Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s not supposed to be like this.

Hunkered down behind a stack of wooden crates, Parker fights to stop the panic from the jolt of adrenaline that shoots through her at the sound of a pained groan, one that sounds far more conscious than she’d like it to be. Panic won’t help in navigating a clear path to an exit, and it won’t keep her level-headed enough to counter any advances if things get rougher than they already are. Think. Think, think, think.

Exit strategies. The door, the closest and most obvious way out, is directly past the source of the moaning. No good. The roof was her way in, and the harness is still dangling where she left it, but it’s across the room and her foot…the swelling is a clear sign she won’t make it there in a hurry. There are windows, plenty of them, although she’ll have the same the same problem as the roof exit for most of them on the other side of the warehouse. The ones that are closer though…

Holding her breath, she scoots to the left, careful not to let her shoes squeak across the grimy floor as she moves to peak around the side of the crate, looking for an escape avenue.

What she sees instead is Alec Hardison, not all that well hidden behind a pole as he fumbles with some device in his shaking hand. The other lays uselessly in his lap, probably broken at worst, badly sprained at the very least, and his haphazard efforts with his good hand are clearly useless. He rocks forward in his spot, in pain, gripping the device tightly as he does. She must have really done some damage; if she’s quick, she might make it past him to one of the closer windows. He doesn’t seem like he’s much of a threat in his state.

The device clatters to the ground as he drops it beside him and Parker winces as he sits up again, head lolling to the side. She freezes when he looks directly at her and startles with an audible gasp that has her whipping back behind her makeshift hiding spot, her own shoes making a loud squeak this time in her haste. Even if he is in pain, she has no idea what he’s capable of, nor does she have any tactical advantage over him. The windows won’t work. They were all she had left.

It's not supposed to be like this! It should have been easy; the fact that it wasn’t should have tipped her off that she shouldn’t have come here. She should have cut her losses and ran when it went south the first time. But now she’s trapped with the hacker.

And Eliot Spencer.

“Okay…”

With ice in her veins, Parker feels her breath catch in her throat.

A deep growl of a groan echoes in the dim, abandoned room, and the shuffling sound of wobbly feet trying to stand indicate that escape’s impossible now.

He's awake.

“M’not sayin’ this more than once,” Eliot Spencer slurs out, “so listen close: Give it to me. Or it’s gettin’ ugly.”

It’s not supposed to be like this.

Chapter Text

Today feels…promising.

Now, maybe that has something to do with the fact that he managed to get more than a couple hours of sleep last night. Maybe it’s because he woke up this morning from the five (yes, five) hours of sleep he got and realized his trick shoulder felt a whole lot better since than it has in the few weeks since his last job (where one of three half-trained mercenaries managed to get a lucky shot in, the uncoordinated bastard) ended.

Whatever the reason, Eliot, feeling slightly better than okay, slips out the door of his nondescript motel room he’s been holed up in since he crawled into town a few weeks ago in search of coffee. Good coffee, not the lukewarm and bitter kind from the gas station down the street. No, today’s the kind of day to shell out for something hot and overpriced from an actual coffee shop.

It’s important to support the local economy, even if it ain’t yours.

There aren’t many patrons in the small, non-chain shop he finds himself in, but the rustic décor makes him feel more comfortable than a more bougie type of place, as does the friendly greeting he gets from the baristas behind the counter.

“What can I get you?” asks the one at the register when he makes his way up.

Eliot hums in acknowledgement as he stares up at the menu board for a moment, then back down at the woman in front of him, who smiles.

“You know,” he starts, returning her with his own, “I was kind of hoping for a recommendation.”

“Oh, sure!” she says eagerly. “What do you normally like?”

“Well, I’ll tell ya, ma’am,” he says, “I’m a dark roast type in general, but today I’m lookin’ for somethin’ a little sweeter, and I’m wonderin’ how your Cappuccino Italiano is.”

He lets his southern accent turn his words into more of a drawl, each word dripping slow like honey, hoping it will make him sound less like a coffee snob and more of a simple enthusiast, thinking maybe she’s one herself.

(He’d dated a coffee connoisseur once who had her own ethically sourced brand. It’s pretty easy now to spot the type.)

The way her eyes light up tell him he’s right. “Oh, it’s amazing. Best in town, actually.”

That’s not just a sales pitch; it’s clearly the truth as far as she’s concerned.

“Do you want whipped cream?” she asks.

“Gotta have the cream to highlight the spices,” he replies.

Her gaze flits down to the screen as she taps at it before flicking back up again. “Wet or dry?”

She’s testing him now, so he grins as he leans against the counter. “Fan of foam, myself.”

Another tap on the screen as she tucks a strand of jet-black hair behind her ear. “Me too.”

“Ain’t that somethin’.”

After paying, he waits for his drink by the large glass window, staring out of it to watch passersby outside on their way to wherever they’re going. Maybe nowhere in particular for some of them; it’s a nice day out, comfortably warm and sunny, and Eliot thinks taking the long way back to his motel to enjoy the weather himself might not be such a bad idea.

“Order for Eliot.”

The barista hands him his drink when he reaches the counter again, which he takes with a pleasant, “Thank you, ma’am.”

“Mel,” she replies with a shy giggle.

Oh. Maybe the accent did a little too much work.

“Thank you, Mel,” he says, emphasizing her name.

In return she gives him a very distinct type of smile, and actually, he amends, maybe it did just the right amount. Maybe the phone number scrawled on the cup will come in handy later.

Could be nice to be shown around town by someone who knows what they’re talking about.

Outside, Eliot takes his time as he meanders down the sidewalk going the opposite way he came. The sun warms his skin as he steps out from under a building’s shadow, and he pauses his stride to take a sip of his drink. The cool whip cream, sprinkled with nutmeg and star anise, hits his tongue first before the frothy, milk-sweetened espresso follows. He takes another sip, savoring the flavors as he does, before continuing on and deciding that Mel was probably correct about it being the best in town.

Also, he should definitely call her.

This would be a good place to go for a run; the shops in this area are built around a park that seems to stretch for at least a few miles, well-kept and open and clearly used by people for all different sorts of physical activity. There are more than a few people running now, and even more hanging out under shady trees. He wouldn’t mind the exertion himself after being holed up for the past couple of weeks.

It's with some reluctance that he eventually starts making his way back to his motel, drink more than halfway gone. Buildings start to look shabbier the closer he gets, a far cry from the picturesque views of the downtown area, but the weather’s still nice and there’s still a lightness in his step as he continues on, spots the motel as he rounds the corner, feels his phone buzz in his pocket…

…and jerks to a stop.

Unblinking, Eliot reaches into his pocket and pulls out his cell. It buzzes again in his hand as he stares at it, demanding action, and on the third ring he puts it to his ear, slow and robotic.

“Hello.”

Please...not today…not him.

“Hi, um, Eliot Spencer?”

The male voice on the other end is unrecognizable and hesitant, not at all commanding or dismissively fond in a way that Eliot’s distantly, intimately familiar with and terrorized by, and he feels a knot in his stomach unwind at the simple greeting.

“Yes,” he replies on a relieved sigh, then forces some professional authority in his voice as he adds, “that’s me. Who’s callin’?”

(He has to stop reacting like this every time the phone rings; if Moreau wants him back, he won’t bother with a courtesy call.)

(That’s not as comforting as he wants it to be.)

“O-oh, yes, good, I wasn’t sure—this isn’t something I normally do so I don’t—well, no matter, I guess.”

Eliot stays silent as the man on the other end collects himself, then continues.

“Mr. Spencer, my name is Victor Dubenich, and I have a job for you.”

~

Objectively, this might be the most hilarious thing to ever happen.

Normally when someone comes looking for Alec, it’s because they want him to stop stealing their money and secrets. Normally, they don’t express an appreciation for his admittedly mad skills. And they don’t take him out to dinner.

Yet, here he is, sitting across a restaurant table from a middle-aged guy in a stuffy monkey suit who claimed to have “a very lucrative proposition” for him.

Don’t care who you are, that’s just funny.

The man, Victor Dubenich, looks more uncomfortable than he should be for sitting in a booth of a semi-nice, mostly empty barbecue joint on a Tuesday evening, as if anyone that is around would stop to care about what the two of them are discussing. Alec watches as the man’s eyes dart to the side when a server walks by their table and pays them no mind, which just adds to his amusement over this whole situation.

Seems rude to laugh, though, so he takes a bite of the flavorful ribs on his plate as a distraction. “You know,” he says after a moment, “seems like this isn’t the kind of place you like to do business in.”

That draws Dubenich’s focus back. “W-well,” he stumbles, fiddling with his tie, “I should state for the record that my business isn’t normally of the clandestine nature, but I will say that this seemed to be the most appropriate avenue with which to conduct ours. This,” he gestures to the general area, “seemed relevant to your interests, according to my uh…let’s say, comical pursuit of your time.”

Alec does chuckle at that one. See, he’s a popular guy; everyone wants a piece of him (on account of all the hacking), and as awesome as he is at that, he’s even better at covering his tracks. He’s developed programs specifically to scrub all traces of him off the web, both what’s public knowledge that any regular Joe with a computer can find and the stuff that you have to have specific clearance to access.

There’s no way to find him, not really, but he doesn’t want to give the appearance that that’s the case, so he does have phone numbers and email accounts that float around, although if you try to trace them, it pings to various places he’s nowhere near, like the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Those numbers and accounts do get traffic, which he monitors for shits and giggles. The phone number he keeps, the one Dubenich’s people called multiple times, led straight to a voicemail he recorded for a kitschy sounding ribs joint.

The only reason he’s sitting here now is because, the 6^th time he got a call from the same number, Dubenich left a very intriguing message of his own, and after doing a little digging, Alec decided there was no danger in a meet up.

“You got that right,” he replies with a grin. “And I appreciate the wining and dining, but I gotta admit I’m curious about this job you got lined up. Seemed relevant to my interests, too.”

“Oh, yes.” Dubenich leans forward conspiratorially. “As I was saying before, I need those designs back from Pierson. Without them, my company as it stands is dead. I’ll lose everything, and for that not to happen, I’m willing to pay generously for your particular brand of skills.”

Alec picks up another rib. “And when you say generously…”

“I mean $300,000.”

The meat lands haphazardly on the table as Alec chokes on the bite, covering his mouth as he coughs violently. Dubenich, unfazed, passes him his untouched glass of water, which he takes gratefully.

He was prepared to be lowballed to hell and back, but 300,000? That’s not exactly chump change! He’d be set for a while, and so would Nana and the kids. Not to mention the boost this would give to his reputation—

“I trust that’s sufficient?” the man asks.

“Uh huh,” he wheezes after taking a big sip, “yeah, that—that’ll do it.”

He’s going to live like a king.

“Do you have any questions?”

“Dude, can I kiss you?” does not seem like the most appropriate question to ask the guy, so he shakes his head no, too speechless to think of anything else.

“Well, I can make myself available, should you think of anything, but I rather this be the last instance of direct contact we have with each other, just so no suspicions are thrown my way in case there are any major setbacks. But I’m sure there won’t be.”

“Yeah, no, I totally got this. Trust.”

“Wonderful,” he replies, leaning back in his seat again, more relaxed than before. “I obviously don’t care about the methods you use to get the plans, and couldn’t even begin to guess, but I do need this done by the end of the quarter, which is two weeks from today.”

“Gotcha, gotcha,” he says, somewhat distractedly, plans already forming in his head. “Can do.” It should be fairly simple, unless… “You don’t got anyone else on this, do you?”

He looks down as he shifts in his seat, pulling out his wallet and opening it up. “Why, do you need assistance from others in your field?”

“Nah,” he quickly assures him, “I got this. Just strategizing.”

“Fair enough,” he says as he pulls out a wad of bills. “I hate to cut this short, but if that’s all, then I’ll be on my way. Apologies, no offense meant.”

Alec waves the comment off as Dubenich slides from the booth to stand up. “All good, all good.”

$300,000 is coming his way; it’s hard to find anything to be offended about.

Dubenich takes another nervous glance around before laying a $100 bill on the table. “That should cover it, I think?”

“Uh.” He blinks down at the crisp bill then back up at the man. “Yeah, it should,” he replies. Their server is about to be tipped real well.

Satisfied, he nods. “Enjoy the rest of your meal, Alec Hardison.”

Alec watches him go, still reeling, and once he’s out of site, he falls back into the cushion of his seat with a thump.

“Holy shit,” he laughs, giddy. Rich people, man, they’re something else. And this one’s about to hand him some serious cash in two weeks’ time.

With a shiver of excitement, his gaze falls back to the Benjamin on the table, then slides over to the dessert menu that sits on the other side.

“Hey,” he calls out to the server walking by, “excuse me, but y’all got any of that bread pudding tonight?”

The server, an older lady, smiles. “We do, young man.”

“Well, I would like some,” he tells her, grinning.

Someone is getting tipped generously tonight, just after bread pudding. He’s gotta celebrate!

This job is gonna change everything.

~

It’s about the money.

The money is worth it.

It’s an easy score.

If that turns out not to be the case at any point, cut and run.

Initially, when she was approached by What’s-His-Name, Parker thought to turn down the job. After all, she doesn’t take jobs; it goes against everything Archie ever taught her, which essentially all boiled down to “take what you want, don’t get caught, and don’t get involved.”

She’s not consulting with Archie, but if she were, she’s sure he’d classify this whole situation as “being involved.” To be fair, she does, too.

But the money…

It’s worth it. It’s easy.

And as involved as she is, she’s not beholden to What’s-His-Name. If she wants to bail, she can, and he can’t do anything about it. Lucky for him, she isn’t, yet.

She’s having too much fun.

Over the past couple of weeks, she’s found all the entrances and exits, been through all the vents to find the best routes, and gotten access to Pierson’s office where she thinks the plans are located. That guy’s been in his office every day, so she hasn’t had much opportunity to crack the safe or go through most of his belongings, but she at least knows his schedule by now.

And the schedules and routes of all the security personnel.

And her plan of attack.

That’s her favorite part, the planning. Well, second favorite, after getting her money. Or her diamonds. Or jewels, or paintings, or statues, or—

It’s like a puzzle. Gather all the pieces, figure out how they fit and bam! She has a plan. And a good one at that.

Smug smile on her lips, Parker opens her eyes to look out over the horizon from where she sits on the roof of the building across from the Pierson Aviation headquarters, the sun in the sky just starting to disappear, the pink and orange hues around her going along with it.

Hopping up, she saunters over to the edge of the roof and leans over, way over, to watch the sidewalk below. Streetlights buzz on as a couple of people file out into the evening, then a few more, and then the sidewalk is crowded, everyone rushing to get back to their homes as quickly as possible.

And across the street, she sees the same thing. Fancy suits heading out the door.

Not long now.

A rush of anticipation makes her squirm where she stands, the excitement making her all tingly with goosebumps that she has to shake off. Actually, this part might be her second favorite. The moments just before the plan all falls into place, like when she’s standing on the edge of a building and feels the wind in her hair, knowing that the adrenaline boost of the jump is only seconds away.

For a few more minutes, she watches as Pierson Aviation employees continue to file out the building before turning to skip across to the other side of the roof. There, she finds her climbing gear on the ground and clips the harness to the buckle at her waste. After making sure it’s secure, she puts her bag of tools on her back and steps onto the ledge.

The wind tousles her hair, makes it tickle the sides of her face.

And with a smile, Parker jumps.

The swooping sensation fills her stomach, and she cackles out a laugh as she falls the first ten feet, then her shoes hit the side of the building before she repels back off again. Landing in the alley, she unhooks herself and watches as the rope pulls itself back up; she’ll come back for it later, along with the assurance of being $300,000 richer.

Maybe more than that; who knows what else she might grab on the way out?

She shucks off her black climbing outfit, underneath of which is the dark grey janitorial getup she’ll be wearing the rest of the evening, and stuffs the discarded clothes in the bag. Then, she makes her way through the alleyway and toward the parking lot that the Pierson Aviation employees park in.

Sharply turning around the corner, she bumps straight into someone else.

“O-oh!” A woman squeaks in surprise as Parker staggers back a half step. “I’m sorry— ”

“No! No, no, no, I’m sorry,” she replies, frantically, as she rights herself, hands flitting all over the woman and herself. “Are you—should I—please don’t tell my boss, I’m sorry!”

Seeming disoriented, the woman holds her hands out reassuringly. “No, don’t worry, dear, it’s fine.”

Hands stopping to rest on the woman’s shoulder, she asks, “A-are you sure?”

“Completely, it’s really alright,” she says kindly.

“Oh, thank you,” Parker sighs out as she woman sidesteps her. “Thank you so much. Have a good night!” she adds with a wave.

“You too.”

As the woman walks away, Parker looks down at the employee badge she swiped in her hand with a grin. “I will.”

Strike everything she said before. The second best part of any heist is actually doing it.

Actually, strike that too, she loves it all. She couldn’t possibly pick a favorite part.

Aside from the having the money part, of course. Duh.

She makes her way across the parking lot toward Pierson’s, steps off the curb to cross the street—

The sound of screeching tires and a loud beep startle her back a step, and she looks up as a dark, nondescript van drives by. Parker’s heart thuds in her chest, fear prickling like ice in her veins as her breath gets caught in her throat. She can’t even see the driver, the windows are tinted, but it doesn’t even matter because she’s frozen in place, unable to move for several long seconds to even be able to give them a scowl.

Eventually, once the van is out of sight, she releases a shaky breath as she feels herself thaw, regaining the ability to move again. She must be a little too excited; she doesn’t normally get spooked so easily.

Shaking it off, she takes care to look left and right before attempting to cross again and makes her way to the other side without incident. When she gets to the building, she gets through the first door before coming up on the turnstile entrances that lead into the office lobby. Placing the badge in her hand to the scanner, the light above turns green, and she makes her way in.

There are still people in the lobby and receptionists at the front desk, as expected, so she makes her way over to the far side of the room where the first maintenance closet is next to the elevator, pulling out the keys she swiped yesterday from her pocket. No one pays her any mind, and she quietly finds the cart and trash can she stuffed in the back of the small room. It’s propped against the wall, and she ducks down to retrieve the missing wheel she’d taken off to ensure no one would use it.

Once the wheel is back on, she puts her pack down in the bottom of the empty waste bucket before making her way back out. Just then, the elevator beside her dings, the door opens, and a man strides out.

Right on schedule.

“Bye, Mr. Pierson, have a good weekend,” one of the receptionists calls out.

“Oh, I’m not leaving yet,” Pierson replies as he walks up to the desk.

Wait, he’s not?

“Ah, that’s right,” the receptionist says. “You’re 6 o’clock with IYS is actually—”

“Mr. Pierson, it’s been a while,” a man who Parker hadn’t noticed before says as he walks up, hand out.

Pierson takes his outstretched hand. “Mr. Ford, yes, always a pleasure.”

“Likewise, likewise,” the other man, Ford, apparently, says, “and I appreciate your flexibility in meeting with me so late in the day, I don’t want to keep you.”

Pierson ushers him ahead. “Well, let’s get started then, shall we?”

Ford takes a step forward, but then falters for a moment as the sound of a ringtone tinkles into the space. “Yes, um, sorry,” he says, pulling his phone out of his pocket. “Just give me a minute, I’ll be right there.”

“Sure, sure.”

Pierson walks back toward the elevator as Ford answers his phone.

“Hello?” He smiles. “Hi, Sammy, how are you buddy?” After a pause while he waits for an answer, he says, “No, remember what I told you? I’m at work late tonight, so I won’t be home for dinner. Mom said she was ordering pizza, though.” He chuckles after another pause. “That’s a lot of pieces, save some for me, okay? Listen, I won’t be there to read a chapter in your book tonight, but tomorrow I promise I will.”

Parker gets out the broom from the stand of her cart and starts to sweep up dirt she sees on the floor to keep up appearances.

“Two chapters? Okay, you have a deal. I’ll see you tomorrow then, buddy. Love you too.”

He hangs up and makes his way over to Pierson, who presses the elevator button as he says, “How are the wife and kid doing these days?”

“Oh, pretty good. Sam just turned ten a few weeks ago.”

“They grow up so fast,” Pierson says as the door closes.

Well, that throws a wrench in things. If Pierson is still here and he’s got someone with him, and it seems like they might be sticking around for a while, that makes it more of a challenge.

Parker grins to herself. She likes a challenge.

This is going to be fun.

“Ready.”

~

“You need anything before I take off?”

Eliot turns to look over at the security guard he’s relieving for the night.

The man hovers by the doorway, clearly itching to get going.

He turns back to the security monitors.

“All set.”

~

There’s a beep of the code breaker and the clunk of the maintenance door.

Hardison chuckles to himself.

“Aaaaand…” he says as he slides on through, “go.”

Chapter Text

Well.

That didn’t go at all like it was supposed to.

The lights in the room dim as Alec slides the switch down to a less blinding level before he shuffles across the hotel room, making his way to the made queen sized bed in the middle of the room. The mattress gives only slightly as he sits down at the foot of it, and the wrinkle-free covers stretch from where they’re tucked securely into the sides of the bedframe.

The thought of mussing up the meticulously made bedding of fancy ass hotels is generally appealing, has been on the other occasions he’s scored himself nice digs when the situation called for it, when he felt he really deserved it, but right now, he needs to just sit here and think. Process.

Nurse his wounds.

He holds an icebag up to his swollen, definitely black eye, whimpering as the cold material makes contact with his skin. It takes some willpower to hold it in place, but he makes himself do it, counting to ten in his head as he gets used to the feeling. That’s always what Nana had him do.

“This ain’t anything we can’t power through, son. Hold my hand and we’ll count to ten, it’ll be alright after that.”

She isn’t holding his hand now, but the ritual helps all the same.

Now the wounds to his ego? That’ll take a little more time. Right now, all he knows is that he definitely didn’t get the job done and Dubenich definitely isn’t going to pay him. Besides that, everything else is one giant question mark, because what the hell even happened today? He had it all planned out, but everything went to shit.

Because Dubenich must’ve lied.

He wasn’t alone on that job at all.

~

First things first: Pierson and Ford.

Parker knows that they’re most likely going up to Pierson’s office. When, why, and for how long isn’t entirely clear to her yet. And she doesn’t know where else they’ll go.

It’s fine, though; she’ll figure it out. And at least there’s one thing she can count on: neither one of them will be in the vents.

Now that the two men have gone up the elevator, the receptionist at the front desk has gone back to paying no attention to her surroundings. She picks up a magazine and starts thumbing through it, clearly not anticipating anyone needing her at this hour and probably just killing the remaining time she has left on the clock.

It makes it all the easier for Parker to slip away unnoticed, putting her broom back in the cart before pushing it back down the hallway. The nearest vent is up ahead and around the corner, and it’s out of the line of sight of whatever camera’s are in its vicinity.

She can easily get to the security room from there, get a more solid lay of the land before doing what she needs to do. By now, the security guards will be on patrol.

The hinges of the vent don’t make a peep as she lifts the gate up (she made sure to grease them thoroughly over the past couple of weeks), and she easily slides herself inside before closing it behind her.

~

Inside the mechanical room, the low hum of the various surrounding machines keeps Alec company as he searches for the specific compartment he needs. Excitement buzzes under his skin as he finds what he’s looking for, makes his fingers tingle as he opens it up before ducking back down to rifle through his bag for his signal blocker with a little jolt of excitement.

He might just be about to get electrocuted by something, actually. That would explain the tingly feeling.

It’s all good, his shoes have rubber, and he’ll be out of here in just a minute. And then the real fun can start.

Not that jamming the signal to all the security cameras isn’t fun. It’s just that it’s so easy he could do it in his sleep. He’s much more excited to use his fancy new codebreaker to get to Dubenich’s plans.

“Alright, alright,” he gloats to himself anyway when the deed is done. He stands back to admire his handiwork as his hands go to the top button of his jumpsuit, unbuttoning it, before rethinking the move and doing it up again. His second outfit underneath this one is business casual, and he’d been debating over the merits of looking like someone who might work in the building in a cushy office, but now that he’s here, he decides to keep the blue collar look on.

A random dude no one’s ever seen before roaming around the building might draw some attention, but no one looks twice at a man in uniform. That’s a guy who can go where he pleases, no questions asked. Including the server room with a tool bag full of gadgets.

Solid logic. He’s going with it.

~

All’s quiet on the security monitors.

Obviously. The only threat to Pierson’s right now is Eliot himself, and he’s in here sitting on his ass doing absolutely nothing. He needs to get to work, and he will. It’s just that if he left his post now and ran into other guards currently on patrol, they’d question what he was doing, and he’d have to take them out and then find a place to store them and it would just be a whole thing.

Eventually, a couple of guards’ll come and relieve him, and adding on to the fact that he’d already convinced one of ‘em to head home (Frank was his name. Likes baseball, the Padres specifically. Watches the games with his twin boys. Nice guy.), he’ll have less people to contend with. Less of a chance he’ll have to hurt any of them. So, for now, he waits.

He shifts in his seat, settling in to get somewhat comfortable as he eyes the monitors. The heavily trafficked areas don’t hold his attention for nearly as long as the empty hallways do, but he tracks the movement and behavior of everyone he sees regardless out of habit.

The two-way on the side of the desk crackles with static, but no message comes through the speaker. Eventually, it stops, and the lack of ambient noise rings loud in the room. Eliot closes his eyes, breathes in deeply once, and makes it all go silent again as he focuses back on the busy lobby in the monitor.

And then it’s too quiet, and he isn’t in a security room at all. He’s in a hot desert, fatigues on his back and a heavy gun in his hand, and everything is silent. Even when it isn’t.

It’s still silent when he’s wearing something much nicer and his gun is smaller, but he’s no less dangerous as he creeps up on an opulent home in the dead of night with the lights all off. Makes his way in. Finds what he’s looking for. Who he’s looking for. Plus something extra. And then everything is so unbearably loud.

Hallway C on the monitor shows the profile of a well-dressed man, close cropped dark hair, and for a moment, Eliot swears Moreau has finally come to find him.

Someone else in the hallway comes up with an outstretched hand, and when the two turn it’s clear who the first person definitely isn’t. Still, it takes several seconds for Eliot to realize, as the two-way crackles again, that the loud noise rushing in his ears is his own heart beating much too fast and his breathing much too shallow.

Gripping the arm rests of the chair, he forces a deep breath in and holds it, feels the too-quick beating of his heart in his chest as he does, then lets it out. Takes another breath in, then exhales it back out again. Rinses and repeats until his heartbeat is steady once more.

At this point, he’s not even sure what he’s afraid of more. Of Moreau coming after him or…or of choosing to go back himself.

Why he’d ever do that is beyond him. He’s not that man anymore, and he’s keeping himself secure with plenty of work that doesn’t require bloodshed (not the deadly kind, at least), so it isn’t as if he needs it to keep himself afloat.

Recovered, Eliot huffs out a long sigh. After this job, he should take a break. Get his head back on straight.

Do something that makes him feel more human than he is.

Above him, there’s a soft, metallic thud, and he looks up and peers at the vent that runs through the room. He waits, but no other noise comes. Must’ve been a rodent running through, bumping into the metal wall. Can’t imagine there aren’t any in this building. It’s well taken care of, clearly, but pretty old. Got some nice history, but with history comes vermin.

He pulls his attention back to the monitors, and his gaze goes back to the one that marks the receptionist area. Just as before, the woman working there (Candace, he’d learned when he asked her his first day) is still reading her magazine. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, then licks her thumb before attempting to turn the page, which…

…she’d done when he last checked on her. Two, maybe three minutes ago? He lost count when he was trying to calm down.

Just to be sure, he keeps his eyes on her monitor, and sure enough, she does the same thing again about 45 seconds later. And then again after 45 more seconds.

Which means the fucking feed is looping. That can’t be a coincidence.

So someone else is here. Possibly for the same reason Eliot is.

“Like hell,” he growls, standing up and making his way out the door, consequences be damned.

He might blow his cover if he’s found out of his position, which means there could be some collateral damage.

Oh well.

~

When the door shuts behind the guard, Parker moves the grate and drops down from the vent gracefully, landing silently on the floor as she puts the grate down. She makes her way to the monitors, hoping to see what got the guard hightailing it out of the room so fast that he forgot his badge and left it sitting on the table, but she doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary on any of the screens.

She also doesn’t see Pierson and Ford, so they could be anywhere.

Which is fine. For now, she’ll operate under the assumption that they’re in Pierson’s office, nowhere near where she needs to go. It’ll take her time in the server room to find the plans she needs get for What’s-His-Name and put it on her storage device thingy, so the longer they’re up there, the better it’ll be for her.

Although, the only way to really make sure they are where they’re supposed to be is to go up and check. Pierson does have a personal safe in his office, and she wanted to get a little extra something for herself for her efforts. Plus, if she went now while the two men are around, she might learn something useful. Suits are always talking about something secret.

What the hell, she decides as she turns to make her way back to the vent, she has time for a pitstop. When they leave, she’ll crack the safe, then make her way back down to the server room. By that time, there’ll be hardly anyone in the building anymore.

Suddenly, the doorknob behind her turns, so she quickly scrambles into the vent. She just finishes putting the grate back in place when someone walks through. There’s the sound of footsteps hurriedly making their way to the monitor desk, then of something small and plastic being dragged off the table (probably the badge), and then the footsteps pause.

“Hm.”

 Parker freezes in place and stops breathing entirely, making no noise at all as the man on the ground takes a step further into the room. And then another. He stops when he’s under the grate, and she doesn’t dare peak over the edge to check what he’s doing.

Then the footsteps recede, the door closes, and left alone again, she exhales quietly. She doesn’t think the guard knew she was up here. He didn’t call into a radio or anything, so she’s most likely in the clear.

Without a sound, she continues inching her way through the vents.

~

8…6…7…5…3…0…9…

Alec chuckles to himself as he watches the numbers pop up on his codebreaker wired to the keypad on the door. It’s taken him less than a minute to get this far and there’s three more digits to go; he can see that $300,000 in his account already. He kinda feels like one of those characters on the old Saturday morning cartoons he used to watch with dollar signs in their eyes.

“Cha-ching.”

6…

Without warning, there’s a tap on his shoulder.

“Hey man, how’s it going?”

Startled, Alec turns around and sees a flash of long brown hair followed by a fist flying at his face.

Then he’s out like a light.

~

What Pierson and Ford came up here for in the first place is entirely lost on her. Ford’s spent a whole ten minutes on an anecdote about his son winning a spelling bee at school. Parker is so bored.

“That’s a smart young man you’ve got, Nathan,” Pierson says, surprisingly not sounding half asleep.

“His mother and I think so,” Ford replies. “He’s all excited about the idea of making it to national’s, probably because he heard from a classmate that it’s televised.”

“Ah, wants a little bit of fame, huh?”

“Not sure where he gets that from,” he chuckles. “Whether he makes it or not, though, we’re proud of him.”

“As you should be. Today it’s spelling bees, tomorrow it’s graduation from law school.”

“I don’t know about that last part.”

“Well, take it from someone who has kids who are all grown up and barely speaking to him , you never know when you’re in the good old days until you’re well past them, so appreciate them now.”

“Oh, I will. I do.”

Up above them, Parker quietly exhales out a sigh. But it’s not out of boredom, she realizes as a sort of heaviness takes root in her chest. She feels kind of…bummed?

Not sure why that is. Some guy talking about his kid way too much should be more annoying than anything.

He’s wasting her time. She’s wasting her time, actually. Clearly there’s nothing to gain from either of these guys information-wise, and whatever she can gain from Pierson’s safe can be gotten at a later date.

She makes her way back the way she came, leaving Ford and Pierson and that bummed out feeling behind.

~

At least getting in the room was easy; after depositing the guy who was clearly posing as maintenance into the maintenance closet, Eliot found the device he’d been using to open the door beeping on the ground and the door to the server room slightly ajar. If it wasn’t obvious before that the guy wasn’t truly maintenance (his stance was wrong, his uniform a size too big, he was snickering to himself trying to open a door), the codebreaker would do it. Guess he was right about not being alone.

He finds himself a little out of his depth once he’s in the room. Normally the things he’s sent after are physical objects, but the plans are on a computer. Server tower? Whatever the hell these things are.

A flash drive was his go-to solution, and he has one in his pocket, but he found a small computer in the other guy’s bag after rifling through it, so maybe that’ll work better.

He plugs the cord into the computer then finds a spot for the other side in the server tower before lifting up the top cover of the laptop. He finds all sorts of open programs on the screen when he does, strings of numbers and letters and whatever other kind of computer language nonsense that makes absolutely no sense. Eliot peers at the screen with a frown.

Then he presses “enter”.

That does something; all the numbers and letters and nonsense start scrolling across the screen and down, so quick it all blurs together before stopping suddenly as the words “download complete” flash across the screen. Then another tab comes up that says “Virus Time” with a prompt to hit enter.

Eliot has no idea what that means, but if this guy was planning on doing it, then maybe it’s for the best. Hoping it means that no one else can get the plans after him, he hits the enter key again and waits, although nothing noticeable happens until the tab closes itself a moment later, leaving nothing but the file for the plans on the screen.

Supposing that that did the trick, he goes to close the laptop before thinking better of it. If this guy’s as tech savvy as he seems, then chances are Eliot might not be able to easily get back into the laptop later. Better maybe to put the file on his own flash drive, then break the computer so that the tech nerd doesn’t have a copy.

He's halfway done with the first step of that plan when he hears the sound of multiple sets of footsteps quickly making their way down the hall. When he turns around, there are three guards in the doorway.

“Hey fellas,” he says casually. “Where’ve y’all been?”

“Step away from the computer,” one of them commands, not at all fooled as he points a gun. “Put your hands up.”

“Sure thing,” Eliot says, complying. “Now what?”

“Step this way. Slowly.”

Eliot hums. “I don’t think you want me to do that.”

The other two guards flanking the first one pull out their guns as well. “I’m not playing games with you, sir,” replies the first one.

“Alright, well,” he says with a shrug, “if you insist.”

~

That guy’s not security.

Parker watches from the vent in the farthest wall opposite the server room as the guy she saw in the security office takes out one guard, then another, and then the last one with an elbow to the chest and then the guy’s face when he doubles over. Definitely not security.

But definitely dangerous. He took those guys out by himself without very much effort. He doesn’t look like he’s even winded as he drags the guards into the server room one by one. Might be a mercenary. Or a hitman. Or something.

Whatever he is, he’s clearly here for the same reason she is. When he leaves the room, shutting it behind him, he has a smashed-up laptop in his hand and a flash drive in another. He pockets it, then looks around, maybe trying to find somewhere to deposit the laptop.

She needs that flash drive.

Moving quickly, she makes her way to the closest vent exit, dropping down to the ground before pressing herself up against a wall and peaking around it. He still has the laptop, and is slowly making his way down the hallway toward her, trying the handles of different rooms as he goes. She pulls back again and waits. When he’s close enough, she quickly steps into his path, letting him knock her back a step as they collide.

“Sorry ma’am,” he says.

“No, that’s alright,” she says, righting herself before continuing down the hall, making her way to where she knows the elevator is. She turns her head slightly to look behind her and finds that he keeps walking in the opposite direction. Good.

Rounding the next corner, she puts the flash drive she swiped in her apron pocket, away from the pants pocket that holds her own. Turned out she didn’t even need it.

As she reaches the elevator, she hits the call button and waits. There’s a chime as it stops, and when the door open, Pierson and Ford are there. The latter moves to make room as Pierson asks, “Going down?”

“Yes,” she replies, stepping inside.

Nearly home free, Parker settles against the back wall of the elevator. Imagining the smell of $300,000 cash in what she assumes will be the crispest of bills, she smiles to herself as she thumbs the flash drive in her pocket while the elevator doors close.

“Hold the door.”

Pierson does as asked and Parker’s smile fades as the mercenary/hitman/not-a-guard comes into view, now sans the uniform hat and tie, looking more like an average worker in the building. He smiles apologetically at Pierson as he reaches the threshold.

“Thank you, sir,” he says, before his eyes slide to Parker. He looks decidedly less friendly as he slides in beside her.

Parker blinks at the now closed door and suppresses a shiver.

So this is bad.

If she gets off, he’ll follow her. If she stays and waits for Pierson and Ford to get off, she’ll be left alone with him. She saw what he did to those guards; Parker can hold her own most of the time but she’s not great in hand-to-hand under the best of circumstances, and these aren’t the best of circumstances. Her best hope of getting out of this alive is to just give him the flash drive.

Or just a flash drive.

Quietly letting out a shaky breath, Parker reaches into her pocket with the empty flash drive. She takes it out and looks to see him watching her. Making sure he sees, she sidesteps as if losing her balance and bumps into Pierson.

“Sorry,” she says quietly as she shoves the drive into his coat pocket.

“Quite alright.”

Even without looking, she can feel scary guy’s glare coming her way as she sways back into her position. Whatever. He can have fun trying to get what he thinks are the plans off of Pierson. If he’s anything like her, he’ll be far more concerned with that than with trying to take her out.

Now, she just needs to concentrate on getting out of here.

When the elevator stops again, it opens at the lobby. Ford gets off first, followed by Pierson. The hitman guy lingers for a moment before stepping off after them. Parker stays, letting the doors close again. She presses the button for the top floor and feels it start to climb again.

No way is she going to risk leaving the same way as the scary guy. She has a secondary exit strategy she’d set up anyway in case something happened. It seems like the best course of action at this point. Get up to the roof as fast as possible, then zipline across to the other building where she’d left her stuff. Simple. Easy. Fast.

Not fast, actually. Feeling the elevator stop again way too early, she holds her breath, hoping it isn’t somehow scary guy on the other side. She lets it out again when a maintenance worker stands there as the door opens. A swaying maintenance worker, blinking against the bright lights and holding his head. He has a black eye. Scary guy might’ve gotten to him, too. She doesn’t know what he’d have against maintenance workers, of all people. Maybe he’ll just beat up anyone.

“Um…down?” he asks.

Deciding that she doesn’t have time for this, Parker scurries off the elevator, jostling the maintenance guy who’s standing directly in the way and apparently unable to move out of it fast enough. At this rate, she might as well take the vents again. The scary guy won’t find her there, if he comes looking for her.

 She makes her way down the hall and to the vents in no time at all, then makes her way through them just as quickly. Once she gets as far as she can in them, she quietly hops out and makes her way to the stairs that lead to the roof, easily picking the lock and stepping out into the cool night air.

She makes her way over to where she’d left a go-bag and a zipline waiting for her. She peers over the edge, looking down at the ground below her. The sidewalk leading out of the building is gently illuminated by the building lights. It’s deserted now, save for one person making their way toward the street.

Scary guy, she realizes, recognizing his outfit and hair from all the way up here. Guess he got the decoy flash drive off of Pierson. Smiling smugly, Parker reaches into her pocket for the real one…

…and finds it isn’t there. She checks both of her own pockets and doesn’t find it in either of them. She looks around and doesn’t see it nearby.

What the hell, where is it? She knows it isn’t with scary guy, she definitely had it on her way up the elevator. And the only other person she saw was maintenance guy.

Who might not have been maintenance.

If scary guy was posing as a guard, the swaying guy could have just been posing as maintenance. And maybe he was just faking like he’d been beat up. Were they working together?

She looks over the edge of the roof again to see scary guy crossing the street. Then she sees the maintenance guy exit the building. She watches as he trudges along slowly, still swaying a little.

Whether they’re working together or not, she’d much rather operate under the assumption that he has it instead of scary guy. If she’s careful, she can tail him until she can steal it back from him. It might take a couple of days to figure out the best way, but she can be patient.

She grabs her bag and secures herself to the zipline.

~

He couldn’t catch him in time.

Alec had trailed after the guy with the long hair, the one who’d knocked him the hell out, but couldn’t reach him. By the time he’d even made it across the street he didn’t even know where the guy had gone, and he couldn’t even formulate a plan because his head was pounding. He barely made the drive back to his hotel room.

He falls back onto the bed, shutting both eyes against the dimmed lights on the wall.

“Man,” he groans at the ceiling. Those plans and that reward money belonged to him. He should be celebrating right now. Instead, here he sits, thoroughly beat.

 It’s one thing to fail. It’s another to fail because someone else decided not to play fair.

Well, two can play at that game.

Sitting up again, Alec grabs his laptop off his nightstand and goes to sit at the kitchen table. If Dubenich found him, he must have found that other jerk the same way. Virtual paper trails aren’t that hard to find. Not if you’re him, at least.

Alec will find the paper trail that leads back to Dubenich’s second option and arrange a meetup. He’ll search all night if he has to. By this time tomorrow, he wants that promised $300,000 in his account, and he’ll use every trick in his arsenal to get it. Maybe he can teach this guy a thing or two about brain versus brawn.

The icepack is completely melted by the time he considers the benefit of having a little brawn of his own. Despite not having a lot of street smarts, he’s pretty sure he can figure out where to get a little something. Just for protection. Or maybe for intimidation.  

Either way, the other guy won’t know what hit him.

Chapter Text

In the early afternoon of the next day, Maintenance Guy is on the move.

Or is he Not-Maintenance Guy? Bruised Guy? Guy Number 2.

Guy Number 2 is on the move, and Parker is trailing behind him. As a precaution if he left the hotel for any reason before she could plan her strategy to get the plans back from him, she’d put a tracker on the underside of his big, ugly van.

It’s the same van that nearly ran her over yesterday, she’s pretty sure, which might explain why it gave her the heebie jeebies being near it. Guy number 2 has a big, ugly, creepy van and he’s terrible at driving it. And he has her plans!

But not for long.  

Once leaving the city, they drive another hour down the highway with Parker making sure to keep a mile of distance between the two of them so as not to give away her presence. Eventually, he pulls at an exit and leads her into some manufacturing town, each building they pass a large distribution company. He stops at none of those, though, and drives until he gets to the outskirts to a different warehouse, one that looks long abandoned even from the outside. Parker keeps going until she’s on the other side of the building and out of sight before stopping.

Not wanting to follow him through the main entrance, she makes her way to the side of the building. A winding, metal staircase leads up to the roof, and once there she finds skylights lining it. Easy enough to open. She has a harness in her bag, which she gets out and clips the other end to a sturdy looking pipe that’s close to a window that would drop her down in the darkest corner of the room. Gives it a couple of good tugs to make sure.

Rifling through her bag again, she finds her window opener and jams the pointed silver end underneath the frame, lifting it up. It goes quietly, all things considered, and she then straps herself into the harness. From inside, she can hear someone talking. It doesn’t sound like Guy Number 2.

“Really wasn’t expectin’ it to be you that showed up, but I guess it saves me some trouble.”

“Kinda get the feeling you’re in more trouble than you think, actually.”

Parker unclips herself once her feet touch the ground. There’s a crowbar on the ground a few feet away, and as she inches closer to the sound of the voices, she picks it up, taking it with her. Peaking around some shelving, she sees Guy Number 2 with a gun in his hand.

It’s pointed at Scary Guy.  She feels a chill in her spine at the sight, but Scary Guy looks unconcerned.

“That right? Feelin’ all big and tough with a piece in your hand, son? Worried if you showed up empty handed you’d wake up in another closet?”

“You snuck up and sucker punched me, dude!”

“Openly admitting you don’t know enough to be aware of your surroundings is a pretty good strategy right now, I’d keep that going if I were you.”

Still moving closer, Parker sneaks up to a stack of dusty wooden crates only a few feet away from them, needing a better vantage point. Soundlessly, she hoists herself up on one and then another, hiding behind the third as Guy Number 2 just scoffs in response.

“Look, maybe we just put the gun down, son—”

“Stop calling me son!” He steps a little closer with the gun, and Parker holds her breath. “It’s Alec Hardison.”

Scary Guy tisks. “Givin’ away your name for free. Now that’s another great plan.”

“Think it’s only fair,” Alec Hardison says, “Eliot Spencer.”

Eliot Spencer looks unimpressed. “Anything else you know about me?”

“Retrieval specialist, whatever the hell that is. So you find things. And you can sucker punch people.”

“Looks like you got it all figured out.”

“I’m a hacker, I like knowing what I’m dealing with. And maybe I like that you know who you’re dealing with. When this is over, I want you to remember who took you down a peg.”

Parker moves a tiny bit more around the box as Eliot Spencer chuckles.

“You know what, Alec Hardison? I promise you I will.”

And in the blink of an eye, the gun is in his hands pointed the other way. Alec Hardison stumbles back a step, spluttering, and Parker unable to help herself, gasps on reflex, pulling the attention of Eliot Spencer. Without thinking, she hurls the crowbar in his direction, hitting him in the head with a loud thunk and then a clang as it falls to the ground.

She needs to take him out and she needs to do it fast. He holds his head as he stumbles backwards, and she bolts off the second box. Tripping over a loose board and stumbling off the first, she lands on the concrete floor just as pain shoots up her ankle. She grits her teeth as she moves forward, grabbing the crowbar off the ground and moving in.

Eliot Spencer looks up just in time for her to slam him in the side of his head again, and he goes down with a grunt, the gun flying out of his hand as he collapses. The motion carries her forward again onto her ankle, and she nearly buckles under the pain, but manages to stay upright. Shifting her weight, she straightens and turns around to see Alec Hardison still standing there frozen with his mouth agape. He visibly startles when she looks his way. His hands are shaking.

“Look,” she starts, “just tell me—”

He takes off, stopping her mid-sentence, and heads for the gun lying on the ground a few feet away. He reaches it first, but fumbles in his hurry, and Parker hauls back the crowbar in her hand and slams it down on top of his. There’s a crack, and Alec Hardison howls in pain as she kicks the gun away with her now swelling foot before darting away to hide behind the nearest crate. She can hear him fall to the floor, whimpering as he goes.

Parker huddles in her spot, breathing heavily. She needed to get him to talk, get some information out of him if not the plans, but that’s clearly not happening now with how much pain they’re both in. Now she just needs to get out of here before he gets it together and comes after her. Before Eliot Spencer wakes up.

There’s no way she’s outrunning him. There’s no way she’s fighting him off.

She needs to get out. She needs to get out now.

As she looks out from behind her crate for an escape route, she sees Alec Hardison leaned up against a poll, some device ins his non-damaged hand. He whimpers as he lets it fall to the ground, then gasps when he sees her looking. Her shoes squeak against the cold floor as she retreats back against her cover, and she tries to grit her teeth against the pained gasp threatening to expose her state as the shooting pain in her ankle worsens with her movement.

This is bad. This is terrible, she shouldn’t have come here, she shouldn’t have taken the job, this was a mistake, she’s done for, it wasn’t supposed to be like this—

The sound of shuffling and a deep groan freezes her in place. Eliot Spencer is awake.

“M’kay,” he slurs out, “m’not sayin’ this more than once, so listen close. Give it to me. Or it’s gettin’ ugly.”

Unwilling to give away her position, Parker stays quiet and still, even as she hears him moving slowly but surely closer. Alec Hardison is not at all quiet.

“C-come closer, dude,” he stutters out in a shaky voice, clearly crying, “I press this button and—and you get put on the No Fly List.”

“Awful resourceful of you,” he replies, still shuffling along. There’s a wound on his head that’s bleeding. “Must’ve taken you forever to come up with that little gadget.”

“I’ll do it!”

“Don’t much like flying anyway,” he says, and Hardison gasps. Parker risks a glance to see that Spencer’s picked up the gun. “You know, kinda admire that you got me to come out all this way, and you were so prepared with all your little toys. But you know how I know you’re all talk?”

“Nuh uh.”

Spencer taps the gun against Hardison’s knee. “You left the fucking safety on.”

He disassembles it and tosses it away, even as Hardison continues to cry.

“You’re gonna need to take several deep breaths and quit that blubbering,” Spencer says, squatting down and leaning in. “Cause you still haven’t given me what I need.”

Hardison squirms uselessly back into the pole. “Which was?”

“The plans. Hand ‘em over.”

“You think—? I don’t have them, man! Why would I bring you out here if I did?”

“Stupidity is my best guess,” he replies, grabbing Hardison by the collar and pulling him closer. “Now—”

“N-no no no no no, I don’t have—w-wait, if you just—" He squirms against Eliot's grip as he frantically looks in Parker's direction. "Wait shit, I think she has them!”

With his one good hand, he points over at her, and Spencer whips around to where she sits, her heart in her throat.

“You again,” he says, letting go of Hardison, “miss maid in the elevator.”

“I don’t have it,” she says firmly, finding her voice. “I thought he had it.”

“Alright, well, one of you is lying,” he growls, “and I’d much rather figure it out sooner than later.”

“Please, dude…” Hardison whispers.

Spencer turns to him. “Not so tough now I guess.”

“Please,” he continues, sobbing uncontrollably now, “I’d give it up if I could, I just wanna go home, this isn’t worth it I just wanted to—and I have family—my hand hurts—please let me go!”

He gets no answer for that. In fact, Spencer goes perfectly still as he blinks at Hardison. Parker holds her breath. It’s dead quiet in the warehouse, except for the sound of sobbing.

Suddenly, he stands up, looks down at his hands. Blood from his head wound trickles down his cheek, but he doesn’t seem to notice. Parker thinks he’s probably concussed.

“You don’t have it,” he says impassively after a few beats.

“N-no, I said no already—”

He turns to Parker, ignoring him. “You’re here, so you don’t have it.”

She nods. “I don’t have it.”

“Dammit,” he groans, “my head.” He holds a hand up to the wound, touching it gingerly, before staring at it again, his eyes wide. Then, he takes a very deep breath. Then another. Then several more. “Since I’m not in the business of killing people,” he says on a shaky exhale after the sixth one, “and neither of you seem to be either, we’re gonna walk away from this. We’re gonna go separate ways. I’m gonna go out this way,” he continues, pointing behind him, before pointing forward and looking down at Hardison. “You go that way out the front.” He turns to Parker. “You can just…”

“Roof,” she says, needing to prove that she does have a way out of here in case he suddenly changes his mind. “Came in that way.”

“Right,” he replies with mild confusion. Definitely concussed. “Both of you get up.”

Ready to comply before it all goes wrong, Parker scrambles up, ignoring her swollen foot. Hardison gets to his feet a lot more gingerly, clutching his injured hand to his chest.

“Now, on the count of three, we’re all gonna turn around. Nobody does anything funny, just turn around and walk away. Got it?”

“Got it,” she says.

Hardison wipes his face. “Okay.”

“Once we’re out, our business is done. If I ever see you again…well. Let’s just never see each other again.”

“Totally cool with me,” Hardison agrees hurriedly with a wet sniff. Parker is pretty sure the agreement is implied by the situation and decides to save her breath and her dignity.

“One,” Spencer says without preamble, “two, three.”

Parker grits her teeth and turns around, takes a painful step back to where she’d left her harness. Keeps going. This whole thing was stupid and dangerous, but now it’s over, she’s almost out, and she’ll be much smarter next time. One more step, then she can get out of here, find somewhere safe, take a long nap, and go steal something worth it. One more step. If she can make it out of this airplane hangar…

Warehouse. She’s in a warehouse. One more step out of the—

Airplane hangar.

She knows she needs to keep walking, and everything will be fine.

Just walk away, she tells herself, it’s easy. How many times has she just walked away?

Each step is heavy, and all she wants is to stop and turn around.

Don’t turn around. You won’t see anything but their backs. Don’t turn around. Don’t turn around.

Don’t turn around.

Parker turns around.

The warehouse is silent. Eliot Spencer and Alec Hardison are both gone.

With a sigh of relief, she leans against the wall to take some of the weight off her foot before continuing on.

Her harness hangs where she left it, and she straps herself in and pulls herself back up through the window. Once outside, she quickly grabs her things and makes her way back to her car.

She peels out, putting the warehouse in her review mirror, leaving the whole ordeal with Alec Hardison and Eliot Spencer behind her.

A phantom feeling, indefinable and vague, rides shotgun.

Chapter Text

Bad things happen sometimes.

When bad things do happen, they go in The Box.

The Box is not as secure as the Federal Reserve or The Chamber of Gold. It really isn’t even locked; it just happens to be the one thing Parker isn’t tempted to open. It doesn’t have anything worth taking out (unlike the Federal Reserve and the Chamber of Gold, both of which she has souvenirs from), which makes it the safest place to hold the things she doesn’t want to think about.

Awful foster system? The horse and the clown? Her brother and his bike? Being hungry and cold when she was living on the streets? It’s all in The Box.

And maybe, sometimes, Parker opens it, takes something out, but only when whatever it is she’s looking at is too far away to hurt, when it’s funny to think about.

Some of it has stayed put for a very long time.

The warehouse incident and everything that happened before it belongs in The Box. It was scary and frustrating and coated in failure, and so after putting as much physical distance as she could between herself and it, she tosses it in with the rest and decides to forget until time fixed it.

Time was the only thing that would fix her broken ankle, too, unfortunately. That and medical care, which she had enough connections and resources to get what she needed to recover, but definitely not fast enough. She’s been holed up in her storage unit unable to do anything useful, which hasn’t helped with the whole forgetting thing, but she’s managing.

Except for when—

“Parker.”

“Hmm?”

“You’re unfocused.”

“Sorry, Archie.” A sideways glance tells her he’s not even looking at her. Instead, he’s watching the entrance to Sotheby’s across the street, so she snaps her attention that way, too. Would-be bidders of the New York auction house are filing inside, all eager to leave with something precious and expensive.

“I don’t need you to be sorry, I need you to be here.”

“Yes, sir. I am.”

Had Archie called her for a job at any other point in the last two and a half months, she might not have been physically capable of pulling it off. Even now, there’s a twinge in her foot when she moves wrong, which she’s trying very hard not to do. Archie would notice, and then he would comment. As much as she would deserve it, she’d rather not spend their time that way.

“Prove it, then,” he says, thumping his walking cane against the ground in front of him for emphasis and resting his hands atop it. “We’re after?”

“Panthère de Cartier. Diamond panther pendant, necklace made of rubies, emeralds.” She grins conspiratorially. “More diamonds.”

“Yes, and revealed?”

“2007.”

“Very good. Currently located—”

“In lower-level storage,” she replies, then adds, knowing he’ll ask, “which is accessible by elevator. You need a key card to activate it.”

Archie digs into his coat pocket and pulls the key card out, handing it to her. She squirrels it away inside her own.

“Obstacles?”

“Cameras. Signal jammer’ll take care of it.” She pats her other pocket, then adds, “Laser security grid. Easy to maneuver through.”

“For some,” he acknowledges pointedly. “And you’ll find the necklace where?”

“Where the rest of the jewelry that’s meant to be saved for tomorrow’s auction, locked in the vault.”

“Which can’t possibly be a problem for you,” Archie says, satisfied. “I’ll be on lookout in the auction room and watching your button cam feed on my phone. We should be in and out in fifteen minutes.”

“Yes, sir,” she replies enthusiastically.

Two and a half months is a long time, and now that she’s here, she’s more than ready to get going. The excitement creeps up her skin in the form of goosebumps, and she shakes them out, does a little twisty jump in place, forgetting for a moment that maybe she shouldn’t as the twinge in her foot makes her inhale sharply.

“Woo,” she exhales out, a little too loudly, overcompensating. “Let’s go already!”

For that, she does get a quick side-eye, but chastisement doesn’t come. Instead, Archie steps off the curb, and she gingerly follows a half step behind.

They blend into the crowd entering Sotheby’s and part once inside, Archie heading off to his position. Parker does as he’d instructed her, having no difficulty making her way into and down the elevator toward storage.

The security grid, when she meets it in the dimly lit room, is just as easy. Bend down. Slide up. Move left. Strafe right. Up and down, up and down, up and down. She doesn’t break a sweat. Then she’s at the vault, taking out her tools to break it.

A smooth, easy job is just what she needed after all her time spent cooped up not thinking about what she didn’t want to be thinking about. She’s much less in her head now, just as focused as ever, and might even have a little spare time to grab something else expensive and shiny if she sees something she likes—

It’s dark out. She’s on the roof of a building, ready to go.

This is new. And fun. And she’s going to get so much money.

“Parker, no freelancing.”

Ping!

Parker gasps as her tool hits the ground, shocking her out of…whatever that was.

Nathan Ford again. She didn’t see him this time, he was talking on a device in her ear. But he was there, somewhere, she remembers.

…no she doesn’t. Parker isn’t crazy, and so doesn’t remember a man that she’s only ever seen once in passing.

At least, that’s what she’s had to tell herself over the last few months, every time she dreams about him.

That must be what it is, a dream. Except for how she’s always awake when it happens. And so maybe she is crazy. Or maybe just very stressed.

Yes, she decides as she bends to pick up her tool, she has been very stressed since then.

At least she’s not still dreaming of the other two. Nathan Ford is preferable.

But she would rather it stop happening altogether.

The vault opens after a click of a tumbler, and it takes very little time for her to locate the Panthère de Cartier and remove it from its box. Putting it in her bag, she quickly looks around and, just to spite the imaginary Nathan Ford in her head, she picks up the nearest thing, a sparkly blue diamond bracelet, and pockets it, too.

Leaving no trace that she’d ever been there in the first place, she makes her way back up and out of the building, and heads for the designated rendezvous point Archie had established.

“Thirteen minutes, forty-nine seconds,” he says by way of greeting without looking at her. “Cutting it a little close, it seems.”

“Yes, sir,” she says, handing him the pendant.

He spends a long moment looking it over. “Of course, if we weren’t dropping things in the middle of the operation and taking things we weren’t sent to get, we may have spared ourselves a few moments.” He puts up a hand to stop her as she reaches back into her bag for the pretty bracelet. “I have no need. I’m only saying that I would rather you keep to the plan when we work together. What you steal on your own time is your business, what you steal on my time is mine.”

Parker fidgets. “Yes, sir,” she says again.

He nods with an air of finality, and Parker, taking it as dismissal, turns to go. She isn’t twelve, and Archie doesn’t buy her ice cream after heists anymore, no matter how long it’s been since she’s seen him last.

“I don’t know what you’ve been doing with your time,” he calls after her, causing her to stop and turn to listen, “but I find it rather disappointing that a thief of your caliber, the one that I trained myself, would do anything to cause such an injury as the one you clearly have.

She feels the weight of his disappointment like an anvil on her chest. “There was trouble,” she explains apologetically.

“Could this trouble have been avoided?”

“I will,” she tells him. “Next time.”

Soon, she determines, her dreams of imaginary Nathan Ford will stop. And she’ll forget all about the horrible time with Those Other Guys. They’re in The Box where they can’t ever hurt her again.

“Yes,” Archie says, turning to walk in the opposite direction, “see that you do.”

~

There was a time, at his lowest of lows, when he was much more monster than he was human, that Eliot found cooking.

Actually, he found Toby who helped him find cooking. Toby taught Eliot how to use his hands to create instead of destroy and Eliot, out from under the thumb of Damien Moreau but hands still never quite being clean of blood from all the wet work he was doing, chopped, sliced, and diced his way into a new coping skill.

After the Dubenich job went south, Eliot was hardly at his lowest, but he’d somehow inched closer than he liked to be, and so reached out to Toby at Vargas Culinary Institute again. For old times’ sake.

Eliot leads a couple classes here and there when Toby needs the help, since the guy’s doing him one hell of a solid and lets him spend as much time as he wants in the kitchen. When he isn’t busy with the culinary students, he takes his time chopping, slicing and dicing. He sautés and he grills. He kneads. Spends long days that bleed into nights trying to bring himself back dish by dish.

And if sometimes he has to take a few deep breaths as he tries not to remember the heaving sobs and utter terror on that hacker kid’s face, well. That’s what he gets for sliding so far backward. He can be better. He will be.

He is.

“Smells good in here,” Toby says one evening, coming into the kitchen with his apron tied around his waist. “What did we make today?”

Eliot hums as he grabs a carving knife from the stand. “Beef Wellington. Want some?”

He smiles.  “Can’t say no to that.”

The knife cuts into the pastry and meat smoothly. Eliot makes sure to savor the gentleness of the act as he breathes in the mouthwatering smell and plates Toby’s piece first. Toby reaches into a drawer and grabs silverware for the two of them before trading one pair for his plate. Eliot gives himself a piece and then waits, watching his friend.

“It’s excellent, Eliot,” Toby says around a mouthful after a few moments, holding a hand in front of his mouth. “The beef is tender and flavorful, the pastry is flaky and rich, and I think I need several more slices after this.”

Eliot chuckles, pleased. “Help yourself,” he says before taking a bite. He hums as he chews.

It is good.

The two of them eat in silence, and it isn’t until Toby plates himself a third piece that he speaks again.

“The offer still stands,” he says casually. “You could teach this for class, if you were interested.”

“Yeah,” Eliot sighs, “I know I could.”

He’d told Toby two weeks ago he needed to be moving on after this week. As much as he was enjoying his time here, he needed to take the training wheels back off, get back to normal. Or, his version of normal. Eliot doesn’t get normal, normal; once upon a time, maybe, but he just ain’t built for it anymore.

He can’t hide from himself forever.

“Hope that don’t seem ungrateful.”

Toby smiles and reaches over to gently clap him on the shoulder. “No one could look at you here and think anything like that at all,” he says, giving him a pat. “And if I did, the offer wouldn’t still stand. Reach out anytime, alright?”

He was going to try not to have to. “I will,” he says anyway as he grabs both their plates and heads to the sink. As he grabs a sponge to scrub them down, Toby’s phone rings.

“Sorry about that,” he says to Eliot, who shrugs it off, before answering the call.

“This is Toby Heath….ah, yes…hello, again.”

His less than friendly tone catches Eliot’s attention, and he looks over his shoulder to see the matching expression on his face. “Yes, I understand, but as I said last time you called I’m not interested, so thank you for your time.”

He abruptly hangs up.

“What’s that about?” Eliot asks as he shuts off the sink and dries his hands with a towel.

“Just someone offering to buy me out,” he says. At Eliot’s look of concern, he continues reassuringly, “I’m not doing it. This place is too important.”

“They called more than once?” Eliot asks, a vague uneasiness in the pit of his stomach.

“I have had many offers over the years, it happens. This one is just persistent, but it’s not a problem. They’ll get the message eventually.”

Eliot frowns as he crosses his arms, feels the uneasiness in the sudden tension of his muscles. “You sure? ‘Cause I can…help.”

So much for the straight and narrow he was trying to walk.

“No, it really is fine. Like I said, this happens.” He grabs more dishes from the counter and carries them over to the sink. “Can’t imagine why they want this place so bad, though.”

He wants to say something comforting or constructive, but what comes out is, “Truffles.”

Toby looks at him quizzically as he turns the faucet back on. “What makes you say that?”

Eliot blinks.

He has no idea.

“Sorry, I was…thinking about somethin’ else.”

“Oh,” he chuckles, “okay. Well, let’s get this place cleaned up so we can head out of here. You get to cleaning surfaces, and I’ll start on the dishes.”

Eliot does as directed, pushing down the weird anxiety. If Toby was in trouble or needed help, he’d ask. And Toby’s not asking, so it’s fine.

When the two part ways for the night, Toby pulls Eliot in for a hug.

“The offer will always stand, you know.”

In response, Eliot just squeezes the man tightly back.

Walking down the sidewalk, Eliot checks his phone to see he’d gotten a call and a voicemail from a name he recognizes, one that feels like it’s been several lifetimes since he thought of it last. He quickly hits play and brings the phone to his ear.

“Eliot? It’s Willie Martin. I probably don’t need to say that, you got caller ID, I just…listen, I know it’s been a long time. Long, long time, and I don’t wanna…if it’d be uncomfortable for you I don’t expect you to do anything, but well, something happened and you were the first person I thought of. Now we’re all fine, but there’s a situation and…Aimee wouldn’t want me to be calling but, well. Anyway, if you could call me back when you can, I’d appreciate it.”

~

With a startled gasp, Alec shoots up in bed and fumbles around in panic.

The outline of something looming in the corner of his room makes him yelp, and he reaches blindly for the switch on his bedside table lamp. Blinking against the sudden harsh light, the looming object turns out to be nothing more than a coat of his hanging on the wall. Everywhere else he looks around he sees nothing out of the ordinary. It’s all fine. He’s fine.

Alec shivers, the last remnants of whatever nightmare he’d been having fading from memory, the specifics of it just out of reach. When he looks at the clock to see it’s only 3:37, he groans with exhaustion as he scrubs at his face with both hands. He’s had too many nights (or mornings) like this, chased out of sleep by faces he wishes he could forget.

Sliding out of bed, he pulls on a hoodie he’d tossed on the floor and makes his way to his computer. It’s in sleep mode, and as he sits down, he stares into the black screen for a long moment before clicking it awake. The screen lights up, and there they are again.

Two slightly blurry photos, side by side, of Parker and Eliot Spencer.

Maybe it’d be easier to forget them if they weren’t the last thing he saw before going to bed each night, but Alec can’t help it. He was so sure that he was going to die in that warehouse, and if Spencer hadn’t suddenly changed his mind for some reason, he’s positive that he would have. Even now, as he stares at his photo on the left, it scares the hell out of him. He looks like the kinda guy who could break Alec in half and enjoy it.

The photo on the right just gives him the creeps. Parker has a sort of dead-eyed stare and an empty expression that reminds him of scary movies with possessed kids talking in robotic voices. When they’d made eye contact in the warehouse, it was like she was looking right through him, and it made his blood run cold. She might not enjoy it if she got to stab him, but she probably wouldn’t feel anything at all, which makes it worse. Somehow.

He got their photos after hacking into the security cameras that were across the street from the warehouse once he was safe back at home. He was able to use those images to search through government databases until he found their basic info, which was how he found out Parker’s name. Her one and only name, which makes her even creepier. From there, he’d done a lot of digging into them (slowly and with a lot of difficulty, thanks to his broken hand in a cast) and managed to set up a system that tracked their movements. Not down to their exact location, but he knows their general whereabouts. It’s how he keeps tabs on them. How he knows they aren’t coming after him, and how he knows where not to go.

If he accidentally ran into Spencer by chance…

“Well…let’s just never see each other again.”

…yeah, he wouldn’t survive it.

He clicks over to his tracking system. For a while there, Spencer was in Portland, Oregon. He just popped up in Kentucky yesterday, though. Parker’s a little harder to track, but when she does pop up, she’s consistently been in New York. Either way, they’re far, far away from Alec, which is exactly where they should be.

The few remaining hours of the early morning are whiled away at the computer. Alec checks and re-checks all his go-to defenses, makes tweaks to some new ones, and ensures he’s scrubbed from databases, taking care to throw a little something in there so as not to be suspicious. It’s only when morning light starts to peak through the blinds of his bedroom window does he realize how tired he actually is. And hungry.

Deciding to grab a quick bite before attempting to doze off again for a couple of hours, Alec pushes back from his computer and makes his way to the kitchen. He warms himself up a couple of frozen breakfast sandwiches in the microwave, and as he takes a bite of the first as he pads back to his room, he hears the ringtone from his cell going off.

It sits on his desk where he left it, and he unhurriedly leans over to check the caller ID. He very quickly, however, picks it up when he realizes who’s calling.

“Hello?”

“Alec Hardison, where on the Lord’s green Earth have you been?”

“Nowhere,” Alec replies innocently, wincing a little at Nana’s “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed” tone. “Nowhere, Nana.”

“Nowhere?” There’s a shuffling sound and then he hears a commotion in the background. “Y’all gotta keep it down or move the ruckus somewhere else, I’m on the phone,” she chastises to what sounds like a handful of kids, whose laughter fades as they apparently comply. “Nowhere must mean ‘anywhere but your Nana’s’, I guess,” she continues to Alec.

Alec pulls his hoodie down off his head, guilt immediately sinking into his chest as he slumps into his chair. He doesn’t have anything to say to that; he hasn’t been to the house since the day at the warehouse. He hasn’t felt safe enough to go much of anywhere, really. What if they found him? What if he led them to Nana and the kids and someone got hurt? Or worse? He couldn’t risk it.

“Have I done something, son?”

“Nah, nah, nah,” he promises, hanging his head in his hand as he slumps over the desk. “It’s nothing like that, Nana. Just busy. You know how it is.”

“Well, if ‘how it is’ doesn’t have you held hostage today, it’s Gotcha Day and I think we’d all love to see you.”

Despite himself, he chuckles quietly. Gotcha Days at the house are a tradition Nana made up. At least once a year, but sometimes two or even three times depending on the mood and amount of time to spare, Nana holds little celebrations for all the kids at the house, the theme being what amounts to “I’m happy you’re here with me.” It’s nice. Growing up, Alec never once felt unwanted by the woman who was raising him, but on those days especially, he knew how much he was loved.

Spencer and Parker aren’t anywhere close, and to be honest, Alec misses his people. And also, just like, normal human interaction. So he asks, “Need me to bring anything?”

“Just yourself, if it’s not too much trouble.”

For Nana, nothing ever could be.

It’s a couple hours later that he finds himself strolling up the gravel walkway to the house. He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly at the sight, feeling some of the stress and anxiety of the last few months fade away as he does. Now that he’s looking at the place, he realizes just how much he’s missed it. It looks the same as it ever has; well-kept despite its age, the light blue color only slightly faded over time. He’s always liked the rounded Victoria architecture of the building, and the wrap around porch immediately brings back memories of all the time spent there with the other kids when Nana sent them outside to play. His gaze strays up to a window on the left-hand side of the second floor, the one that used to be his room once upon a time.

The door is barely open before he’s greeted by twin calls of “Alec!” as two boys, Jamal and Henry, race by the entryway on their way up the stairs. Even with just the small glimpse of them, Alec can see that they’ve both shot up in height since he last saw them, which makes sense for them being 13 and 14 respectively.

“Alec’s here!” Henry shouts down as he trails Jamal.

“What’s up?” Alec calls out to the house in general as he shuts the door behind him and makes his way down the hall toward the kitchen where he smells something sweet and hears the most commotion. He almost passes the living room on his left when a small figure bodily throws themselves at him from the room, and Alec lets out a startled yelp as he’s nearly barreled over. He manages to stay upright, though, as a giggly Breanna wraps her arms around his waist.

“I got you!” she tells him, looking up with a big toothy grin.

“Whaaaaat?” Alec responds in a voice that’s pitched slightly higher than he meant it to be. He clears his throat. “No, you didn’t.”

“So did,” she says. “Payback for last time.”

“A’ight,” he relents, “but we oughta talk about your ability to hold a grudge. They stunt your growth, you know.”

She sobers, peering up at him suspiciously. “Liar,” she says after a moment.

“For real, I mean it. You’re like, what, eight, right?”

“I’m eleven!”

Alec grins. “Oh, see? Couldn’t even tell ‘cause you’re so small,” he tells her, ruffling her curly hair as he gives her a noogie.

With a gasp, she lets him go and bats his hand away, running back toward the kitchen. “Nana! Alec says I’m small!”

“Alec Hardison,” comes the sound of Nana scolding him from just beyond the hallway, “I know you’re not in there bothering your sister before you’ve even said hello.”

Following after Breanna, Alec pokes his head into the kitchen with an innocent smile. “I said what’s up.”

With an apron on that seems covered in batter of some kind, Nana gives him a look of fond exasperation. “What’s up is you can make yourself useful and put together the macaroni salad. All the ingredients are in the fridge.”

He takes in the state of the kitchen, various platters of finger foods and sweet treats lining the counters. “You said I didn’t need to bring anything, Nana.”

“I said just yourself, and yourself includes a working pair of hands. At least…as far as I was aware.”

She eyes his wrist, which is currently wrapped in a drugstore wrist brace. After his early morning computer work, it was feeling a little off, and it felt better to have it on. He raises it in the air and waves.

“Carpal tunnel,” he lies. “Still works.”

“Well then, get to it.”

“Yes ma’am,” he says, opening the fridge.

“Am I small?”

“Breanna Casey,” Nana scolds, “you’re as big as you need to be, but if you don’t get out of my kitchen…”

Breanna clears out quick, and Alec grins again as he starts on his task while Nana finishes up decorating some cupcakes with vanilla frosting. It isn’t too long before everything is done, and he helps carry the trays of food out to the yard where she’d set up some tables.

“Weather’s too nice to not have a Gotcha Day picnic,” she tells him. “Called all of the older kids who are still nearby. Got a couple ‘I’ll stop by’s’, but we’ll see.”

Sensing the lack of pandemonium in the kitchen, the rest of the house files outside behind them after a few minutes, and once they’re all together, everyone looks at Nana expectantly. She huffs a sigh of fond exasperation.

“I gotcha,” she says, “and I’d get you again. Now eat.”

It’s one of the better days that Alec’s had in what feels like forever, eating and chatting up his siblings, both the ones living in the house and the ones that show up despite having moved on like himself. For a while, he finds it easy to forget about the terror of the last few months, until the light begins to fade as late afternoon turns to evening, and then he has to convince himself, as he helps Nana clean up, that the shadows he sees creeping in the dark are only that and nothing more sinister.

“Sure are a jumpy thing,” Nana comments as she finishes putting the last of the leftovers in the fridge.

“Who, me?” he asks with an awkward chuckle. He didn’t realize he was so obvious. “Nah, I’m chill. Cool as a cucumber.”

She hums at that, looking him over. Scrutinizing. Alec gives her a wide, cheesy grin, knowing that she’d see straight through him if he tried for sincerity. With a slight frown, she reaches up to pat him on the cheek, and then holds his face in her hands for a long moment. He has no choice but to let her.

“You look tired, son.”

“Had some late nights,” he tells her honestly but casually, offering up nothing else.

There’s another long moment of silence. “It’s those videogames, hmm?”

“Yeah, Nana,” he laughs, “it’s the videogames.”

She nods, and then finally releases his face, only to pull him in again as she wraps her arms around him. He does the same, burying his head in her shoulder as he sighs deeply.

“You go home and get some sleep,” she says. “No games tonight. And check in more often. I don’t want to wonder about you, you hear me?”

“Yeah, Nana. I gotcha.”

It’s fully dark when Alec gets back home. His place seems too empty and quiet after the afternoon of laughter and fun he had, and now that he’s what feels like a million miles away from home again, the fear starts to settle back in like an unwanted houseguest. The dark computer screen in his room mocks him when he makes his way in and, against Nana’s instructions and all good reason, he finds he can’t ignore the pull of it. He moves the mouse, and the screen lights up again.

They’re still there, right where he left them.

It’s almost funny how the sudden buzzing of his phone in his pocket nearly makes him jump out of his skin. Almost. Alec takes it out to see a text from Breanna:

sent u an email, check itttttttt

k <3

He navigates away from the unending gaze of his personal nightmare, pulling up his email to see Breanna’s message at the top of his inbox.

GOTCHA! the message reads, and there’s a file linked at the bottom. Alec clicks it, and it opens to a picture from today that they’d taken of all of them with Nana’s digital camera. In the photo, Alec sees himself smiling widely, Breanna hanging off of him as the others all ham it up, Nana off to the side looking at her mess of a brood. It’s a nice picture.

It was a really good day.

Alec smiles.

At least, he tries to. He can feel it start to wobble on his face before hot tears well up in his eyes and streak down his cheeks. Pressing his fist against his mouth, he takes a deep breath and tries to hold the emotion back, but the tears keep coming. Finally, with a whimper that seems to echo in the deafening silence of his empty house, Alec cries. Even with his family smiling back at him, he still feels them watching him. Always, always watching. Maybe, he thinks, he always will.

Once he starts, he doesn’t know how to stop. The sobs wracking his body keep coming, and eventually, he makes his way into bed with the tears still falling, hoping that, at the very least, he’ll tire himself out after a while and fall asleep like he promised Nana he would.

Eventually, it works.

Of course, he meets them in the darkness. Same as always.

Alec is terrified.

Same as always.

Alec is terrified.

No.

Millions of people…he can’t, there’s no way—

It isn’t.

Eliot pulls him in by the back of his head.

“You’re the smartest guy I’ve ever known.”

No, tonight…it feels…

“Kiss for luck?”

“I don’t believe in luck,” Parker teases, bending back and away.

…different.

Somehow.

They’re bleeding and bruised and so damn tired, but somehow, they’re walking away triumphant.

And he feels it in the way Eliot leans into his weight as he supports him.

And in the look Parker gives him when their eyes meet over top of him.

This is it, he knows.

This is it!

It’s just like she said.

“We change together.”

For the first time in a long time, Alec wakes up slow, the soft light of the sun already streaming in through the blinds of his window. He turns over and looks at the clock; it’s 8:48, and he feels…so awake. Refreshed, even, despite still wearing his clothes from the day before. And…

…he remembers the dream. More than that, he remembers his feelings in the dream.

“The hell,” Alec whispers to himself as he throws off the covers and scrambles out of bed and over to his desk.

Breanna’s picture is still up when the screen comes to life, and he minimizes it to find two familiar faces staring back at him once again. Only this time, just like in the dream, it feels different. It’s a very specific feeling, one he’s familiar with. He spent all day yesterday at Nana’s completely awash in the exact same feeling. It’s comforting and safe. Easy.

“Those are my people,” he says aloud to an otherwise empty room.

There’s no way that’s right.

But for some reason…

Alec goes back and saves Breanna’s pic. Then he opens it up again, does a little editing, and moves some stuff around on his screen. Then for a few long, silent moments, Alec sits there and stares at a cropped version of himself sandwiched in between the shots of Spencer and Parker on his screen.

“Huh,” he croaks out.

It shouldn’t be possible, but looking at this badly done Photoshop job feels…right. Just like his dream.

Only, he’s not entirely sure it was one.

The sudden laugh takes him by surprise. This is crazy, he knows it’s crazy, but he’s also pretty sure that he knows these people. Or that he’s supposed to. Or something.

He wonders if they feel the same.

Well. Good thing he knows just how to find them to ask.

“Hoo, baby,” he sighs, “alright.”

Two dots blink away on his tracker.

“Eenie, meenie,” he starts, pointer finger moving from left to right across the screen, “miney, mo.”