Chapter Text
Eliot’s been doing his best not to follow the ebb and flow of the card game the others are muddling their way through, instead leaning gently into Parker’s corner of the table and offering token protests whenever anyone - usually Breanna or, more surprisingly, Sophie - tries to deal him in for a round. Even knowing none of the rules, he can tell that Sophie’s really taken to the game. She comes alive, eyes glinting with the thrill of the con, in dramatic reveals of her winning cards and indulgent despair at her losses. Harry isn’t having as much luck, but he seems happy enough in his role as team patsy and is clearly enjoying Sophie’s antics.
Parker, meanwhile, seems to have taken the challenge of learning the game personally and has been winning more and more with each passing round. Eliot suspects he’s not the only one to have noticed the way she’s been glancing nervously at Breanna with every card play, making tiny pleased noises whenever she manages to impress her and screwing her face up in concentration between turns like the whole world hinges on which colour pixie she puts on the table next. He doesn’t know why, out of all Breanna’s hobbies, Parker’s chosen this damned card game as the thing to take a deliberate interest in - he suspects Harry might have had some role, judging by the grins he keeps shooting her when he thinks Breanna’s not looking - but he’s not going to say anything about it in front of the kid.
Eventually the others drift away from the games table, finishing their drinks and absently depositing the empties on the bar as they disappear for the night. He stays behind for a while to rinse the glasses, stow Harry’s whiskey of the week back on the right shelf, collect the various printouts from the con and stack them neatly in the cubby for filing later. Pats the bar as he bids it farewell and heads upstairs to the room he shares with Parker and– well, just Parker at the minute, and the absurdly large bed that she’s curled up in one corner of.
She lifts her head as he enters. He’s never been able to sneak into bed without waking her up, though she swears it doesn’t bother her and usually seems to get back to sleep easily enough. Out of the three of them, she’s somehow the one with the most functional sleep habits, which Eliot has always considered to be more of a testament to the severity of their collective insomnia than anything else.
“You good?” he asks. He knows the day’s been tough on her, too.
“Yeah,” she breathes. “Harry was right, and Breanna taught me some things. I’m glad Hardison didn’t listen to me.”
He has no idea what that’s about, but she seems happy and he’s not about to force her back to full consciousness just to explain it to him. He pulls on a sleep t-shirt and some old sweatpants, brushes his teeth, and climbs under the covers, kicking one leg out and off the edge of the bed like he always does. He closes his eyes, listens to the sounds of the room and the faint traffic noise from outside, lists the things he recognises as he attempts to slow his mind.
There’s Parker tucked into the corner of the bed nearest the window, him on his back nearest the door, and a giant space in between them where the bed should be dipping, maybe babbling about whichever episode of Star Trek was most similar to the day’s con, but is instead cold and quiet.
He reaches out across the gulf to brush fingertips against Parker’s outstretched hand. She grabs it and squeezes.
He’s thinking about the faire. He’s thinking about the rush of the swordfight, the taste of the mead they were serving, remembering Breanna’s impassioned speech at the end that had so many costumed nerds in tears. He’s thinking about how even Nate might have been a slightly better sport than Eliot had managed, plied with enough mead and watching Sophie finish that poem with nothing but fondness in his eyes. He’s wishing that Hardison had been one of those costumed nerds, that he could have seen his kid sister seize control of the room and save the con with her passionate vulnerability.
He’s thinking about Sophie and the jobs she’s been leading, the way she hasn’t quite managed to shake the habit of looking to the corners of the room after she offers a new concept for a plan, waiting for Nate to bark his support or dissent. He’s thinking about Parker, curled up across a bed that only seems to be getting wider and making do with a vice grip on his hand where she should be wrapped around Hardison’s lanky, solid frame. He’s thinking about how much easier he has it, how much more they must be struggling, because they’re missing the fundamental pieces of themselves that they gave away for safekeeping and he’s missing– what, the fellowship of pragmatism and a dip in a too-large bed?
All this to say, he can’t sleep.
He misses Nate, and he misses Hardison, and he can’t sleep.
He lies like that for maybe an hour before it’s too much. Parker’s grip on his hand seems to have relaxed, and he knows that if he gets back up now she’ll do him the unspoken favour of pretending not to notice, the same way she has hundreds of times before. Eliot doesn’t want to leave her but he really can’t stay, something crawling under his skin and urging him to action despite the lack of direction he feels.
He swings his legs out of the bed and makes his exit as quietly as he knows how.
Of course when Eliot gets down to the bar, he’s not alone, because there’s a hacker propped up against it with a laptop, typing furiously. There’s a pang in his chest as he thinks of a decade of encounters in the early hours of the morning, retrieving Hardison when his brain wouldn’t stop turning and he forgot to come to bed, or Eliot being discovered sharpening knives when he just needed something to do with his hands that would get him out of his head.
But this hacker is Breanna, and the shared history isn’t there, and he feels suddenly self-conscious. Her headphones are on and she’s swamped in a hoodie that must block most of her peripheral vision and he could just turn around and leave, right now, with nobody the wiser, but he can’t quite bring himself to find somewhere else to be at 3AM. Instead, he grits his teeth and beelines for the kitchen, hoping it contains the ingredients for some kind of smoothie. He can add the leftovers to the freezer with the existing collection of insomnia smoothies if nobody wants them for breakfast in the morning.
Breanna looks up when he enters her field of view and grunts to acknowledge him, but otherwise doesn’t stop whatever it is that she’s doing, which is absolutely fine by him. He chops some bananas, shreds some spinach, mushes some blueberries into the bottom of the smoothie jar and goes rummaging in the fridge for yoghurt. This leads him on what Hardison would probably term a ‘sidequest’, as he discovers several expired cartons of milk and something that can only be described as a biology experiment in the back of the fridge. He stares at it in despair, trying to work out how long the most recent con had taken and how he’d let this slip under his radar, before returning with gloves and a bin bag to start on a deep clean.
By the time he’s done with that, Breanna seems to be resurfacing from her coder coma. She pulls down her hood and removes her headphones, blinking somewhat dazedly, before closing her laptop lid with an air of finality.
“Why haven’t we met before?” she asks, squinting at him a bit through the early morning haze. It takes him a second to realise that she means before before, like she thinks Hardison was going to bring someone with Eliot’s past to be around someone with 11-year-old Breanna’s future. Well, actually, Hardison had asked, once, if Eliot wanted to come and meet his family, and Eliot had balked, growled something angry and dismissive, and fled to the upstairs bathroom to press his back against the door and sink down and take a second to breathe, to stop his hands from shaking, to scrub them in the sink and remind himself that the person he was with Hardison was safe, that Hardison wasn’t naive for thinking he could be trusted with something so personal, so civilian, so vulnerable. Hardison could ask, and Eliot could say no, because Hardison might trust him but Eliot sure as hell did not trust himself, and it was okay. They’d all been talking about boundaries a lot back then, anyway, and Hardison had clearly put a lot of self-reflection into his, and Parker had known exactly what she did and didn’t want, but Eliot had been struggling with putting words to his limits, and it felt like a tiny victory to be able to draw a line under this and say no, this is something I can’t do, please don’t ask me again.
Hardison hadn’t asked again. Hardison hadn’t asked again for the next five years, and by the time Eliot had started to feel like maybe he could one day have some slim chance of doing this for Hardison, of being around people who were soft, and safe, and important because of it, there was a global pandemic on and it wasn’t the sort of time to be meeting new people.
Now, in the present day, at 3AM in New Orleans in the bar where Hardison had sequestered his crew before jetting off to hack his way into world peace, 20-year-old Breanna is tilting her head progressively to the side as she attempts to recapture Eliot’s attention.
“Hello? Eliot? Why have we never met?”
“Why do you think we should have?” he deflects, turning around to resume work on his smoothie preparation so that he doesn’t have to meet Breanna’s gaze.
“Well, let’s see,” she says, and he can hear her narrowed eyes in her tone. “Parker has been indoctrinating me into a life of crime since I graduated elementary school, because Alec was so excited for the people he cared about to know each other, so he brought her home as soon as she let him. And they both spent years telling me story after story about the stuff they got up to on cons.”
“You know, I wouldn’t believe everything they’ve told you, because I seem to remember you thought I needed ‘saving’–”
“Something that I’d know, if you’d ever turned up to vouch for yourself!” She’s speeding up now, getting a little agitated. He doggedly spoons yoghurt into the blender cup. “I knew Alec, and I knew Parker, but I didn’t know this mysterious third character who they always described charging into danger to protect them, with their freakin’ heart-eyed gazes and giggly in-jokes that let me know you were family too. And so instead of ever getting to meet the missing piece of Alec’s family, I spent literally half my life quietly wondering why you remained a myth when Parker was there snapping wishbones with me every Thanksgiving. So where were you?”
“It’s not like that,” he says, quickly, trying to hide the way his heart rate has picked up with some familiar cocktail of guilt and shame as she’s been talking. He turns back around to face her, places his hands on the counter to ground himself with the cool stone worktop. “I’m not– we’re not together like that. I’m not someone he needed to introduce to his family.”
It’s true, if an oversimplification; he’s never been the type for roses and milestones and meeting-the-parents. Parker and Hardison had been hopelessly in love with each other since the inception of pretzels, but they’d had to mount a year-long campaign to even get him to share their bed, the sheer logistics of which had been akin to one of those river-crossing logic puzzles where you have to get the animals to stop eating each other. He has pretty damn good sex with Hardison, yes, and Parker too when she’s in the mood for it, but he doesn’t make love to them, and the thought that they might think of him that way still makes his skin crawl on the bad days when he struggles to believe that he can make himself fit with them.
He doesn’t want to be anyone’s everything.
When Eliot had first managed to find the words for this fragile internal truth, Hardison had been convinced that it was a trauma response triggered by years of single-minded devotion to people and causes that deserved the opposite. He had tried to wait Eliot out, to wait oh-so-patiently to be granted the passcode to bypass Eliot’s defenses, as had worked so well with Parker before. Eliot, however, had been aware that he was wired differently ever since he ran from Aimee to replace her with the brotherhood of the military, way back before everything went to hell in a handbasket. A guy with a simple fear of commitment doesn’t swear himself to the Army, doesn’t pledge himself to Damien Moreau, and definitely doesn’t say those words to Sophie when staring down the barrel of the end of an era.
And so they’d fought about it, Eliot pulling away from the pair of them to protect himself and Hardison shooting him baleful glances whenever he was around, until Parker had locked her boys in a server room together mid-heist, chanted “Normal is whatever works for you” over the comms, and finished the job by herself while they worked it out.
So instead, he’s still got his own bolthole out in the suburbs where his life is based, still flirts with anyone who catches his eye in bars, and has had some very enjoyable nights out as a result. He shares a bed with his two most important people, he makes their food, he throws himself between them and danger and even lets them patch him up afterwards. He would die for them in a heartbeat, but he hides from the assumptions that their friends make about their relationship. It’s a system that works, now that they’ve had a decade to iron out the kinks. It’s less one-foot-out-the-door than it is one-foot-anchored-inside, but he suspects that such a semantics-based argument isn’t going to cut it here, even if the difference feels like everything to him.
Breanna blinks, frowning at him in a way that morphs achingly slowly from confusion to disappointment, but he doesn’t have anything else to say so he just stands there and resolutely suppresses the urge to grab the nearest vegetable and go at it with the knife, smoothie recipe be damned.
“Are you kidding me right now?” she eventually says, which is not a promising sign that she’s willing to let this one go without a fight. In this regard, she’s so unlike Hardison that it hurts. “Is this some don’t-say-gay ultra-repressed cowboy deal?”
“Breanna, no–” he tries, but there’s an anger in her eyes now like the rant’s been stewing for a decade inside her and she simply cannot stop now that she’s started. Which, in all fairness, is probably not inaccurate.
“This afternoon I outed myself in front of about fifty nerds, my fantasy idol, and three middle-aged white parental figures to save a con, and you’re here looking me in the eye and denying the existence of a relationship that I’ve literally already known about for a decade? You and Alec and Parker were, like, a beacon that guided me through my early-onset sexuality crisis, and you’re saying it’s not real? You’re telling me, what, that you’re just bros chilling in the hot tub at a respectful interpersonal distance?”
He flinches, kicks himself for showing his discomfort, and oh boy, there’s a lot to unpack right there.
“Time out,” Eliot manages to make himself say, because Hardison has always respected the request and he just needs a second to find the words, to take it back, to figure out how to offer Hardison's kid sister an olive branch constructed of twisted up emotions he can barely identify himself. He’s known that Breanna is fuelled by the rage characteristic of her generation since the moment he met her - it’s carved into her every interaction with the world and its failings - but it’s something else entirely to have that ire levelled at him. He blends his smoothie as a defense mechanism to stop her from talking until he’s got a handle on himself and what he wants to say.
“Sorry,” she sighs once he’s done, deflating a little. “I didn’t mean to be all– I didn’t mean to ambush you.”
“I’m sorry we didn’t meet earlier,” he says, sincerely, picking the most urgent sentiment out of the mess in his head and following it like a lifeline. “Hardison wanted us to, but I wasn’t– I had a few hangups.”
She gives him a wry, tentative smile. “I get it. You couldn’t all take the day off from all the world-saving just to hang out with some dumb kids. Somebody had to stay back and run,” she waves a hand around the bar, “this.”
“It wasn’t that,” he says, and immediately regrets his forthrightness as she perks up again.
“So what was it? C’mon, man, you owe me this. Throw off the chains of your hypermasculine repression and show an emotion, or whatever.”
He wants to rise to that, because it sounds like something Hardison would say, and the instinct to rise to meet Hardison is half the reason he’s in this mess. But he’s gotten a lot better at handling his shit in recent years, and instead he digs deep to find something honest to offer Breanna.
“I guess I didn’t… trust myself. To be around people who were so important. To Hardison.”
He turns back to fidget with the blender, detaching the cup from the blades and carrying them to the sink. “And then even once I did, it felt a little bit like lying, to turn up and equate myself with Parker in his life.”
He can feel her watching him, trying to figure him out, so he makes a good show of scrubbing each nook on the blender attachment so that she has to talk to his back.
“Do you know,” she says quietly, “How much Alec likes to talk about the people he loves? My guy has a type, and it’s super secret fugitives of the law, so I am one of maybe three people on this earth that he can discuss his relationships with. He talks about Parker as much as he talks about you. Why would you think it’s a lie?”
Eliot huffs in frustration. He thinks about the way Sophie and Nate had reacted, that first time the three of them had said they were together, a few months after the server room incident. The way Sophie’s eyes had glinted as she clapped her hands and expressed her heartfelt congratulations. The way she had hugged Eliot and murmured “Promise me, you’ll treat them right,” and this time he couldn’t make himself say the words she was waiting for because it wasn’t right, she didn’t know what she was asking, and he had pushed her off and let her assume he was overcome with emotion as he choked on the wrongness of it all. Nate had cornered him afterwards, and had said something inane that was clearly meant as a display of masculine solidarity in the face of romance, before wandering cryptically back to his place at Sophie’s side. Eliot had barely held himself back from socking the guy in the face.
Parker had struggled too, that day, for similar and yet totally different reasons. Hardison had shut the door behind Sophie and Nate as they left to catch their flight back to Boston, all smiles and fond farewells, then sort of sagged against the doorframe and promised his partners that he’d follow their lead on whatever they wanted their friends to know in future.
Eliot had lain in bed that night and wondered what it must be like to have a relationship that could be summarised in one word, that didn’t require a five-page briefing and several footnotes and appendices, all wrenched from some fragile part of his soul, to get the world to understand it.
A strikingly similar problem to the one he’s faced with now, in fact. But the world has moved on a bit, he knows, and maybe Breanna, with the advantage of knowing all the words that the kids these days have for things, stands a better chance of getting it now than Sophie, and especially Nate, ever did. He thinks it might heal something inside him, a little bit, if he can get her to understand.
“People… assume things. About our– our relationship,” he says. He turns around to face her again and sees her listening intently, like she knows she’s being offered something coveted and rare. He swallows. Stalls. Takes a sip of his smoothie.
“Okay,” she says after a moment, careful but unguarded. “No assumptions. Got it.”
“You know Parker’s ace.”
“Sure.”
“Did uh– did Hardison tell you that?” It’s important, Eliot thinks, to understand how she’s been thinking of them all these years.
“I mean, Hardison never told me much when he was describing you guys,” she says. She doesn’t seem bothered by the detour, just steadily answers what he needs her to. “I was a bit like ‘Why are there three of you?’ - I was eleven, cut me some slack – and he just sort of said you all loved each other very much and left it at that. Parker told me she was ace, I think by accident, back when I was having the aforementioned early-onset sexuality crisis and she was all ‘ooh, me too!’ about it. So that was– helpful, I guess.”
“You’re–”
“Ace? Yeah, but I only like gurls,” Breanna says, pointing at some stickers on her laptop that mean absolutely nothing to him. Then, in an impish tone that means she’s been taking lessons from Sophie, she continues, “But I thought we were talking about you.”
“Okay,” he says, allowing the ease with which she offers him her own truths to bolster his resolve. “Okay, so we obviously worked it out with Parker, like, what she’s comfortable with, and what she’s not, and worked around it so that nobody’s upsetting each other.”
Breanna nods. He can see that she’s about to say something else, but he doesn’t want to be interrupted, so he barrels ahead.
“And the others had to– they had to do that with me, too, a little bit.”
He feels a sudden wave of vertigo, realises that this is her brother that he’s talking about, that he’s trying to tell Breanna that he sleeps with other people and doesn’t need or want the kind of fairytale romance that she must have imagined for Hardison when she was a little kid. He very abruptly needs to be sitting down, but the barrier of the bar between them is helping, so instead he fumbles behind himself and leans against the worktop space. She watches him, a little confused but not, he thinks, angry.
“You’re ace too?” she says. “That doesn’t– no offence, dude, but that doesn’t– maybe I’m not understanding.”
“No,” he huffs, both frustrated and very glad that she can’t read his mind in this moment. “I am very much not’.”
He watches her face contort as she calmly processes what he’s said, trying not to spook him, and then realises how it pertains to her brother’s bedroom activities and gags a little. He allows himself to grin.
“So then what was upsetting you?”
There’s not much getting around the subject, but he’s surprised to find that he doesn’t much want to, anymore. Breanna is trying, in a way that nobody outside of his partners has ever tried before, and he wants this to be a thing that he’s able to explain.
“The dating, I guess. The ritual of the whole thing. I used to hate the way that people would react when they found out we were together, the way Sophie used to shoot me these knowing glances and expect me to, I don’t know, respond in some way that confirmed to her how madly– madly in love I was with the two of them. Every time someone did that it felt like I was kidding myself.”
It feels good to talk about this, to have it out there, in a way that he wasn’t entirely expecting. He swallows again and ploughs onwards.
“One time Hardison and Parker surprised me with this, like, overproduced dinner at some new restaurant I had been talking about, like hired out half the restaurant so it was just the three of us, and I was just crawling out of my skin the whole time. I don’t– I just couldn’t stand the way they were looking at me, like I was everything, and I couldn’t–” he doesn’t know how to finish, how to convey the numbing fear of placing such importance on something as fallible as a person, even his favourite two people, without sounding like an asshole. He takes a drink instead.
“Ohh,” she says, “You’re aro.” A pause. “That makes way more sense.”
He chokes on smoothie. She blinks, winces, and then gets up to round the bar and take the glass from his hands and thwack him sympathetically on the back. He’s got to get her training more, because her efforts are honestly kind of pathetic, but eventually he can breathe again. He stares at her. She looks a little sheepish.
“Sorry. I forgot you were, like, old, and southern. Although in my defense you guys are so, so queer, and I know you know what asexuality is, so I don’t know how you’ve managed to escape aromanticism.”
“Bre,” he says, “You’re killing me here.”
“What,” she says, “You want me to present this like a con? Nah-uh, you literally just described what it means. I’ll find you some articles or something if you want, but I’m not going to do a better job than you just did. You’re the one with the lived experience here, boo.”
He splutters a little in protest, but it’s mostly for show. It’s humiliating, obviously, to have something he’s been struggling with alone for years be reduced to one word, but isn’t that what he was after, here? He’s not sure what the word means, exactly, but the fact that she recognised it, even from his faltering attempt to verbalise something that he categorically Does Not Talk About, gives him hope that maybe there are words, or articles or whatever that he can send Sophie, maybe Harry if he sticks around, and have the people closest to him stop grating on his nerves whenever he interacts with his partners. What would it even be like, to not be barraged by amicable misinterpretation whenever he explains a Parker-ism, or worries about Hardison?
Breanna’s still hovering next to him, seemingly uncertain as to whether she’s caused irreparable damage to his lungs or his psyche, so he pulls her into a hug and crushes her against his chest, pressing a kiss to her hair the way he’s seen Hardison do.
“I’m sorry I never came to visit Nana,” he says, which feels inadequate but it’s what he’s got. “You’re family, too.”
She reaches up to awkwardly pat his head in return, which sort of kills the moment. He lets her go and she gingerly rubs the feeling back into her arms.
“Maybe you can make it up to me,” she says, slyly. “There’s this great card game I know, incredible lore, outstanding world building. Did you know that one of the first explicitly aromantic mainstream fantasy characters actually made their debut in this weird spinoff novel series about Glenn the Savage in 2009? Made a huge splash in the overlap with the queer community, which at that point was pretty much just a bunch of nerds on Tumblr, but they were obsessed, and I mean obsessed, with this dude who’s essentially just Aragorn meets Geralt–”
He tunes her out - it’s a finely honed instinct of self-preservation at this point - but he allows something warm to unfurl in his chest as she leads him towards the games table and starts handing him colour-coded cards with their intricate depictions of made-up worlds and characters.
Maybe, he thinks, if he looks closely enough and squints at just the right angle, he’ll see himself in one.