Chapter Text
Eliot Spencer switches careers in three easy steps. The first one involves soaking up the San Lorenzo sun.
He sits sprawled on the hood of a red Chevy pickup, his suit jacket ditched in the backseat and his sleeves folded up. The warm breeze rustles his hair. From up here, the Aspromonte mountains sprout up all around him. The Ionian sea rushes up against them like the world’s gentle breath.
It is a beautiful summer day. With weather like this, his dad used to take him camping in the Arbuckles. He taught him how to fish and how to stack a campfire. Today the Mediterranean air smells almost like an Oklahoma july.
One minute, Eliot is eighteen and storming out of his Pa's house with a pounding heart and a big fat dream – to be a hero, see the world, find some damn purpose.
Next minute, he's pushing thirty and he is about to shoot a good man's brains out because some slimy banker had a rough morning. Life comes at you fast.
Lazily, he blinks into the azure sky. He should have brought some beers in a cooler. “You ever go camping, man?”
General Flores grunts, less as an answer and more from exertion. Eliot is making him dig his own grave. It is almost deep enough now, and Flores is neither stalling or wailing, so he is doing much better than the last guy, or the guy before that.
“Oy, the commander asked you a question, old man,” Eliot's backup guy yaps. Another college-aged ‘roid-rat, recruited out of some third-rate PMC. Damien is making Eliot babysit him out of sheer sadism. If he has a name, Eliot didn't bother to remember.
Flores drives his shovel into the rocky ground again. “When we served together, I thought you were a decent man, Spencer. But whatever good might have been in you, I bet that was the first thing Moreau made you kill.”
He spits in the dirt. Eliot rolls his eyes while the backup guy starts blustering and threatening some sort of straight-from-TV torture. Flores is a useless romantic. They ran one lousy mission together, back before Flores’ failed coup and subsequent exile, and suddenly they're shield brothers. Ribera brought him in as an independent contractor and yeah, maybe Flores would not have spotted that sniper in time, and yeah, maybe Eliot did take a bullet for him, but that was a flesh wound and that was the job. He is a fucking professional.
“Damien definitely never went camping,” Eliot muses. “Shame, too, it might mellow him out.”
He snorts, trying to imagine Moreau in a three-piece suit, scraping lukewarm beans out of a can and crawling into a primary-colored sleeping bag. Flores glares and Eliot wiggles his gun at him until he resumes digging. The rhythmic scraping and clattering soothes him.
Back when Eliot and Aimee dated, he used to daydream, although he never told any of his buddies, about taking their future kids out to nature. Teaching some snot-nosed mini-Eliot how to thread a hook. Plucking burrs out of some rosy-cheeked baby girl’s pigtails. Of course, that was before he became a murderer.
Fuck, he hadn’t thought about Oklahoma in a long time. He almost forgot that kid who had a future. With a sigh, he switches the gun to his left. Flores glances up, before refocusing on his task. Sweat is starting to seep past his tweed waistcoat and form ugly stains under his armpits.
“You know, Damien got this new idea about turning San Lorenzo into one of those gambling islands, like Macao or Monaco. Ribera hates it.” Eliot laughs. Flores fails to see the humor, though, his weathered face gets grim and shadowed.
“Is that why I am to die now? To appease Ribera?”
Eliot shrugs. “No. New guy here fucked up a deal, got jumpy and shot the supplier in the leg. Two ‘mil in Yemeni artefacts, in the wind. Put him in a mood.”
Flores coughs up a rough, unhappy laugh. Backup guy looks at Eliot, betrayed, and then turns to Flores with a hateful sneer. “Shut up.”
“Really, Spencer?,” Flores grunts. “Your soul is so cheap now?”
Eliot shrugs again. “What’s left of it, anyway.”
Truthfully, the issue is that he refuses to die. Somehow he can’t stop surviving, and that means keeping busy. Either he lets Damien put him to work, or his stupid will to live is going to walk him back into the PMCs and they are going to use him to do so much more damage than he could ever do in San Lorenzo.
Besides, if he doesn’t keep himself on a contract, the USA is going to knock at his door again. Some day, things will get bad enough for their committees to approve his fee and immunity deal again. They’ll find a way to drag him back into the nation-toppling business somehow.
“Commander, can we just shoot this bastard now?” The backup guy asks, still grinding his teeth about the dry-cleaning jab. He’d be absolutely awful at camping, or fishing. Lacks the zen for it.
“Don’t be rude,” Eliot tells him.
“Spencer, seriously, before I die. What happened to you?” Flores says, leaning heavily on the hilt of the shovel. “Why Moreau?”
Eliot thinks about that for a second while backup guy fingers his gun. He thinks about Oklahoma. About his dad ruffling his hair after he bonked the fish on the head so they could grill it up. About the way he didn’t cry, ‘cause he was seven, and he wasn’t a baby anymore.
“I’m really only good for one thing,” he settles on. “And Damien pays well.”
“Fuck.” Flores laughs his hoarse laugh again. “You never thought of just picking up another damn hobby?”
No. Yes. He has a thousand hobbies and a thousand skills and he always comes back to this. He’s in too deep, either way. Old dog, he does not get to just pick up new tricks.
Eliot realizes with a mild twinge that some part of him is just waiting for someone else to come along and put him down.
“It's not that simple,” he settles on.
Flores looks at him with strange pity. “Yeah, right.”
Something inside him won’t quit surviving, though, and it is going to survive everyone they send against him. Nobody is going to do damage control for him. Nobody is ever going to make him stop.
Except, one second he was El, his dad’s boy, and the next he was Eliot Spencer, the murderer. Things change. Life comes at you fast.
And nobody else is ever going to make him stop, unless he does it himself.
“That’s it. Hole’s deep enough. On your knees, traitor,” backup guy growls, like he's practiced it in the mirror. He’s not pulling it off, but his semi-automatic pistol helps where his pitch lacks. He’s breathy with the excitement to see something bleed, like all of Moreau’s most obnoxious staff.
The second Eliot knows he won’t do it, he does. He shoots backup guy, twice in the chest, once in the head. Bang, bang, bang. Then, with the body still falling, he slides the barrel off, drops the magazine out, throws the gun over his shoulder.
It is a beautiful fucking day.
Flores stares at him. He grips the shovel tightly, like it would give him a chance in this fight.
“I took a cooking class in Belgium once,” Eliot hears himself say. He aggressively ignores all the ways in which he is blowing up his life. “I make a mean mussel stew.”
Then, he hops off the car’s hood. Flores flinches, and staggers back. His heel catches a stray root and he almost stumbles right into his grave. Shaking away the recoil, Eliot turns his back to him and lets the sun wash over his face.
Nobody brains him from behind. Nobody dives for the fallen semi-automatic. Moron. Eliot swings open the Chevy’s cherry-red door. He finds the key in the ignition. Still, Flores does not shoot him, like an idiot.
“You know, Damien's stupid yacht is anchored a couple miles that way. Probably get you to Italy. Anchor at Gioia Tauro. Ever since Damien got with the Sicilians, the Calabrians have been looking to make his life difficult.” He turns the key and the motor starts roaring. He has a plane to catch. preferably before Damien’s meeting ends.
By the time Flores shakes himself out of his shock, Eliot is long gone.
Step two of Eliot’s retirement plan takes over a year. It includes a lot of running, hiding, shooting people, paying forgers, paying snakeheads, paying for fleabag hotels, burning off his fingerprints in a Vietnamese gas station bathroom, stitching shut a bullet hole with veterinary anesthesia in a Belgian dog kennel and faking his death in an explosion off the coast of Maine. And that is the easy part.
The difficult part is walking into the Cambridge Institute of Culinary Arts.
“So, you are interested in our 37 week Chef Programme?”
Eliot nods at the interviewer. “Yes, sir.”
The man sizes him up. Black dress shirt, jeans, hair down to his cheekbones. He still carries a shiner from that sailboat in Maine, but it mostly healed. “It's not uncommon to learn a trade later in life, but a lot of our students come to us straight out of high school. What made you decide to be a chef now.”
Eliot grimaces.
“Just got out of the service,” he says. That is true. Eliot had technically held a military rank in San Lorenzo, which technically made him a defector. It is also much more true for his new identity, Eliot Smith, who had served three fictional tours in Iraq before a crack to the shoulder caught him a medical discharge.
“I see. But why cooking?” the man pushes.
Eliot dismisses his first answer, which is because I need something to do. He also dismisses his second answer, which is because if I’m cooking I’m not hurting anybody. Eventually, he settles on a half-truth.
“I want to spend my time doing something worthwhile, and that’s feeding people, letting them try new things. And I want to create.”
For the first time, the dour suit cracks a smile. “Very well.”
Step three is realizing that after anonymity and tuition, he is flat fucking broke. His main accounts were frozen courtesy of Damien and his remaining savings are barely enough for another night at the fleabag motel. Most of his other potential income sources are bridges he burned when he retired Eliot Spencer into a watery grave. He hasn't taken a job in months. Doesn't even want to, most days.
For a moment he contemplates knocking over a bank but then he reminds himself that he doesn’t do that shit anymore. He’s clean. On the straight and narrow. Good guy Eliot Smith is going to get a damn job or something.
Job-searching is a soul-crushing experience. Eventually he finds a cozy Irish pub whose grizzled owner listens to his ‘poor vet’ story with softening eyes and agrees to spot him the first month’s wages as long as Eliot signs a contract and forfeits the month’s tips. Eliot scrawls his new signature on the paper and is rewarded with eight-hundred dollars. Tending bar doesn't pay as well as wetwork, but at least he'll get to meet people and not kill them.
Then, the man asks if Eliot has a place to stay and when he gives an embarrassed shake of his head he gets doubly lucky because the old man is renting out the flat upstairs and it may be a tad dingy and he would have to tolerate the roommates but wouldn’t he like to live close to work?
He takes it. Within a day, his meager belongings decorate a cheap IKEA shelf in an otherwise bare room. The walls are one step above cardboard and there is a water stain the size of his torso on the ceiling, from which a naked lightbulb dangles ominously. He gets a lamp and a mattress at a dingy consignment store. A bedframe would be a waste, considering the amount of sleep he’ll realistically get. The place is easily thrice as comfortable as the waterfront apartment he rented in San Lorenzo.
The roommates are… there. Probably. First night at the new place, Eliot startles awake to hear a guy shouting through the walls about raining down the wrath of god on his foes at, like, 2am. He tries to summon up the will to go check if his roommate is committing a murder, but then there is a bunch more yelling about hackers and cheaters and auto-aim bots, followed up by tinny laser noises. Eliot’s not that old. He knows about video games. He turns over and goes to sleep.
The next morning he meets a guy in a cartoon-printed shirt, who barely does a double-take at seeing a stranger standing in his kitchen. Eliot mentally designates him as ‘the nerd’.
“Hey man, nice to meet you. I’m Hardison.” The nerd’s all lanky limbs and big smiles and Eliot barely dodges a hand flying at him in what he belatedly recognizes as an attempted handshake.
Eliot nods at him. “I’m Eliot. Hi.”
Shit, he must have unlearned every social skill he has ever possessed. What the hell. This is all Moreau's fault, somehow. Probably because Eliot hadn’t had a day off to hit a bar or bring home a girl or have a normal fucking conversation in the last eight months of employment, and after he’d quit he hadn’t trusted any pretty thing he might have bought a drink not to be an operative. His defection from Damien’s side had been a big deal in certain circles.
“Right. Make yourself at home, help yourself to whatever. And, uh, grab whatever fridge space you want. I only use it for my soda and I don’t think Parker knows the fridge exists. You met her yet?”
“No. Uh, I haven’t.” Eliot says stiffly. He resists the urge to cringe at himself again. Hardison raises an eyebrow before shrugging and continuing to shovel sugar into a mug of instant coffee.
“Right, she’s cool. You probably won’t see her around too much, she’s off doing her own thing. We can hang, though. I’m here most of the time.”
Eliot stares until Hardison’s grin falters slightly. “Or not. Whatever’s good with you. No pressure.”
Eliot blinks twice. Right. Hanging out. Beer and TV.
“Maybe,” he allows.
Hardison brightens. “Whenever’s good for you. I have classes sometimes but they don’t, like, take attendance.”
Eliot starts mentally calculating Hardison's age.
“At MIT,” Hardison clarifies hastily. “Computer science.”
He breathes a sigh of relief.
Hardison flashes him another bright, awkward grin and weasels out the door, his coffee monstrosity precariously balanced on a plate with a steaming poptart.
Shaking his head, Eliot turns to the little stove. In retrospect, that was the beginning of the end for him.
Parker shows her face three days later, at three am in the morning, just slips out of a shadow and Eliot almost throws a knife at her. He catches it at the last minute and stabs it into his cutting board instead, bisecting a chicken breast.
He tries to breathe. He dreamt about Operation Kansas again, and woke up sweating and breathing hard, the buzz of recoil still faintly thrumming through his shoulder. Sometimes he startles awake from these dreams swinging at imaginary enemies, and sometimes he sleeps through them the way he slept in his San Lorenzo waterfront and he wakes up perfectly well-rested.
“That smells good!” The cute blonde says, standing on tip-toes to glimpse behind him, unaware of her near-death experience. “What’chu making?”
“Chicken Katsu,” Eliot says. “I’m about done.”
Hardison had gone to some kind of college LAN party – “a Hackathon, Eliot! How have you never heard of that?” – and he’d thought he could get some pre-culinary school practice after his shift at the pub. He hadn’t counted on their elusive third sneaking in dressed all in tight, form fitting black, like a cat burglar.
“Why would I be worried?” The girl asks. She leans over to retrieve a possibly expired box of fruit loops from a cabinet. Eliot’s brows rise.
She meanders over to the fridge and retrieves some milk. The cap pops off with an audible hiss and when she smells it, she reflexively scrunches up her nose. Still, Eliot watches baffled as she shrugs and goes in search of a bowl.
He snatches the milk carton from her hand. “Don’t eat that, Jesus!"
“Hey!”
“It’s gone sour. Just– You want some chicken? It’s probably the only thing in this kitchen that won’t give you food poisoning.”
Parker visibly considers, bouncing on her toes with more nervous energy than any person should have past the witching hour.
“Okay,” she finally says, and surrenders the fruit loops. “I’ll eat your meat.”
Eliot tries not to wince at the phrasing, but goes back to his stovetop, chucking the carton into the trash as he turns. He pulls his knife out of the poultry, quickly dunks it in his small plastic tub of panko breadcrumbs, and drops it into the hot oil. Then, he turns his mind to the matter of plating.
Parker hops onto the counter, watching intently. Despite himself, Eliot gets a bit jittery. He had never cooked for anyone before, except maybe to heat up canned soup in the forces and before that, making his kid siblings PB&Js. Toby liked his soup but maybe he had just been polite back then, on account of Eliot’s multiple very visible guns and the blood smears and the general air of murder that Damien so appreciated but that sent most regular folks running the other way.
Maybe he is just fooling himself with that Chef crap. He ought to crawl back into some blood-soaked trench and–
The oil bubbles and sputters around the chicken. Parker reaches for it, only for Eliot to quickly ward her fingers off with his wooden spoon. “It’s hot!”
She shoots him an injured glare. “No, it's not.”
“Just give it a couple more minutes, alright?”
Eliot busies himself with shredding cabbage and mixing up bootleg tonkatsu sauce – Ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, some oyster sauce pilfered from the cooking school in preparation of tonight’s experiment – while Parker picks at her nails.
“You don’t have stuff in your room,” she finally says. “I like that.”
“Don’t look in people’s rooms without permission,” Eliot growls, and then smacks himself for it. If he makes his room mates run off in tears he’s back to sleeping in the fleabag motel, or, worse, in the shrubbery off a highway somewhere.
“But I needed space to rig my climbing harness and all the other rooms had stuff in them and I didn’t even steal anything.”
“It’s rude, is what it is. What's wrong with you? Scooch, I need the counter space.”
Parker hops off the counter and then surges up way too close while he fishes around for the chicken with a pair of chopsticks. He almost dodges back on instinct except that would send him barreling into a pot of hot grease and a case of spontaneous human combustion, so he settles for a sigh.
“Careful. Seriously.”
He deposits the crispy golden chicken on a cutting board and hacks it into chopstick-appropriate pieces. Those go onto their two least-chipped plates along with a healthy scoop of cabbage, sesame dressing and a spritz of the tonkatsu sauce. Plates in hand, Eliot muscles his way past Parker into the dining area, a little nook off the kitchen where three mismatched chairs crowded a rickety table.
“Hot,” Parker yelps.
“Wha-” His head swivels to find her licking at her index finger and making distinct chewing and huffing noises. A swivel back to the plates confirms one of the chicken slices missing. “How-”
Oh hell, his senses had dulled to shit. Next he’d miss a pickpocket and fumble his knives and get dead by some idiot rookie wetworker trying to make a name for himself. Straight up embarrassing. The chair scrapes as Parker throws herself down on it, by some miracle not toppling. She shoots a suspicious glare at the chicken.
Eliot shakes off his impending spiral. “Right.”
They eat in silence. Parker takes a few more seconds and a tentative bite at the panko crust before she shovels food into her mouth as fast as her chopsticks will allow, pecking up morsels with uncaring precision. Eliot picks at the chicken as best he can with the unfamiliar utensils – Damien had introduced him to sushi last year after Eliot had finished drowning the man’s actual dinner guest in the decorative fish tank, and the fragile rice-and-fish constructions had kept crumbling right into the little soy sauce dish. Parker drowns her shredded cabbage in sesame dressing.
When her plate is clean, she blinks at him. “I liked that.”
It’s phrased less like a compliment and more like an accusation.
“Glad to hear it,” Eliot says.
“No.” She wiggles her chopsticks with semi-threatening impatience. “I don’t like food.”
“O…kay.”
“I like dessert. And breakfast. But this isn’t even dessert-adjacent, and I still liked it.”
The chopsticks drift dangerously close to his face. He stands very still. Parker, Eliot has to remind himself, was his strange roommate and not at all a threat. If he moves wrong, he'll break her in half or scare her so bad that she and Hardison kick him to the curb.
“Well?” Parker says.
“Maybe you just haven't had a home-cooked meal in a while?” Eliot offers, putting his hands up in the universal sign for calm. “I can make something else tomorrow.”
Her face twists in a complicated way. “Fine. Whatever.”
And that was that.
Somehow, his impulsive promise to cook Parker dinner sometimes devolves into bi-weekly communal meals with his roommates. It’s always Eliot’s turn to cook.
He tries to think of it as getting some practice for culinary school. Also, he is upping his Karma score by saving his roommates lives. It is a miracle that neither of them had succumbed to scurvy before he moved in.
Seriously, he'd seen Hardison's grocery bag two weeks ago and it had contained equal parts gummy worms and frozen Hot Pockets, and nothing else. It had horrified him enough that he offered up his own class leftovers instead, only to be met with an uncomprehending stare and a confused “I'm good, man, just stocked up. See?”
Also, a couch had taken over the eastern wall of his room. A nice couch, upholstered in soft, tawny leather, complete with two tasteful throw pillows and a mahogany coffee table. Eliot hadn't bought any of that.
When he confronts Parker over the mysteriously spawned furniture, she shrugs. “I changed my mind. The room needed stuff.”
“It's my room.”
She blinks at him. “Yes?”
Eliot gives up. “I'll pay you back on Monday.”
“Don't worry, I didn't pay for it.” Parker laughs. She has a funny, honky little laugh. Before he can ask any relevant follow-up questions, she twists through the kitchenette window and swings onto the rusty fire escape ladder she prefers to their front door.
Eliot stomps off and throws himself down on his new, possibly stolen couch. Who knows how she even got it up the stairs. Maybe she'd hired a moving service, maybe she just rehomed a couch her parents were throwing out anyway. It all makes sense as long as Eliot doesn't think about the fact that he locks his door every day.
The couch is almost too comfortable. Maybe Parker is on to something about having stuff.
Come payday, he scrapes his funds together and invests in a little rail planter, which he hangs outside his window. Hopefully, rosemary and thyme would weather the Boston wind.
They settle into a strange kind of rhythm. Eliot cooks. Parker breaks into his room. She has taken to leaving gifts on his coffee table, ranging from half-eaten donuts to expensive cooking equipment. Once, she leaves him a Phillips screwdriver, which he uses to install a front door that won’t crumble with a single half-hearted kick.
Hardison plays his games at untenable times. Sometimes he takes breaks to poke his head out of his room and raise his eyebrows at Eliot piping out scones at 4 am before offering to put on a movie.
“Nothing with guns,” Eliot croaks the first time he caves and accepts the invitation. The gunpowder stench still clung to him even after two ice-cold showers had washed the nightmares of North Korea off. By the end, they had known that he had no more worthwhile intel, but they kept pressing that damn revolver to his head, the back of his neck, his mouth.
“That’s cool.” Hardison shrugs, even though Eliot must sound pathetic, a grown man who can’t handle a little fictional action. “‘s too early for explosions anyway.”
They end up watching a children’s movie about a golden retriever that plays basketball. Hardison thickly denies any tears when the dog scores the winning ball and Eliot doesn’t smell gunpowder anymore. They cycle through children’s movies, then cartoons, and then get stuck on horribly mushy romances that Hardison puts on “as a joke” only to end up holding back sniffles by the third act. Still, Hardison never asks why Eliot is awake at 4 am, and he never asks about the “no guns” rule, and in exchange Eliot doesn’t give him too much shit for wiping at his eyes with his sleeve when Bridget and Mark Darcy kiss in the snow or when Kathleen cries “I wanted it to be you.”.
Eliot tries not to think about what watching all those romance movies does to his manliness. Or, worse, whether Aimee cried like that at his fake-ass funeral. The last part becomes easier over time. As for the first part, he really ought to switch them over to sports, but each time he tries to make an argument in that direction Hardison has already queued up When Harry Met Sally on his fancy TV and Eliot’s brain is still buzzing from some half-remembered battle-field and he decides it’s fine to procrastinate.
He makes progress at the cooking institute. Their class consists of about forty people of mixed age, gender and background. The regular instructor is a rail-thin Frenchman who speaks with a heavy accent and perpetual sneer and alternates between snapping at Eliot to chop faster and snapping at him to be more precise. He thinks about Toby and the institute in Belgium sometimes. Maybe after this he’d visit, take more lessons or volunteer as an instructor.
There’s another vet, Thomas, who takes to following Eliot around out of some imagined kinship. Eliot simplifies his account of Eliot Smith’s three imaginary tours in Afghanistan to “I don’t want to talk about it”, which does not deter Thomas from regaling him with tales about Iraq. He’d been in charge of supplies for his base and had barely seen front-line combat, but the distant thunderstorm of shelling, the narrowly avoided car bombs and steady stream of soldiers returning in pieces had left their mark all the same.
“You miss it?” Eliot had finally asks, when Thomas nearly cuts off his finger julienning a potato because he’s so caught up elaborating on the ambush that hit their first proper convoy. Thomas grimaces.
“That’s messed up, right?” He rakes his hand through his straw-blonde hair, still cut to regulation. An approximation of a fallen soldier cross looms large on his biceps and a list of names extends under his black t-shirt.
“No,” Eliot says. His own juliennes come out in perfect matchsticks. “War is a simple, straight line. It just don’t lead anywhere.”
For a time, the army had been a good home. Simple orders, simple routines. His fellow soldiers had embraced him easily as one of their own. That flag on his arm screamed of purpose. The only thing that had bothered him about the war, back before he got innocent blood on his hands to be bothered about, had been the unpredictable emergencies. Behind enemy lines, each moment could unravel into an attack, a crisis, a tragedy. This had resolved with Damien, though, because Eliot had been the violent one.
“Most days I’m so glad I got out, but sometimes all I wanna do is get back there,” Thomas mutters and goes back to butchering his tubers. Eliot lets out a grunt of acknowledgement.
The thing is, he gets it. Some days he wakes up so angry – at the world, at himself – that all he can think about is walking that simple straight line again. Throwing his body at somebody, anybody, just to see what gives first. Being useful again.
He’ll cook pasta for dinner. A vodka sauce. Seared pancetta.
He walks home in the evening, arms laden with plastic bags of ham, pecorino and spaghetti along with a generous helping of leftover fried potatoes, when his phone buzzes. He turns onto a dark side street, fishing in his pocket to check whether Hardison forgot to pick up dryer sheets or toilet paper. His instincts go off like alarm bells.
He throws the bags and dives behind a car. His shoulder meets the concrete while shots go off, tearing apart the space behind him. Cans of tomatoes explode into a gory rain. His heart pounds. Shit.
“We get him?”
“Spread out. Find him.”
He rolls back onto his feet, ducks low. Through the window he counts five men on the street, waving oversized semi-automatics through the air. Reflexively, his hand goes to his waistband and finds fuck-all. His other hand closes around the flimsy pen knife in his jacket pocket. He grimaces. In his ratty backpack there’s a roll of freshly sharpened damascus chef knives, but by the time he digs those out of their etui he’ll be dead.
Bootsoles smack the concrete as the hit squad fans out. Sprays of prophylactic bullets chip at the brick residentials behind him.
Eliot waits for one of the operatives to stalk within reach. Their mouth rips open into an alarmed shout and he pounces.
It comes back so easily; jamming the pen knife into the man’s throat, between his helmet and his kevlar, spinning him around in the same motion while the dying man unloads a wild burst of bullets. Ripping the knife through the jugular, dropping it, keeping the corpse upright while it jerks with shot after shot. Hearing the kevlar shatter. Slipping his hand between the twitching arm and heaving torso to grab onto the machine gun, pressing on the dead finger to coax more bullets from the hot barrel. Two operatives fall, mechanical puppets in their last haphazard motions before they crumble. The rest dives for cover.
Just like that, his hands are red, red, red again.
Two months ago, he might have walked out into the street at the sight. He would have died picking up his fucking pancetta. But Damien, if these are Damien’s men, isn’t the type to leave loose ends.
Parker and Hardison– It wouldn’t be quick. He’d think maybe they knew something about Eliot, about why he turned coat. Eliot’s stomach clenched. Chapnam or Darius or any of those shark-eyed fucks in a dark room alone with Parker. Hardison, aiming his bright, nervous smile at the smug man in the suit, asking Are you a friend of Eliot’s? and Moreau would answer Yes, old friends, in that fake implacably-european accent.
So, it’s a beautiful fucking day. Eliot Smith dies in a shooting and Eliot Spencer cleans up his own mess for once.
The commander barks out an order. Movement behind the olive Subaru and the beaten-up van advertising 24/7 plumbing rescue in bold blue lettering. Eliot briefly ducks out of his cover to lob a flashbang grenade off the corpse's belt in their general direction. It bounces off the concrete and slides under the van before it goes off. More shouting. He strips the dead man of his body armor and machine gun, his sidearm too. Magazines. The kevlar vest smears warm blood all over his shirt. As an afterthought he unsheathes a large ka-bar knife from the sheath strapped on the guy’s arm. The handle settles easily into his hand.
It’s quick work from there. By the time Eliot drives out of the alley in the hot-wired olive Subaru, half a dozen corpses litter the street behind him. A handful of salvaged guns and knives rattle around in his hole-riddled trunk. The ruin of the plumbing van produces a dark noxious smoke signal for any civilians who hadn’t yet been alerted by the explosions. Behind him, sirens howl. He floors it.
With any luck, Parker and Hardison are at the apartment, waiting for the dinner he’d promised to cook. The dinner that is currently a sad tomato-y puddle on the street, cartoonishly bright next to all the spatters of real blood.
He circles his apartment block once, just to check for ambushes. If Damien’s new enforcer is clever, they set up a welcoming committee in the apartment. In that case, Parker and Hardison will soon wake up in the Beacon Hill basement dungeon of some bank executive who owes Damien a favor, or they’re currently bleeding out on each other in the rickety bathtub shower.
There’s a chance, though, a slim chance that Damien’s new guy thought he could take Eliot out with that half-cocked street ambush. There’s a chance he didn’t plan for failure. Slim as it is, Eliot owes it to Hardison and Parker to take that chance. And if he is too late…
Well, then Eliot is going to write their names on two bullets and die trying to put them into Damien’s forehead.