Work Text:
Nate has this ambling sort of walk he does, when he’s about to sit a man down for what he thinks is going to be a difficult talk. It’s less purposeful than his usual stride. Not exactly hesitant, but a little… indecisive, maybe. Like a cutter or sheepdog that doesn’t quite know yet which direction he needs to go to move his mark in the direction he wants. It’s almost as distinctive as Sophie’s con voice. That was what gave him away, the night after that fucking MMA match, where it was Eliot’s job to get beat halfway to hell and then convincingly fake-kill a man with his bare hands.
He had begged off the CT scan. He had protected his head better than the doctor could have seen from outside the ring, and didn’t even have a concussion, though the other guy had gotten a few good licks in. It would be a few hours before any internal bleeding in the abdominal cavity became evident, but Eliot kind of doubted there was any. He’d certainly taken worse beatings, from more men and more weapons, and walked away fine. In any case, he had been exceedingly reluctant to let the doctor – any stranger – look him over in his state of heightened adrenaline, let alone pin him down in a hospital, and after his performance in the ring, no one was about to try to force him to go. He had slunk off to his room for a couple hours to lick his wounds before sneaking out of their motel (filled with discordant televisions and people fucking on the other sides of too-thin walls) to find a quiet place to meditate.
Nate Ford was not an inherently sneaky man, or even a quiet one, if it really came down to it. His meandering about-to-have-a-talk walk was broadcast in the crunch of gravel beneath his feet so loudly that Eliot could identify it twenty yards away.
“What’d’ya want, Nate?” he asked without opening his eyes.
“Came to see if you were alright,” Nate answered, kneeling clumsily beside him in the long grass, doubtless slumping into some ridiculous position it would take several seconds to get out of. Nate wasn’t a particularly old man – only nine years older than Eliot himself – but he had never been fit or very flexible, and his two years in a bottle and the death of his son had aged him more than he deserved. Sure enough, when he opened his eyes, his nominal boss was sitting flat on his ass, knees bent and feet planted, looking at him too close for Eliot’s comfort.
“’M fine.”
“Sophie told me what you said, the other day, about fighting and control.”
“There a question in there, Nate?”
The older man shrugged. “She’s proud of you, you know, getting in the ring for us and taking the hits.”
Eliot snorted. The last thing he wanted was the team – Nate or Sophie or any of them, really, telling him how proud they were that – what? He had given up control? He hadn’t. Not for a single, goddamn second. Taken a beating for them? It was his job to do all the nasty physical shit that no one else on the team could or would, whether that meant taking a beating or dishing one out (or both). Well, maybe the second-to-last thing: he suspected Hardison might be a little appalled by the sheer violence of the fight, and he sincerely hoped the hacker wasn’t going to start acting all afraid of Eliot after seeing blood on his hands up close and personal. Praise, though he hated it, was at least better than the fear he anticipated seeing on the younger man’s face.
How fucking sad was it that Parker was the only one of them who managed to strike the best balance of reassurance and space? The thief had showed up at his door while he was cleaning himself up, with stolen fried chicken and beer in hand, verified that he was less injured than he seemed in the ring (by poking at the worst of his bruises and judging his reactions), then vanished without a trace. Eliot found that her non-verbal show of support (odd though it seemed at the time) was much more welcome than… whatever this was supposed to be – Nate playing messenger boy for Sophie? – or Hardison’s avoidance of him.
“Nate, if I wanted to have a heart to heart, I wouldn’t be sittin’ alone, in a field, in the dark,” he pointed out as calmly as he could. The older man made a face and smacked at a bug, so Eliot added, “with mosquitoes,” for good measure.
Nate looked kind of flummoxed. Eliot had to wonder how he expected this conversation to go. “Well, just so you know, I’m here if you ever do want to talk.”
Eliot let his lips form a sardonic twist. Like that would ever happen. Nate was ranked just above Hardison in the list of teammates he could see himself opening up to, and that was only because he tended to be more mature than the hacker, and had more experience with violence and… life. Hardison was last, because Eliot was positive that their youngest member was also the most innocent in almost every way, but seeing as Eliot considered himself the most sane and well-balanced person on the team, he didn’t really think any of them were anywhere close to being an ideal sounding-board or any kind of emotional support. The idea of talking to Nate about his own issues, when he wasn’t entirely convinced that Nate was done with his downward spiral and actually recovering from the trauma of his son’s death, was just absurd.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“You do that,” Nate said firmly, and, a full five minutes later, when it apparently finally became clear that Eliot did not want to talk and had nothing more to say, he struggled to his feet and went back inside, leaving Eliot to think about what it meant to come so close to losing control, and silently congratulate himself on not giving in.