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Against Eliot's will, Parker’s convinced him to let her paint his nails. She’s gotten better at it—practiced on herself—first as part of a con, because she had to play a girly-girl type and Sophie was occupied and couldn’t help, but later on because she thought the colors were neat. Black is her own color of choice, but for Eliot she’s chosen a deep blueish color from her rapidly-growing collection of nail polish, probably stolen.
“To bring out your eyes,” Parker tells him, half matter-of-fact, half mischievous. Hardison snorts out a laugh, momentarily distracted from whatever computer game he’s playing to catch Eliot’s eye before spinning his chair back around.
Eliot grumbles, but gives in, puts his hands down on the dining room table and lets Parker have at it. First she pushes his cuticles back, then she takes a file to his nails. It’s not like his nails are messy; he’s fastidious about keeping himself clean and well-groomed, but for Parker it’s important that all the steps are in the right order, so that means cuticles, filing, and then and only then painting.
Eliot is just humoring her. God knows he wouldn’t paint his own nails. But he’s not an insecure kid, he’s an adult man and he’s a little more flexible about what that all means, even if he wouldn’t have been caught dead with colorful nails a decade or two ago. But Parker wanted to practice on someone, and she’d learned from experience that Hardison was too impatient to let the paint dry—give it ten, twenty seconds and he’d accidentally type something, or tap something, or fish in the fridge for a snack, and bam, nails ruined. So Eliot’s the backup. He’s fine with it. He’ll probably wipe it off in a day or two anyway. No harm done.
Parker’s silent and laser-focused as she applies the color to his nails. Her bangs fall in her face, and Eliot notices and immediately represses the impulse to tuck her hair behind her ear. Just to help her out. Doesn’t mean anything. She’s got it, of course, pausing a second later to fix it back into place, and Eliot glances away. It’s true, lately he’s struggled to play his long-held part of big brother to his younger teammates, for confusing reasons. He tells himself, with growing frequency, that it’s just because things are changing, they’re growing up, they don’t need him the same way anymore. Of course he’s going to have to adjust too, figure out how they all fit. If not big brother, then what? It’s more than friend, more than teammate or partner. More than he could’ve imagined, back before this all started.
#
Of course he’d had no way of knowing, way back then, what the future held. Back before he grew his hair out and turned his back on everything he thought he knew. Before everything changed. He was so goddamned optimistic then—confident, patriotic, whatever—and now, all of that seems like an alien thing to him. He saw too much. He grew up.
Still, it’s all a part of him. It’s like he was poured into that mold, and even if the past decades shaped him into something else, his original form is there—phantom limbs on an all-new person. He remembers it all like it’s yesterday. Helping his dad in the hardware store. Going to church on Sundays, Bible in his hand. Learning to cook—and, most important to him at the time, how to flirt with the girls who visited the store, went to church, went to the same school. He’d gotten pretty damn good at it too, had a reputation even in high school.
These days it’s just another skill on his list, his ruthlessly effective charm—and he weaponizes it just as often as he uses it just for himself. More, actually. Embarrassingly, since they parted ways with Nate and Sophie, Eliot has not picked up a single woman, though he’s very nearly gone through with it a couple of times. And every time, he’s realized his heart wasn’t in it, made some excuse, and left, feeling like an asshole—gone back to the apartment he shares with Parker and Hardison, the bedroom that’s across from theirs, and stared at the ceiling, and wondered what the fuck was wrong with him.
#
“There,” Parker says, her black-painted nail scraping a blue smudge off the side of Eliot’s thumb, “all done. Now let it dry.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he grumbles, lifting his hands to look at her work—really good, clean and even, and he’s dated enough models to know what it’s supposed to look like. He grunts, pushes his chair back, and stands up.
Hardison rolls up to him in his swivel chair, blocking his way. “Lemme see,” he insists, tugging on Eliot’s wrist, yanking him over. He inspects Eliot’s hand, up-close and personal in a way that would make Eliot uncomfortable if it were literally any other man. “Pretty good,” he says to Eliot, before calling after Parker, “Babe, you’re gettin’ real good at this.”
“Practice makes perfect,” Parker says, sidling up between them and clapping a hand on both their backs, a self-satisfied smirk on her face. “Next time I wanna try a pattern. Sometimes they do polka-dots and stripes and stuff.”
“Parker, you are not going to give me polka-dots,” Eliot protests, but it’s half-hearted. It’s whatever, really, if it’s something Parker wants.
#
At a museum fundraiser that weekend, Eliot’s still sporting the blue nail polish, though some of it’s chipped—he does too much cooking and dish-washing to keep it pristine. He hasn’t seen Parker for two days because their roles in this week’s con didn’t require face-to-face contact, hasn’t heard her voice since their check-in over comms that morning. He saw Hardison yesterday to pass on a hard drive, sometimes talks to him through his earpiece, but it’s all work stuff. Otherwise it’s been a blur of smooth-talking curators and patrons, working the higher-ups because—as much as Parker and Hardison have improved—Eliot’s still the best grifter among them. It’s fine, even though he wants nothing more than to get out of this suit and tie and douchebag intellectual persona.
He could’ve taken the nail polish off. Probably should’ve. But it’s not like “Dr. Clayton Weiss”—field archaeologist and antiquities expert—isn’t enough of a freak to paint his own nails, right? And he doesn’t want to destroy Parker's hard work just like that. It’s part of his cover now, and if anyone thinks it’s weird, they’ll think it’s Weiss who’s weird, and Eliot couldn’t care less about that.
Because they’re good at what they do, and because for once this job is straightforward, he’s thinking he might get time tonight to actually go out and meet someone. Take his mind off the surprising difficulties of transitioning from a team of five to a team of three, and think about something else for an evening other than Parker and Hardison: watching out for them, taking care of them, cooking for them and cleaning up after them, watching from the sidelines as their relationship blossoms and they move seamlessly from the honeymoon phase to the comfortable phase. The two of them were always going to be good at being together—Eliot predicted it long before anyone else did, though he kept it to himself—and if it hurts something deep inside him that Nate and Sophie have each other, and Parker and Hardison have each other, and it’s Eliot who's the odd fifth man out, well, he doesn’t let on.
For years he was the lone wolf; he can keep doing it. He can keep up his end of the bargain—Parker and Hardison will forever be safe under his watch—and get nothing back other than the pleasure of their company and the pleasure of working jobs with the two best people he knows. So he’ll go pick up a beautiful, intelligent woman tonight, who cannot and will not know who Eliot truly is, and if he’s a little resentful that he’s out of options for a romantic partner who really understands him—well, it’s just life. Luck of the draw. Whatever.
Cue the last-minute catastrophe and the last-minute Plan B. The chance that he’ll have time or energy to go out tonight is dwindling. Some assistant curator shows her hand, she’s actually a Antiquities Trafficking Unit mole and reported the strange “Dr. Weiss” to her higher-ups, leading to a whole chain of events that culminates in Parker high-wiring it out of the top floor of the museum to a building on the opposite side, and Eliot cursing under his breath and ziplining after her. They cut the line and race down to where Hardison’s waiting, covers explosively blown.
Fortunately, Plan B was in effect as soon as Plan A fell apart, and Hardison needs only to put on a janitor’s uniform and retrieve the 4th century Etruscan statue from its hiding place in the museum basement before the Antiquities Trafficking Unit arrives in full force and realizes the statue on display is a fake.
It takes some time—first Parker and Eliot relocate to their nearby safehouse since the place is crawling with cops and Hardison’s the only one who hasn’t shown his face—and Parker paces the floor while Eliot sits at the table and works through it in his head. Night is falling outside, and Eliot’s troubled. What gave him away? Or was the assistant curator just more paranoid than he guessed? Sophie would’ve known. Eliot’s still working it out.
Hardison’s voice comes over the comms, and Eliot sits straight up. “I got the package,” Hardison says. “Heading back now.”
Parker’s voice is filled with relief. “No one spotted you?”
“Not a soul, baby. We’re in the clear. But I gotta go the long way around to make sure I didn’t pick up a tail, okay? You don’t have to wait up.”
“I’ll wait up,” Parker says immediately, with conviction, crossing her arms.
Since Parker’s dead-set on staying up, Eliot washes up and goes to the kitchen to fix something for her. He’s not particularly hungry, but she probably will be—the adrenaline crash after a chase like that usually does it to her. Because he knows her, and knows what’s comfort food to her, he fixes mac and cheese and maple-glazed roasted carrots. She likes the boxed mac and cheese, but his is better, plus it’s his mission to make sure she and Hardison eat vegetables at least occasionally.
While it’s baking in the oven, he notices her watching from the doorway, arms still crossed, and turns to her.
“You seem tired,” Parker says after a long moment. Eliot’s about to get defensive, like how could she tell him that when she’s the one who doesn’t eat well without him making her, and runs on pure manic glee and crashes without warning, when he realizes it must be pretty noticeable if she’s the one to point it out. And she’s right, he hasn’t been getting good rest these days, and the sudden lack of Nate and Sophie—ready as they are to strike out on their own—hasn’t been easy.
So he shrugs. “You hungry?”
She nods, so Eliot serves some for both of them and sets the table. Parker washes up and puts her hair in a messy ponytail. They both sit down and start eating, and that’s when Eliot notices a fresh, ugly bruise on Parker’s neck.
His immediate reaction is anger at whoever did it, but he evens out enough to ask calmly, “What happened?”
“Nothing,” she says quickly, through a mouthful of noodles. She swallows and adds, “I had to fight a security guard to get to the window.”
“You should’ve called me sooner,” he mutters, though he knows he was too far away to have stopped it.
“I handled it,” she says, and takes another big bite. “This is really good. Thanks.”
“Eat your carrots,” he says, without any bite to it, because it’s Parker, and he knows by now that she’ll end up doing what she wants anyway, so it’s his job to make the carrots taste so good she actually wants to eat them. To his credit, she takes one bite and a soft dreamy look crosses her features for just an instant. “Maple syrup?” she asks, and he nods. “We should put maple syrup on more things,” she says decisively.
He rolls his eyes and goes to clean up the kitchen.
#
Hardison announces his return with a trumpet fanfare playing on their speakers, maybe something Star Wars, Eliot’s not really sure—but he has the real Etruscan statue and he wasn’t tailed from the museum, so everything’s right with the world again. Parker leaps into his arms and they kiss, and Eliot deliberately looks away and goes to get the warm mac and cheese out of the oven for him. Hardison eats a lot, so Eliot serves him generously.
“Smells amazing,” Hardison says, coming into the kitchen with a huge grin on his face. His smile fades a little when their gazes connect—does he notice he’s tired too?—and he slaps Eliot’s shoulder affectionately. “Go to bed, man, we got it,” he tells him. Eliot looks back at the dishes doubtfully, but it’s true, the two of them are slowly learning how to clean up the kitchen in a way that doesn’t drive him crazy, and a yawn is threatening to overtake him. He nods curtly and traipses off to his room.
He takes a quick hot shower, washes Dr. Clayton Weiss and the rest of the day off him, and goes straight to bed. Maybe he’ll have time to hit the bars tomorrow. Maybe he won’t—maybe Hardison and Parker will need him for something. He dozes off fast, dreaming of priceless artifacts and tall buildings that drop off into nowhere.
#
“Eliot,” Parker says softly. Eliot jolts awake, every muscle tensed and ready for a fight, only for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Parker’s perched on the foot of his bed, her blond hair the brightest thing in the dim room. Must be just past six A.M., barely sunrise, meaning he slept for eight hours, uncharacteristic of him. And Parker’s in his room.
“What is it?” he asks, voice sleep-rough and annoyed. If it’s an emergency, where’s Hardison? Why’s she just sitting there? He sleeps shirtless. This is quickly getting awkward.
“I was just thinking,” she says, picking at his blanket, “this is taking longer than I thought it would, and I’m kind of… running out of patience.”
“What does that mean?” he demands. His mind is racing. Taking longer? What, Leverage? Yesterday’s con? Some plan of hers she’s leaving to him to decipher?
She moves forward on the bed, just a minuscule amount, and he moves backwards in response. “Where’s Hardison?” he asks.
“Asleep.” Her voice is quiet, measured, like she knows exactly what she’s doing even though he’s totally in the dark. “But don’t worry. He knows I’m here. Well, he knows I was going to do it sooner or later. Do you want to go back to sleep? We can do this later.”
“Parker, just get on with it,” he growls. He may not have any idea what she’s going on about, but he’s getting plenty impatient himself, so if she’s waking him up there better be a good reason.
“Okay.” She breathes in and then says, “You like me, right?”
What the fuck, Parker, is his first thought, but it doesn’t quite make it to his mouth, he’s just caught in stupid silence. “What does that mean?” he manages in a low voice. She’s sitting here in—he realizes now as his eyes adjust—in Hardison’s oversized T-shirt, and just Hardison’s oversized T-shirt, on his bed, asking him if he likes her? What is she getting at?
“I like you too,” she persists, “and I have a theory that we’re actually a really well-balanced triangle—and I think it would make me sad if we just didn’t do it because you were scared? You don’t have to give me an answer. But you don’t have to be scared either.”
There’s a moment’s silence, and Eliot’s heart is hammering because he didn’t dare imagine this, not once, not ever. He is good at playing big brother to two annoying teammates who happen to be deeply in love with each other. He is good at being their protector and their bodyguard and their caretaker. But this—this isn’t a role he thought he would be offered. Even if he admitted to himself he wanted it, he wouldn’t get it, so why bother?
“Are you surprised?” Parker asks softly. “Even after everything?”
We stay together and we change together, right? But this—what is this?
“You’re with Hardison,” Eliot says, as evenly as he can. He gestures between them. “This isn’t a thing. You’re just tired.”
“You’re tired,” she returns sharply. “You’re lonely and you won’t let us in. But if you did, it would be really good. It would make sense—wouldn’t it?” Her eyes search his, and she pauses before asking, “You like Alec too, right?”
His heart skips a beat, it’s such a heavy, unexpected blow. “No,” he says through gritted teeth, “I don’t,” and I’m not gay is the thing he wants to say next, but it’s not really that, it’s—“I don’t,” he repeats. “Why would you—” And he stops himself. Why would she, indeed. Parker and Hardison sometimes blur into ParkerandHardison, one unit, and if sometimes in his traitorous mind he wants it to be ParkerandHardisonandEliot, well, that’s not his problem, because it’s an impossibility.
Parker just shrugs. “I just thought,” she begins, before starting over: “We thought. But if we’re wrong, it’s fine. But you don’t have to deny yourself just because you didn’t think it could be like this. It can be whatever we want it to be.”
Eliot begins to stutter something else out, but it turns into “Parker, you can’t just—barge into people’s rooms and—” He gestures at her, at the door, toward where Hardison is sleeping, blissfully unaware of the disaster occurring in his room. “You don’t just do things like this.” He’s gripped by the terror that things can never be the same again, that they won’t be able to look at each other the same way again, or that they got each other all wrong this whole time, and he forces out, “You don’t just say things like that, Parker.”
Parker observes him for a second and then says “Okay,” and crosses her legs, retreating slightly from him. “Then we misunderstood. I guess… this never happened.”
She moves to go, but Eliot’s pulse is jackhammering through him and in a rush of pure adrenaline he moves his hand to the bare skin of her arm. She pauses, and their eyes lock.
“Wait,” he says, as breathless as if someone knocked the wind right out of him. “Just—hang on.”
She sits back and waits.
He opens his mouth, ears ringing, and it just pours out of him, like a switch was flipped and everything he pushed down for years is pouring out of the floodgates, and he can’t do anything about it. “I didn’t—I don’t understand exactly what’s happening here. I haven’t expressed it and I don’t know if I can. But maybe—I’m not surprised because it’s bad, I’m surprised because—I didn’t think…”
She takes it in stride. “You didn’t think it would actually happen.” He nods sharply. “Well, it is,” she says, as if she’s informing him that the sky is blue.
He opens his hands, clenched tight the whole time, and tries to relax into this feeling, but his heart rate doesn’t want to listen to him right now. Okay. He’s been in worse situations, he tells himself, get yourself together before you screw it up, but Parker’s being alarmingly patient with him, sliding up the bed to rest a hand over his.
“Nothing has to happen right now,” she says gently. “I mean it. Sleep on it. We can talk about it when we’re awake.”
“I’m awake,” he says defensively, because he refuses to use that as excuse. He’s as alert as ever, and what he’s saying now, he knows to be true even if he repressed it for years. He looks into her eyes and says, “You’re right about everything, but that doesn’t mean anything has to happen, okay? You don’t have to do this for me. You’re happy together and I’m fine by myself.”
She laughs, which kind of infuriates him, since he’s working so hard to be serious. But Parker shakes her head, still grinning. “You think this is for you, that we felt bad for you? What if we’re so selfish we couldn’t stop ourselves from going after what we want? Eliot, just listen to me.” She takes his arm in a mirror of what he did earlier. “I steal the things I want because I want them. The only reason I didn’t try to steal you earlier was I didn’t know if we were ready. I think we are now. I think we left Nate and Sophie because we were ready to be on our own.” She adds after a second, “And Hardison agrees.”
Eliot shifts uncomfortably. “He’s in on everything?”
“Yeah,” she says. She catches his gaze. “We decided everything together. We both like you, but we understand that it might be too much to start out all together. We figured I’d talk to you first at some point, because you have more experience with women and might need time to feel okay with a guy, even one you liked.”
She says it like it’s so obvious, but it hits Eliot like a truck, the idea that he himself has repressed his feelings for Hardison this whole time, tried to sublimate it into some kind of brotherly or familial love when all along he was just—just—well, he was—
Parker watches him cycle through the emotions on his face, shock to denial to fear to acceptance in three seconds flat.
“Oh,” he says, stunned as the emotional rollercoaster winds down. “Okay.”
“Alec’s bisexual too,” Parker says, gently patting Eliot’s hand.
It’s like a second truck hitting him out of nowhere. He manages another “Oh,” while his imagination instantly rockets him somewhere entirely new and not at all unpleasant.
“I can go practice my flips,” Parker says. She’s giving him an out, which is nice of her, but Eliot suddenly doesn’t want her to leave. “Or I could…” She’s looking at the empty space in his large bed.
“Would he mind?” Eliot asks her, searching her face for any hints.
She shakes her head. “Like I said. We figured it would happen this way anyway. He told me to tell you he gives us explicit consent for whatever we want to do, but that he wants to hear about everything afterwards.”
Something in Eliot’s chest flip-flops, and he gives her a shaky nod, folding the blanket open for her. She crawls up the bed and settles in the space next to him, close but not touching. Strange how they’ve slept near each other on several occasions, stripped off clothes near each other, pretended to date or even be married for a con, but this—her sleeping a foot away from him—sends his pulse skyrocketing, flushing down his chest, making his mouth go all dry. Nothing he’s ever done with a girl, first kiss to thousandth, has felt this momentous.
He loves her, he realizes in a lightning-bolt instant. He loves Hardison, and he loves Parker. He hasn’t taken care of them all these years just because he was a good teammate, hasn’t worked himself to the bone to make sure they’re safe out of any selfless impulse. No, it’s all been out of love, a kind he’s never had before and thought he’d never deserve. Love that he’s sure of deep in his bones, in his heart.
He settles down in the bed and pulls the blanket up over them. “This okay?” he asks her softly, and she murmurs in assent and shifts closer to him. He holds his breath and slowly, cautiously, lowers his arm around her waist. She could push him away, or roll away from him, or tell him to fuck off, but instead she grips his arm to keep him there and lets out a small, contented sigh. He breathes out again. It’s not going to be easy to look at her tomorrow, or to look at Hardison, and not be terrified. If he’s being honest, he hasn’t been honest or vulnerable with anyone in decades because he thought it wasn’t who he was anymore, and he’s out of practice.
“Stop thinking,” Parker whispers, squeezing his arm. “Sleep.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he whispers back, and closes his eyes. He’ll make them breakfast in the morning—something so good he’ll start to feel, at least partially, that he deserves to be around them. Then he’ll steel himself to tell Hardison how he feels, even if it goes against decades of his own hardened self-perception, even if it comes out wrong.
Parker gets it, and Hardison’s in the know, so he’s not as alone as he thought he was. Not alone at all anymore. Come morning light, he’ll cross whatever bridges need crossing to reach them both. And it’ll change everything forever, he knows, but it’s a good change. It’s what these five years have led to all along, and he welcomes it, slipping into a peaceful sleep with Parker by his side.