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The door for Nate’s flat hasn’t even closed by the time Eliot is in the drawer he keeps his spare blockers in and is shaking one into his hand. It was stupid of him to leave without them, but the job was supposed to be simple, and he had enough for an extra seven days. Unfortunately, the job was not simple, and here he is in the final hour of day seven, uncomfortably close to his last dose wearing off.
Hardison, Parker, Sophie, and Nate, none of whom have ever asked him about the exact nature of the blockers he takes, but all of whom have seen him take them religiously in overlapping doses for their entire working relationship, filter into the room and tactfully allow their attentions to skim over him. In fact, no one said anything, but Eliot is sure they would’ve stopped for food on the way home if the counter Hardison had not-so-subtly created hadn’t betrayed exactly how little time he had left.
As he hasn’t ever seen the counter, Eliot isn’t sure exactly what it says, but given that he’d never cut the dose overlap so fine before and the fact that Hardison broke three traffic laws on the way back, the countdown is probably somewhere in the red. It warms Eliot a little to think about the care Hardison had taken to ensure he got his dose in time and the respect all of his team showed by never mentioning it, just trusting him to have it under control. They have no idea how much danger he almost put them all in through his carelessness, and he intends for them to never find out.
Nate puts the news on mute on the big screen and Parker helps herself to a bowl of cereal. Hardison is typing furiously at something on his laptop and Sophie is leafing through her theatre schedule. Eliot is taking his blocker. Nothing is unusual in any way.
Which is why they all look up sharply when he spits the blocker in his mouth across the room.
“Eliot, man, are you okay?” asks Hardison.
Eliot doesn’t reply, can’t, his entire attention is taken by the helicopter explosion currently being played on the news. The Cannibal stares at him from where his photo is displayed at the bottom left of the screen. The writing scrolled along the bottom says ‘dead’.
“Is this real?” he whispers hoarsely.
“What do you mean, Eliot?” Nate asks. “Do you know something about this?”
Eliot shakes his head. Deny, deny, deny. He doesn’t know anything, he doesn’t know anyone. He is clueless. He is Sapien.
No one has answered his question so he asks again, demands, “Damnit, Hardison, is this a real broadcast? Did this actually happen?”
“Uh, one second, man, one second,” Hardison mutters, turning his attention back to his laptop.
Eliot’s phone has no notifications. He shouldn’t be surprised, no one has this number. If there was an attempt to get into contact with him, it wouldn’t be on this phone.
With a start, he realises Parker has snuck up on him. She takes his hand and presses his discarded blocker into it. It is still slightly shiny from his mouth. “You dropped this.”
He accepts it from her but doesn’t take it. Might never need to again.
Parker looks concerned. Her face is very close to his and he can see the indecision in her eyes as she prompts him to take his medicine. “You’re late, Eliot.”
He steps back. “Yeah, Parker, I know, I-” he breaks off. “Hardison, is this story real?” he asks again.
“It is definitely being broadcast as a real story,” Hardison confirms. “Like, the news definitely thinks it happened. You seem a little on edge, man, so I’m just seeing if I can get my hands on the incident report to see if I can’t get any proof.”
Eliot nods. “It looks like Naples, or somewhere thereabouts, so start there,” he instructs. “Parker, there is a phone under the mattress upstairs, please can you go and get it?”
She nods and vanishes. Sophie scoffs. “You can’t possibly know it’s Naples from that footage, Eliot, it’s mostly just sky!”
“It’s a very.. distinctive sky,” he mutters, and his voice sounds very far away from his body. He sits heavily on whatever happens to be behind him. It’s not uncomfortable, so a seat, probably. Good.
“Eliot? Eliot!” Nate says urgently, rushing up to him. He has the bottle of blockers Eliot had returned to the drawer earlier and starts unscrewing the cap. “You need to take this right now.”
Eliot shakes his head. “No way, man, I’m- I’m good. Not until I know for sure.”
Sophie puts a hand on his shoulder. “Eliot, you’ve never been this late before, and I think you might be reacting poorly to the delay. I need you to take this tablet right now, and then we can talk about the accident, okay?” she says gently.
He takes the bottle from Nate but only screws the lid back on. He won’t open them.
He has probably twenty minutes until he’s a liability. That’s enough time for Hardison to check for sure. It’s got to be.
“Hardison!” he says, edge bleeding into his tone.
Parker returns with his burner in her hand and he’s on his feet to take it off her. It turns on so slowly. He feels like everything is happening so slowly.
He puts the blockers on the counter. They look so sinister; an unlabelled jar he gets refilled from a guy in the back of a tattoo shop. He hates them.
Hardison makes a noise. “Here, look,” the news disappears and the screen is instead taken up with paperwork. “Incident report, see? Eliot was right, this was just off Naples, there was some kind of shoot out last night? Looks like mob drama, but there was this weird biological company connection.” CCTV footage of a car chase covers the paperwork, followed by the helicopter explosion from several angles. “See this man? He’s got some kind of rocket launcher, I can’t get close enough to see, but the helicopter definitely goes up, man.”
Eliot stares at Will Gorski holding a smoking rocket launcher. “The man, was he definitely on board when it blew?”
“Hold on,” Hardison types a few things, and Eliot can see in grainy footage the Cannibal and Lila Faccini, of all people, get on the helicopter. It takes off. It goes boom. “His name is Milton Brandt, he was some kind of biology hotshot, I guess? I’m finding some hella dodgy research propositions under his name, man, let me tell you.”
Eliot lets Hardison’s voice fade into the background. The Cannibal is dead.
He lets out a bark, unsure if it’s a laugh or a sob. Maybe its both.
Fucking Will Gorski.
They are looking at him again. “Eliot?” asks Sophie, cautiously. “Will you take your tablet now?”
Eliot shakes his head, his eyes still watching Milton fucking Brandt blow up over and over again in 1080p HD. “I’m never, never taking another one of those again,” he says, and then he laughs. “I’m never taking one again.”
Everyone is standing around him, now. Sophie has her hands out like he’s some kind of wounded animal.
“Eliot, would you please explain what exactly is going on?” she asks.
Entirely unsure on where to start, he opens his mouth, but is distracted when his phone finally, finally, wakes up. Immediately, it is chiming dozens of notifications.
He is clearly last to this party.
Nate’s attention is instantly on it. “I don’t recognise that phone, Eliot. Do you have something you’d like to share?”
Eliot doesn’t look up from where he is skimming the messages. His mind is back in gear and he’s able to focus again. “It’s mostly the same,” he says absent mindedly as he types a mass reply. “People want confirmation the Cannibal is dead.”
“The what?” Sophie asks, aghast.
He nudges his head to the screen while still typing. “Brandt.”
Hardison shakes his head. “Nah, man, there’s nothing here about any cannibalism. Trust me, even if they scrubbed it clean, I’d find it.”
Eliot looks up sharply. “Hardison stop digging!” he demands. “He may be dead but that doesn’t mean it’s safe. BPO will take a few days at least to fully collapse and they are dangerous, man.”
“What, more danger than-”
“Yes,” Eliot interrupts. “More danger than whatever you were about to say. More dangerous than Moreau, more dangerous than any agency you’ve met. I’ve been running from these guys more than half my life - trust me, this is beyond you. The ship is sinking, man. Let it.”
“Running from- what?” demands Nate.
Eliot puts the phone down, disappointed. Plenty from all sorts of people, but nothing from anyone he was hoping for.
They probably haven’t seen yet, is all.
“Eliot, we’re a team. If you’ve been in danger, you should have told us!” Sophie says.
Shaking his head, Eliot smiles at her to soften what he says next. “Nah. This kind of danger only increases the more people know you’re in it. Exponentially. Besides, there was nothing any of you could have done.”
“You said that about Moreau, too,” points out Parker.
“Yeah, but the difference is, Moreau is where I hid from these guys. When we first got on the Cannibal’s radar, you think we didn’t try? A whole team of us, all highly specialised, all highly motivated, the whole nine yards. I crawled out alone.” He cleared his throat. “I wasn’t about to do that again, not with a group of people who had no reason to go against these guys in the first place. Not with anyone I- cared about.”
There is a quiet while everyone digests this. A ding from Hardison’s computer draws his attention back. “I mean it, Hardison, you better not be digging into them!” he says gruffly.
Hardison shakes his head but he looks worried. “Nah, man, this was a link attached to your cards. This shouldn’t be possible - I think we’ve had some kind of security breech. Eliot, it looks like you’re the only one affected, but I got four of your identities buying international plane tickets in the last four and a half hours.” Eliot allows himself a split second to feel relief. “No problem, I can just cancel these-”
“No!” Eliot interrupts. “Don’t cancel ‘em, they were me. Kind of. All authorised by me, anyway. Can you look again? There’s supposed to be six.”
To Hardison’s credit, he barely blinks before his nose is back in the keyboard. “Yeah, okay, Eliot, I got four cards, six tickets. All due in Portland International.”
Eliot shakes his head again. “No, it should be six cards, probably seven tickets. Maybe more. Can I see the names on the tickets?” He can feel his blood pressure rising as he checks his phone again in case he missed a message. They would have told him if something had happened.
Don’t let something have happened, not this close to freedom. The world wouldn’t be so cruel.
He grips his phone tightly like he can make it ring. The world absolutely would.
Copies of the tickets find their way onto the screen, wiping away the final moments of Milton Brandt. He scans the names and relaxes fractionally when he sees that Marjan and Louis have booked tickets together from Paris, but it looks like Amun has booked a ticket for his wife as expected. He is missing one.
“Hardison, I need you to find me an Adaline Laymen-Stewart, born in London, currently studying in California. I need you to find where she is.”
“Okay, man, I’m on it,” Hardison agrees.
Parker and Sophie are hovering by each shoulder. He knows he is making them anxious, but he can’t reassure them, he can’t breathe-
“I got one Adaline Laymen-Stewart getting on a bus in Crescent city about five hours ago. Looks like she paid cash.” And there she is, beautiful, pixellated, alive, in the CCTV footage Hardison hacked for him.
The gasp of air he breathes in is so beautifully crisp. This is the air of a free man, who’s future stretches out in front of him endlessly, full of possibilities. Full of family.
He reaches a hand out just slightly and Parker is seizing it before he’s even uncurled his fingers.
“Where does the bus go, Hardison?” He asks.
“Looks like this one goes all the way to the boarder, man, but I’m not sure if she’s still on it. Do you want me to check?”
Already doing the mental maths, he has a couple hours until he needs to be at the airport, plenty of time to find one errant young woman. Security footage of a dozen bus stops fast forward as Hardison employs a slightly borrowed facial recognition programme to look for her.
“Where are you, baby?” he whispers.
He feels Parker tense slightly beside him and Nate turns to say something but is interrupted by Hardison’s victory crow. “Looks like she got off about half a mile away from us. I got cameras following her the next fifteen minutes, and then I lost her.”
Eliot nods, already heading for the door.
“Woah, where do you think you’re you going?” Nate asks looking and sounding every bit a disappointed father (and yes, Eliot is aware of the irony in that) from where he stands between Eliot and the door.
“Nate,” Eliot growls. “I’m going to find her. Get the hell out of my way.”
Nate shakes his head. “I think we deserve a little more than that, Eliot.”
There is a new urgency in Eliot’s blood, vibrating its way through him. Even just a second ago he didn’t feel so itchy, but now he knows that Ada’s so close- “You’re right, you do. All of you do, and I’ll tell you everything, I swear, but right now, Nate, I need to go, I need to find her.”
“Who is she, Eliot? Just tell me that.”
Eliot can see the cogs turning in Nate’s brain. He has the pieces, he’s just gotta make them fit.
Possibly they’d fit a little better with a Sensorium based explanation, but that can wait until at least he has Ada.
Before he can reply, there is a knock at the door. His blockers should have at least another ten minutes, probably longer if the warnings about overlapping doses for long periods of time are to be believed, but he swears he can feel her just outside that door. “Nate, can you let her in?” he pleads.
After a brief hesitation, Nate does, and Eliot is frozen as the door opens in slow motion.
And there she is.
“Ada,” he chokes as he steps towards her, opening his arms.
Her eyes fill with tears and she sweeps past a bewildered Nate without even looking at him. “Dad!”
His five other children step out from behind her as he feels the last of the effects of the blockers fade away. He is on a plane from Cairo, from Paris, from Shanghai, he is sitting in a Dubai airport, he is rushing towards himself in his own team’s headquarters, and then all six of his children are in his arms for the first time in nearly a decade and he lands back in his own body with a crash.
He is sobbing, he can hear it. “My babies,” he cries and holds them tightly, relishing in the feeling of them holding him back.
The air tastes of dust and bus and the strawberry scent of his daughter’s hair. It is sucked into his lungs in short unsteady bursts as he is squeezed. He closes his eyes and experiences the duel sensation of aeroplane air entering another set of lungs that he feels as his own. Amun and his wife are sharing a shitty complimentary cracker on the plane.
It is the best damn thing he has ever tasted.