Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

v. nate & sophie & parker & eliot & hardison

September, 2009.

They are an infestation. Nate can never get away from them and he's concerned that he doesn't seem to want to. His wall, for God's sake! Eliot just-

The chainsaw swings far too close to his ear. He resists the urge to bat at it. Eliot grins at him. Who let this feral wolf pup in his house?

The answer to that, of course, is Hardison, by way of Sophie. They've always known just where to find each other, and Hardison is persistent (and skilled) enough to track anyone on this team to the ends of the earth.

Another thing Nate should not feel comforted by.

Parker is already halfway through the box of Lucky Charms he still buys in every house even though Sam was the only one who ever ate them. They're at least four months old and stale.

"One box of cereal and a pantry full of coffee? Damn, Nate, you live like this?" Hardison spirals over in a spinning office chair Nate knows for a fact was not in his apartment this morning.

"There's sugar next to the plate cabinet," he suggests, to be a dick and also to make Eliot put down the chainsaw and hopefully start ranting about food so Nate can get this piece of cut wall out of his apartment-

It works, mostly, except not really because Eliot and Parker end up frog-marching him out the door to the little grocery down the street. Parker took his credit card but that doesn't even matter because Hardison already has all his bank information.

The Boston Hullabaloo, Nate thinks nonsensically. Requires at least three bodies. Objective: confuse mark into doing what you want by means of excessive noise, mother-henning, and compulsive tracking. Discount all attempts by mark to deescalate.

It's for their own good.

Not a con that'll go down in the history books, certainly.

He leaves Eliot and Hardison arguing in the grains aisle over what type of pasta to saddle him with: linguine (it holds sauce better, dammit Hardison!) or farfalle (but look at the cute li'l bowties, Eliot!). They've already made it through the produce section, where Parker added five bags of asparagus to the basket (they're vegetable swords, Nate, swords), and the freezer section, where Eliot spent a full ten minutes muttering under his breath as Nate begrudgingly stacked microwave chicken pot pies. Parker took off for the desserts a while ago and they've all been avoiding that for their own safety.

Nate thinks he's doing pretty well with his escape attempt, all things considered. These shelves provide good cover and there's that stack of boxes over there-

A high-heeled foot steps into his path, followed by a rather lovely leg and a deep blue skirt with silver edging.

"Jailbreak, Mister Ford? For shame." Sophie glides fully around the corner, clearly done with her date. Short date.

Maybe she wanted my our company more, Nate thinks foolishly, before doing the math and realising the other three have had him for a couple hours and maybe Sophie and her boyfriend just didn't want a sleepover. Maybe it's not that serious yet. Maybe it won't ever be-

"Not so much a jailbreak as a- an- a- creative misdirection!" Nate interrupts himself, flinging his hands out. And who can blame her for craving a little normal? Someone mundane?

He spares a moment to think that maybe this boyfriend is the opposite of mundane, by normal metrics. Maybe he's a skydiving instructor. Maybe he operates a chain of nonprofit animal shelters across the country.

Or maybe not, he decides firmly, and swings his eyes back over to hers.

Sophie is smiling an indulgent little smile at him, like she wants to pet his hair and nod condescendingly along with whatever stupidity he spouts next.

The glass bottles of milk on a cart next to him rattle smally at his passing. Nate offers Sophie his arm and she takes it, her thousand-dollar Louboutins squeaking on the grimy linoleum floor. Sophie Devereaux is not a creature made for Boston corner stores.

He really shouldn't have let her have his arm, because all she does is steer him right back towards the others. A vicious trickster, this woman is.

In Nate's absence, Parker has contorted herself onto the tiny flatbed under the cart, and is amusing herself by sticking her fingers up through the grates and seeing if Eliot can catch them or not. He succeeds about half the time, which really does say something about the sheer speed of his reflexes. Hardison has completely checked out and is playing that new Angry Birds Game on his phone.

Eliot notices them, rolls his eyes, and pulls Hardison's beanie down over his eyes. The phone clatters to the floor. "Time to go," Eliot says blithely, over the sound of sputtering enraged hacker.

The edge of Sophie's mouth twitches in a funny little motion. Nate is fluent enough in Devereaux to know that this means she'd rather be run over by a train than touch that cart.

Hardison yanks at the flannel tied around Eliot's waist, successfully stealing it, and Nate can see the exact moment Eliot weighs and discards the merits of (in order): breaking Hardison's wrist, pulling a shelf down on his head, and putting him in a chokehold. Then, reason wins out over instinct, and Eliot settles for a tug-of-war instead.

Nate looks down just in time to see Parker reach for his ankle and jumps back, flailing. She smiles like a gremlin and retreats back under the cart. People really shouldn't be able to fold like that.

Somehow, he gets them through checkout. The cashier's a kid Nate recognizes as the grandson of Oliver Murphy, who used to play poker with Jimmy Ford. The poor boy looks overwhelmed at their little group. That makes two of them.

Eliot ends up carrying all the flimsy plastic bags back up to the apartment. Hardison flutters around him, saying things like "You're doing great!" in the fakest tone possible. Parker somersaults up the stairs.

Sophie only smiles gently and swans after them like a Givenchy-clad shepherdess. Nate, last in line at the bottom of the stairwell, takes a breath and listens to the foreign sounds of a full house.

By the time he gets upstairs, Parker has torn into the bags. As she lays everything out on the counter, he observes:

• one pack of linguine
• one pack of farfalle
• those five bags of asparagus
• three tomatoes
• a carrot
• twelve single-serve microwave chicken pot pies
• two bottles of radioactive-looking orange soda
• a bundle of cilantro
• two tubs of ice cream (one Oreo, one peanut butter chocolate)
• a single Ring Pop
• a bunch of bananas
• a bag of apples
• a carton of milk
• a pack of bacon

and

• twenty-four green cupcakes

Well, they tried their best. He goes to pluck the milk out of Parker's hand and she plucks it right back. "I'm not going to be eating your cereal dry," she huffs, and shoves the asparagus at him instead. Nate, somewhat at a loss, opens his fridge and puts all five bags on a shelf. Eliot passes behind him, gives him a dirty look, and moves the asparagus to the crisper drawer.

And then Nate is kicked out of the kitchen. It's nearing midnight now, and half the wall is still on the floor. He considers it for a moment.

How about… not.

He walks around to the sofa, pointedly ignoring the mess of cables Hardison is attacking with pliers. Nate props his feet up on an ottoman, and it's only then that he realises Parker stuck a bunch of pricing stickers to the hems of his pants in the grocery store. Sophie, nestled in the armchair across from his sofa, laughs at him with her eyes.

An infestation. Never getting away, he thinks fondly, and closes his eyes.

iv. nate & sophie & parker & eliot

An honest man, they all call him, and Nate knows perfectly well why they do not say a good man. He has never been one of those.

They are none of them good, except maybe Alec.

Sophie wears good like a skin. No lingering sweetness for her. These people are a drug. They convince her she can be more than a greedy little doll. She hates them for it, in the early days.

Eliot killed good and buried it on foreign soil years and years ago. And did it again, and again, and again-

Age of the geek, baby echoes in his ears, a secret handshake not caring that those hands have broken men's necks. Parker pokes his bruises like he hasn't snapped fingers for less. Sophie programs him into making her tea. This, at least, he knows, obedience at a wordless touch like a good dog. And then Nate grabs him while he's holding a knife-

Parker thinks she could be good. Someday. They can teach it to her.

(She doesn't realise until much, much later that they were learning too.)

iv. nate & sophie & parker & hardison

It's a funny concept, crime children.

So funny, in fact, that they don't acknowledge it as serious even as Sophie reaches to feel Parker's forehead for a fever. Even as they pack a briefcase and a sack lunch, papers and pumpernickel strewn about the office.

Even as Sophie jumps off a building-

Even as Nate pulls open a coffin-

Even as-

iv. nate & sophie & eliot & hardison

Sophie's first love was Jean Mettier, when she was sixteen and he was twenty-one and it may not have been legal but it was certainly enough for him to paint her like a goddess. Her self, canvassed in streaks of thick pigments, gets locked away in a safe she doesn't have the heart to crack.

Her second love was a Duke. He died.

Her third love is possibly the most neurotic man she's ever met, and that is saying something given how fond grifters are of neurotic men.

Said neurotic man thinks third time's the charm for both of them. A fling with Paul before seminary, and then years with Maggie, and then-

well, grifters also love a man in pain.

Hardison's first love is coding. Reliable, steady results. He hacks the Pentagon and spins around in his broken chair, fist stuffed in his mouth so as not to wake Nana. He hacks NASA and the underground starts to learn his name. He hacks the Bank of Iceland and feels like he's the king of the world.

His second love is a thief. The tales say they are together still, a boy and girl dressed in black, the ghosts in your vents and vaults and computers.

Eliot's first love was a girl he met in third grade. And then a second in seventh, and a boy in ninth, before he laid eyes on the golden whirlwind that was Aimee Martin and sold his soul flat-out.

(If you could call what comes next love, we can say America was his fifth.)

(Disavowal's really only a different word for divorce.)

(If you could call what comes next love, Damien Moreau will have done his dirty work well.)

(What comes after that…

I guess you can finally call it love.)

iv. nate & eliot & hardison & parker

June, 2008.

Eliot Spencer looks at Nathan Ford and sees a dead man. Not that it's personal (Eliot sees a lot of dead men), but this one's mind is hightailing itself straight off the side of this skyscraper solidly before its body and Eliot can't cushion that kind of fall. Not if he tries.

(Isn't it a wonderful thing, then, that he wasn't trying when it happened? When the sunrise, when taking a breath tomorrow started looking a sight more appealing than the crunch-thud-silence of splattered pavement?)

(Nate was dragged into salvation clawing and screaming but they just tightened their grips, and kept buying his apartment buildings.)

Alec Hardison looks at Eliot Spencer and sees a dead man. Nothing he can't fix, of course, but Eliot's a high-functioning system and those take time to unravel.

There's just the matter of ever seeing him again. One show only, no encores.

(And obviously Alec can get past firewalls from a distance, but there's a difference between hacking the Pentagon and cyberstalking Eliot McFreaking Spencer and he'd rather not find out what it is.)

(So he grabs onto the entire team as hard and quick as he can, and codes his way into the backs of their brains. Softly, softly, and those firewalls start to yield under his touch.)

Parker looks at Alec Hardison and sees a live man. Dead men like Nate and Eliot don't have those soft eyes, those open shoulders. Dead men like Nate are shifty, sarcastic and mean, the kinds who pull their hair out without meaning to in the middle of the night when they wake up. Dead men like Eliot are daggers in person suits, steel slipped in velvet, the kinds who can't pull their hair out because they don't sleep for their self-made nightmares. (Is that why his hair is so long?)

Live men don't watch their backs like they should. Live men are the only fun ones to push off buildings.

(Parker learns later that live men, apparently, taste like pretzels.)

(Nathan Ford looks at Parker and sees potential.)

September, 2009.

They are the ones he didn't choose, but he is the thought they cannot shake. Dandelions, blooming year after year in an otherwise barren backyard, golden-headed and shifty. Weeds, they are. Little thieving ones, bright like summer and persistent as hell.

December, 2012.

They die in the back of a van, all holding hands in a pool of their mixed blood (intimate in a way none of them have ever known), except that they didn't die and it was all Nate's imagination and he can see how they look at him and wonder what's in his nightmares, for him to have told that story.

How they look at him and wonder at how he truly does care, that he's leaving them behind.

(Not enough to keep them, of course, but it's the thought that counts.)

iv. sophie & eliot & hardison & parker

May, 2010.

Oftener and oftener they define themselves as the necessity of him.

He looks at them and sees the smudges of what-could-have-been, an old family that fractured under the weight of his child's death.

They look at him like a teething toy, something a child can sink its fangs into and pretend there's no more pain.

(Their gums never stop aching, though, and eventually they realize that for all that he's the architect of their redemption they can stand on their own.)

Oftener and oftener they define themselves as the presence of each other. He goes to prison and they don't fall apart. Not that he's ever going to escape them, but it's more like losing a puzzle piece than a keystone.

He took the world's best thieves and broke them. Sophie thinks of Japanese kintsugi and smiles to herself. If anyone was ever going to be repaired in gold, it would be them.

Parker snatches the gold-and-black-diamond hairclip Sophie offers with the glee of a baby dragon. She hasn't quite gotten the hang of politely accepting gifts, but Sophie is working with her. No, Parker, we thank the giver and then calmly, calmly! take the gift. No grabbing!

"Parker!" Sophie lets her voice whip through the apartment like thunder. Parker pouts from the countertop. Sophie raises an eyebrow and holds her hand out, palm up.

The hairclip is deposited with the petulance of a million four-year-olds denied candy before dinner. Sophie raises her brow higher.

"Thank-you-very-much-Sophie-for-the-gift-may-I-please-have-it-now?" Parker tacks on a smile she clearly thinks is winning.

Well, she tried. Sophie gestures and the clip is gone again, only to reappear on the next job when Parker pins her hair up for the vents.

Hardison is next. He doesn't wear rings often, but Sophie thinks he'll make an exception for this one. Small, easy to slide over his pinky, won't get in the way when he types. The small blue diamonds she had put in can double as conductors, and if it's really necessary the entire ring can unwind into gold wire.

He sputters when she gives it to him. "Soph- Sophie, I can't take this."

Sophie remembers then that, out of all of them, Hardison deals with physical assets the least. No precious artefacts, no stacks of cash. No jewels. "Yes, you can," she says firmly. "You're a proper thief now, and what's a thief without gold or diamonds?"

Hardison goes a little bug-eyed, but he takes the velvety box from her. Sophie smiles, gentle, and watches as that approval hits some sort of dopamine receptor in his head. Tentative, tentative- and he grins, wide and wobbly.

"You're damn right, woman! Ain't no 'proper thief' out there without their ice!" He puts the ring on, wiggles his finger around, and turns to crush Sophie in a hug. She carefully does not startle.

Hardison is rather good at hugging. Tall, and he doesn't hold on too long. When he lets go, Sophie is smiling for real.

Eliot is the easiest to commission for. He wears his necklaces as a point of pride, unabashedly daring someone to try and pull them in a fight. Just like his hair. She could have read him as ex-military even if she'd never heard the name 'Eliot Spencer'.

Sophie slides the rectangular black box sideways over the table to him. His eyes snap to hers, assessing. What will he owe her for this? What little favor? She lets hers widen. This is a gift, nothing expected in return.

He glares back. This is Eliot Glare Number Seven, the one with no real heat beyond affection and mild annoyance. It's truly amazing how quickly that became his default look, Sophie thinks sarcastically. Some people wear their hearts on their sleeves. Eliot Spencer has his emblazoned on his back in neon paint. They can see it from space.

Ascertaining that the box does not, in fact, contain a live scorpion (as if Sophie would ever touch one of those), Eliot clicks it open. He's stunningly capable of making so many suspicious expressions at once.

"This got a tracker in it?" He rumbles, soft. "Jesus, Sophie, what's this?"

What this is: a not-so-delicate Figaro chain, coppery-gold for durability. A charm in the shape of a wolf's head hangs from it, unique for its red diamond eyes.

What this is: a bit of an apology, and a bit of a promise.

"Helluva'n apology gift," he says. "You been gettin' these for all of us. Afraid we're still mad at you?"

Damn him for being so perceptive. "Perish the thought," Sophie sniffs, nose pointedly in the air just to hear him chuff a laugh. "You've all forgiven me already."

Eliot's rough fingers work the clasp easily. The wolf hangs right over his heart.

"Thanks," he tells her, squeezing her shoulder as he rounds the counter. "Now, what are we gonna do about our jailbird?"

iii. eliot & nate & sophie

2008.

It takes Eliot about two seconds to realize this dynamic is gonna be Mommy and Daddy playing house with the feral youngest child and the middlest middle child ever to middle. Oh, and him, whom he's self-classified as oldest because who the hell else is making sure Parker and Hardison eat actual food? Not Mr. Whiskey-for-Breakfast and Lady Michelin Caviar, that's for sure.

Nate, he knows. Obsessive bastard. Textbook control freak. Softens for one woman in the world, and that woman just had to be Sophie Devereaux.

They tag-team him, an arrangement hammered out implicitly between little glances and body movements. Sophie talks softly and Eliot carries the big stick. It works, some of the time, but it's not like anyone has a better idea so they keep running it. Eliot cooks foods that soak up alcohol and Sophie sits next to Nate during briefings, a hand on his arm.

Sophie looks at Eliot like she wants to ruffle his hair, just to see what would happen. What would happen is nothing, because you don't hit your crew but you don't have to give them a single thing beyond the job.

(What Eliot Spencer has always been, at least to himself, is a liar.)

iii. hardison & nate & sophie

2009.

They're a coupla weird-ass parents, but Alec's no stranger to weird-ass parents. Yeah, he can see it. Especially now that "Mom" has left on her "journey of self-discovery" and "Dad" is drowning his oblique sorrows in Irish whiskey and Catholic guilt.

Yep. He knows this story. Just swap out whiskey for beer and Catholic for… well, nothing, really, and you gotta four-year-old Alec in the back of a social worker's truck. Funny how he keeps ending up in these situations.

He'll love 'em still, because he can't stop now, and anyway this is who he's always been. Why mess with a good thing, even if everyone else does?

(Sophie comes back, and Nate keeps drinking, and she teaches Alec how to do a proper accent, and Nate looks at him sometimes with somethin' like pride in his red-rimmed eyes. It's not perfect — hell, not even close — but he'll take what he can get.)

(Which is quite a lot, considering the circumstances.)

(You don't stop being a parent even if you're a weird-ass one.)

(And Alec's no stranger to weird-ass parents.)

iii. sophie & nate & parker

2011.

Hooking the mark for this con requires a lot of strolling along the Harborwalk. Sophie adores these kinds of jobs, where she gets to wear breezy sundresses and huge floppy hats and hang off Nate's arm. They promenade in the salty air, tucked close. Parker lurks somewhere in the background, snapping pictures for the little blog Hardison set up for "Neil and Janie Aberdeen".

There's a garish plastic model of a person-sized lobster that Sophie despises but Janie goes crazy for. "Parker!" She calls, pulling Nate towards it.

Parker's blonde head swivels up from where she's been inspecting a costume jewellery stand, camera swinging from her neck. She looks so cute in the outfit Sophie picked for her this morning (ruffly white tank top, red shorts with a sunflower at the hem, perfect for "Emma Vane") that Sophie can't help but push her stray hair behind her ears and cup her cheek for a moment. Instead of jolting away like the Parker of a couple years ago would have done, Parker leans into it a little.

Nate waits obligingly, arm comfortable around Sophie's waist. It's a little odd, seeing him in a polo shirt. Sophie lets Parker go, directing her to the best spot and waiting for the flow of people to slow enough around her.

"Louie the Lobster? Really?" Nate murmurs in her ear as she poses, leaning back against him a little more than strictly necessary.

"This monstrosity has a name?" Sophie whispers, horrified, through smiling teeth. She savors the sound of his chuckle as it vibrates through his chest and into her shoulder.

Parker seems to be enjoying the camera, bouncing around for different angles while magically avoiding anyone walking past. Her joy lights an extra spark of contentment in Sophie's chest.

Then, someone taps her shoulder.

Sophie turns, third-politest go-away smile pasting up onto her face to replace the real one she'd been enjoying wearing. "No, we'd not like to buy anything today-"

The culprit is not a salesman. Grey hair, mother, grandmother, happily married, kind. Sophie softens her smile from go-away to I-beg-your-pardon. Next to her, Nate untenses from he-giving-you-trouble? to call-if-you-need-anything.

"Oh, nothing like that, sweetheart! I was just wondering if you'd like a picture with your daughter?" The woman tilts her head at Parker, who's observing with a keen look on her face.

Daughter. Well. That sounds-

nice, actually.

"Of course, ma'am! Thank you so much for offering — sorry about that; these beach salesmen really are persistent," Sophie gushes out, linking her arm through Parker's and guiding her between herself and Nate. Nate looks wildered in that not-a-father manner before something in his eyes gives way.

Neil and Janie Aberdeen have no children. These pictures do not go on the blog. Neither Nate or Sophie would allow that.

Sophie has Hardison print one, though. She keeps it in her bedside drawer, easily grabbable for when she needs to run. She finds Nate looking at it, sometimes.

It looks like this: a dark-haired woman in a gauzy yellow sundress and a huge floppy hat and a blue-eyed man in a white polo shirt stand in front of a big plastic lobster. Between them is a younger, blonde woman in a tank top, single braid along her neck. The women have entwined arms, the man has one of his around the blonde's shoulders.

The blonde beams like she swallowed the sun. The other two aren't much better.

iii. nate & parker & eliot

2008.

None of them talk much on these sorts of missions. Hardison's not there to jabber in their ears, and Sophie isn't making snide comments on the mark's clothes or too-young wife to make Nate smile.

No, it's just mastermind-hitter-thief, and they all love their own versions of silence.

Nate's is the six-step pace behind the kitchen counter, scotch sitting in an amber tumbler. It's his third. Sophie is in Milan and most of him went with her.

Eliot's is the pseudosilence of a fight, elbows jabbing into throats for choking inhales and the oomph-crunch of breaking noses. He is the only one who knows this fight choreography. His breath is a barely-jagged sound in the comms.

Parker's is the hush of a cat in the night. She wears black. She hunts mice. She breaks safes. She remembers when it was this silent all the time.

Nate breaks the quiet with a soft order. They all pretend not to be relieved.

iii. nate & parker & hardison

2012.

For once, he is the third wheel.

They make him regret it.

2011.

He decides, as they all split up again, that it's time for the young to inherit the earth. The young, and their young love.

Laying seeds will be easy; tearing up roots will be harder. He doesn't like to think about how they'll look at him — Hardison, losing another family, Parker, losing her only one.

But they've got each other, fair masterminds in their own right, sunshine and steel and also a hitter if Nate can help it (he's seen those longing little looks Eliot sends them) and he gets the feeling they'll do okay.

2010.

He doesn't know what "pretzels" means to them, but he he can guess.

That guess is love. God, they're going to be insufferable, and it's about time they are.

2009.

He refuses to admit he likes having Parker back in the rafters.

He refuses to admit he likes having Hardison chattering in the background.

He refuses to admit he likes any of this at all.

2008.

"Yes, but Parker is insane," he tells Dubenich. The man only shrugs at him.

Nate keeps the files. He's not worried about Spencer, who can play nice when it's a payout like this.

But the other two? Hardison's a cocky kid with too much to prove and Parker is… insane. Like he said.

This'll be interesting to watch, at least.

iii. nate & eliot & hardison

Apart, they are lonely and the best in their respective fields. Together, they are a happy catastrophe. The urge to yell Alec, Eliot, knock it off! nearly overwhelms him, when they scrap like brothers on a road trip. He's just trying to drive, but someone's spilled orange soda down the middle seat of this extended metaphor and Sophie's got her headphones on in the passenger seat being unhelpful. Parker probably tied herself to the roof of this hypothetical car.

Nate thinks this is what having sons must be like, but he wouldn't know.

The only one he ever had is dead. He never had any brothers either, so who's to say he isn't completely off the mark there too?

(He believes this lie until he's dead himself.)

iii. sophie & parker & eliot

Proper criminals, the lot of them. Nate and Hardison are too new to this, fresh-faced baby thieves drop-kicked into the realness of the world like baby chicks.

But Sophie, Parker, Eliot? They're old hat, even if wearing a white one is new to them.

Hitter, grifter, thief. How many men have they killed, have they driven to madness? Have they robbed blind and left desolate? They know this dance, but now it's a tango instead of a waltz.

The three of them might have ended up on the same crew anyway, if only for the way they complement each other perfectly. Parker jumps and Eliot catches her. Eliot beats up guys and Sophie's there to distract the mark. Sophie twirls the mark around a ballroom while Parker twirls the dial of his safe.

They are so very good at pretending to be emotionless. Well. Not pretending on Parker's part so much as a lack of understanding, yet, what it means to be human and let those fiddly little feelings fill you.

Eliot has to be human. He is so much human, more human than the rest, because there is nothing more human than blood and he understands what it feels like to be buried hands-deep in a man's ribcage.

If vice is humanity, so too, then, is Sophie. Come, all you degenerates, and feast at her altar even as she drains your treasures from you! Be human. Be consumed. Be bloody.

Be a thief.

iii. sophie & parker & hardison

She helps them along, in her own way. Pairs them for jobs and lets Hardison's easy warmth soften Parker's icy edges.

And then-

And then the grave-

when Parker is almost trembling apart from the force of her feeling, and Sophie's not doing much better herself — he was buried alive, bloody murder-

something shifts, for them.

And it's not because of Sophie at all. She's almost insulted, except for she's too happy to pretend that matters to her.

iii. sophie & eliot & hardison

She tries to help them along too, but it never sticks.

There are a lot of 'dammit Sophie's involved in the whole affair. Which isn't even an affair. Wouldn't everything be so much easier if it were an affair?

She knows it. Knows it in her bones when San Lorenzo and Eliot are finally free of the devil and Eliot curls Hardison into his arms, already preparing to push him away.

That's another thing. Eliot, when he hugs for real, wraps his entire self around the fortunate recipient. Arm tight around their waist, hand on the back of their neck to protect them from whatever threat only Eliot can see. It's just with Hardison (and sometimes Parker, and isn't that interesting) that it looks like- yes, angle your head like that and- he's desperate for a kiss.

Again in a graveyard, and Eliot hooks his chin over Hardison's shoulder and it should be funny with the height difference but it's mostly just sad, how Eliot holds him like he can save him from anything. Parker is a spectre in the background.

They come back from DC and Eliot's been shot and Hardison flutters around him like a worried bird who makes terrible chicken soup. Sophie almost laughs at how irritated Eliot pretends to look.

Hardison is banished back to the kitchen. Sophie takes the opportunity to perch herself on the armrest of the couch where Eliot is, his hand over his eyes.

"I don't think Hardison's soup will cure bullet wounds, but it might work on that nasty case of lovesick you've got," she teases, voice low.

"Dammit, Sophie," he growls, soft. Shorter hair gets pushed back, blue eyes narrow at her. She blinks her innocent-demure-little-thing blink at him and he reaches over to shove her. Not hard enough to make her fall — never enough — but she gasps in offense anyhow.

"I'm not gonna ruin their thing." Eliot waves vaguely into the air as Parker swings into the kitchen using the doorframe. "They're good together."

And better with you, Sophie wants to say, but they've been having a variation of this same conversation for years now. So reluctant to believe he could be loved.

Parker bounces back out of the kitchen, Hardison in tow. Sophie slips off the armrest.

The last thing she sees before she leaves is Hardison taking Eliot's hands in his, so very very tender.

iii. eliot & parker & hardison

2013, after.

Whatever they are, it's not complicated.

That doesn't stop them from complicating it.

Parker uses jasmine shampoo and they both recognize the scent by heart. Hardison knows Eliot's calluses as well as his own. Eliot has the sound of their footsteps memorized. Parker has rigs custom-sized for them.

The touching is different than a-couple-and-their-best-friend touching. They eat dinner together on the couch, yelling at some stupid heist movie, and Eliot looks at the curve of lips on drinking glasses, and Parker looks at the strength of hands on plates, and Hardison looks at the sheen of blue light on hair, coppery and gold. They wake up in the morning tangled on the same couch. Eliot is smushed against an armrest, Hardison's head low on his shoulder. Hardison is half-covered by Parker, who some nights entwines every limb they have.

And because Eliot wakes up first, no one moves. He can press his hand flat along the expanse of Hardison's back while his arm falls back asleep.

And because Parker wakes up second, she can hold tighter to the one hand of Eliot's she managed to steal in the night.

And because Hardison wakes up third, he can let his head stay on Eliot's collarbone and keep Parker's legs on top of his.

They share hotel beds on jobs in the same manner, sprawling and wanting. Eliot picks up girls and guys on the weekends but never brings them to the brewpub. He comes back in the mornings, smelling like sex, comes home.

There is no happy resolution. They wind tighter

and tighter

and tighter

and buy a house together

in which they put huge vents for Parker and a proper kitchen for Eliot and a magnificent screen display for Hardison

and all the neighbors think there's something going on

and they sleep in two (sometimes three) separate bedrooms and none of them say anything when they pass each other on the stairs, just barely brushing, and

welcome to Limbo.

Not as unHellish as you thought, right?

ii. sophie & nate

2014.

She has known he was meant to be hers from the first gunshot in Paris. She's a collector, after all, and there is something beautifully broken in him that makes her want to deconstruct him across her sheets.

(And when he kisses her in her white Vera Wang dress in front of the priest, she bites at his lower lip and knows her selfish selfish soul might just be content.)

(For now.)

(The bullet wound is a small pretty circle, two inches to the right of her heart.)

He has known she is just another drug to tempt him from the first night in Paris, watching her carve a missing Degas out of its wooden frame while his heart thumped steady behind his breastbone. He's an addict, after all, and the taste of her is more intoxicating than any of Jimmy Ford's old whiskeys.

(He proposes and signs his own death warrant at the very same time.)

(The muscle of his shoulder aches even now. He still doesn't know if she was aiming for his heart.)

ii. parker & nate

She's always had a problem with dysfunctional fathers, so what's one more?

He drinks and she edges away. The acrid smell of alcohol lingers low in her throat. She thought she'd left that behind in a burning house.

She blows up a reinforced shed on the next job. He gets angry and she knows this so so well, whiskey lining his movements but making him no less dangerous. Yes, she knows this dance.

"You won't be on another job," he yells. "Not until you can prove you're safe." Still familiar. You don't get bunny 'til you do what I say!

And aren't fathers supposed to ground their daughters?

Parker skips away, a smile on her face. She's hidden her rigs, anyhow, and fathers can't take what they can't find. She learned that from Foster Father Number Three, who would burn her clothes in the dead-grassed backyard when he was high but didn't have the patience to go looking for them if she tore up the floorboards under her mattress and stuffed them in.

She went to the streets after him, and found an Archie instead. He taught her to find more things instead, beautiful sparkly things and piles and piles of linen-scented money.

Nate is like Archie. He teaches her things, like how to notice, how to really look at a situation and make a plan out of it.

Except Archie looked at her like he was proud of a thing. Nate looks at her like he's proud of a person. It's different and she doesn't think she likes it.

He makes her go to jury duty and it's so boring and Parker hates being bored and being a normal person and then she spots something and he brushes her off and it makes her mad. 

(But he makes it better. No father has ever done that before.)

Fast-forward five years. Nate touches all of them a lot more, a squeeze of Hardison's shoulder or arm-bumping Eliot or just standing near Parker because he knows she's a flight risk. He's nicer and more distant and she can't figure out why-

and then he leaves her the business and isn't that what fathers are supposed to do?

She doesn't like this new Nate-and-Sophie-shaped hole in her heart.

She doesn't think she likes having had a father after all.

ii. eliot & nate

May, 2012.

Call off your dog, the man says, and Eliot goes.

I'm askin' the other man who saved me, Eliot says, and Nate smirks.

They've gotten over the Moreau shit, mostly. Eliot thinks sometimes about how Nate could easily have become an even crueller Damien, and how Eliot would've followed him just as easily into the abyss.

But Nate has never once treated him like the dog Da- Moreau did. If anything, Eliot tries to keep Nate on the tighter leash. Because even though Eliot would have gone down with this shipwreck, no one else should have to.

Nate's doing better now. Less alcohol-skinny stick man, because he actually bothers to eat what Eliot cooks. He's a little softer around the face, in the eyes, in the way he brushes his hand along Sophie's elbow when they don't particularly care if someone is watching.

It's better than either of them could have hoped at the beginning of this little venture.

Something buried in Eliot's soul purrs at the thought. Yes, this little family they've built will do just fine.

ii. hardison & nate

November, 2008.

Nate calls him up on a Tuesday afternoon, when he's in the middle of Grand Theft Auto IV. Inconvenient, yeah, but Nate Ford is calling like he promised he would and there's a chance-

no need to get overexcited. So Alec picks up the phone, cool as a cucumber, and says hello there in an awful British accent.

Nate doesn't respond with General Kenobi but what comes next is almost as good.

"You still up for some teamwork?" He asks, and Alec spins around in his chair, ecstatic.

"Ye-yeah, I'm free," he says, completely definitely nonchalant. "When you thinkin'?"

"How quickly can you get to Los Angeles?" Nate hangs up. Alec stares at his phone, considering having a spam bot call Nate over and over until his phone shorts.

Of course, Alec is also on the next plane out of Buenos Aires, five-star hotel room abandoned. A day later, he's in LA, time difference just enough to make him feel grouchy and a little off. Nate texted him an address when he landed, and Alec doesn't have the stability right now to figure out how Nate knew which flight he was on.

Alec stares up a red-brick office building. Nothing about it suggests Nate's caliber of thief. Then Alec reclassifies. Everything about it suggests Nate's caliber of day-drinking insurance nonsense.

The elevator plays Muzak at him all the way up, and it's a relief to see the doors open for polished dark wood. Classy. Alec bets even that grifter lady couldn't complain about it.

He pushes open the door and is met with a roomy waiting area and a blank expanse of wall. Needs a sign or something. A name.

Shadow shifts in the hall, and-

Nate steps out, wrapped in an entirely superfluous and dramatic trench coat. Alec raises his eyebrows, unimpressed.

Okay, maybe a little impressed. "Damn, you really went Nick Fury on me," he whistles through his teeth. "Good thing I'm your Iron Man."

Nate blinks, brow furrowing the tiniest amount. A beat. "Come see the briefing room," he says, instead of responding. He presses a wall panel and- damn, maybe Nate really is a white Nick Fury. The screen setup? The table that looks straight out of a spy movie?

Alec's in before Nate even has to ask. Still at the office hours later, he types madly away on his laptop, relishing in the screen-sharing magnification. Spencer's somewhere in Germany, Parker's in Monaco, Sophie Devereaux (under the name Marisa Lyon) is, interestingly enough, here in LA.

Nate is still there too, swirling whiskey around a snifter with his feet propped up on the table.

"How long does it usually take to build a new identity?" Alec looks up from where he's putting the finishing touches on Evelyn Duball (Sophie seems like she'd want a posh name) to Nate's surprisingly unsarcastic question. Alec grins.

"Depends on the depth," he explains, polishing Evelyn's driver's license. He doesn't know Sophie's real birth date, so he plays it safe and goes younger. "I can do a pretty superficial one in a couple hours, for… a fake website or whatever. But the deeper ones? Hell, sometimes you never stop building them. There's always something new to add. Hey, do you want Harlin Leverage the Fifth to have a gym membership?"

Nate blinks. "We are not calling me that."

"Shouldn'ta given me control over the aliases then," Alec cackles. Nate's glare's got nothing on Nana. He taps a few more keys. There.

Nate's head pops back up from the snifter at Alec's sudden straightening of posture. Alec grins like a lunatic. "Let's go assemble us some Avengers!"

November, 2012.

Nate calls him up on a Tuesday afternoon, when he's in the middle of Borderlands 2. Inconvenient, yeah, but Nate Ford doesn't call him anymore unless he's trying to keep a secret.

"I found our window to get the book," Nate declares, and Alec's stomach rolls over itself unhappily.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. It couldn't have been a good secret, like what Nate's getting Sophie for Christmas this year or the arrival time of the coffee-infused chocolate Alec orders special for Parker and Eliot.

"Got it," Alec replies, rather more shortly than he'd meant to.

It's just… he's built something here. A beautiful brewpub, tall enough for Parker to hang from the exposed ceiling beams and hum nonsense melodies. A kitchen right enough for Eliot to cook in, shoulders something approaching relaxed. A nightlife vibrant enough for Sophie to put on a new outfit and vanish into the crowd, or whatever the grifter equivalent of a warm bath is.

Enough of a bar for Nate.

Enough-

or not.

Always "just this one job", Alec grumbles to himself.

"What was that?" Nate's voice isn't even sharp. Just mildly expectant, in that way that says he knows Alec believes he will never stop owing Nate for the best years of his life.

"They're gonna be mad at us." And Alec doesn't think he'd be able to put the pieces back together this time, if they scattered again.

"Perks of the job," Nate grins through the phone. He's not nearly as funny as he thinks he is.

ii. parker & sophie

Sophie would gasp at learning how much Parker already knows about music, since whenever Sophie mentions the theater Parker widens her eyes and gives her the I-don't-know-anything-I-was-raised-in-a-vent look. Because she likes to listen to Sophie talk, but can't quite ask to hear it.

So Parker asks what was that one opera, caramel? and Sophie flutters in bourgeoisie shock and says it's Carmen, Parker and steers her to sit on a cushion and Parker lets Sophie sit behind her on the couch and brush out her hair because Sophie braids good hair and has soft hands.

I robbed the Vienna Opera House once. Well, a man inside it. He was wearing all his emeralds! Silly. The lady onstage sounded like a bird.

…you'll have to be more specific, darling.

Sophie's silver-backed brush feels nice on Parker's head. It never pulls like Foster Mother Number Two did.

She had a long blue dress with lots of silver sparkles. I think you would like it. And she was yelling at her daughter except singing it.

Sometimes Sophie scratches Parker's scalp gently and Parker feels like she's melting inside and wonders what magic Sophie uses. Whenever she tries it herself she digs too deep.

That's a different one. It's Der Hölle Rache, from Mozart's Magic Flute. The Queen of the Night aria.

Even German sounds pretty when Sophie says it. She slides her fingers under the hair at the very top of Parker's scalp, then, and Parker holds completely still until Sophie gets through the first couple weaves.

We should steal that dress for you. Queen of the Night is one of your names, right?

They'd started this little guessing game while Nate was in prison, all of them trying to figure out which aliases of Sophie's they knew. Eliot was the best at it, but Parker liked coming up with unreal ones like Arsenic Angel and the Great Grifter of Greece. They made Sophie laugh.

Sure enough, a low throaty chuckle. Not as such. And I would hope to be better than a vengeful, scheming mother.

She's somewhere around the nape of Parker's neck.

But you are vengeful and scheming.

Parker doesn't understand why Sophie's soft hands pause. Sophie is. She schemes and schemes and gets revenge and that's the truth.

The hands restart.

Generally, you don't tell people that to their faces. It tends to hurt their feelings.

Well, then, it's a good thing Parker isn't facing her. The second sentences catches up with her, then, and Parker remembers that Sophie has a lot of very snarly feelings pushed way deep down.

Did I hurt your feelings?

The hands pause again. The braid is almost done.

A little bit.

Parker considers.

Why?

Sophie ties off the braid with an elastic. Parker likes the feel of a new braid, her hair in a tight little coat around her skull. Like a braid is a zipper. She almost laughs at the idea of unzipping her hair and scaring Hardison with a shiny bald head, but she remembers Sophie doesn't like to be laughed around while talking about feelings.

I suppose I don't like being reminded of how awful I truly am.

Parker blinks, and she can feel the little crinkle between her eyebrows appear.

But it's not awful to have a plan and use it to hurt people who hurt you. Or other people, she explains, as clearly as possible so Sophie understands what she means this time.

Sophie brushes her fingers over the completed braid, and then cups her hand over the top of Parker's head. Parker closes her eyes and focuses on leeching every bit of warmth from it.

You're probably right, darling. You usually are.

ii. eliot & sophie

She stopped flirting with him pretty quickly, and that's how you know Sophie Devereaux has chosen to rely on you.

Instead she almost love-bombs him, if there's a familial version of love-bombing, if that's what you'd call just how quickly she switches from coquettish winks to rolling her eyes in tandem with him when Nate says something shockingly stupid for how smart he is.

Eliot knows she's doing it on purpose. Foster a sense of camaraderie, and she'll have someone with more brawn there to back her up even in less-than-ideal, less-than-job circumstances. Because you lend your sister favors, and you catch her when she falls.

He doesn't trust her for real until into their second year as a team, after the Davids. Nate tells him to throw a fight and Sophie comes up to him, fretting, almost almost right.

Tap in.

He makes her tea.

Tap out.

It's about control, Sophie. Controlling what's inside, not what's outside.

Tap in.

A squeeze of lemon.

Tap out.

He steers her to the helicopter as Nate sags against the railing. Idiot. Like Eliot didn't know he'd been shot the second they reached the deck.

Annie Kroy still clings to Sophie, in the coat and the accent and Eliot thinks Annie might be the closest to whoever Sophie was before… before. Yeah, Annie is a clinger. She holds his arm so tight he'd be wincing if he were anyone else and they climb in the helicopter and she still doesn't let go.

Sophie starts resurfacing about halfway through, when it's clear by the direction that they're heading to Philadelphia with maybe one more hour to go. If Annie is a clinger, Sophie is a crier. Her tears drip silently onto his shoulder.

That's how he can tell that, in the end, she isn't sad to be leaving the team. After all their conversations about living non-leverage lives — and isn't that interesting, what it turned out to mean — Sophie is the one attempting it.

She looks right at Eliot, and makes him promise 'til my dyin' day with no effort at all, and does not cry.

ii. sophie & hardison

December, 2008.

There is one day Sophie brings in a plant for the office.

Playing nice isn't hard, but being nice certainly has its foibles. She remembers walking in, prepared for this new adventure, and Hardison saying something about plants. If it's important to him — and sometimes it's hard to tell, given how much he talks — then she'll do it, because it's not so much the plants as him trying to connect them to this place. Alec Hardison is a homemaker and Sophie wants to pat his head and tell him he picked the exact wrong people for it.

But she picks out a plant because she needs his trust for any of this to work and he'll be the easiest to cement.

It's a beautiful hot-pink blossom in a smooth pot, and Sophie puts it on a windowsill in the lobby because she's heard somewhere that plants need sunlight. It sits next to Parker's snake plant, providing some much-needed colour.

Nate sees it first, striding through the office on one of the few days he's not morning-drunk. He squints at it, squints at her, and does that little smirk Sophie wishes she weren't quite so attracted to.

The next to notice is Parker, a week or so later. She's bouncing around her own plant, having… a staring contest? Hard to tell with her. Sophie approaches from the side, another one of those trust-building things. "Plant buddies!" Parker waves wildly in the air, grinning like she just caught sight of a rich man with an expensive watch and no sense. Sophie smiles back.

Eliot only acknowledges it the next day, glaring at her suspiciously like she's growing poison in a pot. She smiles beautifically, wider than she ever would at Parker, and appreciates how he knows exactly what she's doing.

Hardison, somewhat appropriately, is last to notice. She's beginning to think it wasn't that important after all, but he's practically dancing in one day after a job and ends up right next to it and he smiles like the sun, like a young criminal whose method of working keeps him far away from getting hurt.

"That's what I'm talking about! Sophie gets it, y'all, Sophie gets it-," and he's off on a ramble that eventually turns into something involving airplanes?

He's hard to follow at the best of times.

The next week, the flower is dead. Sophie wouldn't have realized, even, if Hardison hadn't been poking around the roots, desolate.

"Ummm… Sophie? You been watering this thing? 'Cause it looks kinda…," he gestures around the plant, wincing. The flower, once a vibrant magenta, is now a sad and wilting pastel.

Water. Right. She can't just leave a flower in the window and expect it to stay pretty. Sophie looks at Parker's snake plant instead of having to respond. The soil in its pot is dark and moist. Well. Even the feral vent child is doing a better job at this than Sophie.

She picks up the pot.

"It's okay! We can get you a new one!" Hardison starts, waving his hands in the air. "And at least you tried; y'know, Nate and Eliot still haven't brought their plants-"

Sophie can't quite identify why it means so much to her, but the next day she totes in a new plant, the same type of pink flower bobbing on her hip as she carries the pot in. Hardison tells her it's called hibiscus, a word she's known only in perfumes until now.

She waters it religiously the first couple days, using a glass from Nate's ever-sprawling collection. And then she slips, and then they're out on a job in Malta, and she just… forgets, and one day she walks into the office and sees another dead plant.

It takes two months to kill it the next time, and then the fourth time it gets blown up with the rest of the office.

Several months later, hibiscus number five finds its way onto Nate's kitchen counter. It's mostly to annoy him, because shame on him for trying to kick them out again, but Hardison grins wide and easy when he sees it and that makes Sophie inexplicably happy too.

When Sophie leaves on her journey of self, nervous and breathless and grieving just a little, she isn't thinking about the flower at all.

But she comes back, and there on the counter is a hibiscus, healthy and whole.

Hardison meets her eyes from across the room, forgetting for a moment that he's mad at her. Sophie cups her hands around the pot.

"I jus'- I just thought it didn't deserve to die, even though you abandoned it like that," he mutters, sinking down in his chair. "'Cause you bothered in the first place. Nate still hasn't brought a goddamn plant in-"

"I'm sorry." She doesn't mean to say it. The pot is soothingly cool in her desperate grip. "I wanted- I needed-"

He looks up, eyes teary, and she doesn't know how to handle this, has never known how to handle this.

"I had to set things to rights," bursts out of her, hot and shaking, "I had to set me to rights and I thought I did but then I come back and-"

Sophie lifts the plant a bit, throat tight. When did she start crying?

"-and, I come back and all I did was kill every flower I touched!"

She bursts into tears, huge ugly sobs clawing from her lungs. Not even the werewithal to make it look pretty.

Rustling. Arms come up around her.

"It's- well, it's not okay yet. But we can work on it?" Hardison really is the best of them.

Sophie steps back to set the plant down. The flower is somewhat crushed from where it was pressed between them.

"Thank you," feels too small, but it's what she has. That, and a wet wobbly smile, trembling.

Hardison smiles back, and Sophie commits to keeping this one alive forever.

ii. parker & hardison

They eat pretzels every year on their anniversary, and dance on the roof of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, or the brew pub, or the Louvre.

And kiss, and kiss, and kiss, and dance some more, and decide that getting married would only be so Sophie could plan the wedding and Eliot could cater it and Nate could lurk in the background and make crotchety old comments about the decor before taking over from the officiant.

Like they'd have anyone else anyway.

They do not get married. Everybody knows they are anyway.

Pieces of paper can be stolen, after all, and never did anything for keeping couples together.

Instead, they eat pretzels every year, and dance.

ii. parker & eliot

They never talk about it.

(He knows it's his fatal flaw, how quickly he can go from muttering twenty pounds of crazy in a five-pound bag to being willing to snap his own neck if it would bring her any amount of satisfaction.)

(She knows he's hers.)

(She doesn't quite realise he needs to hear it out loud.)

They'll talk about anything else, though, on nights when she breaks into his apartment and pouts until he cooks for her. Snow is her great love, colder than hard cash, and it reminds her of being stuck on a mountain. Lump in her throat, a corpse on the ground, and knowing Eliot would never let her fall.

It makes us… us.

She likes being us.

He wants to be us so so badly.

"You should make me chili," she declares, popping into his apartment.

He doesn't jump, but he swears, "Jesus, Parker, what'd I say about sneakin' in my space!?"

She shrugs. "It's not sneaking if you know I'm there."

They argue in this vein for a while as she drapes herself behind him on the back of his couch.

He still makes her chili, and she swears she loves him forever. He brings a little smile to the surface for her, and she eats swinging her legs from the countertop instead of disappearing up through a skylight like she would have done once.

She swears she loves him forever, mouth stained orangey-red at the corners, and he thinks: I wish you would.

ii. hardison & eliot

It comes slower with Eliot.

It's different than the gunpowder-quick crush he had on Parker, a flashfire knowing thing exploding in his head the second Hardison met her. No, this is a steady-growing thing. Bracing roots versus reaching leaves.

So slow and steady, in the end, that Alec doesn't even realize until sometime in Portland, having bought a brewpub and made it all nice and shiny and upgraded all the appliances in the kitchen and made a bad menu on purpose because he's listened to Eliot complain about them for years and he knows that out of everyone now Eliot is the flight risk.

Alec builds him a brewpub and grins when he scowls and trips face-first into loving this man and knows-

Whoa. Okay, back it up just a smidge. They're in Lucille, Third of Her Name, scouting out some mark's warehouse along the coast. Portland ocean smells different from Boston sea.

Eliot slides into the passenger seat with two cardboard cups of coffee from some overpriced Portland café that Alec goes to solely because its name is Bean Me Up. Alec makes grabby hands at the bigger cup and Eliot rolls his eyes and says, "That stuff'll stunt your growth, dumbass" and Alec shoots back "You musta drunk a lot as a kid then, huh," and

      and

            and Eliot goes to hand him his drink and it's something about the glint of the sun on the sea refracting through his eyes but Eliot's hair, tan skin, everything explodes in a radiant display of colors and

everything becomes so clear when Eliot's hands brush his over the cup and he realizes he wants to kiss him.

Fuck.

Doesn't that sort of thing only happen in movies?

Only, no, because Alec's had this happen exactly once before, watching Parker hang by her knees from a rail to ask him for a comm.

He's gonna- he's gonna have to do some soul-searching, and, um-

"You good, man?" Alec's vision unfuzzes, fingers still pressed over Eliot's on the cup. Eliot's eyebrows are doing the thing where it looks like he's angry but he's really concerned.

Alec takes his drink, seized by the inconvenient urge to keep Eliot's hand and lay a kiss across the scarred knuckles. Just as a thank-you.

What would it be like? To kiss Eliot?

In his head, Alec never let go of Eliot's hand. He did kiss his knuckles, and then his palm, and then his wrist where a pulse thrums strong under the skin. He can imagine it, how Eliot's face would go that shade of red it only does when he's truly flustered, how his lips would part just a little-

He starts up the engine, trying to focus on the vibration of the steering wheel under his fingers.

-and so of course Alec would have to kiss him fully then, winding his hand through that glorious hair and running his tongue over lips that look too soft for the line of work Eliot's in-

Lucille pulls out of the little seaside parking lot, Eliot just now clicking his seatbelt at Alec's pointed look.

-and maybe he'd make a little noise in the back of his throat and kiss back, because never has Eliot Spencer been capable of backing down from a single thing-

The first stoplight they come to is red.

and you're really not supposed to driving a van thinking about making out with your best friend while said best friend is in the passenger seat.

You're not supposed to be thinking about making out with your best friend when you have a girlfriend.

You're not supposed to-

You're not-

Alec guns Lucille as soon as the light turns green. He needs to get back to the brewpub, Eliot's brewpub, and talk to Parker. Parker, his sun-bright love, his sky and stars.

The conversation goes far more oddly than he expects it to.

So you like him like pretzels?

…not really? Pretzels are me'n you, baby, and Eliot's a different thing.

I'm not sure if I'm ready to share you yet.

That's- that's not what I meant- I just thought I should tell you that I wanted to kiss someone else, 'cause we're dating, and like- did you say yet?

In DC, Eliot tells Alec he's the smartest guy he's ever known and says it with his hand secure at the back of Alec's neck, face close like he's almost asking for lips on his forehead- which Alec understands rationally he's not because Parker is there and Eliot respects both of them and also consent is sexy and also there's a bioweapon about to detonate-

but the moment passes and they win and fly back to Portland on an itty-bitty charter plane, Eliot sandwiched between him and Parker like that'll protect him from any more bullets, and Eliot's thigh is solid against his and Parker's arm lays on Eliot's so easily and they make eye contact over Eliot's head, dozens of tiny silent conversations played out in the space of Eliot's painkiller-assisted haze.

It's wonderful, to have Parker. He'll never regret her, never do anything to make her feel unwanted because that is so goddamn far from the truth. He is content with her. He does not push.

(He'll always wonder what it could be like to have both.)

(These things exist together.)

i. sophie

She wakes up still half-drunk, sprawled over a mattress in a dark room. Deep breath, take stock. She's wearing only a tiny black silk negligee, one of the hair-thin straps fallen down her shoulder.

The man asleep next to her — Adam — practically owns the transportation industry. The woman next to him — Lilian — is a professional socialite, the one who'd organized the wonderful gala So-An-La- Victoire had gotten so wonderfully drunk at last night. The three of them had hit it off, mostly calculated on Victoire's part, and in the small hours of the morn found themselves seventeen floors up in the hotel, mouths hot on skin and hands wandering every which way.

Victoire slips out of the negligee, the canned air-conditioning whispering over her bare self. Her underwear was thrown over the green armchair, her gown from last night laid with a little more care over the desk. The Prada is a smooth slide as she puts it back on and zips herself up.

She doesn't fix her makeup or hair before taking her shoes in one hand and clutch in the other. Waiting for the sound of someone passing in the hall, Victoire leaves the room, pretending to try and rub at the lipstick smeared across her chin.

The two hotel workers almost succeed at pretending not to look at her, but they move a little too slowly not to be noticing. Good. The gossip will be all over the hotel by noon.

Mystery woman seen leaving the room of transport CEO Adam Roqueforte!

Isn't he newly married to that actress? The one who started that kids' charity?

He didn't bring her last night…

And they'll do all the work for her, especially once Lilian is seen leaving the room too.

Victoire takes the elevator to floor three, opens her own room, and strips naked again. Gown gets zipped into a garment bag, shoes go in the suitcase, and her clutch - full of the blood diamonds Lilian was wearing last night - gets carefully placed in the secret compartments of her makeup bag.

Thirty minutes later, Victoire steps back out of the room. Her hair is brushed through and half-up, her makeup light and fresh. Her day dress is deep blue, and her sandals are easier to run in than they look.

The lobby is hardly bustling in the early morning. Victoire steps outside and inhales, secondhand smoke and muddy river filling her nose. Welcome to Paris. That's how you know the difference between the great European and American cities: America smells like weed. Europe smells like cigarettes.

It's freeing, to be Victoire Lachance, favourite daughter of a mildly wealthy vineyard owner from Bordeaux. She jaunts about Europe, free of anything even remotely resembling responsibility.

It's also freeing to know that the reputation of a man and woman responsible for creating abusive sweatshops will just happen to tank when the public finds out about Adam and Lilian's professional — and not-so-professional — association.

Leverage might be on break, but the small hungry thing behind her breastbone is not.

i. hardison

Tickety-tap. Tickety-tap.

Alec's gonna make this place a home if it kills him. The state-assigned psychologists, back before Nana took him in, told each other that a genius intellect plus an anxious attachment style meant a kid who created very sneaky ways to make people stay.

He's mostly rid of the anxious bit, but that sneaking stuck with him.

Gush about it when Parker and Sophie bring in plants. They'll remember something they brought here, and that subconsciously anchors them, a reminder every time they see it.

Tickety-tap.

Sure, then the office gets blown up, but Nate can't run away if Alec sets up shop in his apartment so he does. The kitchen gets nice pots and pans for Eliot, the rafters get monkey bars for Parker. He has a little closet installed for Sophie's emergency clothes.

Parker starts to sit a little closer and Alec's heart just about beats out of his chest.

"What are you doing?" She asks, nose scrunched, one afternoon when it's grey and wet outside. Numbers scroll across Alec's screen, functions nesting inside each other.

"Okay, so…" and then he's off and she still sits through his entire explanation on the basics of daisy-chain programming and nods along like she's committing it to that Parker-sharp memory, that vault of information she organizes like a bank's safety deposit room.

It's a perfect afternoon, is what it is, because the lamplight inside is cosy and Alec's still riding the high of a successful job and Parker tilts her head at him and smiles a little and everyone else is a sparking light on the edge of his awareness: Eliot humming under his breath as he hand-washes dishes, Nate reading a book and Sophie reading a book and both of them pretending they don't want to curl together on the couch instead of sitting at its opposite ends.

Look at that. Alec stole himself a family and only had to sneak a tiny bit to do it.

i. parker

Bizet's Farandole plays through her head on every con. Sneaking past cameras with showy acrobatics no one will ever see, starting with the big proper full brass, and then sliding through vents with the creeping strings.

Build-

A slip of the hand with barely-there woodwinds, and the painting or statue or vase or diamond disappears into her bag.

Build-

Running along the rooftops gives her a high like nothing else except maybe jumping off buildings. The brass get louder again.

Build-

A beautiful dizzying counterpoint reaches its climax as she deaddrops through the rooftop of the brewpub, blood hot in her face. She's been told she smiles like a feral wildcat after a heist.

She crashes into Hardison, pressing a giggly little kiss to his cheek before wrapping her entire self around him. He laughs and puts his big warm hands on her back. Behind him, Nate raises a glass to her, Sophie plastered to his side. And possibly just plastered. Eliot pulls his beanie off, running a hand through flattened hair.

Funny, that a shadow can look forward to going home at the end of the night, but Parker supposes shadows have to go somewhere when you can't see them.

Not that anyone's ever seen her except them.

They're home anyway.

i. eliot

These guys are idiots. But-

my circus, my damn monkeys.

And even monkeys have to eat.

2008.

They're a month or so into this new thing, and he and Sophie Devereaux are still circling each other like lying sharks. Most of their communication is nonverbal and Eliot prefers it that way. He's never had much patience for word games.

So he stays in his apartment that day with the tenderloin cutlet and shallots, chopping cornichons and whisking olive-oil dressing. It's annoying to transport, but he's trying to make a point.

The point being that he watches her closely enough to know her favorite dish.

Eliot wait until the others have dispersed out of the office, and plates the steak tartare with a precise flair meant to show her how fluidly he can move when he needs to. Sophie sits at the kitchen table, eyes glittering in blasé non-intimidation.

Raw meat for a damn shark.

2009.

Eliot's not gonna let Nate cast them off again. Man needs to step up and take some responsibility. Idiot.

They restock his barren fridge, and there's gotta be some sorta truth to the way to a man's heart is through the stomach, even though that's categorically untrue because the real way is through his fourth and fifth ribs. Nate's skinny and heartless and those things have to be connected somehow.

One of the bar employees lets him use the back kitchen in return for a couple crumpled twenties after hours and Eliot busies himself making soda bread with raisins and a shepherd's pie with beef, who the hell makes it with beef, goddamn Bostonians.

Nate has to be lightly threatened to leave the whiskey on the shelf, but Eliot cuts into the pie and Nate's eyes shutter a little at the scent.

Got him in one.

2010.

"You're gonna kill yourself eating all that processed crap," Eliot growls, snatching Hardison's half-eaten bowl of Kraft mac and cheese. Hardison squawks in protest and Eliot ignores his fumbling attempts to get the bowl back.

He storms all the way over to Nate's empty sink, scrapes the mac and cheese into the garbage disposal, and puts the bowl in the dishwasher with more force than necessary.

Kraft.

What an insult.

Eliot's muttering under his breath, searching for the bag of dry macaroni he stored here a couple months ago. He'll show Hardison mac and cheese.

He pulls open the fridge, rolling his eyes at the stock of orange sludge. Eliot has relegated Hardison to half a shelf by now, mostly because he kept throwing out anything extending beyond that.

The cheese drawer has three cheeses so Eliot grabs all of them. Gruyère, sharp white cheddar, and mozzarella. He's hand-shredding, of course, because nobody wants a clumpy cheese sauce like you get with pre-shredded.

Dried basil, heavy cream, casserole dish… pop it in the oven and there you go. Eliot succumbs to the impulse to grill some chicken, because where the hell else is Hardison gonna get any protein?

Forty-five minutes later, a new bowl clatters down next to Hardison, who snatches it with uncharacteristic speed before devouring half of it with one bite.

"'Mish dam goo'," he says around a mouthful, and Eliot rolls his eyes.

Next week, there's another bowl of Kraft mac and cheese, placed perfectly for Eliot to see immediately as he comes through the door.

Eliot sighs and gets to work.

2011.

The sky is blue. Snow is cold. Parker likes chocolate. It's less a fun fact than a rule of nature.

The sky is blue, and snow is so very very cold. Eliot's sure Parker's killed someone before, but she probably didn't stick around long enough to see the body. Parker doesn't like corpses. That one's less a rule of nature than a quirk of being human.

They get off the mountain and Parker still hasn't let go of Hardison, so Eliot opens the kitchen drawer full of boring papers on the top and all his baking chocolate on the bottom so Parker won't eat it all.

He simmers whole milk in a saucepan, adds semi-sweet chocolate to melt. Stirs in the brown sugar and a dash of cocoa powder.

Taking it off the heat, Eliot realizes his hands are shaking. He clenches them into familiar fists, and goes hunting for the mugs.

The hot chocolate is cool enough now to add a splash of vanilla extract, a sprinkle of cinnamon. Stir again. He ladles cocoa into two mugs and slips out into the main room.

Parker has mashed herself into Hardison's side, feet tucked under his thigh. Eliot hands one mug to her, and she holds it in both hands like it's the only warm part of her, not drinking. He gives the other mug to Hardison, who murmurs "thanks" and sips it immediately.

Whipped cream. Fuck. He forgot the goddamn whipped cream and Parker always likes cocoa best with whipped cream and she obviously needs it right now, look how subdued she is and she never touches anyone for this long-

"Eliot?" Parker's voice pokes at him, distant. He jolts to attention immediately. What does she need? What can he give her, when he hasn't been able to protect her this whole week, when he forgot to make the stupid whipped cream.

Her eyes are still red. "Come sit." She pats the couch cushion, somewhat away from her own body. Eliot sits, because what else is he supposed to do?

"The cocoa is good," Parker tells him, and something settles. It's okay. She liked it and she's even smiling a little.

That's what he wanted.

It still takes him a long time to relax into the couch.

2012.

Eliot pulls his third batch of blueberry muffins out of the industrial oven and snarls. They're a little more brown on top than he'd like. This recipe obviously needs to be fine-tuned.

Baked goods litter the brewpub's kitchen counter. All the staff wisely packed it up and went home when Eliot stormed in that morning, angrily declaring the place closed for the day. They'll be fine; it's paid time off.

That leaves Eliot and an empty kitchen. And also an egg casserole, a pot of simmering chicken soup, three cooling racks full of chocolate-chip cookies, a vegetable stir-fry with that new Thai spice blend he picked up a couple jobs ago, and a roast chicken.

He could've been cooking for his dad, if only the man had answered the door. Eliot slams the muffin tin down on another cooling rack and whirls for the batter bowl-

which has been stolen by Sophie, who holds it like she thinks the batter will jump out and attack her expensive outfit. It might.

"I think you should come and sit with us," she says gently, like he's a dog in need of careful handling. Eliot scowls, about to hiss something vile, but his shoulders tighten and he realizes that would just prove her right. He settles for a flat, unimpressed look.

"Busy," he settles on, debating whether or not to try and grab the bowl from her.

"Not," she parries back, stepping back. "I need you to win a bet for me against Nate."

Fine. Shouldn't take more than a couple minutes, and then he can come back and make the recipe perfect.

Except Eliot walks out of the kitchen and Parker immediately drops from the ceiling on him and he has to catch her and then Hardison takes a cue from the pool table and his form is so bad that Eliot has to correct him on it and they end up playing a game, Nate calculating odds for every shot with Sophie pressed next to him in the same armchair, and time passes in a blink and his shoulders have gone back to their usual tenseness instead of painful.

"Hey- gimme a sec, Parker- I got chicken for us, y'all should eat somethin'," Eliot laughs, pushing back through to the kitchen to retrieve the roast chicken kept warm in an oven.

He makes them all sit down proper around the table and Parker dives for the stir-fry once he tells her it's spicy. Nate gets to carve the chicken while Sophie needles him about fragile masculinity and cutting things. Hardison nibbles at a muffin, eyes happy.

The knot in Eliot's chest unspools. His trip home mighta been worthless, but his family's right here.

i. nate

He can hold his liquor better than he can hold on to any of them.

Lucky him, then, that they keep coming back.