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“Eliot,” Parker blurts. Eliot gives her his attention immediately, pausing with his undershirt still in his hands. Parker is staring at his bare chest in the dim light of the storage closet they’re in. They only have a few minutes to switch disguises, but Eliot holds his breath as she slowly steps forward, convinced she’s about to break bad news. She opens her mouth to say something, then stops short and pulls out her earpiece. She shoves it deep in her jumpsuit pocket, and at her nod, Eliot follows suit so their comms are muffled.
“What’s wrong?” Eliot demands, looking around to double check their safety, but it’s just a closet. And Parker isn’t staring at anything in the closet, she’s staring at his chest.
“Those two scars,” she says, pointing a finger to ghost along the two thin lines that underscore his pecs. Her eyes flicker back up to his. “If I asked you about them, would you tell me?”
Eliot looks down at his chest as if he can actually see them from this angle, as if he doesn’t know exactly what she’s talking about. His body is littered with all kinds of scars, most of them small white nicks, but those two pinched lines have remained pinkish over many years. He looks back into her eyes and nods once to answer her question.
“Do you want to tell me?” Parker’s voice is still flat, but the words hit Eliot in the stomach. Butterflies of affection for her explode in response.
“Ask me, Parker.” She holds eye contact a moment longer, surely longer than she’s comfortable with, so Eliot gives a smile in reassurance. She presses her lips together.
“How did you get those scars?”
“Top surgery,” he answers. It’s easy to tell her. She examines the scars again with wider eyes.
“You used to have a chest,” she breathes, just exploring the statement. Eliot nods again, unable to keep the soft smile off of his face. He doesn’t know if she said chest instead of boobs out of respect for him or because she didn’t want to say the word ‘boobs,’ but he finds it endearing both ways.
“Any other questions?” Eliot asks, raising a playful eyebrow. Parker leans back with a smile soft enough to match his.
“Not right now,” she says, and Eliot knows it means she’ll probably blurt out the rest of her questions at equally odd times. He smiles at her approvingly, then yanks his shirt over his chest to finish transforming into a janitor.
———
The first time Hardison invites himself into Eliot’s hotel room and interrupts the dude pulling a needle out of his bared thigh, other than having to suppress a giggle at Eliot’s truly pale hairy thigh, he doesn’t think anything of it. Eliot’s always been the crew’s doc, so Hardison has no doubt he’s being safe about whatever meds he’s on. What he does have is a hunch about the mark he wants to run by Eliot first, so he just focuses on his tablet screen for emphasis and explains what he’s thinking while Eliot nods along and disposes of the used needle in Hardison’s periphery.
The second time it happens, several months and many hotels later, Hardison thinks a little harder about what Eliot’s doing with a syringe. Eliot doesn’t seem ashamed to be caught again, or even particularly secretive; he removes the needle from the now-empty syringe and takes care to put it in a hard container on the nightstand while Hardison rambles on about everyone’s conflicting pizza orders. He returns the syringe to a small case on the bed, finally turns to Hardison, and casually says, “Oh no. If only we were millionaires who could order multiple pizzas for everyone to get their own goddamn topping combination.”
(“Man, it’s the principle of the thing.”)
Third time, and Hardison launches quickly from chill to a hair trigger away from digging through Eliot’s medical records. It’s easily been a year since that first incident, so it’s obviously a long term dosage situation. Which means a serious situation. He doesn’t need to know what meds he’s on, per se, as that would definitely cross a line, but it would only qualify as toeing the line to verify that Eliot actually has a real prescription for something and isn’t shooting up steroids. Damn, he hopes it's not steroids.
But while Hardison is short circuiting trying to run the math of what he’s willing to do, Eliot is waiting with expectantly raised eyebrows. Hardison clears his throat.
“Yeah, we’re just — can you be ready to leave in twenty? Nate’s antsy,” Hardison says very normally if he does say so himself. Eliot’s face softens and he nods.
“Meet ya outside, okay?” Eliot directs. Hardison loves to take a hint, so he hightails it out of Eliot’s room. He busies himself taking his bags down to Lucille 3.0, sorting through possible explanations in his head the whole time.
He holds out until they’re in hour two of the drive back to Boston, but he does break. Eliot is driving with Nate in the passenger seat and the curtains closed. They’re talking quietly to keep each other awake, and Hardison tunes in one more time to check that they’re thoroughly distracted with chatting about sports cars. Sophie and Parker are equally indisposed, both curled up on the floor asleep. It’s barely midnight, but it had been a long con and it’s going to be another long hour before they’re home. Hardison takes a deep breath and boots up his computer. He types in the code he needs to run a medical search, then pauses, closing his eyes and listening to Eliot chuckle at some story Nate’s telling now.
“What are you doing?” The whisper pops up directly in his ear, and Hardison damn near jumps out of his skin. His shoulder bumps into Parker’s chin when he startles, and he mutters a few profanities before he has the good sense to close his search program in a huff. He turns to look at her, and Parker turns her wide eyes on him in sync.
“Were you spying?” She hisses.
“No!” he whispers back, checking over his shoulder to check that Eliot and Nate are still distracted on the other side of the curtain. He faces Parker again and her increasingly shocked expression tells him the furtive glance probably didn't further his innocence. He sighs and pulls a hand across his face.
“That’s something Nate would do,” Parker’s hiss is even sharper now with its edge of disapproval. Hardison shushes her and looks back again to pray that Nate didn’t hear his name.
“I will tell you everything later,” Hardison mutters out of the side of his mouth, “just go back to sleep.”
Parker brightens at the idea of being told everything, but steels herself and trains a wary eye on him again as she sinks back to the floor. Hardison lets out a long breath and slumps in his chair. He doesn’t pull his search back up.
A long hour later, Nate is carrying a sleeping Sophie up to — his couch, his bed, Hardison can’t tell with those two. Eliot shifts back into drive and pulls back onto the street to head for Parker’s warehouse. They’ve established a regular route for these post-road trip drop-offs, and Eliot’s clearly expecting the usual Nate-Sophie-Parker-Eliot-Hardison order of getting home. Parker sticks up a foot out of nowhere to prod Hardison’s side. He glares at her, but still obediently leans over to pull back the curtain.
“Hey, why don’t we go to yours first? I’ll take Parker and Lucille home myself,” Hardison suggests, poking his head far enough into the cab that Eliot can glance sideways at him.
“Why?”
At the same time that Hardison says, “You’ve been driving for hours, man,” Parker says, “Hardison has to come to my place and tell me secrets.”
Eliot gives one more squinting sideways glance, and Hardison snaps from glaring at Parker to flashing a brilliant, very innocent smile back at him. Eliot rolls his eyes and smiles just a little when he answers, “Whatever.”
Hardison thanks him and then gets into a playful fight of muttering and kicking with Parker, who beats him into silence even though she's still curled up at his feet. It’s all he can do to laugh.
They reach Eliot’s more suburban home soon enough. Hardison watches from the driver’s seat as Eliot walks straight to his garden instead of the front door, and shakes his head. Maybe Eliot really is on illicit drugs if he’e still awake enough to tend to his garden after the drive he just made — Hardison can’t shake off those kinds of fantastical thoughts the entire trip backtracking towards Parker’s. By the time he’s crosslegged on Parker’s bed in the center of her surreal warehouse, sitting across from her and sharing a bag of gummy frogs, he’s practically spiraling in his worry.
He rambles around stress-eaten mouthfuls of gummy frogs until Parker tilts her head and Hardison trails off, “...What?”
“Are you talking about his T shot?”
“His— Parker, are you listening? I’m talking intramuscular injections, not teacups and—”
“No, dummy, testosterone. You know. For gender,” Parker cuts him off, popping a frog into her mouth. Hardison balks.
“For gender? What are you talking about?”
“Yeah, gender. I’m surprised you don’t know how hormone replacement therapy works.” Parker tops it off with a shrug and another frog thrown into her mouth like she hasn’t just smacked Hardison with news that his best friend is trans. (Hardison can unpack the fact that he automatically thought of Eliot as his best friend at a later date; he’s occupied processing other information at the moment because Parker is plowing on.)
“One cc, two hundred milligrams every Thursday,” Parker rattles off, an obvious echo of something she’s been told. That’s what wakes Hardison up to exactly why this feels like a gut punch: Eliot told Parker and not me? “This is a boring spying secret. I already knew this.”
“And how long have you known, uh, this?” Hardison tries to seem casual, but his voice is an octave higher than usual. Luckily, he’s talking to Parker, who just hums in thought over more gummy frogs.
“Mm. I think five months and two weeks,” Parker states. Hardison feels throughly smacked, gut punched, whatever. He runs a hand over his face, hiding with his forehead in his palm.
“He told you he was trans five months ago.” Hardison says it more to himself than anything, to force himself to swallow it, but Parker uh-uhs him.
“He explained the T dose five months and two weeks ago. I found out he was trans more like… seven months ago,” Parker says, proceeding to count on her fingers to verify the dates.
“Seven months— in San Lorenzo?” Hardison wants to implode. He nearly drowned for Eliot’s secrets those seven months ago.
“No. Seven months ago today was three weeks and two days after San Lorenzo,” Parker finalizes, nodding and proud of herself.
Hardison can’t help it; he twists to collapse onto his back. Parker’s bed bounces in protest and bright overhead lights force his eyes closed. He lies there and sighs and feels like chopped liver until a shadow comes over his eyelids.
“I asked,” Parker says. Hardison peeks open one eye to see her blonde braids hanging in his face. She looks kind of sorry for him. “You could have just asked, y’know.”
———
Eliot is snickering in spite of himself, in spite of the way Hardison is glaring over at him. “Well, she was right. Could’ve asked, big guy.”
Hardison doesn’t have a reply to that beyond a third exasperated sigh. But now that he’s actually sitting on Eliot’s porch, watching him water his garden and laugh off Hardison’s high and mightyness, Hardison sees that he’s easily ten times more angry at himself than he is at Eliot. He’s not really mad at Eliot at all, the bastard.
He’s mad at himself for not asking. Mad at himself for not being tellable-enough. Mad at himself for not finding that kind of information in his initial background check years ago, to be completely selfishly honest, and doubly mad that he knows prodding about why every single medical record of Eliot since birth said Male would be insensitive and irrelevant. This would actually be easier if he were more ignorant. If he cared about Eliot less, maybe. If Eliot didn’t already know everything there is to know about Hardison.
“Look, to be honest? Assumed that you knew. I watched you hack the goddamn Steranko. Kinda figured my sex at birth was probably small potatoes to you,” Eliot says, wiping his hands on a rag hanging off his belt and pulling Hardison out of his wallowing.
“Okay, no, thank you! I feel like it should’ve been, too!” Hardison sits up in his porch chair, hands gesturing wildly. Eliot smiles up at him from the garden and then steps up onto the porch to listen to Hardison rambling about how thorough his process is. He settles into the chair next to Hardison, looking out at his beautiful garden bed with satisfaction and more or less tuning Hardison out.
When Hardison trails off with implied curiosity about how Eliot buried that shit so well, Eliot stands. He stretches his back first, soaking in the afternoon sun. Then he punches Hardison in the arm. “Ow! Bro, what?”
“That’s for not asking,” Eliot supplies, a small smirk forcing its way to the surface. Then he furrows his brows again. He punches Hardison’s other shoulder to even more avid protests. “That’s for thinking I was on steroids. Fuckin’ insulting,” he mutters. Then he goes inside and grab them both a beer, smiling and shaking his head the whole way.
When he comes back to the porch, he brings the beers and a new conversation topic about this weekend’s baseball game. Hardison falls into easy teasing about keeping Roy Chappell in retirement. Eliot basks in the warmth of the sun, the cold beer in his hand, and his best friend giving up the tired “why didn’t you tell me” bit to switch back to their familiar push and pull. It feels good.
The next time he feels quite the same level of warm and easy, it’s two months later for late night victory drinks in McRory’s.
Eliot is several beers and a few whiskeys deep, which means he and Hardison have to call it quits on the increasingly sloppy game of darts, which then puts Eliot in a booth with Nate and Sophie. Parker and Hardison are bickering at the bar, and Eliot looks on with a smile as he takes another swig. He can sense that Nate is watching him watch them before he knows it for sure. He doesn’t bother looking away, though.
“Hey. I’m trans,” Eliot says before he really has to think about it. Only after the words are out does he pry his eyes away from Parker and Hardison to catch Nate and Sophie’s reactions. Nate looks subtly surprised, but it’s as understated as Eliot would’ve expected. Sophie, also as expected, is smiling and gasping dramatically.
“Oh, how lovely! Us women will finally outnumber the men on the team!” Sophie exclaims, putting down her own empty glass to reach for Eliot’s hand with both of hers. He lets her take it, his smile crinkling his whole face.
“Love the energy, Soph,” Eliot begins, prompting a beaming smile from Sophie and a sly knowing glint in Nate’s eyes, “But uh, other way. Couple decades ago.”
Sophie looks sheepish and pulls one hand back to cover her mouth, but Eliot squeezes the hand he still has. Then all three of them are laughing, only half at Sophie’s expense. He’ll blame it on the alcohol tomorrow, but tonight, Eliot feels weightless, light in the wake of dropping a weight he swore he’d stopped carrying years ago.
Parker bounces over to ask what’s funny, and Hardison follows, sliding deep into the booth and into Eliot’s space.
“Tell me I did not just overhear you telling them outright,” Hardison warns. Eliot’s eyes damn near twinkle as he leans back comfortably into the seat.
“You just overheard me telling them outright,” he gloats, just to watch the steam pour out of Hardison’s ears.
“Okay, so you two — you already know?” Nate interrupts, gesturing his glass and Hardison and Parker. Parker nods dutifully.
“For nine months and ten days,” she says, making Eliot snort with laughter. He remembers that day too, of course, but no one remembers things the way Parker does. Nate considers that with satisfaction, and Sophie chuckles along with Eliot.
“Yeah, and I found out two months ago because somebody didn’t feel like telling me directly,” Hardison pouts, crossing his arms.
“Yeah, well, someone wanted to assume I’d take steroids before he’d just ask—”
“Oh, so everybody else getting told but it’s on me to ask?”
“Exactly, Hardison, that’s—”
“Boys, please…”
“Technically, I asked as well.”
“Hush,” Nate cuts through the overlapping voices, but his lazy smile softens the command. They all fall silent regardless, though Hardison and Eliot do elbow each other for another second. Nate leans forward onto the table, conspiratorially glancing between Eliot and Hardison.
“Hardison ran the world’s most thorough background check on you and didn’t notice a thing?” Nate asks, one brow raised. All eyes turn to Eliot, and okay, weightless suddenly feels a little bit more like falling than flying. But he swallows and takes a deep breath, then makes eye contact with Sophie. She’d been the first one to forgive him the last time he had to reveal something about Moreau, and her eyes are just as warm now. If he wanted, he could probably hold eye contact a millisecond longer and she’d slap Nate’s chest and tell him to mind his business.
“Moreau had all the outdated records buried. Deep,” Eliot explains with a shrug. He can’t bring himself to look at Hardison just yet, so he finishes what’s left of his drink. When he slams the glass back on the table, harder than he expected, Hardison claps a hand on his shoulder. Eliot meets his eyes and sees nothing but kindness, soft lines of a sorry smile on Hardison’s face. Eliot ducks his head and leans all the way into the falling — something he’s learned from Parker. “It was his idea of a birthday present. I left soon after.”
He doesn’t say anything further to connect those two dots, but he looks up though his lashes to see recognition pass over each of their expressions. They all know what it’s like to realize that you’re in too deep. Which is a comic concept, now, considering that he would die for any of them in a heartbeat. Would kill for them. He is the definition of too deep, and he isn’t scared at all. How terrifying.
———
“What’s the- the best thing about being trans?” Parker slurs, wrapping an arm around Eliot’s shoulders. At some point, she had weaseled her way between Eliot in the wall so that she, Eliot, and Hardison are all squeezed on the same bench booth even though Nate and Sophie’s side is wide open with them taking everyone’s empty glasses behind the bar.
“There is no one thing, Parker, the point is having all of it,” Eliot explains, trying to be stern and failing halfway through. Hardison catches Eliot’s smirk, of course, and gets a shit eating grin of his own.
“C’mon, what is it?” Hardison elbows Eliot, knowing Eliot well enough to know that there’s an answer lurking behind that smirk. Eliot rolls his eyes, but he’s too drunk to withstand both Parker and Hardison prodding him for answers. Easiest to give up while he’s ahead.
“The fear in men’s eyes when they knee my balls and I don’t even flinch,” Eliot answers, probably a little too gleefully. But Parker giggles and claps and Hardison smacks the table with a loud “ha!” so he figures they get it.
“Alright, alright, closing time,” Nate says, strolling over to the trio. They let themselves be shooed, filing out of the booth and grabbing their scattered belongings. While Sophie takes Hardison on one arm and Parker on the other to escort them up the steps to call a cab, Eliot lingers by the door, pulling on his jacket slow.
“Nate,” he says, and the older man turns to look innocently over his shoulder. Eliot keeps his hands in his pockets and shoulders back, so Nate moves to mirror the stance with a smile leaning up against the bar. Eliot looks into his eyes and feels something unspoken pass between them. But tonight is the night for speaking the unspoken, apparently, so he forces the words out: “Thank you. For never using my gender on a job.”
“Ah, little preemptive, don’t you think? Just found out tonight, plenty of time to get exploitative,” Nate smiles and looks down as he says it, but even so, he can’t miss the look Eliot is giving him.
“I don’t care how you knew. Just take the thank you,” Eliot commands, and at that, Nate really smiles. He considers it, grows solemn, and eventually nods, the best “you’re welcome” he has to give. Eliot nods back and walks out the door before the cab leaves without him.