Work Text:
It occurred to Eliot that he'd never seen Parker type on a keyboard before. Actually, he'd never seen her write much of anything.
He couldn't blame her for being unprepared for actual clerical work, having expected her only to put up a front, but what surprised him were the small motions she made as she typed. An erroneous key press resulted in a slight but rapid jerk of her head to the side, while her expression was unchanged. Then, a grunt deep in her throat, drawing a glance or two from her coworkers. He could hear the jabbing click of the backspace key from her right pinky finger over and over. This continued for a few minutes in a series before Eliot rolled his desk chair over to her.
“Hey, ‘Mary.’ Everything okay?” He kept his voice low as he drummed his fingers on the desktop beside her wrists.
She stared at him blankly. “Yes.” He glanced at her screen. Her typing had only resulted in a few sentences, while he had expected at least a few paragraphs the way she was going at it.
“You… know how to type, right?” He didn't mean it in a condescending way– there was some part of him that wouldn't be surprised if she had never been taught. He didn't really know what kind of upbringing she'd endured to turn out the way she did.
“I know how to type,” she said flatly, staring only at the computer screen and not at Eliot. “I learned in one of my schools. I’m just having a-” One side of her face scrunched up in a pained expression and her head shook again before it relaxed. “A bad brain day.” Her lower leg jogged up and down beneath the desk. She shook her head again and blinked forcefully, her lower jaw working back and forth. Eliot felt like putting his hand on her shoulder to try and settle her, but then decided it would probably have the opposite effect. “I don’t like this shirt,” she added, pulling at the white collar that Hardison had painstakingly ironed that morning.
“Okay. Why don’t you take a break, Parker?” He patted the back of her chair instead. “You didn’t take your lunch.”
She nodded stiffly and got up, hurrying off to the break room without another word. Eliot frowned as he watched her leave. There were a lot of things about the woman that confused him, but usually when she was being weird, there was a smile on her face. Its absence bothered him.
---
“Stupid,” Parker muttered to herself as a new bad thought emerged: she was failing. It often felt like the world was one big test, and she’d forgotten to take notes. New note: sit still and be quiet while on the job. Well, that wasn’t a new note. In fact, it was one the first notes Archie made her take. But sometimes it was the hardest one to follow. And Eliot coming over was proof. She was being too conspicuous. As always. “Stupid,” she repeated, this time smacking the side of her head with her palm. It didn’t make her feel better or make the thought go away. She wanted to be able to pretend to be normal to help the team. She tried to follow Sophie’s notes on acting. But it was really hard to sit still and do nothing when she kept on making mistakes. Parker didn’t know a lot about psychology, and generally tried to avoid anything to do with the subject because it creeped her out, but she was definitely familiar with the concept of operant conditioning. There was negative reinforcement, when something was removed to increase the likelihood of a behavior. And then there was positive punishment: when something was added to decrease the likelihood of a behavior. She just wished it would work.
The door to the break room opened, and a portly woman with greying hair gravitated toward the coffee maker. Her shoulders jumped a little when she noticed Parker sitting down at a table by herself. “Good heavens, dear, you startled me! How’s your day been going, Mary? Are you liking it here?”
Parker gave a big thumbs-up and a smile to match, like the stock photo man on the HAPPY square on the chart at the school counselor’s office.
The older woman, whose name she could not remember, beamed. “Aw, great! It’s been a while since we’ve seen such enthusiastic faces here.” She pulled a crinkly bag of decaf coffee grounds out of the cupboard above her head and measured a heaping scoop. “What was it like where you worked before?”
Parker blanked on that particular aspect of her alias’s backstory. She looked at a can of peas on the shelf next to where the coffee grounds had been. “Canning factory,” she said with some solemnity, then held up one hand. “Nearly lost a finger a couple of times.”
“Oh!” The woman’s eyes went wide, and she gave Parker a stunned once-over.
Hardison groaned loudly over his headset. Parker had forgotten he was there listening. Did he hear her calling herself stupid? “Girl, what? You’re like a hundred pounds soaking wet. Nobody would believe a factory would hire you.”
Parker didn’t know what her weight had to do with anything. “I’m just kidding, I was a–”
Hardison supplied for her to echo, “-front desk worker at Prentice & Young. It’s a law firm.”
This made the older woman laugh with nervous relief and turn to her coffeemaker to wait while it brewed. “Hopefully not as much drudgery here?”
Parker hugged her arms around herself and looked out the window. The accounting firm was located on the twentieth floor of a skyscraper. From here, through the slitted blinds, she could only see a blank blue sky. Not a cloud in sight.
Noting now that Hardison (and Eliot) were listening over the earpieces, she chose her words carefully. “My boss really didn’t like it when I made mistakes,” she told the other woman. “He wanted me to be perfect, but I wasn’t.”
The woman tsked and turned around to lean her back against the counter. “Well, nobody’s perfect, hon. Everybody makes mistakes.”
Yeah, but I make them more than everybody else. She kept her mouth shut this time, like she was supposed to. Just nodded and gave another one of those toothy smiles. It seemed to have the opposite effect this time- the woman looked a bit unnerved and turned back to the coffee machine. Parker decided that her lunch break was over.
---
When Parker got back from her break, she didn’t seem any better. If anything, she was more agitated- she kept making quick faces and shaking her wrist once at a time before it fell back to her side. Eliot intercepted her before she got back to her desk. Her gaze was trained on the floor, even as he stood directly in front of her. He glanced over his shoulder. Luckily, nobody seemed to be paying attention.
“Hey, you should go home,” he murmured to her. “Tell Jones you’re feeling sick or something.”
She actually looked up at him, blue eyes wide with betrayal. “What? No! I can do this.” Her lower lip jutted out. “I can be… I can be Mary.”
It took him a second to realize what she might mean. Not “I can be Mary today” but “I am capable of being Mary.” “Hey, I believe you, Parker. I’m just saying, you’re having a bad day. Mary will be here tomorrow.”
“It’s a Friday,” Parker pointed out.
The corner of his mouth lifted up at that. “Okay, smartass. Mary will be here on Monday.”
This seemed to placate her, and her body was mostly still as she made her way to Jones’s office. Again, he watched her leave, this time feeling like he was a little closer to understanding what went on in that brain.
---
They don’t want you here. You’re doing it all wrong. “Stupid, stupid.” She had taken her earpiece out and was pacing the length of the empty office back and forth, waiting for anyone to come back. There was a reason she worked alone, in the shadows. Why she wasn’t a grifter like Sophie. She didn’t want anyone to look at her, because once they did, they would realize how much she was failing at it all. It didn’t matter how much Archie taught her. She was never going to be good enough. She was good at stealing. But that was all. Sometimes she didn’t even feel like she was really a human being. She looked at people like Nate and Sophie and Hardison and they all seemed so vibrant, so lived-in. (Eliot? Well, there was something familiar about him. She couldn’t quite figure that out yet.) Parker was just… nothing.
The front door opened, and Parker paused in her pacing to watch Sophie and Nate come through the door toting suitcases. Sophie blinked at Parker in surprise and checked her watch.
“I thought you would be at-”
“-Eliot told me to tell Jones I was sick and to go home,” Parker interrupted her. Sophie and Nate exchanged glances and set down their luggage. “How was Kansas?”
“It was Kansas.” Sophie shrugged indifferently. “Do you feel sick?”
Parker clenched and unclenched her fists and bounced a little on her toes. She rolled her eyes up to the ceiling as she spoke. “No. I was having a bad brain day.”
Nate crossed his arms over his chest and cocked his head to the side. “Okay… what exactly does that mean? Are you delusional or something?”
Sophie spluttered at him. “Where are your manners, Nate? You don’t just ask someone that.”
“Well, I’m just saying! There’s obviously something a little– you know– about her, but-”
Sophie cut him off with a finger planted to his lips. He frowned. “I’m sorry, dear,” she addressed Parker. “Nate here had a little too much to drink on the airplane. Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m going to take our Nate upstairs to nap off his overindulgence. I’ll be right down.”
Parker waited there, because she had nothing else to do. She was thinking about Bunny back in her warehouse and wishing she had him here with her right now. She liked to rub the soft inner parts of his ears when her brain was yelling at her. It helped a little. Archie told her she had to learn to be able to survive without material comforts. It was part of a thief’s life. This was mostly okay with Parker, except for Bunny. She made it clear to Archie that Bunny was off-limits. It was a lesson that her old foster parents had to learn the hard way.
Bad thought: these people are going to leave you behind when you mess up again, just like Kelly did. She pounded her head with her fist and muttered under her breath. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”
A gentle hand caught her wrist, and she froze to look at Sophie, who had materialized at the foot of the stairs.
“Please don’t hit yourself, Parker.” Sophie gestured toward the couch, and Parker obediently followed her to it. “Can you tell me what’s wrong?”
I’m wrong. I’m doing everything wrong! (Just like how she got Nick killed.) NO. That was the worst thought. The bad thoughts to end all bad thoughts. She wasn’t supposed to think about it. Erase! Erase! Erase! BAD BAD BAD!
“Parker, Parker!” Sophie ended up hugging Parker from behind, arms coming around to hold her hands tightly against her chest. “Please, stop hurting yourself.”
Parker sniffed and rocked back and forth as much as she could in the other woman’s grasp. “I keep making mistakes. I just want to be good.”
“Good at what, Parker?” came Sophie’s voice from behind. She kept using her name, like she was worried the younger woman had forgotten it.
Good at being a person? Being a thief? Being a part of a team? It was all on the table. “Just better than I am.”
Sophie sighed and loosened her grasp, turning Parker around by the shoulders to face her. “You’re too hard on yourself, Parker. Nobody is perfect.”
But that was what Archie taught her to be. Perfect. The flawless thief. In training, mistakes meant a slap on the wrist. But in the real world, mistakes meant getting caught. “I’m not like you guys. I have to try so hard all of the time.”
Sophie’s eyes narrowed. Parker didn’t know which expression to assign to her. It wasn’t on the chart with the HAPPY stock photo man. “I know you had to fend for yourself for a long time, Parker. But you’re not alone anymore. You have us. A team. And the thing about having a team is that they have your back when you’re having a bad day. You don’t have to be perfect all of the time.”
Parker considered this. A childhood of running away had instilled a hell of a fight-or-flight response in her body. She was never prepared to settle down, always had a go-bag in case things went south. Plus, she knew how to hotwire a getaway car.
“I mean it.” Sophie didn’t seem assured by her silence. “You’re stuck with us, whether you like it or not.”
Parker snorted at that. “You would not succeed at holding me against my will.”
Sophie’s mouth lifted into a smile. “No, definitely not,” she conceded. “It’s a figure of speech. We chose you, Parker. We want you on our team. You’re one of the best thieves there is, but we also like having you around.”
Parker just blinked at that. She’d never heard anyone enjoying her company before. It was almost a completely alien concept to her. “You mean that?” she asked, unconvinced.
“Of course!” Parker knew this expression on her face now: SAD. “The team wouldn’t be the same without you. We want you, mistakes and all.”
Parker wanted to believe it because it sounded nice, but only time could tell if the woman really meant it. For now, she’d keep the go-bag stashed and try to stick with it. These people seemed nice, nicer than anyone had ever been to her when she wasn’t trying to be someone else. If they liked her even if she made mistakes, she hoped she could stay for a while.