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“And a nice tackle by Lewis, that’s gonna set Florida back a ways, and--oooh, ouch!-- ”
Eliot smirked at the tv and raised his beer to his lips as a replay of the tackle was shown. His boys were playing well tonight. And he’d only had to threaten Hardison twice to turn on the Sooners game before he’d complied.
Eliot was alone in Nate’s apartment--their headquarters--now. The client had shown up down in the bar and the others had all gone down. Eliot had hung back, expecting Sophie to stay too, since she didn’t have much personal involvement in the case, but she had groaned about her need for a martini ( a proper martini ) and traipsed downstairs. Eliot had been surprised to see Parker leaving with everyone as well; she almost never went to initial client meetings or follow-ups. Maybe she had gone right out the front door and headed home instead of staying to talk to Ashley or whatever.
She’d been acting weird lately. Ever since they’d accepted this job, to take down PallaGen and Vioplex, she’d been… off. Even by Parker standards. Eliot had noticed her watching Hardison and of course, there had been the whole thing with her glaring right at their client all suspicious. Then she’d gotten more distracted than usual during her grifts, and snapped over the comms during her raid of the offices.
If Eliot didn’t know better, he’d think she was jealous of the way Hardison had been interacting with their client. But it was Parker and it was Hardison , so there was a huge chance he was reading into something that wasn’t there.
Florida scored with a freak run and Eliot grimaced at the screen, then scooted a little lower in his seat and propped his feet up on the coffee table.
Which of course meant that as soon as he got comfortable, he was interrupted. By a knock on the door, of all things.
No one knocked on their door. If anyone came to their door they came right on through it, either kicking it open and striding in with guns and knives, or throwing it open with a pout and flopping onto the couch dramatically or going to the collection of liquor in the kitchen. No one came in quietly, and no one knocked.
He set down his beer and went quietly to the door, then leaned in cautiously to peer through the peephole. He frowned when he saw Parker standing there.
Is the door locked or something? Wait, that wouldn’t stop her.
He opened the door with a confused frown on his face.
“Parker, what--”
“I need your help,” she interrupted.
Parker didn’t ask for help. She did things on her own or she grudgingly listened to orders. Sometimes you could offer to help and she would accept it. But she didn’t ask for help. Ever.
Which meant she was in trouble.
Eliot automatically began taking stock of the situation. She was a little pale, her eyes a little hazy, but her expression was the neutral one she always wore. He stepped slightly into the hall and quickly scanned for tails, captors, and cameras. Seeing none, he grabbed her by the arm, pulled her inside the apartment, and shut the door.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, his voice quiet but nevertheless urgent. “You in trouble?”
She wordlessly held out her hands, palm up, and Eliot’s heart thudded in his chest in a quiet moment of panic.
Blood. Jesus Christ, she killed someone.
Then he noticed the gashes in her palms and fingers, her hands trembling just faintly.
She’s hurt.
His heart leapt into his throat and he moved automatically, taking her by the wrists and pulling her gently to the table.
“Christ, sit down,” he commanded as he pulled out a chair, and to his surprise she complied without complaint.
He went to the kitchen and rooted around quickly until he found a couple clean, dark-colored dish towels.
“What the hell happened, Parker?” he asked as he rejoined her at the table.
She still held her hands out, palms up, and was staring off into the middle distance. He folded a towel up so it was several layers thick but still big enough to cover her whole hand, and made to press it to one of her palms.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she said, and he stopped.
The hell? She asked for my help, and now she’s refusing it? She didn’t... she didn’t do this to herself, did she? On purpose?
“The hell are you talkin’ about?” he asked, moving to try again.
“There might be broken glass in it,” she explained, her voice distant. She still had barely looked his way since walking into the apartment.
He paused and peered at her hands. He didn’t see any glass, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t any.
He spread a towel out under her hands and stood.
“Stay there. Keep your hands over the towel,” he instructed, then walked off.
He’d tended to her injuries enough that he knew she’d listen to him, at least as long as she was in the apartment. The number of times he’d patched her up and sent her home, telling her to change the bandages daily only to see her the next day completely sans bandages was truly astounding.
He went into Nate’s bathroom and pulled open one of the cabinets, muttering to himself as he grabbed things he would need. Rubbing alcohol, gauze, butterfly closures, antibiotic cream, bandages... He didn’t think he’d need the suture kit, but figured he might as well bring it with him in case he had missed a deeper cut, so he wouldn’t have to trek all the way back upstairs.
He went back down the spiral staircase and dumped his supplies onto the table next to Parker, then headed into the kitchen to wash his hands. He quickly found his reading glasses, too.
When he sat down again after turning the dimmer switch for the light over the table all the way up, she was still staring blankly.
He set to work quietly, letting her talk if she wanted.
He carefully wiped up all the blood, partially dried in some places and still flowing lightly in others, until he could properly examine the cuts. They were little more than scratches, mostly, and he didn’t see any glass in most of them. There was a deep, jagged gash across one of her palms and a short puncture on a couple of her fingertips, though, and he found tiny slivers of glass in all of them. Nothing would need stitches, at least.
When he dropped the glass out of his tweezers and onto a tissue he saw that it was brown glass, and his eyes shot to his beer bottle across the room. It was the same color.
A beer bottle? Really? he thought. She barely even drank, and when she did the only beer she drank was on draft down at McRory’s, so she never drank beer out of a bottle if she could help it.
Did she get into a fight? Is this someone else’s beer bottle? He wouldn’t put it past her, quite frankly, especially with how weird she had been lately.
Throughout all this Parker remained silent, until he started dabbing the cuts generously with rubbing alcohol and she hissed and tried to pull her hands away. He had anticipated it, though, and held onto her wrist firmly with his left hand while he worked with his right.
“That hurts!” she whined, trying to tug her hand away. Eliot knew that if she really wanted to get away she’d use every means at her disposal--teeth, feet, knees, whatever--so he didn’t feel bad for holding on. If she told him to let go, he’d let go, he respected her and all, but until then she was just whining as far as he was concerned.
As suspected, she finally calmed down, still wincing every time he passed over a cut with a soaked cotton ball. He let go of her wrist and kept working.
He worked quickly, his hands practiced in first aid and immune to tremors, wanting to get the bigger cuts closed up as soon as he could so she wouldn’t lose any more blood. He didn’t think she’d lost a lot, but she looked pale, and judging by her limited diet he suspected she was at least a little anemic normally.
“I crushed a beer bottle between my hands,” she admitted, finally breaking her silence, and he frowned, his suspicions confirmed.
“I figured,” he said, nodding to the slivers of glass on the table without taking his eyes off the butterfly closures he was attempting to put over the larger cuts without sticking the adhesive ends over smaller ones. “Why?”
She shrugged, and he took hold of her wrist again when the movement shifted her hands resting on the towel.
“Because feelings are hard,” she explained, and he let out a little huff of a laugh.
“Sure are,” he agreed, and left it at that, leaving her to elaborate if she felt like it.
She didn’t, and he concentrated on swabbing the shallower cuts with antibiotic cream. When he finished he wrapped her palms with gauze as completely as he could, but he couldn’t completely cover all the cuts, as some of them were in awkward places, like between her fingers or the creases where her fingers met her palm. He settled for covering them as much as he could and taped the gauze in place.
Her palms taken care of, he wiped off his hands and sifted through the bin full of boxes of bandaids he’d grabbed from the cabinet. There were regular brown ones of all shapes and sizes, as well as ones printed with WWE stars and cartoon characters and animal prints and everything in between. Whenever Hardison or Parker were in charge of groceries to stock headquarters they always picked up a box of new bandaids, because they went through them faster than most decently sized elementary schools, and most of the time they got printed ones because they were “fun”. Recently Sophie had begun doing the same when it was her turn to shop.
He came up with a box of bandaids with Princess and the Frog on them, and another with How to Train Your Dragon, and offered them to Parker. She nodded at the Dragons box and he set the other aside.
He wrapped her fingers with the bandaids, and by the time he was done there was very little skin showing on her hands at all between the colorful bandaids and white gauze.
As an afterthought he stuck a bandaid each onto the backs of her hands over the gauze, because it looked plain and he knew it would cheer Parker up, if only a little.
She smiled softly, tracing one of them with a wrapped fingertip gingerly, and he started clearing the table.
He still didn’t know what was going through her head, what had prompted her to crush a glass bottle between her strong hands, but if she didn’t want to tell him he wasn’t going to pry. That wasn’t his job. His job was to keep his team safe, take care of them, and that’s what he was good at. If the team started coming to him expecting him to be their therapist, that would just be wrong--it was out of his wheelhouse and job description.
After the table was cleared and the dirty towels were in the laundry, Eliot washed his hands and grabbed a cold pack out of the freezer, then handed it to Parker.
“Go like this,” he said, pressing his hands together like he was praying. Parker followed suit, holding the cold pack between her hands, and he nodded.
The game was still playing, and Eliot retrieved his beer from the coffee table and turned up the volume, then went back to sit at the table with Parker.
“Thanks,” she whispered after a few minutes.
“It’s my job,” he replied.
Tomorrow he’d track her down with his first aid kit and change her bandages, holding her down if he had to, because she needed her hands, goddammit, and losing her hands to an infection would really slow her down while safecracking.
“I hate football,” she muttered, and he frowned at her.
“Shut up,” he grunted, then went back to watching the game.