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Hardison had a few updates on the weirdness of his team.
- Parker had a death wish, jumping off buildings like that. Or she was just trying to kill him, specifically. She also happened to mutter to herself in foreign languages without noticing.
- Eliot Spencer knew many things, such as how to ID gunshots by sound over sketchy audio and speak French. Modern technology was not one of those things.
- Sophie Devereux could probably seduce anyone with a pulse. She also liked to act like team mom, treating all of them like children except for Nate. Actually, sometimes even Nate. Hardison was not interested—Nana filled that post way better.
- Nathan Ford was actually insane. Also a micromanaging asshole. Oh, and an alcoholic, too. Yay. Hardison knew the type. If he hadn't been damned exceptional at his job as mastermind, Hardison would consider quitting.
That wasn't the weirdest thing about them all, though. The weird thing was the inside jokes that no matter how hard he tried, Hardison just could not understand. He knew Sophie and Nate had history, he expected it from them, but everybody else? He'd known them just as long as they'd known each other. Shouldn't be happening. Like the time Sophie talked about some random dead army guy from Medieval Times that she somehow knew would wind Eliot up. That time Parker talked about a theft from the 60's in so much detail that it had Sophie eyeing her. The way Nate would practically wax nostalgic about the art and culture of Renaissance Italy, where he obviously had never been, to much eye-rolling from Eliot and indulgence from Sophie. The way Parker acted any time anyone brought up Ancient Egypt, which happened far more often than Hardison thought it should. The sheer number of times that Sophie and Nate fondly remembered shooting and/or stabbing each other. After three separate reminiscences, Hardison had taken to tuning them and their nastiness out.
The way Parker had just now tipped her head, squinted at Eliot, and asked, "Do I know you?"
To which, instead of being offended at being forgotten by his literal teammate who was standing right in front of him, Eliot had tipped his head to mirror her, studied her face, and hesitantly said, "I don't think so?"
Hardison cleared his throat then, pausing his game. This was ludicrous. "Parker, this is Eliot Spencer, he's a caveman. He likes grunting and punching people—"
"Come on, man!" Eliot threw up his hands and stormed off. Point to Hardison.
Parker laughed once at that, the abrupt and endearing way that she did. "Him, a caveman? That's ridiculous."
Hardison blinked at her a couple times, still smiling. Not what he was going for, but he'd take it. "Yeah, I know, right?"
She walked away with another laugh, and Hardison stared at his monitor with wide eyes. "Working with a bunch of crazy people," he mumbled to himself.
The good news was that their client Corporal Perry was safe.
The bad news was that the team was rattled. Sophie couldn't blame them when she was so rattled herself. Even Nate was feeling it, which was all too noticeable when he started drinking straight from the bottle. He did have manners, most of the time.
"I didn't sign up for this," Hardison said. "What I did before, nobody got hurt."
"I stole paintings for a living," she said in agreement. Self-defence was very different than going to battle.
"I never hurt anyone—" Parker said, cutting her words a little short. Yes, self-defence was different.
Eliot shrugged a little. "I actually hurt people, so...."
She knew he'd been a soldier from the start. She knew he kept returning to it. What she didn't understand was why. He had never especially liked wars and yet he kept joining them—joining them often enough to recognize the knife style of a particular kind of modern soldier. Enough that what had felt like a terrifying risk to them, fighting off that goon in the hospital, had made Eliot smile at their very attempt.
To his credit, Eliot had warned them from the start. Private army, he'd said. Sophie hadn't known what that meant at the time. Now that she did...she might not have agreed to take this job, had she known
"Nate," she said. "If anything had happened to that kid tonight—"
"You—you guys called on me, remember?" he interrupted her.
Sophie felt it in her gut when he looked at her as coldly as the others. She paced away from him.
"You begged me to run the crew, agreed to play by my rules. Now walk out if you have a problem with that. Walk out any day if you have a problem with that. It's that simple."
It was a bold gamble, with both the team and Corporal Perry's life in the balance. A bold one, but not necessarily a risky one.
"We finish this one," Eliot stated, and oh, this one was as personal to him as she'd thought.
"Just one," Parker added firmly.
"How do we hit them?" Hardison asked, serious.
Sophie said nothing at all. The door was right there, along with her opportunity for a new job, a solo job, but...she'd try to work with Nate one more time before she took it. Friends were hard to find.
Update on the team, job number two. Hardison hadn't been sure if he should count that first job in Chicago, or if he should count it as two jobs, or if only the second job counted because that was when Sophie joined the team—anyway. For ease of reference, helping Corporal Perry was job number one.
- Parker had not had a normal childhood, or life in general. Ever. And she kept appearing and disappearing at will. Hardison could almost believe it was because she was something more than a thief. What? He had no idea.
- Eliot had become a professional chef in his spare time, y'know, as a hobby. He'd also ended up somewhere that the Butcher of Kiev could recognize him. He also defeated said butcher with a surprisingly tasty appetizer. The trend of not getting modern technology continued. The score was 7 to 6 for Eliot, but only because of the appetizer.
- Nate as a priest. What?
- Hardison did not want to get into whatever was going on between Sophie and Nate. So far, it hadn't impacted the jobs at least.
Side note: Nate did not consider people who ran across the mob for whatever reason worthy of helping. That one...that one didn't feel good.
And oh yeah, new inside jokes, because he'd started cataloguing them. The word "old." "Old" friend, enemy, whatever. Both Sophie and Eliot had been extremely clear that these people from their pasts did not qualify as "old," whatever that meant.
Eliot scrubbed the pots—he'd insisted, he knew how hard a restaurant had to work to survive. He was glad that dinner had been a success. Trying to meet everyone's tastes was a challenge, but pasta was good at being versatile. He'd gone with a sweet marinara sauce, given the pair of sweetooths on Parker and Hardison both, but it had to be the right marinara with the right wine to hit Sophie and Nate's tastes. That was made more difficult by the fact that he hadn't had that sauce in over two hundred years, and he hadn't been this invested in cooking back then. It wasn't perfect, but he'd come up with something that made their eyes light up all the same. It had also been a hit with Hardison. Parker had kind of...abandoned it after three bites, which was more than he was expecting but less than he'd hoped—
Wait. Not less than he'd hoped. He wasn't—he didn't make the food for them, it had just...been a while since he'd seen a professional kitchen. That was all.
Sophie stepped into the room to lean against the counter across from him. He glanced at her from the corner of his eye, but didn't turn around.
"Thank you again for the meal. It was lovely."
"Just a little somethin'."
"I didn't know you cooked."
He glanced over his shoulder. She raised an eyebrow in response. "It's new," he said, setting the pan aside.
"I think it suits you. It's a great way to do something for the people you care about—"
He turned to face her. "Whoa. Who said anything about caring? This is just a job. I got a chance to cook. I like doing it, so I did."
"And why do you like looking after others?"
He folded his arms. "There is no 'why,' and it's not about looking after anybody, okay? I just like cooking."
Sophie gave him a look. "There's always a why. The fact that you connect with people isn't a flaw, Eliot. I rather think I envy you that."
Eliot could say that she would have better luck if she stopped embodying twenty spirits in a single body, but unlike some people, he had manners. "No, you don't," he said instead. "Because it's a liability. Especially to a grifter."
"Why take the risk, then?"
"Who said I was?"
"Eliot."
He shrugged, and she pouted. She flicked a finger at him, walking closer. "So, is cooking something that you do, or something that Eliot Spencer does?"
He turned back to the dishes. "I am Eliot Spencer."
"And I'm Sophie Devereux. That doesn't mean that's all I am."
He scrubbed the pot vigorously. "Yeah, well, that's where we're different."
She made a thoughtful sound, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. He rinsed the pot and set it with the other dishes, grabbing a towel to start drying.
"It was wonderful," she said quietly. "It's been a while since I had pasta like that. Nate too—he actually ate more than he drank."
Eliot glanced at her sidelong. "That going to be a problem?"
She sighed, throwing up one hand in exasperation as she turned away from him. "Well, we did come to an arrangement."
"And he'll stick to it?"
She pressed her lips together and nodded, not quite looking at him. "Mmhm."
He shook his head, turning back to the dishes.
She set a hand on his shoulder to lean in and kiss his cheek. "Really, though. Grazie."
"It wasn't that close," he muttered. "Too many substitutions."
"Close enough," she assured him, trailing a hand down his arm as she walked away.
First and foremost, Parker was a thief. Everyone had seemed to forget that for a while—though she'd admit that hanging from the ski lift was a lot of fun—but now she was doing thief things again. It was just stealing video and planting magic boosters for now, but it was...nice. Cozy. Ridiculously easy.
Okay, she was bored, but at least the team was competent. That's kind of why she was bored. But she was still getting a good amount of magic knowledge from it. Like how to set up boosters!
Shadows approached the door. Her time was up. Parker confirmed her set up, then dove out the window. The landing might be a little rough, but it was only 25 feet or so. If it kept her from being caught then it was more than worth snapping a joint back into place—
The hitter collapsed under her, cushioning her fall. "Dammit, Parker," he said, short of breath. "A little warning next time."
She gulped down air herself, utterly confused. He chose to help her over making a clean break himself. He chose that. He just said he'd do it again.
She was working with crazy people.
"How'd you even know I'd be there?" he asked.
"I didn't," she admitted.
Hardison had done some background digging on everyone. Eliot's trail of info dead-ended in some very hinky file references—the kind that had to be accessed on site and were covered in black marker besides. Fair enough. Before his general tenure in the army, there was something about working with horses in Tennessee? But earlier than that, the trail went cold. No pictures of the high school quarterback. Weird.
Sophie's past was a tangled web of identities he'd already been trying to work out, just so that he didn't overlap them. He could kind of understand that. She seemed to be a compulsive grifter.
Nathan Ford was actually a priest. Or had almost been. He'd gone to seminary school, but dropped out before joining IYS.
Now Parker? Parker was a ghost. He couldn't find the first damn thing about her, except that she was a thief. But the more he dug, the more confused he got. Yeah, that theft from the sixties that she had talked about so much? The MO matched her own as much as anything could—beating what was considered unbeatable without leaving a trace. No one knew how it had been done, except Parker. She'd told them proudly how the thief did it. At first Hardison was thinking grandparent or something, but...Parker didn't really get families. And skills like those? They weren't hereditary. It was possible that it was Parker's mentor, assuming she'd had a mentor, or...no. The idea was crazy. There was no way she’d done it herself. Either mentor or coincidence.
"—Alright, I'll need everyone on site and ready to go tomorrow—"
Hardison tuned out Nate, his smile growing as his WoW guild shared the news. Oh, he knew just what to fill his time with. He started strategizing. The Alliance was going down.
"—Hardison?"
It was the pregnant pause that drew his attention, not his name. He looked up.
Nate stared back at him, waiting.
"I've got it covered, man," he bluffed. "You're acting like I've never done this before. Look, I'm a professional—we are all professionals—"
Nate heaved a sigh. "Just be there."
"Wouldn't miss it," he promised, turning back to his laptop.
The others chatted or left to do something else, while Hardison settled in to help his guild. He'd already done a breakdown on the Genogrow building in order to share what he'd learned in the briefing. This one promised to be their most normal job yet.
"Hey, Hardison!"
He regretfully turned away from his guild chat. "Yeah, Parker?"
She was frowning at him. "I called your name three times. You're not going deaf, are you? Because hearing is important." She leaned in close, trying to look in his ears. Hardison drew back, off-put. "Maybe Eliot should check them—"
"I—just focused, Parker. I was just focused. My hearing's fine."
"Oh," she said, wrinkling her nose. "You should be careful about that."
Hardison nodded and looked back at her, waiting. She didn't say anything, letting an awkward silence grow between them. "Uh, did you—did you need something?" he asked.
"Oh, right! Your computer can read microfilm, right?"
"My computer can read what now?"
"You know." She gestured unhelpfully. "Microfilm."
"I...can probably put something together that can read it," he said. "I don't have anything on hand. You got something special you want to look at?"
"Oh, I stole a bunch of it from some safety deposit boxes one time," she explained. "The money was much more important, of course—"
"Of course."
"—but I've always wondered what it said."
Hardison rested his chin in his hand, looking up at her. As far as he knew, microfilm hadn't seen widespread use like she was describing since before computers. In, say, the 1960s. Even then, "widespread" was a bit of a stretch. "Yeah, I could put something together to convert it," he said. "Probably take me a couple days."
Parker blinked. "But there's computers to do that already."
"I mean, there's readers from the seventies for sure," he said. "But they just project it onto a little tube tv, far as I know. Actual converters are harder to come by. No trouble for me to build one—"
"No, it's fine," Parker said, a little tense. "It's not important—"
"I mean, if you're sure—"
"Yep," she said, smiling too wide. "Don't worry about it, it's probably worthless anyway."
"I mean, the film would degrade over time.”
"Oh, really?" she said. "Anyway! Not important."
"Okay. Let me know if you change your mind."
"I'll just—do that. Yep."
She turned and walked away. Hardison watched her go, the idea on the tip of his tongue, but— "Y'all making up nonsense," he muttered to himself.
He should probably be careful about the number of Doctor Who marathons he watched if he was starting to find connections between it and real life.
Eliot had never been fond of airplanes. It wasn't that they were deathtraps—far from it. But they were more dangerous to immortals, specifically, than a great number of things. Parker had listed some of those ways while playing flight attendant—explosions, burning past regeneration, being surrounded by metal prone to breaking up during a crash, sinking into the middle of the ocean—
They had also become an unavoidable part of modern life. Hardison had done his part, at least. As they set their lives in the hands of the pilots, Eliot could see Nate working everything through, trying to find something more than just "stay away from the nose and tail in case of collision," which they were already doing. Eliot could sympathize. It galled that he couldn't do more to protect his team—that these moments would always be a failure, perhaps his final one.
Nate started to reach for his seatbelt—
Eliot grabbed his hand, shaking his head. Nate stared at him, wide-eyed.
Catholic he may still be, but Nathan Ford was used to being able to act, and had the arrogance to believe that he and he alone could change things. He felt he had to, even now.
Catholic he may no longer be, but Eliot was well aware that his life and his death, now or later, were far beyond his control. He knew what it was to be helpless—though he wished he could have done a little more good before the end, he expected that would never have changed, not in another thousand years. He'd done too much bad.
Nate grimaced and clutched his hand back. His grip shook slightly in his terror, and Eliot couldn't blame him for that.
The plane landed.
They let go. A shared glance confirmed that they'd never speak of it.
Hardison was well aware that he gave too freely of his heart for a criminal. He hadn't meant to get attached to these people, honest. But they were—they deserved to be cared about, and he was one of the only ones who would, okay? What was he supposed to do? Not worry when they were falling out of the sky?
The trouble was that there were too many things that should've gone wrong. If they hadn't pieced it together fast enough. If his frantic googling hadn't had the right search terms. If he hadn't figured out what the system was supposed to be when not tampered with. If Parker hadn't found the right kind of cables. If the pilots hadn't been able to land it. If Hardison had taken five seconds longer—
He'd done the math. If he had needed five more seconds, the pilots wouldn't have had the time to level off, bleed speed and put the plane down safely. Not with their acceleration.
They had all been so incredibly lucky. And all Hardison could think about was every minor variation that would have made them fail. Because they should have failed. He was good, but he wasn't that good.
Screw it. If he couldn't sleep, he could at least marathon some more Doctor Who.
Parker was pouring herself some cereal in the office kitchen when Hardison walked in, rubbing his eyes. "Hey, thank you," he said, grabbing an orange soda.
Parker set down the cereal box, picking up one of the bits that had escaped the bowl and crunching it. "For what?" she asked. He looked...really tired. Maybe a little asleep, still.
"Hey, you didn't have to, uh..."
Parker stared at Hardison, waiting for him to finish. She frowned when he didn't. "Didn't have to what?"
He had a weird look on his face. "How many loops did it take?"
"Loops?"
"Yeah, I mean..." he sighed. "I know I'm good, but I'm not that good. I couldn't have done that first try."
Parker blinked at him. "But you did do it 'first try.'"
"From my perspective, sure," he said. "But from, say, the perspective of someone who could both conduct a bank robbery in the sixties, and steal art in the here and now—"
"The sixties weren't that long ago." Parker hesitated after she said it. They weren't, were they? How long had it been since she'd last seen Archie, again? He was still alive...right?
Hardison laughed softly. "Damn, girl, I guess they're not. Not when you have a time machine."
"Time machine?"
"Well, yeah. I mean, don't worry," he promised, "I won't tell anyone, ever. Your secret's safe with me. But it makes sense! It's how you know so much about Ancient Egypt, why you speak in other languages sometimes, why you laughed at the idea of Eliot being a caveman—"
She snorted, although she could feel a pit opening up in her stomach.
"—because you've been there," he finished. "Because you've seen it."
She smiled tightly. "And you won't tell anyone."
He raised one hand, trailing his finger across his chest twice. The vow was made. "Cross my heart," he said. "But can I ask—?"
"No!" she said, still smiling a crackling smile.
"Okay, spoilers, I get it," he said, nodding. "But can I—Parker?"
Parker slithered away through the vents, almost panicking but not because panicking only interfered with escaping. She thought that the microfilm thing had gone unnoticed, instead of it and so many other things getting noticed and connected. Maybe...maybe she wasn't that good at hiding she was immortal after all. But if Hardison wouldn't tell anyone because he thought she was a time traveller, then it would still be fine because no one would know.
"Magicians," she muttered to herself with a scowl, climbing up the elevator shaft to the roof.
fin