Chapter Text
When Eliot was young, he thought he’d have some kind of purpose. He was foolish enough to think it would be something big and noble, that he’d be heroic and important. It burned in him, made him all too eager to leave the small town and get out into the world, like the world was somewhere you could be and not just whatever little corner you found yourself in. He believed in a lot of things back then: his country, justice, right and wrong.
And then he got boots in the dirt, blood on his hands, and after that it was a little hard to believe in anything at all.
There’s no purpose in war, no heroism or legacy or actualization. There’s following orders, there’s pointing and shooting, there’s not thinking because that’s not what he is here to do.
This is what he chose, the emptiness, the passive horror, the meaningless pain. He’s a cog in a terrible grinding machine that’s run by a bunch of men in fancy suits in a room far away from dirt and blood and loss. He isn’t anything important.
He doesn’t think about purpose, doesn’t think about himself again until Damien Moreau. It’s more point and shoot, but it’s different, sharper. He is not a cog, he is the finely tuned machine, he is the skill, the talent. There’s something special about him, according to Moreau, something unique in the way that he can fight, that he can kill.
And Eliot thinks for the first but not even close to the last time that his purpose might be a bad thing. That maybe he was put on this earth not to accomplish something wonderful, but to destroy, to kill, to ruin.
(The worst part, the thing that keeps him up night after night even years after, is that at the time he was mostly just relieved he could still believe in anything at all.)
It ends quietly. There’s nothing new to his final job for Moreau, just a man who knew too much and his wife who was too close to live.
Eliot watches the house during the day, watches the two of them in different rooms on different tasks. They breeze through each other’s lives with a practiced ease, kisses on foreheads and squeezes to shoulders. He taps on his laptop, she scribbles in a notebook, he watches the game, she reads a book in the backyard. He cooks them dinner, she makes some weird looking drink with a blender and a lot of alcohol.
It gets dark and he gets ready and after looking away, he finds them again in the living room with the lights low… dancing, a poor attempt at a waltz.
And his hands start to shake. He heads into the house and feels nervous the way he hasn’t since his first kill with the army.
He aims his gun, stills his hand, and goes to shoot the man first, the bigger threat, the actual target. And his wife… she spots him and doesn’t scream when he pulls the trigger. She gasps and throws herself between her husband and the gun.
And she falls.
The target, the man… Eliot doesn’t give him time to react, just shoots him quick and makes sure he falls, crumpled over his wife as they both bleed out, curled into each other.
Eliot runs, makes it a block and a half before he doubles over and vomits pure bile into a bush.
He had dealt in death for so long, he forgot about living, about the people living lives, about the way they all tried so damn hard to carve out their little bit of happiness, about the kind of love that could motivate you to throw yourself in front of a bullet for someone else.
He cleans his face and staggers off.
It’s the last time he fires a gun for a long time. And he never does a job for Damien Moreau again.
***
He stops searching for purpose.
He has skills, skills he can be compensated for, so he gets by. Retrieval only. No killing, no guns. It’s far from honest work. But it gets him through and doesn’t make him feel nauseous.
He works alone. There are too many people out there he’s never met that probably consider him an enemy, too many people who are willing to pay other people if it means he ends up dead. Plus no one's as good as he is, he doesn’t like getting dragged down.
Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and wonders if this is the rest of his life. He doesn’t use the word purpose, because everything feels so much less than that. But as the years start to add up, he resigns himself to the emptiness of it all.
There’s no reason for him to take the Dubenich job. Well, that’s not true. The payout’s good and the job is challenging enough and the rumors about Nathan Ford pique his interest. But those don’t do much to budge his reasons not to.
He says yes anyway. Like he was drawn to it, a little bit of destiny and a little bit of a higher power and a little bit of pure dumb luck.
(He says yes again, for one more. And then one more. And then one more. And then… well.)
It’s nice, doing jobs and not feeling like shit after, not feeling nothing either, but actually feeling good, just a little.
Helping people. Doing some good.
It reminds him of being young and thinking nobly, heroically, when he believed in those things.
He cooks for the team, mere months in. It’s dinner around a table and he’s never cooked for this many people before, ain’t that fucking something. And he knows that he cooked with love and that it didn’t come from nowhere. He’s fighting for a cause now, but more than that, he’s fighting with them.
***
He does a lot of risk assessments, pretty much all the time, without even thinking about it. That first job, those first few jobs if he’s being completely honest, he marks Parker as the person to watch out for.
She’s crazy, but worse than that, she’s the kind of crazy that’s unpredictable. It’s easy enough to figure out what everyone else is motivated by, their strengths and weaknesses, how they’ll act in certain situations. He doesn’t know them but he knows enough about people to know what they might do.
Parker, in every way, is impossible to pin down. She’s unlike anyone he’s met before, which is distinctly a bad thing.
But she’s good. Really good.
After that first job, he gets back to a motel room with his duffel bag of stuff to find the emergency cash he had stocked in his sock missing and beads from a candy necklace hanging from the chain around his neck. It’s… bewildering. He’s almost too impressed to be pissed.
She’s sharp edges and smooth fast motions and for the first few weeks he keeps peeking out of the corner of his eyes to keep track of her and even still can’t figure out how she does half of what she does, let alone why.
He starts learning her, not through scrutinizations and risk assessments, but through her own sharing.
She’s scared of horses. Which is dumb because there’s no reason to be scared of horses if you treat them right. But he’s met a lot of people, arrogant and cruel and everything in between, who think themselves above being scared of horses or any animal. There’s a certain reverence in fear, and it’s better to have that reverence in any form than to not have it at all.
(There’s also something painfully human about her having a fear like that, and sharing it with them in a situation where it would be so easy for them to use it against her. It’s… endearing.)
She seems to make herself at home with them, puts her trust in them before they even have time to realize all the reasons she has to not trust anybody. Her sharp edges fade when she’s around the team, leaving a soft jumble of other confusing, unpredictable, and crazy little quirks, but it no longer factors into risk assessments for him. Parker is the best at what she does, and she’s no threat, not to him or the team. To the job, occasionally, but she’s more important than the job anyway.
The team trusts him to keep them safe, but Parker trusts him the most, to catch her when she throws herself off things and to boost her up just right and to incessantly invade his personal space during briefings. It’s been a while since anyone’s done that, trusted him that much.
His evaluations shift, from how to protect himself from them to how to best protect them.
Parker is the one he worries about the least, who makes his job the easiest. Oh, he’ll throw himself between her and a fight in a heartbeat, but he trusts that out of all of them, Parker knows how to protect herself, Parker will cut and run where the others might linger or might be baited. Parker has a self preservation instinct and a pension for stabbing men who get too close, and for that he’s alarmingly grateful. She’s also strong, all tightly corded muscles from her climbing. He thinks with some training for any fights she can’t just get away from, she won’t even need him.
So he starts training her.
She takes to his lessons like a fish to water, even though he wishes she wouldn’t act so much like it’s some big game. But her control of her body and her endless energy has her mastering most forms and holds quicker than he expects. She still can’t beat him unless he’s explicitly letting her, not many people can, but she gets close enough to catching him off guard to pose a real threat.
He’d almost feel bad about releasing a trained and fight ready Parker on the world, but he sits squished in the backseat of a van with Hardison, a drugged up Parker between them and her hands on each of theirs. She spends more than half the ride holding them out in front of her, studying them both carefully with the pads of her fingers and her inscrutable concentrated gaze, before she folds their fingers together on both sides and tugs them close, hugs them tight to her chest like a pillow, and she yawns with her mouth wide open.
And he feels this burning of fondness in his chest, and something a little more vicious just beneath it with the knowledge that he’s done something meaningful and permanent to protect her.
(He feels something else entirely when he sees her in the office kitchen the next morning after she sleeps off all the drugs and realizes she’s wearing his sweatpants and one of Hardison’s shirts, but that’s a problem for later.)
***
Hardison is a completely different story.
He is frustrating immediately, because Eliot reads in him the worst kind of arrogance, the kind that comes from being so good you can actually pull off all the things you talk up. Eliot has never done a lot of work with computers, but he’s worked pretty well at keeping up different identities, making sure to wipe certain traces of himself off the internet, getting into the information he needs to pull off a job. Hardison puts that work to shame so effortlessly, not only doing things that Eliot can’t, but things that Eliot didn’t even know people could do with computers. It drives him crazy.
But also makes his life a whole lot easier.
Hardison is a natural caretaker. Eliot has no fucking clue why he didn’t work with teams before them, because he has a knack for easing off all their rough edges, decorating their office, giving them backups upon backups, treating them to gift after gift so casually they barely register as a kindness, all sorts of other comforts Eliot hasn’t had in a long time.
Hardison also makes his job harder than it has any right to be. He’s like a magnet for trouble every time he goes out into the field for a job. It becomes second nature to stick by him because god knows if things are gonna go wrong it’s gonna start around him.
He gets used to dragging Hardison’s ass out of fires and taking on the fights for him, but also gets a little too used to Hardison’s IDs and camera wiping and unlocking doors and files from afar.
It’s been a long long time since Eliot’s had a friend. He’s had buddies, in the army, on jobs after. Some of which he trusts to watch his back, but most of which he’ll jokingly call bastard and work without complaint but never fully close his eyes around. So he’s a little shaky, but falls easily into a friendship with Hardison to his own goddamn bewilderment. Watching games on the couch and laughing over beers, but also talking about his past. The good past, the Oklahoma, growing-up kinda past, the past that’s somehow the hardest to talk about. He listens to Hardison’s stories about foster siblings and odd jobs he pulled just to see if he could. (He also refuses to listen any time Hardison tries to talk about his wizards and orcs and shit.)
Hardison continues to gas himself up, to earn every stitch of his confidence, to prove his worth at just about anything they need him to take on. Eliot watches in a silent sort of awe, trying to remember what it felt like to be that confident, not of your skills because Eliot is plenty sure of exactly what he is capable of, but of yourself, your ability to keep getting better. He waits and waits for Hardison to find some upper limit to what he can pull off with a device in his hand, and sooner rather than later stops betting against him, just to see that smug look wiped off his face, and starts betting on him, waiting with baited breath to see just how he’s gonna pull his next miracle off.
The only thing he seems to never get any fucking better at is defending himself. He won’t give training a proper chance as soon as he realizes it’s gonna involve lots of effort over time and actually listening to Eliot. He can barely even throw a goddamn punch, and it drives Eliot up a wall, but he also never hesitates to take care of it for him.
They're team, he excuses every time. It’s his job.
But there’s all this extra stuff brimming beneath the thin defensive veneer of team, crew, fucking co-workers. There’s a goddamn f-word lingering on the horizon, that he feels itching at the door of his brain every time he finds himself grouped with the two of them especially, on jobs, in the office, anywhere else.
Where Parker involves a lot of uncovering things, puzzling through her words and actions and discovering her codes and rules while she does the same with them, with Hardison, it feels like building something steadily with care and practicality and teamwork.
Both are things that desperately need to be protected. And that’s separate from the job, but he’s ready to take on the responsibility anyway.
***
He changes his mind back and forth about who he’s more concerned about. Like he thought Parker would be fine without him, but then he watches her sprinkle a handful of sugar into a bowl of microwave soup before downing the whole thing at 8 on a Wednesday morning, and he realizes she’s gonna die at 35 of a blood clot if he doesn’t do something.
He shoves fruits and vegetables at her, dilutes her sugary cereal with Cheerios and Special K and Raisin Bran even though she can always tell and scowls at him about it. He makes her soup when she wants, with a complex enough flavor palate so she doesn’t take matters into her own hands. It’s a temporary fix, but she starts asking him for snacks sometimes when she’s hungry instead of just lifting whatever sugar crap is loose at the convenience store down the street.
Hardison is slightly better in that he can cobble together an actual meal, but he guzzles his orange sodas and expensive coffees, and stays up too late staring at his screens and hunching over his laptops.
Eliot can’t exactly bring himself to actively expressing concern for their health in all this, so he sticks to drawing Hardison away for breaks with stupid arguments about his little video games or tripping over one of the many wires that make up his high tech set up or accidentally making some extra sun tea that he should just drink instead of the fake syrup crap from the Starbuck on the corner, damnit Hardison.
It’s just part of his job. It’s just watching out for the team, making sure they’ll be around to keep doing jobs. He likes cooking. And he does think Hardison’s computer games are dumb.
It’s all fine.
***
The jobs take them all over the country. There’s a lot of hotel rooms.
There always had been, but never like this, with others.
Sometimes, they get their own rooms and a common area. But it’s an unusual set up and only works if they need a fancy hotel or can get Hardison to properly hack the right reservation. Just as often they end up with connecting doubles.
Nate and Sophie always get their own, not because they demand it, but because no one else wants to deal with whatever is going on there. And Eliot knows that they could get a third easily, but… it just seems easier to share with Hardison and Parker, makes his job simpler to watch only two rooms.
He always takes whatever bed and side is closest to the door, but other than that it’s a toss up for how they’ll configure themselves.
Parker has no hesitation claiming the bed (and partner) she wants at night, bouncing around for a while before settling and sprawling out. She fits into the space she’s given like a gas, filling out her side of the bed or curling up small. Her limbs kick out a lot, like she’s climbing and jumping and flying, in her sleep but she always seems to know her limits, never brushes up against him or Hardison. She does steal all the blankets though, always, from both beds, piling them up around her like a cocoon.
(“I don’t like being cold,” she offers defensively when they complain about it, something heavy behind her eyes that says don’t ask but also offers enough of the answer anyway. So yeah, they let her have the blankets.)
Hardison is a lot less hesitant to share a bed with him than he expected.
On an early job, a before-Boston job, they get back to the hotel exhausted and Parker crashes on the far bed with her limbs stretching from edge to edge, and Hardison only looks at her fondly before changing and joining Eliot on the other.
He sleeps on his side, and doesn’t seem to care whether he’s facing Eliot or not. He also tries to leave the TV on, tuned in to the Sci-Fi channel and letting the colors splash and the sound rumble out. (Eliot always turns it off the second Hardison seems asleep enough to not notice.) But Hardison is high fucking cuddle risk, always reaching out and grabbing and making little snuffly sounds as he nuzzles in wherever he can. Eliot does his best to dodge but Hardison has a helluva grip in his sleep for some godforsaken reason. Once he’s got a limb he’s got it.
Eliot doesn’t sleep much, gets about an hour or so most nights, where he lays flat on his back and stays stock still. But he’s able to eek out a little more with them, with the warmth of their bodies near enough to his, the sound of both of their breathes, steady, a reassurance of their safety near him, the part of him that is never off the job holding onto it, cradling the sound of them carefully.
And some nights, when it’s Hardison and Parker in a bed together, finally giving him some space, he’ll wake up and change the hotel TV to a sports channel and watch them. Hardison reaching out and Parker sticking to her cocoon, the weird little dance they do in their sleep. Sometimes they end up facing each other, bodies like parentheses, holding all that air and potential in the space between them. There’s gonna be something there someday, he knows, something beautiful.
He’ll protect that too. And that’ll be where the problems start.
***
It crystallizes into something dangerous because of the goddamn psychic.
Because he feels cold in his veins as the reading goes worse and worse, Parker pinned in place and being worked over, cracked open without her goddamn permission, and that kind of visceral reaction that he’s having, not to her being in any physical danger, but to this emotion duress, it means something, something way beyond what he does and what he would do for most people. There is something deeply horrifying about what’s happening here: something is being stolen from Parker of all people. And he wishes it was money or jewels or something else valuable like that, because it’s so much worse that it’s emotional, that it’s something from her past, that it’s something deeply hers that even they don’t know about.
He catches Hardison’s eye as they rush back to the apartment looking for her, and he finds his own horror mirrored there, and the anger beneath it, the unwavering combination of both, that this should not be allowed to happen, people should not be allowed to take things from Parker, especially not these things, these stories that need to be earned with care and patience, the kind that Hardison has in spades for her, the kind that Eliot is forcing himself to learn.
She’s crying quietly on the floor and they gather around her because dammit, if she thinks for a single second that she’s alone, that she has to hurt.
And he’d kill for her.
He’s reckoned with that before. To protect the team, any one of them, he’d kill. But those reckonings were always about fights, physical protection, nothing more, and suddenly, violently, it does include this, revenge for them, for any of their hurts.
He’s killed for people before. He’s killed for country and for money and for Damien fucking Moreau. But this feels more, feels deeper than his years and years of point and shoot on other peoples orders.
Killing for her, if it made her feel better, if it could take back the part of her that was just stolen, it would be different, it would sit lighter on his soul, it wouldn’t feel as wrong.
(And he knows he wouldn’t be alone doing it. Knows that him actually doing the killing would only be a practicality but that he’d have Hardison right there with him at the very least, with the same goal, with his own hands in the process.)
They don’t. Which is fine, he’s not eager to kill again even with the knowledge that he would.
He and Hardison stick close to Parker for the rest of the time they spend in the apartment planning next steps. There’s this understanding, this silent communication between them when it comes to Parker, that they’ll do whatever they have to to catch her.
There’s something a little subdued about Parker, an unsteadiness that unsteadies him, but she doesn’t bolt and he watches in real time as she restocks herself and locks herself all up again.
He and Hardison share a look of relief and get to work settling the score.
Before they leave, Parker stops them by the door and throws her arms around both of them, using all that with strength to drag them close into a tangled lump of bodies.
“I’m okay now,” she says, bubbly as ever. “Stop being weird.” She firmly pats their shoulders before pulling back and turning on her heel.
“That girl,” Hardison breathes, all shock and awe and warm sticky love. Eliot nods along with him, taking a deep relieved breath before catching himself and pulling back.
***
He hears Nate say the name Damien Moreau and his brain goes into autopilot. He’s still there in the room, still doing the things he should be doing, breathing and listening and talking, but deep inside he’s cold and panic and then snapping back into place.
He has plans for this, and as soon as he gets back to his apartment, he’s moving along that plan, gathering his essentials, grabbing his emergency bag, moving his money around to specific accounts. He cleans out his fridge, but leaves the non-perishables. The apartment hasn’t been compromised so he can probably come back at some point, when it’s safer. He throws his shit in his car and starts driving, pulling onto the highway and heading for his backup garage he has outside New York City.
He made this plan so long ago that it takes a while to remember exactly what the details of it are. There’s a safe house, he carefully selected not too close to where Moreau does his business but also not too far to be suspicious, just exactly in his blind spot.
It’s in a very very isolated area, rustic and dusty, which is gonna drive Hardison crazy. The house itself is only a story and the area around it is really flat, Parker’ll get bored quick, but he can probably build her some jungle gym or something out in the backyard and he’s pretty sure they’re in sight line of the county water tower so he doesn’t put it past her to go bungee jumping off it.
And then his brain comes to a screeching halt, nearly going spinning off before he shifts back to manual steering.
Hardison and Parker aren’t coming. The safe house is too small for one, just a bedroom, bathroom and basement. No room for them, not for any long period of time, and even if they could find the room, that means definitely none for Nate and Sophie, no habitable places nearby for them to get set up.
They are not a part of his plan. And their plan right now includes going after Damien Moreau.
They don’t know what the hell they’re getting into, they’re gonna…
Hardison, his brain latches onto first, is gonna get in over his head and for once might not be able to pull himself out of it with his genius. There’s nothing that man can’t do from a laptop screen but he’s been more and more determined to get into the field, to throw himself into the action and figuring out how to get himself into situations as he’s staring down the danger. With every win and every crazy accomplishment he gets a little more bolstered, and now he’s gonna think he’ll be able to take on the devil on earth. He’s good but he’s only so good, and he’s still an innocent in all these important ways, probably can’t imagine the callousness with which a man like Moreau destroys all that’s good without a second hesitation.
Nate won’t give up, Nate is still self destructive enough to stay the course as he nosedives towards the ground. Sophie’ll try to pull him back, try to keep him steady, but her ability to manage Nate is only so strong.
Parker, he thinks, his heart burning as he blearily watches the highway lights flash by. Parker’ll be okay. She has the self preservation. She’ll see the danger and she’ll cut and run and she’s good, she’s so good, he’s pretty sure that even Damien Moreau could never catch her, couldn’t get to her. She’d be safe.
Except… except she’s not the same Parker for three years ago. He knows what the team means to each of them, but it probably means the most to Parker, her first family, her home when she’s never had one. Losing that…
Because she would. Because despite Nate’s index of backup plans, despite Sophie’s gifted grifting, despite Parker’s fast fingers, despite Hardison’s genius fucking brain, they don’t know what they’re getting into. People like Alec Hardison don’t survive people like Damien Moreau. Even though Hardiosn is a genius, even though of everyone he has the best chance to actually outsmart Moreau, could take him for all he’s worth, could actually get past the best security money can buy, could knock him down a peg with that wry prideful smile, he’d never be ready for the consequences, for what Moreau does to people who best him. The only way to escape that hell, that cruelty, would be to put Moreau in the goddamn ground, and the team, and Hardison, they’re too noble for that, too good.
He pulls off the next exit and turns the fucking car around.
This may be the last job he ever does with them, he realizes as he heads back to his apartment, ten over the speed limit, buzzing under his skin at all the worst case scenarios he’s running through. This may be his last job. If he has to die to take down Damien Moreau, to protect them from Damien Moreau than… well, that feels like some sort of poetic justice.
***
He turns off the part of him that cares for them, all of them, the fondness that bubbles up with Parker’s smiles and Hardison’s jokes and Sophie’s accents and Nate’s horrible games. He goes back to risk assessment, to cataloguing their skills and abilities as carefully and exactly as he can. How are they gonna do this, how are they gonna pull this off, just how far can this team go.
There’s no room for error, no room for the warmth he has for them, in these cold calculations he makes.
Whether or not he ever works for them again, whether or not they forgive him, whether or not he makes it out, he’s gonna make sure they survive this.
That’s his job, that’s his mission. Where these feelings come from are entirely unimportant. He’s gonna get it done.
***
They celebrate in San Lorenzo.
Because somehow they pull it off and Damien Moreau is behind bars, never leaving the island again, and so they celebrate.
Hardison works whatever magic he has in those fingers over the speaker system in the hotel ballroom to play some godawful party music. And Parker drinks a bottle and a half of very expensive champagne.
Eliot’s never seen her drunk before.
She seems happy. Champagne, of course, would be right up her alley, sweet and fizzy and light. She moves across the room like she’s flying, her limbs loose and free, her balance tipping back and forth, but like it’s totally in her control nevertheless, gravity is merely a toy that she’s waving in the wind.
She throws herself at his side with precision and he catches her around the waist with his free hand, nearly sloshing the whiskey in his other over.
“Parker,” he grumbles. She’s distractingly warm, and now with her chin digging into his temple, her arms around his neck, he can almost smell the wine on her lips.
“Wee,” she breathes, almost sleepily, burying her nose into the top of his head.
He’s never seen her drunk before. She’s been spinning around a room of strangers all night, bringing herself up and close to each of them, Nate and Sophie and Hardison and him, in careful intervals as she drank and drank, loosening, lightening, and trusting them, like spotters, to catch her.
He tightens his arm around her waist, adjusting his grip because he’ll be damned before he lets her fall.
“How’s it going, sweetheart?” he asks, as her hands pick through strands of his hair, deft as ever.
“Champagne gives me hiccups,” she says, tugging absently at the collar of his shirt. “But I stole three wallets and a watch and oh…” She interlocks her ankles for balance as she reaches god knows where and pulls out a thin chain bracelet, dangling it in front of his face. “This.” She pauses briefly to hiccup. “Do you like it?”
It’s swinging too close to his eyes for him to really see it but he nods anyway, and tries not to be surprised when the chain disappears and is suddenly hanging from his wrist, Parker’s hands back in his hair.
“Hardison,” she mutters, one hand coming up to wave. “Hardison!”
Fuck.
He feels half-pinned between them, with Parker up against him, head lolling against his and her warm sleepy exhales against his cheek, and Hardison suddenly walking steadily over, his warm eyes locking him down.
“Hey there,” he says when he gets close, voice sticky and deep, smooth as honey. He’s been nursing his own drinks throughout the night, Eliot’s watched, but he’s not actually drunk like Parker is, just loose.
She makes an eager noise and squirms, sipping dangerously to grab Hardison’s hand and pull him closer. He bumps up against Eliot’s other side, and he’s warm too.
“Pretzels,” Parker slurs, pressing her cheek onto Eliot’s head and pulling Hardison’s hand to her chest. “I want more pretzels.”
Hardison laughs lightly, and steps in, pressing against his side a little firmer.
Parker’s pure muscle weight isn’t hard for him to hold but he starts to feel the burn in his arm. Eliot finishes off the rest of his drink and puts the glass down, bringing his free hand around to better support her.
Hardison leans in and Eliot can smell his aftershave on his neck as he places a kiss on her forehead, one hand on her side, one on Eliot’s hip.
“What’ve you been up to, baby?” he asks when he shifts back.
“Got Eliot a bracelet,” she says, all sing-songy. And she does one of her open-mouth yawns right in his ear. He grimaces and tries to ignore the shit-eating grin on Hardison’s face.
“Here,” he says. He tries to shift and slide Parker back to her feet, but even when he lets go she won’t budge. He sighs and turns so she’s shoved into Hardison. “I’ll leave you to it.”
Parker gasps, scandalized, and digs her fingers into his skin. “No, you can’t go,” she says and it makes his stomach twist because it really is something to be held and pulled close and wanted. But she’s drunk and Hardison is here to catch her and hold onto her properly.
“Somebody needs to not have a hangover tomorrow,” he says, tries again to wiggle Parker free. Her grip is strong as ever, and she’s bracing through her shoulders like he taught her.
“But I told that creepy guy at that bar that you were my boyfriend so I wouldn’t have to stab him.” She raises her eyebrows meaningfully.
“That’s good,” Hardison says, raising his hand for her to high five. “No stabbing.” Her smile goes wide and excited as she leans over to meet him.
“Well, tell him Hardison’s your boyfriend if he messes with you again,” he grumbles. He’s not going to be able to shake her free, she’s got him tight enough that his options of escape are only relevant to actual fights. He seeks out Hardison for assistance, ready to accept soft begrudging Parker help or worse an actual agreement that Eliot shouldn’t be here. They’ve been a little unsteady since the pool, as an understatement.
But instead Hardison just watches him back, an unassuming amused look on his face.
“You look more threatening than Hardison,” she says, poking his bicep. “No offense.” She’s still spinning and swaying as she reaches and pats at Hardison’s shoulder next.
“Offense taken,” Hardison says, getting all yelp-y and excitable. “I can be threatening.” It sets Parker off, laughing her wild impish laugh.
Eliot keeps her from flopping over to the ground and barely avoids meeting Hardison’s eyes again, already knowing the soft fond look they’d share and how much it would hurt him if it wasn’t there.
There was a time not too long ago where Eliot would follow Damien Moreau and look threatening, look like violence and death and worse to get people to do what Moreau wanted. And now he scares off creeps from across the room for Parker, so she doesn’t have to stab people.
He killed a warehouse full of men not too long ago. He can still feel the weight of the guns in his hands. There’s so much blood on his hands, from years and years and he’s added another layer of stain that he’ll never wash off. And yet… he’s never felt less like a weapon.
With the team, and almost especially now, with Parker hanging off him and Hardison laughing along with her, near enough that Eliot can feel the warmth of his side, he feels like a shield, sturdy and protective and wrapped around them.
Damien Moreau is behind bars, and he feels better about himself than he has in years and years, a contentment settling in his chest at their victory.
“Hey,” Hardison says, his hip nudging into Eliot’s side. “You alright?”
It makes Parker gasp again, even though she’s still all giggly, and she runs her hands messily over Eliot’s hair in what he assumes is an attempt at a comforting pet.
“Eliot?” she asks, all sweet concern.
“Fine,” he grumbles, clearing his throat. “Just astral projecting to my goddamn room.”
“Are you tired?” Parker asks urgently, patting him down again. “Sleep. You need sleep.”
Hardison is still half laughing at them, but tilts his head consideringly.
“Will do,” Eliot says. “You gonna hop down?”
“Oh,” she says softly, disappointed. “We can come.” She glances back at Hardison, head tipping and almost crashing into his shoulder. “We can come?”
“Sure, baby,” he says, smiling softly at her. The thing between them is shifting, he can feel it, and this close it’s almost overwhelming, the sweet easy warmth that’s blooming in the space between them.
He’s too close to it like this, far too close to them. He feels like he could get drunk on it, get dragged right into the gravity of them, if he doesn’t get away soon.
“Now hold on—” he starts before Parker turns directly into him and yawns in his face.
Hardison pats him heartily on the back.
“C’mon, man,” he says. “Let’s get the lady to bed.”
He’s ready to protest again, but then Hardison gives him this look, warm and shining, and Parker presses a wet and smiling kiss to his temple before jumping off and landing easily on her feet. Her hand wraps tight around his wrist and she leans her weight back, tugging him and also Hardison towards the hallway.
Parker’s talking a mile a minute as they head for the elevators, something story about a different fancy hotel she stole all but the bathroom grout from, and Hardison nods along and laughs with her, so obviously and painfully enamored Eliot can feel it spill right over into his own chest. He’s far from drunk despite the whiskeys, but he can’t quite tune in, watches the moment from outside of himself, these two beautiful bright people and the taste of victory in the air between them, his place with them, not just some hired gun, some muscle, some force of violence. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for them, to keep them like this, smiling and happy and close.
Parker leans back against him in the elevator, pulls Hardison in close to smother her giggles against his chest. When the door dings open, she disappears, heading off like a shot, sloppily cartwheeling her way down the hall towards their room. As Hardison reaches Parker, flopped on her back in the carpet in front of their door, Eliot walks slow, wanting to bottle this moment, hold onto it with the few possessions he’s managed to carry with him over the years.
Hardison gets the door open and tries to pull Parker up by her hands as she tries to pull him down to her. She’s winning and she’s drunk, which means he absolutely needs to try to get Hardison in some sort of training again.
Eliot rolls his eyes and crouches next to Parker, immediately getting her loose attention, an arm shooting out and tugging at his shoulder.
“It’s soft,” she says, bumping her head back into the floor. “Hardison doesn’t believe me.”
“Oh, I believe you,” he says, faring a little better now with only one hand to deal with. “I’m completely taking your word for it, baby.”
“C’mon, Park,” Eliot says, indulging himself just enough to reach out and brush her bangs flat against her forehead. Her skin is flushed and warm. “Bed’s soft too. More fun to sleep this off there.”
She sighs, her eyes fluttering closed, but nods, swinging her arm around towards Hardison and rolling to her feet, before hopping up into his arms.
“Whoa, okay,” he says, staggering a little under her weight, but wrapping his arms around her as she tucks into his neck, rubbing her forehead against his skin. Eliot stands, herds them into the room. He can tell watching Hardison’s movements that he’s not bracing the right muscles, not lifting from his legs or his core just flopping around, but he seems contented enough to have Parker close, and she seems comfortable enough too, mumbling nonsensically into his ear. They look wonderful together.
Eliot busies himself with his bag, stripping off his jacket and his jeans, getting ready for bed in his corner. He focuses on each inhale and exhale, on the movement of each individual muscle as he pulls on a soft t-shirt, ties his hair up. He doesn’t think about Hardison and Parker and their beautiful smiles and their soft touches and their delicate fledgling love. He thinks of Damien Moreau in a cell forever, he thinks of redemption, he thinks of being a kid and wanting a purpose. He thinks he might finally find one, if he makes more amends like this, undoes more of the wrongs he’s done.
“Eliot,” Parker calls plaintively and it wipes out any other thoughts. He turns without hesitation, as she wrestles Hardison under what appears to be a fourth blanket stolen from God knows where.
“You’re gonna need to get it over his head if you wanna properly suffocate him,” he tells her.
“Man!” Hardison protests.
“Shh,” Parker insists firmly, tucking the additional blanket over his shoulders before turning and making grabby hands in Eliot’s direction.
He’s drifting towards them before he can remind himself not to. Parker grips him tight by the wrist and yanks him down onto the mattress next to her, turning to pile more of the blankets over his chest. “It’s cold. Don’t be cold.” She wrangles the sheets over him with that drunken intensity and that Parker death-grip.
“It’s the damn AC,” he grumbles at Hardison, because he knows he left it at 70 all night and didn’t turn it off in the morning like he said he would.
“Hey man, you’re the one who didn’t want to open the window.”
“We are on the third floor. Do you really need me to tell you how easy it is to get in a third floor window or should we just let Parker go do it right now—?”
“No,” she protests, rolling onto her back and tugging the blankets up to her chin. “It’s cold.” She closes her eyes, head tipping to the side, nuzzling her nose into the side of Hardison’s pillow. “Sleep.”
And right. It’s a lot easier to argue with Hardison than deal with the fact that he’s in bed with them, the mattress wide enough to hold them but not enough that their shoulders aren’t overlapping.
He should get up. He should head to the other bed. He should.
But Hardison is staring across the pillow at Parker, looking for all the world like he’s never seen something as beautiful, and Eliot can’t move, he can’t bring himself an inch away from them.
“Everything’s still dizzy,” Parker mutters after a moment, sounding as helpless as she can for someone who he’s sure can still execute a proper judo flip.
“Oh, babe,” Hardison says, ever sympathetic. He shifts slightly and Eliot can imagine their hands folding together beneath the sheets.
“That’ll be the spins, honey,” Eliot says. “You’ll be fine when you wake up.” Hungover probably, but that’s a problem for the morning.
It seems to settle her, as she takes a deep deep breath and digs further down into the mattress.
“I didn’t drink before I turned 21,” she says. Her voice is still something fluid and slurred, but it’s that soft tone that means she’s carefully cracking open the safe at the heart of her, letting them have a peek inside, offering one of her precious pieces. “It’s probably one of the only laws I haven’t broken.” Her nose wrinkles. “Aw… now I can’t break it.” There’s a flash in Hardison’s eyes, like he’s trying to calculate exactly how to warp linear time so she can if she wants to. “I had this one alias though while I was living with these older thieves in New York, and they wanted to celebrate her 21st, so we went to a bar. They bought me one of everything, though I don’t really remember anything after the screwdriver.” She exhales steadily, and Eliot holds his breath like bracing for a blow. “I woke up alone on a bench in the park and when I got back to the abandoned apartment we were staying in, all my stuff was gone.” She sighs all too casually. “So I don’t really like being drunk.”
He can hear as Hardison swallows hard, practically taste that complicated twist of hurt and anger and sympathy and pride that despite all the bullshit, Parker is here and wonderfully whole. Some of that might be his though.
“Don’t worry,” Eliot stage-whispers, turning slightly towards her. “If Hardison tries to steal our stuff, I’ll punch him.” The carefully calm blanket over Parker’s face folds quickly, the corners of her eyes crinkling as she grins.
“If I—?” Hardison squeaks. “Excuse me. I have no need for any of your raggedy ass cowboy clothes, thank you very much. And for the record, I would let you steal any of my stuff, what’s mine is yours, man, and if you can’t handle that level of trust—”
He keeps going but Parker’s snickers nearly drown him out.
Her hand reaches and settles around his wrist, her fingertips slipping against his palm. He gives them two quick squeezes.
“Go to fucking sleep,” he adds quietly, in case she misinterprets it.
And for once she seems to listen, unwinding into the sheets and evening her breaths.
Hardison is propped up a little on his hand, watching her, and Eliot knows, deep in his bones, that Hardison is gonna do his damndest to make sure she’s happy for the rest of their lives. It the kind of look makes Eliot’s chest tight, makes him long for simpler days when he was a simpler person, makes him want to choose back then and there, when he had the chance, to take the smaller life and the small town, to dedicate himself to love over all the other things he thought would give his life meaning and purpose, if only to give himself a chance at the sweet belonging that burns in the space between them.
“She’ll still be there in the morning,” he teases quietly, hopes against hope that Hardison thinks the croak in his voice is exhaustion.
“I know,” he replies softly. “That’s what’s scary.” Eliot makes a confused noise in the back of his throat. It earns him Hardison’s eyes tracing up to his. “That she trusts us enough to do things like this, and to stick around.”
Eliot grits his teeth and nods. There’s a million words on the tip of his tongue about it, about how much Hardison deserves that trust, about how he won’t screw it up because he’s never screwed anything up, about how Eliot believes in so little these days but the two of them are a sure thing, he’d stake his life on it. He swallows them all down.
“How about you?” Hardison asks after the silence continues. “How’re you doing?”
“What do you mean?” he huffs.
Hardison narrows his eyes, deeply unimpressed. “You know what I mean,” he says. “This was a rough one for you. How are you feeling? I know you have feelings down in there, man, you can’t hide them from me.”
“What? R’you concerned?” he asks, half spluttering. “I’m… I’m fucking fine, Hardison. God.”
“Hey,” he says, sharp and soft all at the same time. “Eliot.” He says his name like it’s oh so important. “Whatever you’re feeling right now, it’s okay. I just want you to know that I’ve got you, if you wanna talk about it. And you know, Parker does too when she’s not drunk and asleep.”
It all settles wrong in his chest and he feels like squirming out of the bed, like rolling away. Feelings and talking about them are always discouraged, have been for as long as he can remember. Actions are more important than words anyhow, talking about your problems isn’t a solution, and figuring out how you feel about something that’s already happened will only distract you from being ready for what’s coming next.
“You know, last I checked you were pissed at me,” he says firmly, like nudging Hardison away, shoving him back towards that safe distance of anger and frustration and betrayal.
Hardison shakes his head. “I can be mad at you and care about you at the same time,” he says like an iron brand on Eliot’s soul. “And I am, still mad, but I know this has been hard for you, been dragging up a lot of shit. And that’s more important right now.”
“We got him,” Eliot chokes out. “We won. Everyone’s alive. I’m fine. You can go back to being angry.”
Hardison sighs, something complicated and fast flickering over his eyes, his brain working fast, doing something, some hard work that Eliot knows will not turn out well for him.
“I trust you, man,” he says softly. “I know you’re gonna keep us safe. Next time just… give me a heads up, you know?”
“Hardison,” he grumbles.
“No, man, seriously,” he says, eyes searing into his, no room for negotiations or push backs. “I need you to trust me, too. There are things I can do that you can’t. We can keep each other safe.”
It sits heavy in his throat, makes him feel so tight and tense and fragile.
“Sorry,” he says, helpless to say anything else. Hardison just stares at him for a moment longer and nods, somehow finding some answer where Eliot has none.
“We’re a team,” Hardison says, eyes flickering down to Parker as her leg twitches out under the piles of sheets. “We’re better together than apart.”
Eliot follows his gaze down to Parker, her face smoothed out in sleep, her hands somehow still and steady next to theirs.
“I know,” he says, exhaling. “I know, man.” There are more words, more confessions and apologies he has left in himself all tied back to Damien Moreau and the black hole of a mark the man is on his history. But that chapter is closed, right here. Hardison nods like he understands everything that he’s not saying, and Parker, the only one who could steal those stories from him, is asleep and is keeping her hands to herself.
“Night, Eliot,” Hardison says, turning slightly onto his back.
“Night,” he echoes, and stays on his side, keeping them both in his sight line until he falls asleep.