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Sophie did think it a bit odd that Eliot stayed only long enough to help them drag Nate up to the loft and make him comfortable, take care of the burns, cuts, and bruises he’d sustained in the explosion. He checked in with the rest of them – a touch on the shoulder for Hardison, a hug for Parker, a brief shared glance with her – before making a beeline for the door.
Ten minutes later she jerked her head up as she was pouring her tea, spilling it on her hand in the process. “Ouch! Dammit, Eliot!”
Parker poked her head over the couch where she was lying sprawled all over Hardison, snoring away. “Sophie?”
Sophie groaned in irritation, drying off her hands and grabbing her coat. “Stay here with Nate, I’ll call you if I need you. I’m going after Eliot.”
“Eliot? But he left already.” Two minutes later Parker got it. “Oh! Eliot was beaten up.”
But it was more than the beating, Sophie remembered, taking the steps two at a time. She remembered the devastation in his voice as Eliot bolted from the car after Nate had gotten blown up in the explosion – she’d gotten so worried about Nate and his father that the others had gone straight out of her head.
That fight in the glass corridor with those hired guns had been vicious. She knew on some distant level that Eliot had staged it—had let them get to him to convince that idiot agent he was “one of their own.” And then at the warehouse—oh, Eliot hadn’t let any of them see his face; Hardison had held them back too, but that was fear and desperation in his voice, or she wasn’t Sophie Devereaux.
He hadn’t gotten far. She found him at the bottom of the steps, clinging on to the railing with both hands and breathing hard. His head hung low; she couldn’t see his face through the thick curtain of hair.
“Eliot?”
It took him a moment to answer. “So-phie?” She winced at the obvious effort it took to ground it out.
“Oh, Eliot! Can I touch you?” She didn’t think she had ever touched him before, and the man certainly had trust issues. Would he spook? Surely he was coherent enough not to hit her?
“’M fine,” he bit out, weirdly embarrassed that Sophie saw him falling apart. “Adrenaline faded all at once. Just need a sec.” He risked a glance at her face, and saw sympathy and annoyance warring openly on her usually composed features. “Sophie?”
She snapped to attention. “Everything’s fine. Can I touch you?”
“Dammit, Sophie, there’s no need, I’m fi—“
“Eliot. I just want to help you sit down.”
Sitting down, he thought fuzzily, was good. He felt like he’d gotten drunk on cheap liquor like a fucking frat boy. “Can’t—really—move,” he said. “Just need—a sec.”
He felt fairly confident in his enunciation, but Sophie just looked upset. Again he asked, unsure, “Sophie?”
“I’m here, Eliot. Look. Um. I’m going to take your hands, okay? There’s a step right behind you. To sit down on.”
His ribs and back were on fire. “Ok.”
She had to peel his hands off the railing, he was so stiff.
He couldn’t help the groan that punched out of him as Sophie helped break his fall. If he was lucky, it sounded like a groan of relief, not pain. Finally, he was seated on the step, his head bent over his knees in an effort to stem the nausea climbing up his gullet.
He was simultaneously grateful and embarrassed that Sophie just sat wordlessly beside him. Once he got his breathing under control he’d be able to tell her to go back upstairs to Nate; he would be fine once he got into his truck.
But for some reason he couldn’t figure out how to breathe right, and the knowledge of it made him more lightheaded, made the spiraling pain radiating from his ribs come in stronger and stronger waves, and—
And he just couldn’t stomach having another member of the team there to watch him, not after blowing every damn pretense he could ever come up with about not getting attached. He had shown each and every one of them on the team just how much he cared, leaping out of the car and running to Nate like that. God fucking damn it all, his throat was still hoarse from the way Nate’s name had ripped out of it, and—
And he was having a panic attack, wasn’t he, a fucking panic attack like some high strung child, and wasn’t that the fuck-all cherry on top. Eliot Spencer, everyone, hitter, murderer, battering ram, bloodstained motherfucking—
“DAMN YOU ELIOT SPENCER STOP IT RIGHT NOW DO YOU HEAR ME?”
He’d never heard Sophie yell before, not really, not at them when they weren’t running a con. The surprise—and the hoarse worry in it—was enough to pull him out of his own mind just a little bit, just enough to realize that the wheezing in his ears was coming from him.
“Look at me.” Sophie had gone from his side to kneeling in front of him. “Open your eyes and look at me.”
She was angry with him, he thought distantly, realizing that unconsciousness was flickering at the edges of his vision as he forced his eyes open, and his mind stuttered a bit at just how near her face was to his—
“Breathe with me, okay, just breathe with me, breathe in, count 1,2,3,4, breathe out, 1,2,3,4, in 1,2,3,4, out.”
As she counted for him, she placed his hand on her sternum, so he could see, hear, and feel her breathe with him, her chest rising and falling.
It helped. His stuttering breaths loosened and turned deeper, and something in his throat finally unlocked. He couldn’t help the way his whole body sagged in relief, even while his breath caught on his broken ribs.
But she caught him, and the…niceness, he supposed, the niceness of it, more than the beating, more than the emotional exposure, the niceness of it was what turned that sheen in his eyes into something a little more. She caught him and balanced him back on the step.
“Sorry,” he said, and cringed when it came out a breathy, raspy growl. “Sorry,” he said again, clearing his throat. “I’m fine now, I’m fine, go back to Nate. Thanks.”
“Oh Eliot, stop it!” She snapped at him, and his eyes darted to hers in surprise for the second time that night at the anger in her voice.
She huffed a half apologetic sigh. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap. It’s just—why didn’t you say you were hurt? Is it some bloody hitter thing? You let yourself get decimated by how many men for the con, for us, and then you just walk it off, walk out the door without telling us, without letting us help? Where is the rationality in that? We had Hardison’s absurd first aid kit all around us; why in the bloody hell wouldn’t you speak up?”
He swallowed twice, stalling as he tried to think of an answer. Tried to figure out how to navigate pride and fear and desire and loneliness and affection. Tried to figure out how to explain that he could take pain—to be patient through physical pain and hang on till it faded, and to do then what he needed to do—but he had never figured out how to do that with feelings, and emotions, and heart hurts, and so he made it so that he didn’t have to; he could shove them away into a corner and they did not get out.
Tried to think how to tell her that they, she and Nate and Parker and Hardison, they kept swamping over every one of his defenses. That they were changing him too fast, making him bigger, making him softer, weaker, and it screwed with his head. He was drunk on it, and sick on it, and it scared him, and he loved it, and he desperately wanted to be a good man with them.
“Adrenaline, I guess,” he said, hating himself for hiding, for being a coward about it. He needed to think, and he was just too raw, too naked right now. Hell, Sophie probably saw right through him. “Anyway getting Nate’s dad—Nate, Nate was more important, he’s more important, that’s all,” he finished in a hurried mumble.
Sophie did read something from his body language after all, because her face softened, and she reached up to cradle his cheek with her hand. “Eliot,” she began, turning his face to meet her gaze. He thought he could see the faintest pink blush powder her cheeks. “I noticed. In the car today, when you ran after Nate—”
His gaze skittered away as his heart began to pound again, afraid of what would come out of her mouth next. His heart was all on display.
“I saw, and I heard,” she continued, “And Eliot, after everything today, I think you are laboring under some sort of misapprehension that you, I don’t know, that you aren’t as valuable to the team as any of the rest of us are. That you aren’t valuable—no, team’s not the right word. That you…don’t have a place in our, our hearts—” And Sophie was blushing, too, because this, this putting herself out in the open, this real, this not practiced, vulnerability was making her heart pound too—“Um, as much as I can tell we are in yours.”
The outright nervousness on the hitter’s face as he stared at her was a dead giveaway that she had gotten it right, and that gave her the courage to keep going. “Eliot…you matter. You are important to us, just as you are. None of us would have you be anything other than what you are, do you hear me? You matter to us, you, not any of the roles you play and certainly for much more than your role on the team.” She punctuated each you with a gentle squeeze of his hand, still, he realized, clutched in hers from when she helped him breathe. “Do you understand?” she asked quietly.
He’s nodding, jerkily, almost before she’s finished asking. Yes, he thinks, yes, and swallows, and then he remembers how to speak, “Yes,” and it wobbles, and he doesn’t know how to do this anymore.
Her eyes are wet too, and she wraps an arm gently around his shoulders and tugs him closer until his forehead comes to rest on her shoulders, and he shudders once, twice, three times before he manages a deep breath and stills.
“Think we can manage going inside now?” she asks a few minutes later. He nods against her shoulder, steels himself to rise—and can’t, another groan ripping out of his chest as his back spasms and he sees white. He feels Sophie cringe in sympathy as he rides the spasms out. “Eliot, what can I do?”
He drags in a long breath and moves her hands so they are under his elbows. “Help me up with you,” he bites out. “Move slowly.”
Slowly, slowly, they stand, and something in his spine pops and releases and he grunts in relief. He moves his arm so that it’s around her shoulders, and they half-stumble, half drag each other up the two steps to the door.
Hardison and Parker are blessedly both waiting right inside the door, looking relieved when it opens. It’s much easier going with Hardison’s wiry frame taking most of Eliot’s weight from her, says “We got you, bro,” quietly, solidly, and Sophie is so grateful. Within moments Eliot is safely ensconced between her and Hardison on the couch, Hardison removing Eliot’s heavy coat and cutting through his trashed t-shirt while Parker sorts through the first-aid kit for what they would need to wrap up broken bones and soothe angry bruises, and Eliot, exhausted and hurting and fuzzy in his mind, is nevertheless aware of his clammy sweat pooling in the crevices of his neck, and the itch underneath his breastbone, threatening to escape from the fragile confines of his skin. He was hyperaware of the hands touching him, and while he knew, he knew, that they were to support and brace him he felt his breath hitch and stutter when Parker found the antiseptic and started touching him too. The urge to run—too many hands!—brought a welcome spike of adrenaline and he lurched up from the couch with the wheeze back up in his ears, to everyone’s dismay. But he didn’t make it far, only a couple steps before slumping down to the ground. Parker springs to catch him and bring him back to the couch while he tries to steady his breathing, again, and he’s starting to feel despair creep up on him, again.
Parker hushes Hardison and Sophie’s rebukes and looks Eliot in the eye for a long moment, and then somehow, miraculously, she understands. “Stop touching him, both of you. Just put him down on the cushions,” she says, and he nods once, choking out, “Too many hands.”
Sophie steps in again, coaching him with the breathing, though she doesn’t touch him this time. Then he could let Parker clean and bandage his battered body, and the relief when she was finished made him feel like he was almost in control of his own self again. Hardison handed him two Vicodin and a bottle of water, and Sophie disappeared into the bathroom and emerged with a hot water bottle, and he sank into its warmth with a surprised grunt of relief. “Thanks,” he said hoarsely. Then Parker emerged with pillows and a blanket, helps him tip onto his side, and he feels his heart ache at the tenderness he could taste in the air, and tomorrow, he thinks. Tomorrow he will set up the shattered pieces of his soul again, and he wonders if it would be like those Japanese pieces repaired with gold, gold holding them together, their golden them-ness, Parker and Sophie and Alec and Nate, veining and threading through him and making broken things beautiful things. Tomorrow, and only remembers the feeling of fingers lovingly combing through his greasy hair for a moment before sleep claimed him.