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His teammates were immortal.
Hardison still wasn't sure what to do with that. There was nothing in existence that could tell him how to react. Honestly? It still didn't feel real.
One of the things that was making it real was the way the rest of the team had started to treat him, now that he knew. After the initial reveal—and the prolonged argument with Nate—Sophie made a show of being available to answer any questions he might have. He took her up on that, and couldn't say that he found it surprising when, by the end of it, he hadn't gotten the answers to even half of his questions. Disappointing, yes, but not surprising. Nate was an asshole about the whole thing, which was definitely in character. He made a point of reminding everyone that they were immortal and that Hardison knew it whenever anyone did anything even tangentially related to that fact. If Nate was trying to unite them in annoyance, he was succeeding. Eliot was...quiet, but only sometimes. The rest of the time, he was pretty much normal. Probably a little too normal. Then Nate would remind everyone that "Hardison knows we're Immortal," and Eliot would disappear. Any conversation they'd been having would be over, and half the time he left the room while Hardison's back was turned. The rest of the time he'd make some kind of excuse first. He got that Eliot hated the fact that he knew, but it was getting insulting. He'd seen how messed up Eliot had been about it, okay? He was trying to be cool; how was this his fault?
Parker was the only one who hadn't changed at all—not that he'd noticed, at least. She was the same as ever, and unlike Sophie she would answer his offhanded questions about history and herself—at least, as cryptically as she always had.
That's what he thought, until they took the job in Serbia and Parker stabbed a dude with a fork. The dude needed stabbing, sure, but Parker on the job was focused. She'd pulled off drunk bridesmaid around guys that would've shot her dead without flinching. Well, not dead dead, but...the fact that she'd given into impulse for this one? Hardison was worried about her—and he'd have to be blind to miss how she'd looked at Luca.
"I can't believe they sent you to babysit me," Parker said, approaching the warehouse.
"I'm here on my own," Hardison corrected her. Nate had caught him when he was already halfway to the door, looked him in the eyes and swore under his breath. Well, screw him too. Somebody needed to look out for Parker. He didn't care if she was older than the pyramids, or even just the Internet. This job was personal to her in all the wrong ways, whatever the reason.
When she found the kids...he started taking it pretty personally himself.
Kids. Why was it always kids who were used this way? Thrown away this way.
Parker didn't remember her childhood. It was too long ago—things got fuzzy. She was pretty sure that it hadn't been nice. She'd never had someone to look after her, not until—
She didn't understand how mortals could be so careless with the lives of others. Of children. They hadn't even tasted life, yet it was being stripped away from them, made miserable and cut short. Didn't they understand how little they had? How fragile, how precious it was? But over and over they would build false tribes to crush others for an ounce of uncertain power.
There was a reason she stayed away from mortals. They always did this. Yes, she and her team were fixing it—that's what their team was for.
But why did she have to be the one to fix it when it was just going to get broken again and again and again?
It was better not to care at all. She was stuck with the team, but they were like her. She couldn't care about mortals, not anymore. She was done.
"No. No, no, no. What about Luca and the others? We can't leave them like that," Hardison said.
"Why not?"
"You don't mean that."
Parker felt brittle. She wanted to run. "You think this is the only crappy orphanage in this place? This is a country full of orphans, okay? We can't save them all."
Hardison reached out to her, his touch gentle. "No, but we can save these ones. Parker, we can—we can save these ones. Look, I know it's been tough. I-I know that you—you've been through a lot. But this matters."
"It just keeps happening, Hardison," she said, starting to cry. "People keep killing each other and it's the children that are left behind to fend for themselves. Always."
"It's not always like that," he said. "Parker, I grew up in the foster system. I've seen the good and the bad, and there is still good. And it matters."
Parker frowned at him. "You grew up with your grandmother."
"We called her Nana, but she was our foster mom. She, uh... she—she would cuss like a sailor. It wasn’t like a fairy tale. She expected us to watch our manners, follow her rules. But—but she fed us, she bathed us, she put a roof over our heads. She taught us how to treat others...she loved us, even when she was scolding us for some fool thing or other. And, oh, she would raise hell if somebody so much as looked at us crooked."
"Yeah?" Parker asked. She wanted to believe it, but—
"Yeah."
"Well, you were lucky. No. We’ll put these kids in the system, and odds are, they're gonna—they're gonna...." She blinked away her tears. "They'll be alone, and hungry, and hurt. That's all they'll ever know, and it sucks, Hardison. They have such a short time to experience things and all of those things will be awful—"
"They won't," he promised. "We'll make sure they won't."
"Certainty is an illusion inviting disaster," she recited.
"Okay, don't speak that language," he said, "but we can always try, Parker. Entropy sucks, yeah, and it seems like you've seen a lot of it, but...we can't just let it win, can we?"
"Why bother? It always wins."
He ran a hand over her shoulder. "Where would I be, if Nana didn't try?"
She hated the thought of Hardison without someone to care about him.
"It matters that we try," he told her again.
Her nod was sharp.
He smiled like sunshine. "Let's go save some kids."
They rescued Luca. The moment was heartwarming, truly, but Nate knew that Parker wasn't standing behind him and to the left like she usually did. How could he relax when a member of his team was about to put them all in danger for a stupid risk? Alone? She could have at least talked Eliot and Hardison into going with her. Frankly, she wouldn't have been able to keep Hardison away.
That was all going to end in heartbreak one way or another, but no matter. The important thing was finding Parker before she got herself shot.
Every second counted. As they drove to help her, Nate started to catalogue what was around him. "Okay, what do we have to work with?"
"You're looking at it, man," Hardison said, still poking away at his computer. "Everything we've got is in this van."
Prop guns and costumes. Yeah right.
"Complication," Hardison said. "The buyer's there."
Nate turned to the expert. "Eliot?"
Eliot's jaw tightened. He took a corner far too quickly. "Spell it out for me, Nate. What do you want?"
That...he sidestepped the issue. They didn't have time for it. "I want you to get Parker out of there."
"She ain't coming—not without the kids."
"I know," Nate said, his tone slipping spiteful without him meaning it to. The easiest solution was obvious—Eliot had lived a long time for a soldier, even an immortal one. Nate had a good idea of what he was capable of. The words still stuck in his throat. "Could you do it non-lethal?" he asked, careful.
"Trying to protect that many civilians? I'd want to clear everything before Parker even got in. I figure twenty minutes to be safe," Eliot said. "More like forty if I don't take risks."
"Take risks—?"
"If I'm careful not to die, Nate."
Hardison faltered. Nate shared a glance with Sophie. "That, uh, kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?" Nate asked, stumbling over his words just a little.
Eliot's smile was grim. "I got a reputation. Walking off some bullets won't do much to it."
Sophie asked him something in an asiatic language, and Eliot responded in kind. Based on Sophie's frustration, Nate could guess what she'd asked and what he'd answered, though he didn’t speak it himself.
"I don't know what y'all just said, but I vote for 'how about we don't do that,'" Hardison said. "I don't care if you can walk it off, getting shot can't be good for you."
When there was always a chance you just wouldn't heal? That was an understatement. "Prop guns and costumes," Nate muttered to himself.
"Hey man, give me a little credit. We've got pyrotechnics, we've got a wicked sound system—"
Explosives, those could be useful— "Wait, Hardison, do you still have that—that sound clip from the movie? The NATO soldiers?"
Hardison grinned. "I do indeed."
They saved Parker.
They saved the kids.
They went for ice cream.
They went for ice cream, and Nate found it extremely difficult to look at the children. They were so young. Younger than Sam had been. Should be.
"How are you doing?" Sophie asked him.
"What do you think?"
She folded his hand in hers, ignoring his bitterness. "We're helping them, Nate."
"So that they can die later."
She squeezed his hand. "So that they can live now. Everything dies, Nate—but not everyone has the chance to live."
"They're so young," he whispered, hoarse.
She rested her head on his shoulder. "I know, Nate. I know."
Things were finally starting to settle down, and Sophie was glad to see it. She couldn't say that she trusted Hardison with their secret, but he knew and there was no going back. Eliot wasn't quite as flighty around the mortal, and Nate had stopped being such an arse about it. She was sure he'd thought it was helping, but it really hadn't been. Hardison was endlessly curious of course, but he'd asked his questions and accepted her answers with surprising ease.
She should have expected something to go wrong.
"By getting us in safely, Parker." Nate exhaled heavily through his nose.
"Did the elevator decapitate you?" Parker asked him. "Did it decapitate you?"
Eliot shook his head and walked away, riddled with tension as he prowled the room.
"Actually, from this angle, it looks pretty close on the decapitation," Hardison said. He paused. "You’re treating this way more seriously than guns."
"Yeah, Hardison," Eliot snarled. "Cut off the head, there's no time to heal."
He ran a hand over his throat, uneasy. "So that means that you're like...dead dead?"
"Yes, decapitation will kill us permanently," Nate said, “which Parker should know.”
Parker turned away, heading to her office.
Eliot still wasn't done. "What, did you think we could regrow limbs, too?"
Hardison shrugged. "Hey, how am I supposed to know the rules of immortality? Nobody will tell me."
And that accusing look was at her. She had been a bit vague with her answers, yes, but did he really need to know all the gory details?
"You need to go talk to her. It's not the first time she's gone loco," Eliot snapped, interrupting her thoughts.
"Parker? Really?" she asked. She was young. She hadn't brushed up against her limits yet. They couldn't just clip her wings—
"I'm serious," he said, sober.
Sophie sighed and went to talk to her.
In Sophie's defence, Parker's motivations, her way of thinking were...unusual. She couldn't even peg down when Parker came from, and she was usually quite good at that. She had gone along with Nate's idea of jury duty to try to determine where to start unravelling Parker's mysteries, not...not deepen them.
It had quickly become apparent that Parker had no experience talking to everyday people. How long had she been alone in the shadows? Before her first death, even? Whatever the case, she needed help and Sophie was the best one to provide it. She hoped it might even help the two of them connect.
On another note, it was frankly concerning that Parker had such trouble connecting her Alice White identity with herself. Sooner or later she would need to assume a new identity.
"What am I going to do with you?" she murmured in ancient Egyptian.
Parker wrinkled her nose. "Of course you speak the Greek dialect," she replied in kind. "Did you live under the Ptolemies?"
Sophie stared at her. She couldn't be—no. "I-I did," she replied. She hesitated. "...Did you?"
"For some time," she said—Sophie presumed she said. She wasn't familiar with the slang Parker was using. "Hatshepsut was much more interesting."
Hatshepsut was from Egypt's eighteenth dynasty, if Sophie remembered her more recent college studies correctly. She'd only been in Egypt during the twenty-eighth dynasty. Parker was at least 500 years older than her, and Sophie suspected that she was even older.
This was a far different situation than she'd thought it was. "Parker, have you always been alone?" she asked.
"Mostly," she said with a shrug. "It's safer to be alone." Parker tipped her head. "Are you okay?"
Sophie needed to get a grip and fast. "Yes, yes, I'm fine," she said, in English again. "Let's try something a little different."
She had to try to socialize an immortal who'd been isolated for Gods only knew how long. This was going to be difficult. The con? That was easy, but this—this wouldn't be over when the con ended.
Sophie didn't think she could do it alone.
Eliot still wasn’t happy that he’d missed the game, but it could’ve been worse. They ended up doing some good, he got to punch some thugs and catch up with his friend Donnie. He could admit that Hardison had done a good job as a lawyer, even if he was a fake one.
"Who needs to study? I'm gonna be a surgeon," Hardison announced.
Eliot swatted him with his paperback, making Hardison yelp. "Hey!"
"You're not gonna be a surgeon," he snapped. "Surgery isn’t like your computer games, man. It's not a joke."
"What, and being a lawyer is?"
"More than surgery is."
"You would know," Sophie said, blowing on her tea.
Eliot rolled his eyes at her amusement. Yes, the Immortal medic. So funny.
Hardison blinked at him. "You're a—you're a surgeon?"
"I'm not current," Eliot admitted. “I’m up to date on my first aid certification, though.”
"Why learn at all?" he asked, honestly curious.
Eliot grimaced and didn't answer.
"Really?" Nate said, eyebrows raised. "I thought it was just something you picked up."
"No," he said quietly. "It was more than that."
"Speaking of history," Sophie said, sounding atypically nervous. "Parker, would you—would you like to tell them?"
"Tell them what?" Parker said blankly.
Sophie gave a nervous little tip of her head. Eliot straightened. "It's up to you, of course. If you don't want to, I'll make sure that they respect your privacy—"
"What?"
Sophie gestured, an obvious you know, what we just discussed?
"Oh. Oh!" Parker said. "You can tell them. It's fine."
"I can't tell them for you."
She wrinkled her nose. "Why is it such a big deal?"
Sophie gave her an exasperated look. Eliot could tell that Sophie was reading too much into her responses—grifter versus thief. He took pity on the two of them. "Parker. Just tell us."
Sophie started to intervene, not wanting to pressure her, but Parker was already shrugging and answering. "I'm older than Sophie."
Nate spat whiskey across the table and started to choke. Eliot couldn't even care—he felt...displaced. Was this how most mortals felt when they found out? If so, Hardison had taken it really well. "Oh," Eliot said. "Um. H-how much older?"
Why was he asking that when he didn't want to know?
Parker shrugged. "I don't know. It's pretty fuzzy after five thousand." She squinted. "Six thousand? ...Ish. Years are weird."
Eliot set his hands on the table and took a couple of deep breaths to ground himself.
"I knew it! Totally called it," Hardison crowed.
Nate drained his glass and stumbled his way to the liquor cabinet. Eliot counted Hardison's hidden cameras and took another deep breath of whiskey-scented air. Parker was old? Okay. She was still Parker. He took a sip of beer himself, running through the flavour profile and trying to block out the whiskey smell.
She was still just Parker. She was.
Nate came back to slam down a bottle of gin, just opened and already half gone. "Sophie, did you put her up to this?" he demanded. "Is this some kind of mind game—?"
"No, Nate. And you know it's not."
"You can't be older than me!" he said, indignant. "You definitely can't be older than Sophie."
"Why not?" Parker asked.
"You just—you can't! You don't act like—" Nate cut himself short, turning back to the gin.
"What's the problem? It never bothered you that I'm older than you," Eliot asked. He was shocked too, but Nate was taking it too hard.
As Nate turned a wild-eyed stare on him, Eliot realized that maybe it hadn't bothered him because he hadn't known.
"What? No," he said.
"I'm from the Crusades, Nate."
"Oh, yeah? That's—that's two hundred years. Which one did you actually fight in, huh?"
Eliot stared him down. "The first one."
Nate gaped at him for a moment before he shut his mouth and scowled. "So what was your real name?"
"None of your business."
"You're not older than me."
"He is. They both are." Sophie shook her head. "Stop being ridiculous, Nate."
"I—" his expression shifted. "You don't act right to be from the Crusades. You understand pre-Reformation references, I know that much, but you're—"
"I'm what?"
"You're—" he gestured at him, at his book "—cultured."
Eliot stared at him.
"Why Nate, how positively modern of you," Sophie said with a sniff.
Parker shook her head solemnly.
"What—but I—what?" he asked, helpless.
"For shame, Nate," Hardison agreed. "Even I know that one's historically inaccurate."
"Hey, you don't get to talk!"
Eliot put on an expression of quiet hurt. "You really should have more respect for your elders, Nate."
He choked. "Eliot—"
"Seriously? You know Sophie and never even considered that Parker and I might be older than you?"
"I didn't see you figuring out Parker's age."
"You know, you're right," he said. He turned to Parker. "I'm sorry for the assumptions I made. Long as I've lived, I've still got a lot left to learn. Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?"
Parker studied him closely to ensure that he was sincere. "You owe me a favour," she said after a minute.
He nodded. "Of course. I'm good for it."
"I know," Parker said, her eyebrows scrunching as she said it. Eliot felt a little confused, too. That had almost felt familiar—they couldn’t know each other that well already, could they?
"Okay, you know what? I don't have to take this," Nate interrupted, storming off. He took the bottle with him.
Eliot shook his head slightly. Five hundred years and he hadn't learned a thing.
fin