He sweet-talked the chef at this one restaurant we were at for some fancy dessert recipe and hasn’t shut about it since.”

“I mentioned it two times,” Eliot protests, pots clanging as he searches through the cabinet. 

“I think he’s been waiting to make it for you,” Hardison whispers into her ear. “We had the nicest hotel kitchen the internet could find and he still wanted to wait.”

She has to hide her face against Hardison’s for a second because it feels sunburn hot.

“So Japan was fun?” she asks slowly when her stomach stops fluttering. 

“Stop fishing, Parker,” Eliot says fondly. 

She frowns, retracing the conversation in her mind carefully. 

“He means you don’t gotta talk around it,” Hardison says, kissing her cheek. “Yes, we missed you.”

“Oh,” she says, ducking her head so Hardison can kiss her forehead too. That was the question she was trying to ask, under it all. It’s weird, that she’d gotten better at grifting all while they’d gotten better at reading her. 

“You gonna make us fish too?” Hardison asks with a big bright grin. 

“I missed you,” she says. Her brow furrows. “Obviously I missed you.”

Hardison’s thumbs rub slow circles on her sides, and he kisses a neat little line down her nose to her mouth. She has to rest her hands on his wrists for balance, pressing forward until her chest is tight against his.

She tries to melt into him, but her brain is still buzzy. 

“You okay, baby girl?” Hardison asks. His forehead bumps softly against hers. 

She shrugs. “I dunno,” she says and feels Eliot’s eyes on her back, feels the air shift as he steps closer to them. “I don’t like being alone anymore. I used to. It’s weird.”

It had been okay, in the end. There were other people, Amy and all the people in the brewpub and they felt real to her in a way that was new. She made a friend, not even as Alice, just as her, and it didn’t feel like she was alone anymore. And it’s good, that she’s like this now, that people feel real now. But having somebody to talk to didn’t use to matter and now it did. 

Hardison nods against her. “Makes sense,” he says. “That it would feel weird. You know, I used to hate sharing snacks, once I could I would just always buy my own shit, but…” He grins goofily. “With y’all it doesn’t bother me at all. But old habits die hard.”

It’s not really the same, she knows. Her thing is different, bigger, because she liked being alone too much, because she made herself so alone that other people stopped feeling real. But it helps that he puts it like that, like it’s the same as something smaller. 

Eliot doesn’t offer his own confession. He just leans up against the counter behind her, his elbow pressed next to her hip. 

“I think… I think I need you more than you need me,” she says, and then quickly closes her eyes because she’s not sure where that even came from, but it’s somewhere too close to her heart and soul. It’s too real.

Eliot hums consideringly and brushes a light kiss on the back of her neck. 

“We missed you every second, darlin,” he says. His hand closes around her hip, Hardison’s slips up to cup her cheek. 

“I think…” Hardison says slowly. “That maybe you underestimate how much we need you, Parker.”

“I know you do,” she mutters, her hands twisting in her lap. They need her. She’s their thief. They love her. She knows that.

“It’s all new for me too,” he continues. “And I’ve never done this before either. I’ve never loved anybody the way I love you two.”

She feels Eliot nod behind her. 

“It’s new,” he agrees. “And it’s a lot.”

It’s everything. 

“We feel it, too,” Hardison assures her. “You’re not alone in this, baby.”

“You always know what to say,” she whispers. “You always take care of me.” She can still take care of herself, she can take care of herself better than ever actually. But she knows now what it’s like to have them do it.

Eliot rests his forehead against the back of her shoulder. “Always will.”

Hardison tilts his head, his fingers brushing against her hair in a way that tells her he knows that’s not the heart of this, that’s not what she’s really worried about. But she doesn’t want to say it. 

She kisses the corner of his mouth and reaches out to wrap her arms around his waist and pull him in closer to her so he can’t read it in her eyes. 

He doesn’t ask, just holds her, leaning his head against hers. “Always.”

And she knows. She trusts them. But just like nobody ever took care of her, nobody ever taught her how to take care of anyone else. She doesn't know how she can possibly make them feel the way they make her feel. And selfishly, she hopes they never notice. Or else she hopes she can learn how before they do.

—

It’s been a while since she’s stolen something all by herself. The past few years it’s just been smart to get any info the rest of the team had on an exhibit or artifact or guard rotation pattern before heading off on a heist. 

And unlike Wakefield, there’s no safety net this time, nobody would be coming to help her. 

This is dangerous. This is reckless. She’s barely prepared, she has no rundown, no slideshow, no information, there are no backup plans or escape routes. 

But it doesn’t matter. 

“They’re ours,” she whispers to Bunny in defensive explanation as she messily shovels things into a backpack. 

She’s packing stupid. Sure, she gets the important things, tablets and phones and travel safe rigging, but then she goes a little crazy, grabs Eliot’s sweatpants and Hardison’s socks and all of Eliot’s hair ties and Hardison’s retainer and their alarm clock. And the blue felt box in the back of the underwear drawer. 

She throws the bag over her shoulders and looks around the bedroom, empty and quiet and wrong for the second night in a row because it’s without them. She’s gonna fix it though. 

Nate is sitting at the kitchen table, spinning a drink between his hands. He doesn’t look up at her when she comes in, like he’s not surprised, like he’s been waiting. 

“We can’t help you with this one,” he says. 

“I know.” She wasn’t expecting it. She wouldn’t want to ask that of them anyway. 

“I don’t…” he starts and runs a hand down his face. “I may not have been a priest but, uh, I was still raised Catholic, Parker, and there are some things I don’t think I can—" He shakes his head. 

She nods. “I know,” she says again. “I can do it.”

Nate meets her eyes and she recognizes something in that look, that acknowledgment he’s been giving lately, like tossing her the keys to the car, like opening the driver’s side door. 

“I’m so sorry,” he says. She almost smiles. She doesn’t think she’s ever heard Nate apologize before, not so plainly. It, more than the drinks or the grief on his face, is what really tells her how much he’s hurting right now. He plans for everything, even this in his own way. She’s sure somewhere in the back of his head, he had a plan X: lose the boys, drink yourself to death. 

“I’m gonna get them back,” she says. Because that’s what matters. That’s her plan. Plan A: get them back. Plan B: get them fucking back. 

He nods solemnly. 

She has more questions. About plans, about faith, about God, about things he definitely doesn’t have the answers to. But he’s listing to the side and her flight is leaving soon. So she hikes her backpack up and turns to the door. 

“Parker,” he calls after her. “You come back, okay? No matter what happens… come back home. Please.”

She won’t come home without them. It won't be home without them. 

But she nods anyway. She won’t fail. She won’t. But it’s nice to know she won’t be alone.