Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Breanna was seven the first time she remembered not saying thank you to him. She was sitting at his Nana’s table, crying, as she tried to tune out the shouting coming vaguely from the direction of her house. She couldn’t hear much of what her grandma was yelling, but of the words she could hear, she recognized at least three that would usually wind up with someone putting money in the Swear Jar.

She heard him clear his throat, and she focused on the shuffle of cookies as he rearranged them on a plate.

“Now I’m not sure if any of my younger sisters have spilled the beans,” Hardison said as he made his way over to sit at the table with her. “But these cookies have magic healing spells. Nana keeps them stocked special— for moments like this.”

Breanna wiped at her eyes, still frowning as he placed the pile of cookies between them and poured what looked like another sleeve of knockoff Oreos onto the plate.

“There’s no such thing as—"

The Swear Jar words got louder outside, and he paused mid-pour to glance out the back door.

The word magic died on Breanna’s lips.

When she sniffled, his attention turned back towards her. He winced, then emptied the rest of the cookies from the sleeve and crumpled up the packaging.

“I ain’t never heard your sweet, old grandma use words like that, and she has to have lived here just as long as Nana has—probably longer,” he said, meeting her eyes. “You wana fill in some of the blanks for me?”

She remembered staring down at her hands, her eyes dropping to avoid his. She couldn’t make sense of it. Her grandmother usually never swore on her good days— she never even raised her voice, really, unless she was frustrated on a bad day— but then there was this strange lady on the stairs after school, and they talked for a little while, and when Grandma stuck her head out the window to see what was keeping her, she took one look at the woman and ordered Breanna to Hardison’s Nana’s house.

She shook her head. “I think she’s new,” she finally settled on. “Because usually they send Miss Cindy to check up on me, but she said her name was Miss Kaitlin, and that I shouldn’t be walking home from school alone.”

When she looked back up, he was nodding at her. “Okay,” he said before throwing the crumpled-up packaging into the garbage can behind her. “And?”

“And she said it was time.” Breanna wiped at her eyes. “That they tried to keep me here, but it’s not working, because she forgets, and it’s not enough that I know the way and I can walk home by myself, so I have to go. But I don’t want to go—”

“Oh, shit,” he said as his eyes widened. “We didn’t realize it had gotten—Nana would have— Oh, shit.”

“Shhhhhhhh,” she found herself automatically correcting. “That’s a—"

“—Swear Jar word, I know, I know. You’re lucky I just used that one,” he said, eyes darting. He looked back towards the door, then at something near the fridge, then at the hallway behind him before pushing the plate her way. “Here, take all the cookies.”

His chair legs scraped the kitchen floor as he pushed away from the table. He reached up above the fridge to turn a radio on—some old synth-pop drowning out the voices two houses down—before turning on his heal and heading for the hallway.

Breanna rubbed at her nose and bit her lip, at a loss for what to do now that she was alone. She didn’t want to leave her grandma’s house. It was the only home she knew since her mom and dad died. She felt her eyes water again at the prospect of this stranger taking her away from the only family she had left.

She remembered these thoughts, these fears, taking over—that is until Hardison returned. He turned her chair slightly and knelt down next to it, eye-level with her.

“You don’t gotta go anywhere with her,” he explained slowly. “Your grandma ain’t the only family you have on this block, you hear me?”

Breanna sniffled and nodded. Alec nodded back. He gently grabbed one of her little hands and put a wad of Kleenex in it, then reached back to the plate of generic Oreos and brought one up in front of her face.

“Magic. Healing. Spells,” he emphasized with a wave of the cookie before pushing it into her other hand. “You sit here and eat at least three while I go work some magic of my own.”

She frowned as he stood. “But there’s no such thing as—"

“Yeah there is,” Alec interrupted, hand on her shoulder. “Because I’m a computer wizard. ”

Breanna remembered him pointing at the cookie in her hand, eyebrows raised as he waited. She took a hesitant bite, but soon hummed as the sweet filling melted on her tongue. The music crescendoed, and she closed her eyes, and for a moment, everything felt like it might be okay.

When she opened them again, chewing the cookie noisily, Hardison was giving her a small smile. He pointed to the Kleenex in her other hand, and she wiped some of the snot from under her nose. Then he nodded, flashed three fingers at her, and squeezed her shoulder as he headed towards the hallway again.

She was done with the second cookie before she realized she had forgotten her manners. But a few months later, after Miss Kaitlin said the paperwork was somehow, "magically" in order and helped her move all her belongings two doors down, she asked Hardison’s Nana—her Nana—for some paper and some crayons. She wasn’t really sure what a computer wizard looked like, but she had some ideas, and her grandma had always said it was the thought that counted.

She slipped the drawing under the door to his room, because saying thank you didn’t seem like it would be big enough, then returned to Nana’s side, asking if she could go with her to work on Saturday to visit her grandma at the nursing home.

Chapter Text

She remembered it happening again when she was eleven. She was sitting on her bed with her journal surrounded by cards and notes when there was a knock on the door frame.

“Nana said you’d probably be up here.”

He looked different than the last time he visited, and the time before that, and the time before that—the times she and her sisters weren’t allowed to speak of when the FBI came knocking at the door. She smiled and moved to get up and hug him, but when she shifted, a stack of drawings spilled onto the floor.

“Well. Look. What. We. Have. Here!” Hardison waved her off and started gathering them up himself. “Your drawings have gotten better, Bre. Although, I have to ask,” he mused as he flipped through the pages, smirking. “Does an Earth Spirit Knight beat a Computer Wizard Extraordinaire?” He turned the drawing of herself in magical armor towards her with a smirk.

“Please.” She snatched the drawing from his hands. “She’s not concerned with such small-time threats,” she quipped back, watching him clutch his chest in mock pain. “She’s busy loyally defending the Queen.”

“Of course she is. No other way to defend a queen,” Hardison said as he passed the stack of papers back to her. “Especially one as attractive as the lovely Queen Zeil.”

Breanna froze, holding the stack of papers mid-air. Her stomach dropped, and her wide eyes followed him as he rolled her desk chair closer to her bed. He sat on it, backwards.

“I mean that long, purple hair—mmhmm,” he continued, his tone light, as if nothing had changed from just moments before. “Beauty like that is no joke. Personally, I’ve always been more of a blonde guy myself, but recently, maybe a bit of a brunet man too—”

“She told you?” she interrupted, studying him for any signs of negativity.

He shrugged, face impassive. “Told me what, exactly?”

“You know,” she tried, bringing the papers back to her chest and hugging them with a small frown. “That I think I’m… I mean that I am… I’m…” She trailed off, unable to finish her statement when her mind was so singularly preoccupied with this irrational fear of what his reaction might be.

He filled her heightened silence with a maddening nonchalance. “A huge nerd? Well, we all knew that already. Takes one to know one—”

“No, that’s not why that girl was making fun—Well, not the only reason—Not why I—Uggh.” She growled in frustration, dropping the stack of papers onto the bed once again and rubbing at her eyes. “You really guna make me say it?”

She heard him clear his throat. “Not if you don’t want to—”

“Well maybe the reason I don’t want to is because Nana already told you—”

“Hey, hey—slow down just a minute.” She felt his hand on her shoulder, felt him squeeze once in reassurance. “You really think Nana—our Nana—would take something like that away from you? She wouldn’t do that. No—she barely implied. She stuck with the facts of what happened at school that resulted in our sweet Breanna landing herself in the principal’s office.”

Breanna looked up to meet his steady gaze with her own anxious one. “Now, because I’m me, and I know all, I may have deduced some of the rest when I correctly hacked into the school’s records, among others.” And because it was Hardison, he winked and smirked as he added, “Age of the geek, baby.”

It had the effect she knew he had intended. She felt a small smile creep back onto her face. He then proceeded to roll with this new, more lighthearted direction, dropping back into their familiar pattern of teasing. He shifted on the chair and clapped her shoulder twice, lightly. “See, it was you that just confirmed it. Come on now—I know I taught you better than that. If it had been an actual, important secret just now, you would have been toast.”

“I just… It...” Breanna licked her lips. She found she couldn’t quite tease back yet, though she appreciated that his efforts made the air between them feel less fraught with perceived danger. She shook her head a little, eyes darting around the room. “It’s just that it feels like it really is this big, important secr—”

“Nuh-uh,” he interrupted. “It’s a big, important declaration. It’s a fact, not a secret. Never a secret, or something to be ashamed of, or to hide. Not in this family. Nuh-uh.”

He removed his hand and started rummaging around in his jacket pocket, muttering under his breath. “And I’ll tell you what, that girl from school is going to have more than just that embarrassing moment—of you sharing her pictures and messages and internet history on that old-ass projector during an assembly—to haunt her dreams by the time I’m through with her. Kid or not, she should know better. I’m about to be the most infuriating, annoying thorn in her digital side until she wisens up and learns to be a better human being. Or at least to keep her hateful ass out of other people’s own damn lives. Her and those horrible people that raised her. They can for damn sure kiss that college fund goodbye—”

Breanna’s small smile returned as she listened to him rant about the parents’ ill-begotten profits being donated to various charities that specifically catered towards causes that ran counter to their awful beliefs. He patted down his jean pockets before seeming to remember something and took out his Star Wars wallet. She watched as he produced a shiny new sticker from between its worn old folds, and when he held it up to her, she took in the familiar swirling earth, water, and fire magic triangle. The Spirit’s Ruse logo had been reduced to just a black outline, but the typical red, blue, and green colors had been replaced with a very meaningful rainbow.

Her breath caught, and her eyes widened, darting between his steady expression and a sticker that seemed to so perfectly embody some of the parts of herself that she loved the most, but all too often, felt like she had to hide.

“Go on,” he prompted. “A declaration, not a secret—remember? It’s called the Pride Flag for a reason, so go on, now. Take it.”

So she did, running her fingers over it in reverence. She let out a breath she didn’t even realize she had been holding in, let go of a weight she didn’t even realize had been sitting heavy on her shoulders. She stared at it, feeling the pressure behind her eyes build from relief, acceptance, happiness, and so many other emotions she couldn’t quite place.

“Now, before you get too excited,” she heard him continue. “Just know that this will be your only freebie sticker. All other stickers will have to be earned at Hardison’s Official Computer Coding Camp—we’ll make t-shirts, start a club with your other sisters—where I will be your counselor and guide, judge and jury, etc. etc. Because no sister of mine will ever be allowed to leave such a disgraceful trail of digital breadcrumbs for the likes of a low-level, school system IT nobody to find and trace back to her—”

But Breanna was barely listening. She was thinking about what he said before, and she was trying to reconcile the conflicting feelings of wanting him to hear her say it—out loud, proud—and not wanting it to be treated like a big deal—not wanting anything between them to change.

“I… I…” she interrupted before trailing off. She brought the Spirit’s Ruse Pride sticker up to her heart and wiped at a single tear on her cheek before raising her eyes to meet his. “I like girls. But, but not in that way, I don’t think. I’m—I’m ace, and a lesbian.”

She watched as Hardison nodded solemnly, his hand returning to her shoulder. “Now that was a declaration if I ever heard one.” He squeezed in reassurance again—once, twice, three times—as he held her gaze, meaningfully. She bit her lip, wishing away the intense focus and attention. “But you forgot this family’s worst coder, too. And if you think you can call yourself any kind of knight without these crucial skills in the new computer age that we are living in, you had better think again. I mean, your queen would be affronted—”

But he didn’t get to finish his thought, as Breanna grabbed her pillow and swung it as his head, thankful that her big brother had somehow managed to find the perfect balance in his response.

It sent her drawings flying once again, but she barely noticed as she defended her Queen’s honor and took chase after him down the hallway.