Chapter Text
A soft clicking sound pulled him awake.
He couldn’t place it at first—his thoughts were fragmented, frayed like a threadbare shirt sent through too many washes. Whenever he tried to focus, a gust of pain would tumble through him and scatter whatever he’d managed to gather, and he’d have to start over. The clicking, though. It stayed consistent, a beacon through the fading mist.
Tick tick tick pop, click, tick tick tick.
“You missed the buried treasure,” said the voice in his head. Except it wasn’t in his head; it was at his side, next to the clicking sound. “There used to be a shed in June’s yard, I guess, and Elizabeth Classen wrote about a loose floorboard where she hid her letters from her family. When she moved away, she took her letters with, but left the money. Now it belongs to June.”
He took a breath, dragging himself away from the windswept pain toward the sound of her voice.
“Now that Lancaster isn’t around to bother her about it, it might actually do some good,” she went on. “Nate and Hardison are helping her authenticate the find. You know, with the paperwork and the taxes and whatever other boring things go with making official historical claims. It’s a shame. I would have found a better place for the money. They wouldn’t even let me smell it. Hardison was afraid of mold or something.”
“Parker,” he said.
She stopped talking.
The silence enveloped him, and panic clawed up his throat. “Parker?”
“I’m here.”
He opened his eyes, blinking in the faint light coming through the window. He was in his room at Sunny’s, lying with a quilt tucked around his chest and Parker sitting cross-legged on the bed beside him. She had her back against the wall and a lock in her hands, just like his dream. When had he dreamed it? It was after he woke up earlier, after he went back to look for her, back when she was—when she was... God, was she…?
“Are you real?” he whispered.
She tilted her head. “You mean like solipsism? Like, the only thing we can know exists for sure is ourselves, which means everyone else is only a representation of ourselves—myself? Er, yourself?”
“Parker,” Eliot gritted out. “Are you here?”
“Oh!” She dropped the lock into her lap and did what he couldn’t do, this time or the last.
She took his hand.
“I’m here,” she said, closing her fingers around his. “And you’re here. I don’t think solipsism is all that popular anymore.”
He lifted his free hand and laid it on his forehead, grinding the heel of his palm into his eyes. It was splinted and wrapped—he must have sprained his wrist in the second explosion—but it didn’t matter. She was alive. He hadn’t dreamed it. She was here, sitting next to him and being weird and he’d forgotten how much he loved that, how much he missed her, how badly he needed her.
“You remember me?” Parker asked.
Eliot spoke without moving his hand from his face. “I think so. I don’t—I don’t know, there’s still… How do you know what you don’t remember?”
“Hmm.” She rubbed her thumb over his knuckles, pulling him farther from the pain to center his attention on her touch. “Do you remember the time we stole a diamond that was actually a potato, but it turned out there wasn’t a diamond after all?”
“…No?”
“What about the time Nate hypnotized Hardison and he played the violin at that concert hall?”
“Um… maybe...”
“Or the time you were a minor league baseball player and you made a commercial for the Japanese energy drink?”
“That never happened.”
Parker laughed, and the sound filled Eliot’s chest, chasing out the empty ache and the tight, lingering fear. She was here. Fatigue weighed on him, filling his head with a thick, fuzzy haze of pain and disorientation, and nausea swirled in his stomach and his leg hurt, but the Parker on his bed was real.
He felt better than he could remember.
He took a grounding breath, trying to compose himself enough to look at her, but a sound at the door broke his concentration.
“Parker?” Hardison said. “Do you have those photocopies from—” He stopped, and Eliot lifted his hand so he could see him standing uninjured in the doorway, a laptop in one hand, his pants dusted with dirt.
“Hardison,” he said.
His voice was still rough, and Hardison’s eyes watered at the sound of it. He dropped the laptop on the dresser and kneeled on the floor beside the bed, wrapping his arms around Eliot before he could fully sit up. He seemed to be making an effort to be gentle, but Eliot pulled him closer, throwing his right arm around Hardison’s shoulder and pressing his fist to the back of his neck. His left hand was still in Parker’s, and he clung to it, pressing all the fear and remorse and relief he couldn’t voice into the contact.
“Hey, man,” Hardison asked unevenly. “You okay?”
Eliot nodded into his shoulder, and Parker pressed his hand, and the last of the fear coating his thoughts splintered apart. There were details he knew needed his attention—Lancaster and June and the other properties he and J.B. had found—but at the moment, he was content to let them exist in the background, a problem for his future self. For now, he wanted nothing else but to know that his people were safe, and he was safe, and that the void in his existence wasn’t going to stay empty forever.
Finally, Hardison eased back, and a wave of dizziness swept over him at the lack of support. When he blinked the spots out of his vision, Hardison’s hand was on his upper arm, and Parker had let him go so he could hold himself up.
“J.B. said you’d probably feel weak when you woke up,” Hardison said. “Hang on, I’ll get you some water. I’ll be right back.”
Parker helped him sit up as Hardison hurried from the room, stuffing a pillow behind his back to keep him upright. “Do you want to see your brain scans?” Parker said excitedly. “I kept a copy.”
“Uh… maybe later.” He closed his eyes, breathing through his nose to control the nausea brought on by the movement. “The others are okay?”
His voice came out gruffer than he meant it to, but Parker didn’t seem to mind. She leaned back against the wall and stretched her legs over his lap, settling over him like a blanket. “Everyone’s fine. Well, except for Lancaster—he was inside the building when it exploded. Janish, too. But the rescue teams did get the guards you knocked out in the basement. I guess the staircase held up, and they were able to pull them out. They’ll all be fine.”
At least that was something. “The bombs were on a timer,” he said. “Lancaster stalled to keep me inside.”
“But you made it out,” Parker said. “You kept your promise.”
She said it like it was a given, like he was someone who could be taken at his word, and her certainty sent a spark of shame smoldering through him. He still had no idea who he had been before. Parker was a thief, Hardison was a hacker, Sophie was a grifter—criminals, all of them, but he knew in his heart that they were good. Even more so after they gathered together under the leadership of a man they respected, a man who had made them a family.
But Eliot? He wasn’t like them. He wasn’t innately good like they were.
Parker was still watching him, her head tilted, and he forced a smile to his face. “Yeah,” he rasped. “I promised.”
Parker opened her mouth, but footsteps in the hall announced Hardison’s return, and she let the conversation end.
Nate, Sophie, and J.B. followed Hardison into the room, and Eliot sat up straighter under their worried looks, trying to look as healthy as possible. Sophie moved to the head of the bed and took the chair from the desk by the window.
“Parker,” she said, frowning. “He has a bullet wound in his leg. Should you really be lying on him?”
“I know where it is,” Parker said, lifting her foot to prove that her weight was distributed safely across his upper thighs.
Sophie shook her head. “Still, you probably shouldn’t—”
“It’s okay,” Eliot said, too quickly, afraid that Parker would pull away if Sophie kept talking. Her absence would hurt far more than the little bit of pressure she was putting on his injury.
Sophie studied him for a moment, her brow furrowed, and then handed over a bottle of water. “All right, but make sure to tell her if it gets to be too much.”
“How are you feeling?” J.B. asked from across the room. He was standing just inside the doorway like he didn’t want to intrude, but at Eliot’s nod, he took another step toward the bed. “I can’t believe you don’t have serious brain damage, but your scans were encouraging. Your memory should return once you’ve had some real rest. Which means you’ll actually have to rest, and not go running off into any destroyed buildings or starting fist fights, and I’d highly encourage you to avoid getting blown up for a day or two. Got it?”
Eliot gave a weak laugh. “Deal.”
“I have the deeds,” he said. “The ones you got from Lancaster’s office. Sophie was kind enough to help me retrieve them before the building went down.”
Sophie looked up at him. “Is that what was in the envelope?”
“Yep. I’ve been posing as a messenger to the office for the last few weeks, trying to pick up information on Lancaster, so when Eliot found the deeds in Lancaster’s office, it made sense just to pretend it was another delivery.”
Hardison sat on the end of his bed, crossing his legs and setting his computer in his lap. “Well, with the deeds you guys found and the files Sophie downloaded from Lancaster’s hard drives, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to return all of the properties to their original owners.” He flashed a grin at Eliot. “You continued our job on Lancaster without even knowing it.”
His gaze drifted to Nate. When he and J.B. had decided to go up against Lancaster, they hadn’t meant to get the deeds. They were just going to try to keep him away from Sunny. Eliot was the one who had changed the plan, once he realized how many other people Lancaster had hurt. It had been an unconscious decision—a realization followed by an instantaneous adjustment—and he wondered now how much of that had come from Nate’s influence. Without meaning to, without remembering the details… had he done what he’d thought Nate would do?
“I also went ahead and cancelled the hit on June,” Hardison went on. “And I might have sent an anonymous tip about where Lancaster’s contacts might be hanging out for the next few days, you know, just in case.”
“That’s right neighborly of you,” Nate said.
J.B.’s eyes were on Eliot. “Sunny’s fixing something to eat,” he said casually. He kept his expression neutral, but Eliot had a feeling he understood more than he would say. He sensed a similar struggle in J.B.—a past he wasn’t proud of, a strength forged through suffering. It was what had made Eliot trust him, in the end, and probably what had made J.B. extend a helping hand in the first place. They had each recognized something familiar in the other, something that ran deeper than names or backstories or questionable skills, and Eliot knew without out a doubt that if he needed him again, J.B. would answer. Eliot would do the same.
He met J.B.’s gaze and nodded, and J.B. nodded back.
“I’ll be back to check on you in a little bit,” he said, smiling. “Drink that water, all right?”
He backed out of the room, and Eliot obediently lifted his bottle to his lips.
“I’ve been thinking,” Sophie said, laying her hand on his arm. “Until your memory comes back completely, you’re a bit of a blank canvas. You have a chance to be whoever you want.”
He shot her an uncomfortable glance. That was too lucky a guess to be coincidence, and one look at the careful way she met his gaze was enough to convince him that yes, she was posing this question intentionally, and he wanted to change the subject and turn their attention away from his gaping insecurities, but she had her lips parted already, and the way she watched him said that she had anticipated that, too, and that she had another topic ready.
Whatever I don’t know, we’ll make up, she’d told him. Not a threat, but an offer.
He cleared his throat. “Anyone?”
“Anyone,” she said, squeezing his arm. “It’s the role of a lifetime.”
Hardison nudged Eliot’s foot. “How about a chef? You got crazy kitchen skills, man. You could open up a restaurant in Paris or something and serve all them fancy little plates with like two bites’ worth of food on ‘em. You know the ones.”
Eliot considered that. He had no specific memories of cooking, but the thought of sitting at a table filled with his team and his food gave him a warm, contented feeling.
But Sophie was shaking her head. “No, no, that’s too obvious. I think—hmm, let’s see—I think you’d be a dancer.”
“A what?” Hardison laughed.
“It’s perfect!” Sophie said when Eliot wrinkled his nose. “You’ve got the athleticism for it, you know how to lead and how to follow in a fight—it’s not that different from dancing. I bet you’d be so good in an improv competition.”
“I think he’d be a pirate,” Parker said.
They looked at her, and she shrugged and turned her attention back to her lock. “Then you could have a parrot.”
“You can have a parrot without being a pirate,” Hardison said.
“I stole a parrot once,” Sophie said. “Horrid little thing. It started yelling just as I was making my getaway.”
Nate leaned his hip against the dresser and raised his eyebrows at Eliot. “What about a cowboy?”
Eliot groaned, but Sophie tapped his arm excitedly. “No, no, that could work—you can ride a horse, and you can pull off the hat. We could get you a little ranch in Texas, and you can sit out on the porch in a rocking chair sipping iced tea—ooh, I like that one.”
“I’m picturing more like a Gene Autry kinda thing,” Nate said, sounding far too serious for comfort. “A rodeo performer and a musician. Between the stunts and the singing, I think you’d keep busy.”
“What do you think, Eliot?” Hardison asked.
Eliot took another sip of water, sifting through the jumble of feelings and fragments of memory, aware of his team’s patient silence. He’d spent the last few days so worried about his past that he hadn’t given much thought to his future. The only skills he knew he had were in fighting, and he’d assumed that made him a violent man. But Sophie had looked at that knowledge and said he could be graceful instead of dangerous. Hardison believed he could create something to share with others. Parker… well, Parker had called him a thief, but that was probably a compliment for her.
And Nate. Back in Lancaster’s office, Nate had said he was a good man. It was what made Eliot decide to go with him, even though he still hadn’t settled on the truth, even though every clue he had suggested the opposite. He’d wanted to believe Nate’s words. He’d wanted to live up to them.
Maybe he wasn’t a good man yet. But maybe it was enough that he wanted to be.
“Eliot?” Sophie said quietly.
Eliot looked at her, then at Parker and Hardison tucked against him on the bed, and finally at Nate. “I want to help people,” he said at last. “With you. That’s what we do?”
Nate smiled. “That’s what we do.”
Sophie rubbed his arm again and sat back in her chair. “You should rest,” she said, smiling reassuringly as she gave him one final pat and stood. She touched Nate’s shoulder as she went past, and he pushed away from the dresser to follow.
“Make sure he stays in bed,” he said, fixing Hardison and Parker with firm looks. Then he nodded to Eliot and stuck his hands in the pockets of his jacket. “It’s good to have you back,” he said.
Eliot nodded back. It was good. He was good.
Or if he wasn’t yet, he would be.
Eliot woke to darkness. Not complete darkness—a sliver of light winked over his face, and he turned his head to avoid it.
“I can’t see how that’s comfortable,” said a voice in the hall.
Eliot opened his eyes. He was still in bed, lying on his back with a warm weight over him. Light from the hallway cast a long golden stripe over his right side, illuminating a pair of feet propped up on the mattress next to his hip. He followed the feet to their ankles and knees—upon which his sprained wrist rested, elevated above his heart—and up crossed legs until he recognized the still form of Hardison on the chair beside him. His arms were folded over his chest and his eyes were closed, his head tipped back on the backrest, his breathing deep and peaceful.
“It’s hard to explain,” said a new voice. Eliot blinked, trying to focus his blurry vision on the figure in the doorway. Nate. He spoke in a whisper, and Eliot tilted his head reflexively toward his words. “Eliot doesn’t normally show his vulnerabilities. It won’t sit easy with him, being out of commission like this. He won’t rest well if he doesn’t know where the team is.”
“I see,” said the first voice—it took Eliot’s muddled thoughts a moment to match Sunny’s name to it. “I suppose it’s reassuring to them, too, after all you’ve been through.”
Them. Eliot looked down at his chest, at the golden hair tucked against his neck, the head pillowed on his shoulder, the arm sprawled across his ribs. Parker had one leg draped over his, covering as much of his body as she could without actually lying on him, as though trying to physically hold him down.
“He’s a light sleeper,” Nate went on softly. “At least now when he wakes up, he’ll know he’s safe. He won’t be compelled to search for us.”
“J.B. told you about that, huh?”
Nate was silent for a long moment. “This won’t be easy on him,” he said again. “When he starts to remember… They’re not all good memories. And from what J.B. said, it probably won’t all come back at once. He may remember the worst first.”
“How bad was the worst?” Sunny asked.
“Bad.”
A cold thread of worry wound around Eliot’s throat. He didn’t want to lose the progress he’d made, didn’t want to go back to fearing his past. He shifted toward the door without meaning to, lifting his head and shoulders, as if he could get anywhere with Parker and Hardison penning him in.
As if proving a point, Parker sighed in her sleep and burrowed deeper into his side.
“He’ll need us,” Nate said. “And he’s not used to needing anyone. And Parker and Hardison—” He paused, his voice low and fond. “They want to make sure he knows he’s not alone.”
Eliot relaxed into the mattress. Was that what they were doing? Placing themselves in such a way that he couldn’t possibly miss them? Making sure he felt their presence even when he wasn’t awake?
Parker’s fingers twitched on his chest, and Eliot looked down to find them resting on his necklace charm. She must have put it on him while he slept—which spoke to both her skill and his exhaustion—and the sight of it now filled him with determination.
He’d made a promise, and she’d returned it. However difficult the coming weeks might be, he would come through it—because he could do hard things, the things others couldn’t do, and he wouldn’t be doing them alone.
“That’s a blessing,” Sunny said quietly. “How long do you think you’ll stay?”
“We’ll give him a few days to heal up,” Nate said. He eased the door closed, but his voice still filtered through to Eliot’s straining ears. “I think we’re all ready to go home.”
“Well, if you’re ever around this way again…”
“You have my number,” Nate said. “Call any time. We’ll make sure to visit.”
Eliot closed his eyes, lying back on the soft pillow with one hand resting on Parker’s side and his other across Hardison’s knees. Nate and Sophie were safe, and Sunny was safe, and J.B. and Miguel would take care of anything he couldn’t until he was on his feet again. Despite what Nate had said, he wasn’t in any hurry to return home.
As far as he was concerned, he was already there.