Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It had started out innocently enough - or as innocent as any of Nate’s ideas could be, which, granted, was not very innocent at all. However, Nate was really more of a tactician than a strategist and, true to form, he had not planned for the long term when he’d come up with the idea. And so, in that respect, it had begun rather innocently.

The seed of the thing had been planted back when the team had been based out of LA, but it only germinated - so to speak - a little over a year later, in Boston. It would only bear fruit almost four years after that, in Portland.

This is the story of these four years.

There was a game playing on TV. Nate wasn’t really watching, though, and he was listening with only half an ear. He was reading, but his attention wasn’t primarily on that either: it was on the front door, listening, waiting for Hardison and Eliot to arrive. Parker was already there, eating her favorite cereal straight out of the box. As for Sophie, well - Sophie, or rather, Sophie’s absence, was what made Nate decide this was a path worth pursuing.

By some stroke of luck, Eliot and Hardison arrived together. Just as Nate expected, the book in his hands drew immediate attention.

“What are you reading?” Eliot asked suspiciously.

Parker swallowed her cereal without chewing it first. “You can read the title, it’s printed really big,” she said.

Eliot made a face at her and replied: “Thanks, Parker.”

Meanwhile, Hardison did read the title. “Oh. Em. Gee. Nate. Buddy!”

Now Eliot looked at him in suspicion. “Is that one of your books? I didn’t even know you read stuff that’s not on a screen.”

“That, my friend,” Hardison replied, “is a vintage edition of the Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide. Though, now that I think about it--” he turned to Nate “--why are you reading that?”

Yes, Nate had expected that line of questioning. The answer seemed self-evident to him but, nevertheless, he expected that it’d take some persuasion for Hardison to agree with his reasoning. This was sensitive territory; it was best to tread softly. Lightly, Nate said: “And not the Player’s Handbook?”

Hardison didn’t reply in words, but his gaze spoke volumes - and he was, indeed, as unhappy as Nate had thought he would be. 

“Well,” Nate continued, “you didn’t think I wou--”

“No,” Hardison said. His voice became more emphatic with each syllable. “Nu-uh. You never played a single campaign in your life.”

“You see--”

“You are not DMing,” Hardison stated, more than loudly enough to override Nate’s deliberately calm tone.

“Actually--”

Hardison pointed at his mouth. “Read my lips: no. way.”

“It’s not that different than running a con,” Nate pointed out.

“Oh, isn’t it?”

“I need to sell you on a story. The rules,” and Nate lifted the book slightly for emphasis, “they’re just window dressing.”

It was the wrong thing to have said. Hardison’s expression twisted in genuine anger. “You do not get to turn everything into a con. I am turning around, walking right out of here, and calling Sophie.”

Hardison turned on his heel and left, but Nate was no longer worried about his little plan falling apart before it really took off: after all, Hardison was going to talk to Sophie, and Nate had a fairly good idea of how that would turn out. Hardison wanted to play more than he wanted to run the game, and Sophie was more than good enough to realize that.

Meanwhile, though, Eliot was measuring Nate with his eyes, his expression unreadable. “Why are you reading that, Nate? Seriously.”

This was going to be the hard sell. Hardison wanted to play; Parker had no reason not to, and would cooperate if this was what the others wanted. But Eliot-- No: as unhappy as it was going to make Eliot in the short term, the only way to win him over in the long one was to be completely truthful. “I figured Hardison was right, and this will make for a very nice team building exercise.”

“Team-building,” Eliot repeated, drawing the words out.

“I noticed everyone’s a little on edge lately,” Nate said, feigning lightness and pretended to not see how stormy Eliot’s expression got, “and I thought--”

Entirely predictactly, Eliot cut him off. “You know what, Nate? Hardison had the right idea. I’m outta here.”

Eliot made a show out of leaving angrily, but he closed the door with care rather than just let it slam behind him noisily. Oh, he would come around with time; and, perhaps, also with a conversation with Sophie.

In the meantime, though, Nate looked at Parker, who was still sitting on his breakfast bar - rather than by it - and still eating her cereal. “Are you going to leave, too?” he asked. Oh, she was going to leave, but more often than not, he could learn more about how Hardison and Eliot really felt by listening to Parker. She may not be all that good about using what she picked up, or even consciously accessing it, but she was extremely sensitive. 

“I’m not done eating,” she said, and actually waited a beat for emphasis before adding: “Yet.”

“Well, if that’s how it is,” Nate said, and leaned back as he prepared to really focus on the book he was, in fact, reading, “put the box in the garbage before you leave, all right?”

She didn’t reply to that. When she did speak up, a few moments later, her voice was laced with suspicion. “Why are you still reading that?”

Unlike with Eliot, here being upfront wasn’t the way to go. Without lifting his eyes from the book, Nate replied: “It’s quite gripping, actually.”

“I don’t believe you,” she declared.

Now Nate did raise his eyes to meet hers. “Why else would I read it, if it isn’t interesting to me? No, the better question is,” he continued, not giving her a chance to reply, “why is it interesting to me?”

Parker resumed eating, and didn’t reply. But her expression - when Nate carefully looked over the edge of the book - was more thoughtful than hostile.

Oh, yes, Nate thought: this was going to work just fine.

Seven weeks later found the four of them sitting around Nate’s dining table as outside, the sun set. Nate had not been wrong; Sophie did eventually stir Hardison and Eliot towards gaming. That said, it had taken longer than he’d thought for that to happen.

And so, seven weeks later found the four of them finally sitting together for what - Nate hoped - would be the first session of many. 

Parker was sitting very straight in her chair. As straight as ever: Parker’s core muscles didn’t ever let up. Eliot was slouched in his, looking resigned. And Hardison - oh, Hardison was very nearly bouncing.

First, Nate decided, they should get the metaphorical elephant out of the way. “I’d like to thank you all again for--”

He’d gotten along farther than he’d thought before he was cut off.

“Don’t thank us,” Eliot said flatly. “Thank Sophie.”

“Yeah,” Parker said, drawing the word out a little, “she said your communication skills are terrible, and we should model some for you.”

Had Parker timed it to catch Nate just as he was taking a deep gulp from his coffee? Whether or not Parker had done that deliberately, Nate found himself choking. Well, he supposed, whatever got the job done: obviously Sophie would go for that.

It was a lie, and he knew it. He also knew that, as talented a liar as Sophie was, she’d absolutely default to the truth when she could use it. They were different, in that regard: he only used the truth when he ran dry of lies. That, he supposed, was what she wanted him to learn.

Nate was still coughing; Hardison was done waiting, though. “So,” he asked, brightly, “what are you guys playing?”

“Thief,” said Parker.

“Fighter,” said Eliot.

Both of them had brought their best bland tone of voice for those short words. Parker probably did that because she was matter-of-fact unless she perceived an actual reason to communicate differently. Eliot, though, was probably deliberately pulling Hardison’s metaphorical pigtails.

And yes: Eliot’s mouth twitched as Hardison threw his hands up - which, in turn, sent a fair number of paper sheets flying.

“Seriously,” he said, then repeated: “Seriously. You get to be someone else, not for a con, not for a mark, purely for your own sake, and you choose to do the exact same thing you do every day.”

Nate knew what Parker would answer; he was curious to hear Eliot’s reply.

“I like what I do,” Parker said, proving Nate correct.

“I’m good at what I do,” Eliot said.

Meaningful difference, that. Most people enjoyed being good at things; Eliot most likely was not an exception. That Eliot drew that out, though, and hadn’t said what Parker had - oh, Eliot knew exactly what he was doing, there. More than that: Nate noticed the way Eliot’s eyes flicked across the three of them, seeking their reactions. Nate was pretty sure he showed nothing - but then, Eliot was more than smart enough to expect that. The skin around Parker’s eyes tightened, just slightly. It was a subtle - if consistent - sign that something caught her attention. Hardison, though--

--yeah, Eliot’s little test had gone straight over Hardison’s head.

“If I were a lesser man,” he said, “I would despair of you people.”

“I don’t know,” Nate said, drawing everyone’s attention back to him; it wouldn’t do to let this escalate into an argument or a fight - the potential for which was there, if Eliot was in the sort of a mood to be testing. “Makes for a balanced little team.”

This short sentence achieved exactly what Nate wanted it to. “This is not a con, Nate,” Eliot said, even as Hardison said the same thing in fewer words: “Not a con!”

Wait for it, Nate thought, counting seconds until--

“I kind of wish it was a con,” Parker said.

Hardison slapped his forehead, hard.

It went like that for a while: the game teetering on the edge of falling apart despite Nate’s best efforts, despite Hardison clearly wanting this to succeed - and Nate knew that, no matter what they said, Parker and Eliot wanted to not let Hardison down. 

Then Eliot showed up at Nate’s place hours before they were due, carrying a tote bag and a bowl covered with a towel.

“Do I want to know?” Nate asked neutrally as he let Eliot in.

“I am done eating that crap,” Eliot said. His voice had that particularly clipped edge it did when Eliot was pretending that he was not, in fact, doing what he was doing.

Nate didn’t need to hang out in the kitchen to figure out what that was. Hardison was almost as fond of cheap pizza as he was of his dreadful orange soda, and a towel-covered bowl meant dough: Eliot was making pizza from scratch.

And it was excellent pizza, too.

“That’s it,” Hardison declared a few hours later, leaning back in the chair, “I’m ruined for normal pizza. Eliot, you’ve ruined me.”

“You look fine to me,” Parker said.

“He means that now he knows what real pizza is like--” Eliot began, then shook his head and changed tact. “No, you know what, I don’t believe you: you’ll go out and have that crap again tomorrow.”

“But I’ll be weeping on the inside,” Hardison promised. 

Eliot would’ve retorted, but Parker cut in. “Can we play now?” she asked, impatiently.

Excellent, Nate thought: so both Eliot and Parker were invested now. He waited, curious to see whether either Eliot or Hardison would reply, and how.

It was Eliot, and he said “Yeah, just one moment,” then got up to clear the table. It wasn’t long before he returned, saying: “Now we can play.”

That was Nate’s cue. He put his hands together, asked: “So, where were we?” and continued directly. “This is your third day wandering the enchanted castle, and you still haven’t found a way out. Every room you enter is different and yet, all the rooms are the same: everything is in perfect condition, everything is fresh and clean, and absolutely nothing looks as if the castle has been abandoned for three generations. When you go through the kitchen, the apricot pie smells as if it just came out of the oven.” There Nate paused, giving his players a chance to interact with the story.

“Oh, that smells delicious,” Hardison said. 

Eliot smacked him upside the head.

“Ow!” Hardison protested. “What was that for?”

“Enchanted castle, remember?” Eliot said in the slightly different cadence he used for ‘Mike’, his character. “Do not touch the food!”

“I wasn’t going to touch it!” Hardison protested.

Eliot and Parker exchanged a look. “Yeah, I don’t believe you either,” Parker said.

“I am a wizard,” Hardison said, affronted. “I do not need to be reminded not to eat the enchanted food.”

“Well, magic us a map to where the children are kept, wizard,” Eliot drawled.

“This castle,” Hardison said, drawing himself up, “has been enchanted by a dragon. I told you before we accepted this job, this is way above my pay grade. But no, you heard missing children and that was it. Aren’t you supposed to be neutral?”

Nate was wondering the same thing; Eliot’s reaction to that plot line was visceral and intense, and obviously - at least, to Nate - rooted in Eliot rather than in the background he’d given Mike.

“Aren’t you supposed to be good?” Eliot retorted - and it was Eliot, not Eliot-as-Mike.

Fascinating as Nate found that, Eliot’s response also had the chance to derail the game. Before that could happen, though, Parker said: “It’s not above our pay grade if we find the loom first. I want to find the loom that spins gold. Can you magic us a map to the loom?”

Hardison fell back against the chair and lifted his hands. “Dragon, people,” he said. “Dragon.”

That - or rather, both of those became a pattern: Eliot denigrating Hardison’s elf-wizard, and Eliot showing up well before the game session to cook something up in Nate’s kitchen.

Or, more often, bake.

“You’re late,” Parker said almost as soon as Hardison was through the door. “Why are you late? Eliot wouldn’t let us have cake without you.”

Hardison wasn’t late, but the cake was chocolate. Nate held back a smile.

“I’m not late,” Hardison protested, even as Eliot said: “It’s called ‘manners’, Parker.”

Unsurprisingly, the cake did not last long. 

“Finally,” Nate said, settling into his storytelling voice as soon as Eliot returned to the table from having cleared it, “the tunnel ends and you reach the dragon’s lair. Even though you’re deep underground, the lair is lit; there must be something like a skylight very high above, so high that you can’t see it even when you crane your neck. There’s just enough light to see the sleeping dragon by, but it’s not enough to see around the lair. You don’t need to see when you can hear, though, and what you hear over the dragon’s deep snores is children crying.”

“I sneak past the dragon to get to the children,” Parker announced in the split second it took Nate to draw a breath.

“Roll the die, please,” he said, instead of adding more detail to the scene.

Parker picked up the D20 and cast it. “Ha!” she announced triumphantly. “Twenty!”

That was a very convenient 20. Nate lifted up the die and gently weighed it in his hand. The result was inconclusive, but nevertheless Nate was confident as he told Parker: “The unloaded die back, please.”

“What?” Parker protested, wholly unconvincingly. “I didn’t--”

“Parker,” Nate cut her off.

Parker’s demeanor changed to sulking, but she produced an identical-looking die - out of where, Nate wasn’t exactly sure - and held it out to Nate. “There is no way you saw me swap the dice,” she protested. “No way!”

“I didn’t need to see you,” Nate said calmly.

“Then how did you know?” she demanded.

He was, Nate reflected, going to pay for this. He’d deserve it, too. He tacked on a smile because that was part of the mystique, and said: “I just did. That’s why I’m the--”

Eliot lifted a warning finger. “Don’t say it.”

Nevertheless, Nate did go ahead and complete the sentence: “--mastermind.”

The three looks he received spoke volumes.

“Okay, just for that,” Hardison said, “you’re going to let her sneak to the children without rolling again. To the children, and back.”

“All right,” Nate said easily.

Hardison straightened up sharply. “Parker, don’t do that! It’s a trap!”

Nate would’ve been disappointed if he’d missed it. Still, he asked: “How did you…?” and waited to see who would reply, and how.

It was Eliot, closing up the line with the other two: “I think it’s our turn to ‘just know’.”

Well, Nate thought, if ‘team building’ was the goal, then it was being nicely achieved.

That was the last thing to go according to plan for a while.

They were using Nate’s place to hang out together. There were all sorts of justifications that could be made up for that; the others would probably make them, if the question arose. Sophie, though - Sophie couldn’t lie to herself. It was a catch - not the catch, but a catch - in the way she could lie to anyone but herself: lying to herself would only end badly for her, and she knew it.

So Sophie wasn’t lying to herself about why they were in Nate’s living room, despite Nate’s not being and despite his failing to be there any time soon: they missed Nate. Not having Nate there with them felt wrong, and so they were trying to make up for that by hanging out in a space that was Nate’s.

Because having Nate on the comm with them was, clearly, not enough.

Speaking of--

“So,” came Nate’s voice over the comm, his tone the sort of precise that meant he was making a pitch, “I was thinking…”

He didn’t get further than that.

“No,” said Parker.

“Nope,” added Eliot.

“Definitely not,” Hardison concluded.

“Would you at least let me tell you what I was thinking?” Nate asked. His tone - Sophie thought - meant he knew that was not going to happen and was trying to make an alternate path to getting what he wanted.

It was Hardison who replied to him, which meant Nate had about 50-50 odds of getting where he wanted to get at. “You were thinking that if we don’t have another session until you’re out of prison, that’ll be a really long time.” He paused, probably for emphasis, then asked: “Am I wrong?”

“No,” Nate replied, “But--”

“No,” the other three replied all together.

“Really, Nate?” Sophie added. She even put her magazine aside. “They refused to hear you the first time.”

“That was going to be my point,” Nate replied, because of course he did.

“Respect, Nate,” Sophie said. Keeping her voice cool was hard work. “Learn it.”

“Oh,” Hardison said with thinly-masked glee, “burn.”

“I thought the game was going great!” Nate protested.

Nate had found his alternate path, as evidenced by there being real emotion in Hardison’s words as he replied: “Yeah, and then you went ‘The princess is in another castle’ on us.”

“Yeah,” Parker picked up from where Hardison left off. “There was no castle, no dragon - how do we even know that there are missing kids?”

It still made Sophie uneasy that Nate had gone for that. It was no surprise that Nate wove the game from the fabric of reality - that was how he knew to weave a story. But that-- Childhood was a touchy subject for their three younger teammates, and without knowing what Nate had planned Sophie couldn’t estimate the odds of that exploding in all their faces.

In the meantime, though, Nate was absolutely taking the chance to sell his pitch, now that he’d gotten the three interacting with him. “Because you met the families, in the village.”

“Maybe someone paid them off,” Eliot said - and he, Sophie thought, understood that they had capitulated the second they were willing to talk with Nate about this at all.

“Well, if someone did,” Nate said, and he wasn’t even trying to hide the salesman in his voice, “don’t you want to find out who that was? Because that cave trap came very close to killing all of you.”

There was a pregnant pause while that angle sank in, and then:

“No,” said Eliot.

“No-uh,” emphasized Hardison.

“I don’t care,” Parker said.

That was a lie, and by the tone of her voice and the set of her shoulders, Parker knew she was lying. Nate had to have known that, because he chose to not continue to press, but rather let the niggling worm he’d just planted do its work.

Sophie looked at Hardison and Eliot as they resumed their game, at Parker as she returned to her locks, and knew that wasn’t going to be long.

It really did not take long, but they managed to get Nate out of prison, first. And given how that had gone for them, they all needed the distraction.

“Why oh why did we take a ship?” Hardison moaned, chewing the metaphorical scenery. “Ships are terrible, man.”

“And woman,” Parker said. It could be Sophie’s imagination - it really was that difficult to tell - but it was possible that like Eliot, Parker was developing a different voice for when she was speaking in-character as Lolly.

“And woman,” Hardison agreed.

“Yeah, you wanna watch that bit, buddy,” Eliot said in-character, the difference subtle but there. “Or you’ll find a knife poking out from between your ribs one of these days. Nights.”

“Lolly wouldn’t knife me!” Hardison said, scandalized.

Eliot and Parker let the beat hang.

“You are terrible,” Hardison informed them, and it was anyone’s guess whether he was speaking as Eldaran or as himself. “You are even worse than this ship.”

“Which one of us?” Parker asked.

“Right now? Both of you.”

“So are we each, like, half of a ship, or…”

And Sophie was clearly missing something, here, because Hardison’s expression changed in a way that said Parker’s words did something to the inside of his head - something that wasn’t unpleasant, exactly, but nevertheless messed with him in some way.

And Eliot probably missed that, because he didn’t usually offer Hardison an out in those situations. “It’s not our fault you get seasick, man,” he said.

“Oh, so you’re allowed to use that?” Hardison retorted.

“I was only talking to you,” Eliot pointed out, sounding so reasonable that Sophie could imagine Mike’s face.

“He was,” Parker-as-Lolly supported.

Hardison leaned back in his chair, and informed them crossly: “I hate you people.”

Nate swallowed back a smile, and jumped right back into narrating.

Hardison and Parker were talking about ships and the internet, a conversation that was probably key to understanding just what had hit Hardison, earlier. Sophie was badly positioned to eavesdrop, though, as she was helping Eliot clear the table. She refused to let him do that alone; sooner or later, she thought, he would no longer put up with this.

That turned out to be ‘sooner’, because Eliot picked up both the dishcloth and one of the towels, marched over to where Parker and Hardison were still at the dining table, and threw those at their faces.

“I cooked,” he said shortly in reply to Hardison’s indignation. “You do the dishes.”

“Exactly,” Hardison said, an agreement that wasn’t an agreement at all. “You cooked. Why should I--”

Eliot, Sophie decided, needed the backup. Not in terms of actually doing the dishes, but in terms of the drive that had him cooking for them every game night. She cut Hardison off and demanded: “Were you raised in a barn?”

That actually gave Hardison a pause. 

“They’re both right, you know,” Nate remarked.

That had everyone suddenly focusing on him; he was still at the table, too, tidying up after the game. Sophie wasn’t actually sure whether his drawing attention to himself was deliberate or not.

“You know,” Eliot said, and his tone was very deliberate, “technically, you’re the host.”

Parker and Hardison exchanged a look then, simultaneously, threw both the towel and the dishcloth at Nate’s face. Hardison even managed to aim.

“Yeah,” Nate said, “I probably earned that.”

And if Sophie wondered if he was getting something out of the game as well, now she knew: he’d deliberately drawn everyone’s attention to his role in the shared dinner, and the setup was - without question - getting to his head, too.

He’d already put missing children in the game. Sophie could only hope that when it - almost certainly - blew up, it would only tear the scab off wounds that had already healed enough.

Sophie got up and went to the kitchen as soon as Nate started narrating the party of three’s entrance to the village. She was that certain that she knew where this was going. She kept some of her attention on Nate’s narration as she dug through the snack cupboard for the packet she knew was there and stuck it in the microwave. 

“Oh, seen anything you like, buddy?” Hardison demanded, and nothing in his tone alone indicated that this was in rather than out of character.

“Eldaran,” Eliot as Mike warned.

She could hear the slight smile in Nate’s voice as he continued the narration. “The barbarian stands up. His head nearly brushes the ceiling, and he’s obviously a regular enough patron that he has no problem avoiding the lamps.”

“Damnit, Eldaran!” Eliot swore, in- and out of character mingling for a second.

“What?” Hardison said, flip. “You’ve been complaining about boredom since the bog. I thought I’d get you some light exercise.”

That would’ve worked if it was only Mike who’d gotten restless, but Sophie was fairly sure that Eliot was getting restless, too. She wasn’t sure what kicked it up this time, but she was reasonably sure that she knew how to disarm it.

Right on time, the microwave beeped. She pulled the packet out and tore it open.

“Oh,” Hardison said, attention clearly wrenched away from the game, “something smells good.”

“Smells like popcorn,” Parker said.

“Caramel popcorn,” Eliot corrected, then turned his head to look at her. “Sophie, I told you that was for a special occasion.”

Yes, which was exactly why she reached for that over the regular popcorn. “Nate’s gonna let you break that barbarian’s arm without rolling,” she said through a deliberately full mouth.

Eliot looked at Nate.

“I do know you,” Nate said, sounding entirely too reasonable.

And it said something, Sophie thought, that Eliot didn’t show signs of having realized that Nate was managing him, too. Eliot was usually sensitive - or perhaps sensitized was the better word - to that sort of a thing.

“Fine,” Eliot said, and Sophie was glad no one but Nate was looking at her because her breath caught: whatever had wound up in Eliot was unwinding already. “But you’d better pass me some of that.”

Sophie made a noncommittal sound, and stepped over to sit down next to him and put the bowl next to his elbow.

Eliot chewed through a small handful, then said: “I break the barbarian’s fingers and elbow and dislocate his shoulder.”

“The entire group of dwarves, as well as the other barbarian, stand up,” Nate replied immediately.

“Uh-huh,” Hardison said.

“What, you didn’t see that coming?” Parker said as Lolly. “Because I totally saw that coming.”

And that indicated Parker had seen that coming out of character, too.

“Both of you shut up and help,” Eliot-as-Mike said, the bite in his voice too thin to believe, “or I swear…”

Sophie picked up another handful of popcorn and tossed a few into her mouth, keeping up the casual front she had on.

Nate, though - he gave her a quick, sharp look. Sophie tweaked an eyebrow at him, and he looked away. 

He should’ve known he wasn’t the only one playing this game.

Sophie could see just the moment Eliot decided what Mike was going to do.

“Wait, you’re going to do what?” Hardison blurted out - in-character, Sophie thought, because it had been a while since Hardison was genuinely that surprised at Eliot doing those things.

“It’s not a big deal,” Eliot said, using Mike’s voice.

“The lake is frozen, man!”

“You should try it sometimes,” Eliot said, and Mike’s voice was thinner for a moment, letting through more of the way Eliot often related to Hardison. “It’s good for your health.”

“No, thank you.”

“Besides,” Eliot continued, distance back and firmly in place, “the next item we need in order to find the loom that spins gold is at the bottom of the lake. So, I’m going to find it.”

“Thanks, Mike,” Parker said, using Lolly’s voice.

“I’m not doing it because I want to find the loom. I told you, odds are the damned thing is cursed. But if we find it…”

That - Sophie made a split-second decision - wasn’t something Eliot actually wanted to say to Parker. Too much of Eliot was coming in through Mike’s voice, but Parker’s character voice was always thinner where the loom was concerned: the idea of it had hooks inside her head much like the children had in all of theirs, but Eliot hadn’t noticed that and would end up hurting her in a way he never did.

Sophie cut him off with: “Don’t say it.”

“Don’t say what?” Eliot replied. “That…”

Sophie lifted a warning finger. “That’s just mean, and you bloody well know it.” She didn’t know what he was going to say, not precisely, but she could and did figure out the shape of it from the way Eliot shaped his words and voice.

Nate tilted his head minutely. “Are you part of this game, Soph?”

She made a movement that could’ve been tossing her hair back, if she had let it be a little bit bigger. “I’m the angel on their shoulder. Oh, see if I help you next time!” she added feigned-crossly as Parker, Eliot and Hardison showed their opinion on that idea, which they seemed to find patently ridiculous.

Nate turned back to Eliot. “You were saying…?”

Eliot hesitated, just long enough for Hardison to say: “Don’t say it, man.”

“Oh, are you a mind-reader now as well?” Eliot retorted.

He wasn’t - Sophie thought - going to say it, whatever ‘it’ was; were he going to say it, he’d’ve said that right then. And given the precise shade of annoyance in his voice, how fresh it sounded, he hadn’t minded that decision because she had asked. 

“Nope,” Hardison said, still fighting a battle he’d already won, “it’s just that Sophie’s usually right about those things. You already said you think the loom is cursed, we hear you.”

And if Sophie had any doubts about what had made Eliot change his mind, that would’ve clinched it: the way Eliot almost shifted in his chair, the micro-expression that flickered across his face, that slight tilt of his chin. “You know what?” he said, too flatly, then his tone switched to Mike’s: “I’m gonna jump in now. The sooner I get in this lake, the less I’ll hear about it.”

“Uh, don’t you need to cut a hole first?” Parker asked, Lolly’s tone pitch-perfect. Sophie felt a momentary relief that Parker elected to not pursue what Eliot had almost said and chose not to.

“That what he’s for,” Eliot replied, jerking his chin towards Hardison, who raised his hands, palms forward.

“Don’t look at me,” he said.

“Don’t you have a spell that does this?” Eliot-as-Mike asked.

“Not right now, I don’t.”

“Take a wizard, they say,” Eliot-as-Mike said, and the anger was entirely for show, enough that even Hardison seemed to sense that. “He’ll be useful, they say. Seriously, man?!” The last two words were emphasized by Eliot bringing up both his hands and shaking them in Hardison’s direction.

“Oh, just you wait until I make it to level 5, buddy,” Hardison retorted, with less than the usual bite he packed into that sort of a sentence. “Just you wait.”

“You’re gonna die before that happens,” Eliot said, and Sophie couldn’t tell if that was as himself or as Mike.

“Yeah, didn’t you say that you’re crunchy and good with ketchup?” Parker asked.

That did it: Nate’s mouth twitched in the beginning of a smile, Hardison drew himself up, and Eliot leaned back slightly in his chair, looking pretty much the way he always did when he - or Parker and he - succeeded at pulling Hardison’s metaphorical pigtails.

“Okay,” Hardison said, crossly. “Nobody is allowed to make fun of me except me, okay?”

“Watch me,” Eliot retorted.

Nate chose that moment to intervene, cutting in before Hardison had a chance to and - deliberately, Sophie thought - switching the focus firmly to him. “That’s an interesting hole you’re digging there, Eliot.”

Sophie could tell how the other three were going to react the second Nate’s lips formed the word ‘hole’, and she wasn’t disappointed by the chorus of: “Shut up, Nate.”

And yes, Nate had done that deliberately, because he leaned back in his chair, satisfied, and said: “Wow, guys, this time it took you two hours to say this. I am impressed.”

Sophie very nearly sighed, then added her part in the play: “Take the compliment and shut up, Nate.”

Nate liften his mug in a mock-salute towards her, then took a sip.

This time, Sophie did sigh.

It went like that for the next few game sessions: Eliot was getting increasingly edgy and taking it out on Hardison within the safe bounds of the game, while Nate and Sophie ran interference. It didn’t take either of them much time to understand why Eliot was the way he was: they were drawing nearer to the six-month deadline and nearer to Moreau, and Eliot hated this job even more than he hated going up against pharma companies. Really, it was a marvel - given how much he hated what they were doing - that he was growing edgy rather than distant. So long as Eliot wasn’t growing distant and detached, Sophie wasn’t going to worry - or that’s what she kept telling herself.

Then came Grakkville Market.

“First of all we’re buying soap,” Eliot declared. Mike’s voice was solid. “Then we’re buying food. I was thinking chicken.”

“Wait,” Hardison said. “When you say ‘chicken’...”

“I mean a whole, live chicken,” Eliot said with relish. “Oh, yeah. Do you have any idea what an amazing meal I could make out of that?”

Hardison lifted a finger. “That requires setting up camp. I was kind of hoping for the inn.”

“So you can get us into another brawl? I don’t think so.”

“He has a point,” Parker said, Lolly backing Mike up for once.

“See?” Eliot stuck his thumb in Parker’s direction. “She thinks I have a point.”

Sophie’s and Nate’s eyes met: Hardison’s reaction was going to be interesting.

“Okay, I really hate you two right now. Really, truly hate you. In fact,” Hardison drew himself up, “I hate you so much that I turn around and go into this maze-like market, alone.”

“I’m not rescuing you when you get kidnapped!” Eliot said, raising his voice slightly as if calling after someone.

Really, Eliot should have known better than to give Nate the idea. Within half an hour of gameplay, Eldaran got arrested by the - probably corrupt - local law-enforcement.

And it spoke volumes about Eliot - Sophie thought - that even with this being a game, even with Hardison being only mock-enraged about the whole thing, which Eliot was more than capable of reading on him; even with all that, guilt flickered across Eliot’s expression and settled into the crow’s feet next to his eyes.

“He got kidnapped,” Parker said.

“He got kidnapped,” he agreed.

“He got kidnapped,” Parker repeated for emphasis.

Hardison threw his hands up at the two of them.

“I mean, technically he got arrested, but…” Eliot let the sentence trail off. Both he and Parker sighed deeply, then Eliot continued: “We could bail him out.”

“Could we?” asked Parker. Implied was, This is not our style.

“It’ll be the last of our gold,” Eliot said, putting mock-regret into Mike’s voice.

Parker pursed her lips, then declared: “Fine. We’re going to steal a wizard.”

And because Eliot knew what signals he was giving - he always knew, even when he couldn’t help but give away those signals - he glanced down at the table then sang softly: “We’re off to steal a wizard, the stupidest wizard of all.”

Hardison balled up a sheet of paper and tossed it at Eliot’s head. Eliot caught it without even looking.

The line of his shoulders looked a little less tense, though, so Sophie figured they were good.

She wondered about the missing children plot and its having all but disappeared for several months.

She should’ve known Nate was building up to something truly foul.

“Wait,” Parker said, voice wavering between herself and Lolly. “Children have gone missing in Sheinar too?”

“Oh, it’s not just that they’ve gone missing, the old lady tells you,” Nate said. “Six months after they vanished, the children came back and killed everyone in Shienar Village. Then, they disappeared again.”

“How long do we have?” Eliot asked, the first to recover.

“Uh…” Hardison fished around in the papers he had spread out before him. “It’s been two months since we heard about the missing children in the other village, and they’d been missing for about a month at that point, so…”

“Three more months,” Eliot said. “We have three more months.”

“We were looking for the loom,” Parker said in a very small voice. She didn’t say, I was looking for the loom, but all of them knew whose character wanted to find the loom the most.

“Don’t go there,” Eliot said tightly. Sophie couldn’t tell if he said that to Parker, or Mike said that to Lolly.

“We were working on this too,” Hardison said, his voice cast to pacify and soothe. “We know about all the abandoned castles and all the places dragons are, or have been, rumored to live within a three-kingdom radius.”

“Yeah, but the children could be at any of these places!” Parker said, distraught still.

“Eldaran’s right, we gathered a lot of intelligence. What we didn’t do is sit down and look it over.”

“We do that now. I don’t-- I can’t-- The loom can wait. Right now, I don’t care about the loom. We need to find the children.”

It just had to be children, Sophie thought. The distress of her three younger teammates was completely real. Nate had to have known that would happen. Was he trying to drive home some sort of a lesson?

“I wasn’t finished,” Eliot said, cutting right through Sophie’s musing. “We didn’t waste the last two months, and not just because we were gathering intelligence. We’re stronger, we’re faster, we’re better at this. Two months ago we were going to die going up against a dragon. Now we just might stand a chance. Even if it takes us two more months to get to wherever we need to go, we’re gonna be even stronger and better when we get there. And that means these children have better odds. Are you sniffling?” he demanded of Hardison, whose eyes have grown misty as Eliot gave his little speech.

The break in tone between Mike and Eliot was clear. That made Sophie feel a little bit better.

“You get it, you truly get it,” Hardison said.

“What?”

“Leveling, man. It’s how games work: you take a side quest so you can get the XPs and level up so you can take the boss fight. It’s exactly what we did, and you get it.”

Eliot’s expression was a study in carefully avoiding looking pleased. “Whatever, man,” he said. “You’re weird. Lolly?” He switched tone, turning back to Parker.

She took a deep breath. “Yeah. Yeah. Let’s go steal back some children.”

“All right, Nate,” Eliot said as soon as the apartment door closed behind them, “why’d you drag us back here? It would’ve been safer if we’d gone our separate ways from the airport, and you know it.”

And also Eliot needed to lock a door behind him and fall apart, Sophie thought. It’d been barely over a week since Eliot’s past with Moreau had come up. It’d been a demanding, exhausting week for all of them, and it had to be that much worse for Eliot. Focusing on safety considerations was just like Eliot, but Sophie figured that this time, it was more of a diversion: Eliot probably knew that he needed to crash.

“Yeah, yeah,” Nate said dismissively, “we need to lay low after San Lorenzo, I was the one who said it.”

“You said it, but you’re not practicing it,” Sophie said, on the basis that Eliot could probably use the focus being off him.

“Hey!” Nate protested. “I’m going to practice it. But first, we wrap up this campaign.”

Oh, for the love of-- Sophie thought.

“We just wrapped up Vittori’s campaign,” Parker said, confused.

“He means the game, Parker,” Eliot told her.

“Man, even I don’t feel like gaming right now,” Hardison said.

Nate’s expression did a careful dance, emotions shuffled up behind an unreadable mask. That, Sophie thought, was probably not a good sign. She was proven correct by Nate saying, “Don’t you want to find the missing children?”

“Did you just give us a spoiler?” Hardison demanded, suddenly more awake. “Or are you pulling our leg?”

“I wouldn’t do that. Not when there’s children involved.”

“Wait, there’s real children--” Parker started up.

“Oh, no,” Nate said. “Definitely not. I mean, probably somewhere in the world, but-- no. What I mean is, fictional or not, you spent the last half a year trying to find them. And you could do that tonight.” He paused for a second, letting that sink in. “Or in two weeks. Take your pick.”

It was blatantly manipulative, in a way Nate - no longer - usually was with the team. It wasn’t a miscalculation on his part: they were all too tired, too emotionally wrung out, for that to properly register.

Nate wasn’t necessarily wrong: finding the children was going to hit the three, no matter when it happened. They may as well get it out of the way when they had two weeks free of jobs ahead of them, when they could afford to rest and recover. 

Their group wandered off towards the dining table, all of them but Eliot. Parker helped Nate pull out the game paraphernalia; Hardison just crashed in one of the chairs. For his part, Eliot stood in place, duffel bags still in hand. Then his shoulders rose and fell as he heaved a silent sigh, dropped the bags right there and said, “Oh, hell,” before joining the others at the table.

Yes, Eliot was fully aware of what this was going to do to him. So was Sophie - and so was, for that matter, Nate: Eliot had been wearing his earpiece back in the car with Chapman. They’d all heard what Moreau’s lackey had said. Sophie had no doubt Nate had put the pieces together, just as she had. She wasn’t surprised that Hardison hadn’t, but Parker - Parker was going to figure it out, Sophie thought. She could only hope that wouldn’t go as badly as Eliot seemed to think it would.

Nate gave it a beat of silence after they all sat down, then began the narration. “Finally, the tunnel ends and you reach the dragon’s lair. Even though you’re deep underground, the lair is lit; there must be something like a skylight very high above, so high that you can’t see it even when you crane your neck. There’s just enough light to see the sleeping dragon by, but it’s not enough to see around the lair. You don’t need to see when you can hear, though, and what you hear over the dragon’s deep snores is children crying.”

“The last time we were in this situation,” Eliot said, and Sophie couldn’t tell whether that was in or out of character, “it was a trap.”

“It’s a dragon, man,” Hardison said. “It’s smart. Maybe it put that trap there so we won’t do the right thing now.”

“You’re not the one the cave collapse would’ve buried,” Eliot replied.

Hardison turned to Parker. “Lolly?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s your call.”

Sophie counted seconds before Parker took a deep breath, then said clearly: “I sneak past the dragon to get to the children.”

“Roll the die, please,” Nate said.

Parker did. 

They were staring, Sophie knew.

“Oh. my. God,” Hardison said.

“Yeah!” Eliot said, and yeah, Sophie thought, none of his defences were working right now, and this was going to hit him like a hammer between the eyes.

“Twenty,” Nate declared. “Nat twenty, even. You successfully sneak past the dragon and find the children. They are in a long series of cells, each locked with a padlock the size of your head.”

“That just makes them easier to pick,” Parker said.

“There’s no trap?” Hardison said, the confidence he displayed a moment before - when Eliot needed it - gone.

“There’s no trap,” Nate confirmed. He wasn’t looking at Hardison, though, and neither was Sophie.

“Oh my god,” Hardison repeated, then he too noticed what was going on. “Eliot, you all right, man?”

“Eliot?” Parker asked tentatively.

Sophie wasn’t wrong: the moment hit Eliot as hard as she thought it would. His eyes were scrunched shut, hands balled into fists on the table, and he was shaking; subtly, but shaking.

The shaking wasn’t good. The shaking wasn’t good at all. If Eliot was about to have a flashback, they needed to-- 

Eliot must’ve reached the same conclusion at the same time because he pushed his chair away from the table, so hard he almost lost his balance, then stomped out of the apartment, the door very nearly slammed behind his back.

This wasn’t as bad as Sophie thought it’d be, it was worse, and there was no way that Eliot being out there on his own was safe. She looked at Nate, her one potential ally in this, but Nate seemed completely calm as he got up to open a window, letting in the cool night air and the noise from the bar below.

“Why was Eliot crying?” Parker asked, sounding small.

“I think you’d better not ask him that,” Nate said. “Because then, he will tell you.”

“Nate, a word?” Sophie said tightly, then followed him near the monitors, as far away from the dining table as they could get without actually leaving Parker and Hardison on their own.

They two were talking quietly, but Sophie wasn’t listening to that, not even with half an ear. She needed her whole attention on Nate, because he - unlike her - had done the math properly on how badly Eliot was going to react, pushed that hard deliberately, and Sophie wasn’t actually okay with that.

There were things you didn’t do to your team. She thought they were past the point of Nate learning that.

“Was that really necessary?” she asked, her voice coming out in a hiss.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nate deflected automatically.

She shook her head. “Don’t play coy. Not now. Not about this.”

“I did give them the choice,” Nate said. He was trying for his reasonable voice, but Sophie could tell: he knew that was a shit excuse also.

She laid that out where he couldn’t deny it. “And after the week we’ve had, you expected them - expected Eliot to keep up, to think about all the angles and the implications? They trust you, Nate,” she said exasperatedly, “even he does! And I don’t think this is what they signed up for.”

It wasn’t. It wasn’t what Sophie had thought she was talking them into, almost a year back.

“I know what I’m doing,” Nate said.

Sophie was having none of that. “Do you? Because that didn’t look to me like he was ready.”

Nate’s expression became complex again. “The game is far from over.”

For a long moment Sophie just breathed, forcing her anger down and forcing herself to really look at Nate, to take in all the tells he was giving, everything he knew she’d be able to read on him - because he couldn’t lie to her, not when she was looking for it, and they both knew that.

She wasn’t going to back down, wasn’t going to let Nate claim this one for an uncomplicated victory, and that meant there was only one thing she could do, only one thing she could say. “Fine. I want in.”

“‘In’ as in…?” Nate asked, letting the question trail off. The question - Nate’s voice and body language as he asked it - said that he wasn’t trying to negotiate the extent of her involvement from this point on, but rather merely having it clarified, being put out where they could both see it. 

“I want to know what you’re planning and why you’re planning it,” she said, flatly. “If this is the kind of game you’re running for them, you’re not running it alone.” That last bit was vicious and - given the way she was reading Nate - not entirely necessary, but she did want him to know, thought he needed to know just how angry she was with him.

She hadn’t missed the wounded cry that’d come in through the window a few moments earlier, hadn’t failed to recognize Eliot’s voice.

“Fine,” Nate said, simply.

She tilted her chin. “Thank you,” because good behaviour should be rewarded.

In the silence that followed, she could hear Hardison saying: “...happened to some of my foster siblings.”

“So is it something they did or something that happened to them?” Parker asked as Nate and Sophie were returning to the table. The question, and Parker’s voice as she asked him, told Sophie what the conversation was about, how the subject of Hardison’s foster siblings had come up and what it was, precisely, that had happened to them.

That was good. It meant that when the truth came up eventually - and eventually, it would - Hardison would be able to reconcile himself to it, would be able to accept it without tearing the team apart.

“Both,” Nate said, answering Parker’s question. 

“Nate’s not wrong about that,” Sophie allowed.

“You think he’s going to be okay?” Hardison asked the two of them.

“Well, it hasn’t killed him so far,” Sophie said. She couldn’t keep the darkness from her voice.

And Hardison heard it, because he said bitingly: “Oh, because that’s encouraging.”

“He’ll be fine,” Nate said, his coldness allowing him to be a little more soothing in this moment. “Just give him time.”

“You know it’s not as simple as that,” Sophie told him exasperatedly. Goodness only knew what Eliot would revert to, after having been pushed this hard before he was ready for it.

Nate’s expression did another one of those complicated dances, until he settled for replying, looking at her rather than at Parker and Hardison: “Well, like you said - it hasn’t killed him yet.”

Chapter Text

Two weeks. Two weeks they were supposed to lay low after San Lorenzo. Barely a week later found them at Mount Kibari, returning a dead man to his wife. They didn’t talk about San Lorenzo. They also didn’t talk about whatever had gone down on the mountain - and Hardison wasn’t blind, or deaf, or anything else of the sort: something had gone down, up on the mountain - something that made Eliot carry himself differently, something that rattled Parker. Hardison had a principled stand against anyone or anything that upset Parker but the difference on Eliot was good, and that put Hardison in a conflict of interest, so to speak.

Not that they were going to talk about it. Just like they weren’t going to talk about San Lorenzo, about Moreau, about whatever was so terrible that Eliot had told Parker Don’t ask me this over it.

Not that that mattered, because Hardison meant what he’d said to Parker: Damien Moreau was something that had happened to Eliot, and that made anything Eliot had done for Moreau something that Moreau had done through Eliot as much as it was something that Eliot had done himself. If Eliot wanted not to talk about it, then Hardison ought to damn well respect it.

Knowing would probably just make him sick, anyway. Which meant that in the meantime--

“So, where were we?” Nate asked, all businesslike.

The very next day after Mount Kibari, the lot of them were already seated around Nate’s dining table, Sophie nursing a cup of tea and whatever Eliot was baking this time in the oven, smelling like heaven.

“We saved the children,” Parker promptly supplied, as if it had been that simple, as if it had been just that.

“And we did it right under the dragon’s nose,” Hardison said. He let his voice reflect exactly how pleased he was about that - and he also very carefully didn’t look at Eliot.

Eliot didn’t pick that up. Instead, it was Parker who said: “Can we go find the loom now?”

“Good with me,” Hardison said.

“Yeah,” Eliot said.

And they were off.

It was easily the most fun game session they’d had in a while. The adventure of the week involved planning an actual in-game con. It was exactly what they needed. The evening was made even better by Eliot’s dish-of-the-week, which turned out to be onion quiche. Eliot could cook that every week as far as Hardison was concerned, and given Eliot’s chocolate cakes - plural, because he’d baked them at least three different ones - that was saying something.

Then Nate got up first.

“Are you clearing the table?” Eliot asked.

Hardison couldn’t fault him for that tone of voice: Hardison’s would’ve probably been even more suspicious were he the one to voice the question, which was exactly why he didn’t. Hardison liked Nate, appreciated him a whole lot, but the man just didn’t do things like that without a concrete reason, and that made Hardison… concerned.

“It’s like you said,” Nate replied, “I’m the host.”

“Don’t expect a medal,” was Eliot’s gruff reply.

“Yeah,” Nate replied, unfazed, “I thought I might hear that.”

Sophie tilted her head, but again it was Eliot who replied: “Interesting phrasing.”

Nate’s expression and the set of his shoulders said that were he a normal man, he’d’ve shrugged. “I knew one of you would say it; I just didn’t know who.”

Sophie gave up. “Nate,” she said, “did you just admit to not being able to know everything in advance?”

Nate’s expression was remarkably straight as he replied: “I am, in fact, capable of learning.”

Was that an apology? Hardison wondered. Sophie was thinking along the same lines to judge by her expression, and even Parker tilted her head minutely. Eliot didn’t give any sign that he realized that Nate had probably just apologized for the night they’d returned from San Lorenzo. That was its own sign: the Eliot was going to pretend that night hadn’t happened, right up to and including ignoring Nate apologizing for it.

Hardison bit back a sigh. He didn’t need the look Sophie was going to give him for it. Hardison was all in favour of Talking About Things, but in this particular case that was probably going to do more harm than good. It Eliot wanted to Not Talk about it, they were going to not talk about it.

Even if Hardison thought that was a bad idea.

Hardison was never going to say it out loud, but Nate got pretty good at managing a game. That was a relief - and another thing Hardison was never going to say out loud: that it was a damn good thing that Nate made for a good game manager, because Hardison enjoyed playing the game more than he enjoyed running it.

And the Ancillian Castle heist adventure was fun. Nate had the difficulty level down perfectly - it was challenging enough to make them work for it, but not an inch harder than it had to be. By the time they made it out of the castle, Eldaran, Lolly and Mike were all basically high on it.

“She can hang from a building with her fingernails, man, I don’t think walking tiptoe all night slowed her down any,” Eliot said, speaking about the ridiculous outfit that Lolly had had to wear for the costume ball.

“Yeah,” Parker said, and immediately added: “And why would I complain about the gown? Do you have any idea how many jewels I can hide in the sleeves alone? Why can’t I wear this every day?”

“Right,” Hardison acknowledged. “Okay, who has the list? Anything else we need to get before we can head out for the Mountain and finally trade for the map?”

“We have everything,” Parker said.

“And more than enough time to get to Black Mountain before the Blood Moon,” Eliot added.

Uh-uh. Hardison knew that tone, and it sounded the same when Mike was talking to Eldaran as it did when it was Eliot talking to Hardison. “At your pace, or at normal people’s pace?”

“Don’t you mean at normal pace, or at your pace?” Eliot shot back.

Yeah, that was what Hardison feared. Still, as it wasn’t like Eliot was going to bodily drag him on a march, Hardison continued to the next thing they needed to figure out. “Right, well, we also have one last problem to solve. The map is a demon map. We need to barter for it at a demon carnival, and then we need to read it. And I don’t speak Abyssial. Or read it.”

“Take a wizard, they say,” Eliot said bitingly, the beginning of one of Mike’s favorite lines, which Hardison let him get away with without comment because Eliot was clearly enjoying himself, “he’ll be useful, they say. You don’t have Comprehend Languages? That’s first grade stuff, man!”

“Oh, you’d rather I learned that and not Cure Light Wounds?” Hardison shot right back. “Sure, every time you’re bleeding out I’ll be able to scold the monster in its native tongue. Would that make you happy?”

“You know what makes me happy?” Eliot retorted.

“Oh?”

“I know Abyssial.”

“You have Comprehend Languages?” Parker asked, confused.

“I took a level in bard, not in wizard,” Eliot said. Hardison had given him shit for that - team needed its fighter - but the truth was, he was walking on air for a week after Eliot chose to spend his XPs on that. It was proof that Eliot was genuinely enjoying himself, and that made Hardison happy. Very. 

Meanwhile, Eliot continued. “No, I can just speak and read Abyssial.”

“What?” Hardison asked.

“Learned it from a demoness once. Classy lady.”

Apparently, Eliot had been bringing himself into the game as early as when they’d developed their characters. At this rate, it was going to turn out that “Mike” was short for something more game-appropriate, and that Eliot had just been trolling him all along. All he said out loud, though, was: “I shouldn’t be surprised, should I.”

Nate probably thought he was funny. Nate had probably thought he was funny when he’d said, three years prior, “Hardison dies in plan M”. Nate had never joked like that about the others, and Hardison had been keeping that observation to use at the appropriate moment since.

And if Nate pulled this one more time, Hardison just might pull that one out and hold it over his head. In the meantime, though, he replied to Parker’s - to Lolly’s - You’re seasick with “You say that like it’s a surprise.”

“I don’t know,” she said, defensive, “I thought maybe you got used to it.”

“No, I did not,” he replied.

“Isn’t there a spell for that?” Eliot asked, the twitch to his lips betraying that he, too, found this hilarious. “Or a potion or something? I’m just saying, man,” he added in response to the Look Hardison was giving him. “Maybe you want to add it to your arsenal.”

Oh, this was on. “Okay first of all,” Hardison said, “it’s not called an ‘arsenal’.”

“Toolbox. Spell kit. Happy now?”

There was no doubt that Eliot was doing this on purpose. “You really ought to know better by now.”

“I don’t care?”

That, Hardison knew, was bullshit. And the only reason Hardison was putting up with Eliot behaving like a kid on the playground was because Eliot was behaving like a kid on the playground with a girl he liked. Hardison drew his back very straight, and said: “I’m going to need a minute.”

“Wait, was that in or out of character?” Parker asked.

“I’m going to go with ‘both’,” Hardison replied.

“Come on, Lolly,” Eliot said, “let the man hurl in peace.”

Parker made a face at him.

“Hey,” Eliot continued, “are there any lemons on this ship?

“Why do we need a lemon?” Parker asked.

“We don’t need a lemon; he needs a lemon,” Eliot said, jerking his head in Hardison’s direction. “It helps keep the nausea down.”

“Oh, now you remember that?” Hardison demanded. “We’re been on this ship for three days, man!”

“Just be grateful I know this, dammit!” Eliot groused.

And that, that was the thing Hardison had been privately wondering about for years. Because the specific way Eliot had been giving him shit, Hardison knew the shape of that: or at least, he knew the shape of that when it came from most women or from a man who was into other men. Coming from those, this particular form of shit-giving meant I find you attractive and that pisses me off. Except Eliot consistently picked up women only. The only hint that he could be into men was the way he’d harass Hardison then turn around and do something kind, then pretend the kindness away. It had been driving Hardison up the wall but, well: a man couldn’t win on all fronts. He was getting somewhere with Parker - slowly, patiently, but getting somewhere - and relationships were complicated enough when they involved only two people. Hardison was working on being fine with that.

In the meantime, though, Eliot was beginning to shift in his chair, because Hardison had left the conversation hanging and that kept the focus on Eliot, and what he’d said, and how he’d said it. Problem was, Eldaran didn’t have a better response for that than Hardison did.

Parker’s eyes darted between the two of them, back and forth. “I’m going to find a lemon,” she said, saving the moment. “Bye!”

The game settled into a comfortable routine: their characters were travelling to the loom’s location, the difficulty level was just right, Eliot cooked something new every week and Nate did the dishes.

Well, it was a mostly comfortable routine.

“He does that every time now,” Sophie said quietly. The four of them were still seated by the table; Nate was in the kitchen, rinsing the dishes and putting them in the washer.

“Should we be impressed?” Eliot replied, the tone of his voice suggesting that no, they should not.

Sophie countered that with, “I’m impressed you got him to do that.”

“You are?” Parker asked.

“Yes,” Sophie said, the tone of her voice making that a question: Aren’t you?

“I think it’s creepy,” was Parker’s reply.

Yes, yes it was, Hardison agreed; the first time could’ve been an apology but he had no idea what Nate was trying to say by making it a pattern and, as a rule, he didn’t like it when he didn’t know where Nate was going with a thing. It was even worse when Sophie didn’t know where Nate was going with a thing, which seemed to be the case here or else she wouldn’t have remarked on it.

“Yeah,” Eliot agreed with Parker, at the same time that Sophie allowed, “That too.”

And into the beat of silence, Hardison added: “Definitely creepy.”

“You know how Eldaran hates ships?” Parker asked.

Hardison was going to hate this conversation, he could already tell. And by “hate”, he meant secretly love but pretend it offended the hell out of him.

“Unfortunately,” Eliot replied to Parker.

“Hey!” Hardison said, getting his affronted game on. 

“I hate deserts,” Parker said. “All this sand.”

“Oh, the sand?” Hardison asked, still in the same tone. “That’s your problem, the sand?”

“What’s yours?” Eliot countered. 

“The heat, for starters,” Hardison replied. “Then, I have one word for you: camels.”

“Really?” Parker asked, and yeah: she knew exactly what game the three of them were playing and as usual, she was taking Eliot’s side. “I think they’re kind of cute.”

Hardison lifted a finger. “One spat me in the eye. In the eye!”

“That was kind of funny,” Eliot said.

Hardison straightened his back. “So you’re a fan of them, too?”

“I hate their guts, man,” Eliot said, and fine, Hardison was okay with being the butt of the joke because it was rare to hear genuine laughter in Eliot’s voice, and there was laughter there as he said that, then added: “But it was still funny.”

Really, Eliot was lucky that Hardison liked him, because if he didn’t, his rage wouldn’t be just for show.

Parker made it easy on him: she’d only got up to the roof of Nate’s building. Hardison didn’t have to climb anything worse than a couple flights’ worth of stairs to find her. In translation from Parker to English, that meant she wasn’t really pissed off with him and wasn’t seriously hurt either, but she was still going to make him work for it.

Hardison was absolutely fine with that.

“Hey,” he said, coming up behind her. “Thanks for rescuing my ass back there. I forgot to say that.” She didn’t turn her head, so he added: “And for doing my homework.”

She looked at him. “I thought you didn’t really go to that school.”

“It’s the thought that counts,” he said. “And also, I was an asshole.”

“Yeah, you were,” she agreed. “What got into you?”

Had Sophie or Eliot asked him that Hardison would’ve flinched, because from them that question would’ve been angry, would’ve been an accusation. Coming from Parker, though, it wasn’t either of those things: it was exactly what the words themselves were - she asked because she wanted to know, wanted to better understand.

“I spent a lot of my childhood and the first half of my teens dreaming about going to college,” he said. “Plus, you know, people never thought I was cool before.”

“Yes, we did,” she replied promptly. “I don’t count? Eliot doesn’t count?”

That made Hardison feel all warm inside. And also like an even worse asshole, because that should have counted, and Hardison didn’t know how to explain that it wasn’t the same thing, or at least didn’t feel like the same thing. Sophie or Nate could probably sort it out for him if he asked them. Hell, Eliot in the right mood could sort it out - or more accurately, Eliot in the right mood would agree to tell Hardison, because whether or not Eliot could sort it out wasn’t the thing that depended on his mood. It felt odd, being bottom of the barrel in something, and Hardison knew he didn’t deal well with that feeling. Which was the reason he decided to try and sort this out with Parker without talking to any of their other teammates first. Hopefully he could actually pull that off. “Like I said, I was an asshole. And also,” Hardison continued, because what he was about to say was true, “mostly, you and Eliot make fun of me.”

“Eliot does it because he worries about you getting cocky,” she said. “Because you get cocky.”

That was, decidedly, Eliot Logic. Hardison wasn’t going to argue with that, among other reasons because Parker wasn’t wrong: when you were used to being the smartest person in the room, it was easy - too easy - to forget that wasn’t the only thing that counted. There was another question that that begged, though. “Why do you do it?” he asked.

“Because it works,” she said, quickly again. “And because…” she hesitated. “It looks like you kind of like it?” Her tone made that a question. She added: “Am I wrong?”

Hardison expelled a long breath. “No, you’re not wrong,” he admitted. “Mostly because I can tell you aren’t really doing that to be mean, and like I said: it’s the thought that counts.”

“Okay,” Parker said, and the tone of her voice implied, I have no idea what you just said and I’ll ask Sophie about it later. 

“How did you know where to find me, anyway?” Hardison asked.

“Eliot made the interrogator tell him.”

“Wha-- Eliot made the interrogator, he made a professional interrogator tell him? How did he do that?”

“By torturing him,” Parker said, as if that was completely obvious.

“Okay, now that’s just disturbing.”

Parker gave him an odd look. “Not as disturbing as the other thing.”

“What other thing?”

“The one that Chapman said?”

There was something in her tone of voice that Hardison didn’t like. He didn’t like it at all. That meant it took him a moment longer to place the name Chapman, to recall he was Moreau’s top lackey, the one who seemed to be Eliot’s replacement in Moreau’s employ. “I don’t remember what Chapman said,” Hardison admitted.

And yeah, the look Parker was giving him was really odd. Really unhappy, but also odd. “About the-- about the children.”

“You’re going to have to remind me.”

“When he drove Eliot to Atherton’s house.”

Atherton, that was the general, the guy that Moreau had wanted Eliot to kill. Because Moreau wasn’t a sick, sick fuck that got off on control, at all. But, “I still don’t remember.”

Parker’s look said, clear as day, that she really hated that Hardison was making her say this out loud. “He said that he wanted to kill the entire family. Like they usually do.”

Hardison was missing something here. And given by how much it agitated Parker, he was going to hate it. Still, he had to ask: “Okay, so?”

“The whole family? Like they usually do? Like Eliot--” Parker stopped, as if she - no, she really was unable to finish that sentence. She stared at him and Hardison stared back at her until what she’d just said suddenly jumped in focus, and he knew.

He was sick to his stomach and wheezing like someone just punched him in the solar plexus, because he knew. “Just to be sure we’re on the same page here - you’re saying that Eliot…” He couldn’t finish that sentence either. “Shit. Fuck. No wonder that messed him up, that’s horrible. No, scratch horrible, this is the worst. No, scratch that one also, I do not have the words for how nasty this is.”

Parker’s look was still odd, if a little less full of tension. “You’re not angry. I thought you’d be angry.”

“I am angry.”

“I mean, with Eliot.”

Okay, that hurt. “Girl, I meant what I said: I think Damien Moreau happened to Eliot.” Something occurred to him. “You were never in a room with him, were you? Man can charm the paint off the walls. Terrified the fuck out of me, and still--” Hardison swallowed back the phrase could charm the pants off someone because Hardison didn’t like the way that sounded, talking about Moreau and Eliot. Instead Hardison finished, a little lamely, “--and was still that charismatic.” After a moment, he added: “You’re not angry with Eliot either.”

“Eliot hates himself,” she said, so quickly it was obvious that she didn’t have to think about it now, because she’d already thought about it before. “Makes it kind of wrong to--” she waved her hand.

Hardison agreed: they could make Eliot feel worse if they tried, but Hardison remembered Eliot’s face when he’d said, The worst thing I did, I did for Damien Moreau, his face as he’d told Parker, Don’t ask me that, because I’ll tell you. Remembered Eliot’s voice over the comm, telling the interrogator, I didn’t count; I don’t need to. Trying to make Eliot feel worse than he already did would just be cruel, rather than any kind of right. “Yeah,” Hardison said, then sighed: “Yeah.”

Nate clearing the dishes wasn’t the only new pattern. And this one, Hardison was going to call out. “Seriously, Nate?” he said.

“Seriously, what?” Nate replied.

“Costume ball, fine, that was a nice touch,” Hardison said, ticking incidents off on his finger. “The desert I was willing to spot you. But now a gold mine? Gold mine? Are you basing this game on our jobs? Do you even have a game plan?” Which was the crucial question: Hardison was beginning to trust Nate to run the game, here, and he was hoping like hell that that wasn’t a wrong call.

“Geek has a point,” Eliot said.

“And you’re still saying that like it’s a bad word,” Hardison retorted, because he wasn’t going to let that fly even if Eliot was backing his play against Nate.

“To be specific, our latest job involved gold, not a gold mine,” Nate said. He was splitting hairs, and that meant that Hardison absolutely had this right. “There was always going to be a mine there; making it a gold mine was just… artistic flair.”

“And the desert?” Hardison demanded, just to make sure.

“It made sense on the map,” Nate replied. He wasn’t even trying to pretend his way out of this one, and that made Hardison even more wary.

“So you are basing the game on the job,” Parker said.

“I’m inspired by it,” Nate corrected.

He was splitting hairs again; this was looking worse and worse by the second. “So I’m going to ask again: do you even have a game plan?”

“Oh, yeah,” Nate replied, in a completely different tone of voice. “There is a game plan. There is very much a game plan.”

Well, shit. Hardison didn’t like that one bit. And he wasn’t the only one, because Eliot said into the silence that suddenly descended on the table: “Anyone else worried now?”

Hardison raised his hand. Parker copied the gesture.

“Sophie?” Eliot asked, looking at her.

“Don’t look at me,” she said. “I know what the game plan is.”

Well, shit. This time, Hardison was the first to find his tongue. “Okay. Now I’m twice as worried.”

“Yeah,” Eliot agreed.

“Me too,” Parker said.

“Really, guys, would we do that?” Nate asked, a knee-jerk reaction, then seemed to realize just what he asked and of whom, because he said: “That was a stupid question, wasn’t it.”

“Yeah,” Eliot said.

“Yup,” Hardison agreed.

And Parker rounded it up with: “Pretty much.”

By the next time they sat down to play, Hardison had completely forgotten that he was worried about the game plan. That was for a number of reasons. The first was that Dubenich happened and things had gone very, very wrong. The second was that Nate got Hardison involved in a non-game plan of his, and that had Hardison worried in its own right. And lastly, Parker had a plan, and Parker’s plan--

Parker’s plan made it very hard on Hardison to think.

Sophie was the one who put the team on vacation. Nate hadn’t even argued. Parker wasn’t really sure what that meant, but Sophie hadn’t seemed particularly worried about that so Parker decided it didn’t really matter. Vacation was fun, anyways, even if it seemed like Hardison would never learn how to handle his own jumping harness. Actually, Parker found herself wanting to smile every time Hardison managed to get it wrong. That was a weird feeling and it made no sense: that should’ve annoyed her but somehow, because it was Hardison, she found it cute instead. The oddity of that made her think about something else she found odd, and that-- that was maybe not a good thing to think about on vacation because it made her not-quite-sad, and vacations - according to Hardison - should be fun.

“I’m going to say something,” Parker announced one evening after Hardison was done sweeping their hotel room for bugs. “I think it’s going to be weird.”

Hardison sat down on the bed next to her. “Girl, you know I love your weird.”

“I don’t know that it’s a me-weird. It might be just weird.”

“All right,” Hardison said. “Hit me. I mean - go ahead. Tell me. I won’t get weird about the weird.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Okay.” Parker took a deep breath. “I miss Eliot. Like - I miss Sophie and Nate too, but it’s different. I miss Eliot more like-- You got weird. You promised you won’t get weird.”

“What? No, I don’t--”

“Hardison.”

His shoulders dropped. “Okay. But like - it’s not your weird I’m weird about.”

“Then what are you weird about?”

“My weird.”

“Tell me.” His expression was dubious, so Parker added: “I mean it, Hardison. Seriously. I--” Her voice was going to quaver. She knew that. She also really meant it when she said: “I need to know.” She was going to continue, but something shifted in Hardison’s expression and she thought that maybe he got it the first time. She really hoped he did; she didn’t want to have to say this again.

But she really did need to know.

“Did I ever mention,” Hardison began; his voice was a little strange and he was staring straight ahead at the carpet instead of meeting her eyes, “that I don’t discriminate between gals and guys? Bat for both teams?” he added, a response to what - she was pretty sure - was her expression of non-comprehension. “Uh--” He took a deep breath. “I’m into both men and women.”

“Oh!” She didn’t understand why that was so difficult for him to say; she made a mental note to shoot Sophie an email about that. “What does that--” That was a stupid, stupid question that she was about to ask. “You like Eliot also.” He looked like he expected her to be upset, which she didn’t understand at all. “How is that your weird? I just said--”

“No, Parker--”

She waited.

Carefully, he said: “Usually, people like-like only one person.”

He was so obviously expecting it to be a problem, that Parker forced herself to not impatiently reply but rather take a deep breath herself and think about it, try and figure out how Sophie would think about it.

Hardison said “like-like.” That was different from just liking someone. Just liking someone was the way she liked Sophie; like-like was the way she liked Hardison and he liked her - the kind of liking that made people “date” and seemed to usually lead to sex. You were only supposed to like-like one person; Parker knew that on her own, didn’t need Hardison to tell her that. That was probably what Hardison meant was his weird - that he liked-liked both her and Eliot. 

Maybe he expected her to be jealous, the way she’d been about him liking that one client. She wasn’t, though. It was Eliot.

How did she like Eliot?

Not like she liked Hardison, but-- like it could get there, if she gave it a chance. It had taken her a while to get to like-like Hardison, too. And even if it didn’t get there, Hardison like-liking Eliot wasn’t going to be a problem. He wasn’t just anyone; he was Eliot.

“Do you think he like-likes us too?” she asked.

Hardison blinked several times, very rapidly. “What-- How-- Give me a moment here.”

“I’m not weirded out by your weird,” she said, in case he needed that said out loud.

“Yes, I get that, I just--” He blew out a long breath. “You kind of broke my brain with that question, girl.”

She was pretty sure she knew what Hardison was thinking, why he was reacting this way, and if she was right then he was wrong. “Because people usually like-like only one person?”

“Pretty much.”

“We’re not most people,” she said. “We break laws all the time.”

“Well, when you put it that way--”

She waited.

Eventually, he said, “No, you know what, I have no idea what he feels.”

“Should we find out?” she asked. “Because I want to find out.”

“Yeah, sure, let’s just go ahead and do that,” he said, in a tone that implied he meant the exact opposite of what he said. “You let me know when you figure out how to do that without wrecking everything.”

Usually she would ask Sophie. She didn’t want to ask Sophie, though; was pretty sure that Hardison would be vehemently against asking Sophie - but she might’ve gone ahead and done it anyway, if she didn’t feel the same way she thought Hardison was feeling.

She nodded. “Challenge accepted.”

Their first game session after vacation started out really really boring. Nate didn’t have anything nasty waiting for them in the last stretch of the woods, and there seemed to be nothing and no-one in the magical library who wanted to kidnap Hardison. They did find a collapsible portal, which meant no more ships and no more deserts; that was neat.

Rolling for a prolonged search was still boring.

“Yeah, baby!” Hardison crowed. “This was number 10. Give it to me.”

“Us. Give it to us,” she corrected. “Eliot’s on note-taking duty.”

“You guys are having breakfast, right? Hardison asked. “I can read out loud what I find.”

Nate slid him a sheet of paper. “There you go, then.”

Hardison glanced at the page. “Oh look, it has a table of contents.”

“Is it in a language you can read?” Eliot asked.

Hardison gave him a Look. “Ha ha, very funny. Yes, it’s in a language I can read.”

“Well?” she asked. She was impatient and she knew it, but seriously: boring.

“Oh, this is a dark, dark book,” Hardison said. “Draft of the Living Dead, On Zombification, Tarzos’ Arrows, Controlling Animals, Controlling Plants, Chalices of Eshkovar…”

Ice slid down her spine. “Wait. Chalices of Eshkovar?”

“Yeah, like the one we-- Wait.” Judging by Hardison’s expression, he just got the icy feeling, too.

“Chalices, plural?” Eliot demanded. He was angry - scared-angry, Parker thought. “Like the one the dragon used to store the power from the blood sacrifice, the one we destroyed - there’s more than one of these things?”

“Let me flip through to this chapter,” Hardison said.

Nate pushed a thin booklet towards him.

Hardison looked at it the way he looked at her explosives. “You made props.”

“I made a prop,” Nate corrected.

“Actually,” Eliot said, “you made at least two.”

“I have a really bad feeling about this,” Hardison said. Then, with trepidation, he picked up the booklet and started reading. A few moments later, he said: “Guys, do you remember what colour the gem was on the chalice we destroyed?”

“Yeah, green, why?” Eliot asked.

“Are you sure?” Hardison asked.

“It was green, I remember it too,” she said. “Why?”

Hardison looked really, really unhappy. Very. “Because green gem means an inactive chalice.”

“In Common, Eldaran!” Eliot snapped.

“We destroyed the wrong chalice.”

“We put those children back in the village.” The words slipped out of her mouth on their own.

“Dammit, Eldaran!” Eliot said, his anger audible. “You said destroying the chalice would free them from the curse! Where’s the calendar, how long do we have--”

Parker did the math, as easily as she calculated trajectories and velocities for a jump. “Two weeks. We have two weeks.”

“Oh, gods,” Hardison said, then put his face in his hands.

Eliot slammed his fist down on the bar. Everything rattled.

Parker took a deep breath, and said: “This time we destroy the dragon. We have to destroy the dragon. Even if we destroy the right chalice, that won’t stop it: it’ll just get another chalice. Or make one.”

Hardison removed his hands from his face. “On the bright side, we have a collapsible portal to get us to the dragon. And according to this,” he waved the booklet, “it has to stay within a limited range of where the sacrifice will take place in order for the magic of the chalice to work.”

Eliot snatched the booklet from Hardison’s hand. He flipped through it with one hand, and reached for the map with another. “There is only one dragon-sized hideout in range. It’s where the illusory castle is.”

“This time I can punch through the illusion,” Hardison said. “That said, I do vote we use these two weeks to research. There’s no knowing what else we can find here that’ll help us.”

He had a point, but--

“We can’t wait until the last day.” Eliot voiced the same concern she was having. “It’s too risky.”

“Ten days,” Parker said, before the boys could start arguing about it. “We give it 10 days, and Mike and I will help. Now let’s do this; we don’t have a lot of time.”

They got back to the illusory castle, Eldaran punched through the illusion like Hardison said his wizard could, and everything went fine - argument about the colour of dragons aside - right up until the moment Nate announced: “Suddenly, something other than scales reflect the torchlight: the dragon has opened its eyes. They, too, are the blue-grey colour of steel. At least its teeth, when it opens its mouth, reflect white. It doesn’t breathe out an attack, though. Rather, it speaks. Its voice is a deep, booming baritone that occasionally grits and hisses.” Then Nate paused and did something funny with his jaw that made his voice sound deeper as he said, speaking as the dragon: “So, you are the thieves.”

“How does it know we’re thieves?” Parker asked.

“You stole the children from me,” Nate replied.

“No, we stole them back,” she said. “You stole them in the first place.”

“You stole them before I completed the spell. Now their sacrifice will be wasted, I will need to take one more sacrifice than I had planned. That village’s fate is on you, not on me.”

“Define ‘need’,” Eliot said. His voice promised ugly things to follow - or it would’ve, if this wasn’t a game. It was probably a bad thing that he sounded like that; the expression on Sophie’s face backed that thought up.

“I need not justify myself to you,” Nate said.

“You don’t,” Hardison said, in a tone that was and wasn’t an agreement. “And we don’t have to hear you out either. But if you’re willing to talk, we’re willing to listen.”

“Eldaran!” Eliot hissed. Parker was relieved that it was the right name; she honestly wasn’t sure which name he’d use, given the expression on his face just before he spoke.

Still-- “No, he’s right,” she told Eliot. “I want to know what’s going on.”

“He’s using children to kill,” Eliot snapped. “What else is there to know?”

“I should eat you for your insolence,” Nate said, still speaking as the dragon.

“See?” Eliot demanded.

He was too angry. There was nothing Parker could do about that, so she decided to ignore it. “Try us,” she told Nate. “If you’re in trouble, maybe we can help.”

“You, help me? Ridiculous.”

“Try us,” Hardison said. “What have you got to lose?”

For a moment Nate pretended to think, then he said: “I am attempting to return home.”

“You’re not from around here, are you,” Hardison said in the tone of one who had just realized something.

Well, at least someone understood what the dragon meant.

“You’re from a different plane,” Eliot said, spelling it out for her.

“And opening portals between planes is a right pain in the ass,” Hardison concluded.

Those things probably wouldn’t have surprised her if she’d read the same books as everyone else had, but if she read the books this would no longer feel like a game.

Nate did that thing with his jaw again. “This is the only method I have found which may be powerful enough. Lesser methods have failed me. I have had centuries to research.”

“He’s just trying to get back home,” Parker told Eliot.

“Or it’s lying,” he shot back. “It’s a dragon; smart, thinks it’s better than us, and always dangerous.”

“You seem insistent on becoming a snack.”

Eliot threw out a hand as if presenting Nate. Or maybe Nate’s dragon. “Like I said.”

“Actually, I think I’m with Lolly,” Hardison said. “If he was going to eat us, he’d’ve moved by now. But he’s just lying there, talking to us.” He turned to Nate. “You’ve been real lonely, haven’t you?”

“You are not the first to try and slay me,” Nate replied. “But you are the first to ask why.”

“What if we can help?” Parker asked him.

“Lolly!” Eliot snapped. “He’s turning children--”

“Not with that,” she said, offended he even made that mistake. “Obviously. But what if we could find a different way?”

“I have been looking for centuries. You will not succeed where I have failed.”

“Actually,” Hardison said. “We have access to a seriously heavy-duty magical library.”

“I have been through many such libraries.”

“Been through one housed in a big white ziggurat?” Parker asked.

“The lost Library of Achabaad? You have found it?”

“See?” Parker replied.

“We’ll try and find a different way for you,” Hardison said. “But we need you to remove the spell from the children first.”

“I cannot do that.”

“There’s a surprise,” Eliot said. His arms were crossed over his chest, further communicating just how unhappy he was with the direction Hardison and her were taking.

She was a little bit worried the dragon would comment on wanting to eat Mike again; instead, though, Nate said: “But I can delay its effect, for six days, six weeks or sixty days. The longer I delay it, the more violent the effect will be.”

“So we send it home, and the children still murder their families,” Eliot said.

“No,” Nate replied, quickly and resolutely. “Not if I am not here. The spell will break as soon as I am gone from this plane.”

Parker looked at Hardison, who was looking back at her. Then both of them looked at Eliot. 

It was a moment before he said: “Fine. Fine. But I reserve the right to say ‘I told you so’ when this goes south.”

As high as the stakes were, the game got boring again: they rolled for research until they found an alternative way for the dragon, then rolled for research again to figure out where and how to find everything the dragon didn’t choose to source himself. It was worse than it had to be because Eliot’s game-night cooking became-- Parker didn’t have a compact way to express that, but Eliot was cooking as if he didn’t want to send out the message that ceasing to cook for them would send, but his heart wasn’t really in cooking for them anyway.

Parker was a little bit worried about that, even if Eliot still seemed to enjoy the brewpub Hardison and her had basically bought for him - because if they’d made it his on paper, he would’ve just freaked out. Then they met Toby, and Eliot told them about Toby and him, and Parker felt even worse about them making Eliot feel this way.

And of course it had to be game night.

When she walked into the brewpub’s back room, though, the debrief bar was covered in a white tablecloth and made out as if this was a formal dinner, and Parker realized she was wrong about the reason Eliot had gone weird on them instead of just no longer cooking on game nights: Eliot had done that because he could, because he trusted them to not really get angry, to not get weird on him in return.

Parker thought that had she been anyone else, she’d’ve found that a scary thought, the way everyone else she knew found jumping from tall buildings to be scary: most people trusted the people they liked, but Eliot wasn’t most people. She wasn’t most people either, so it didn’t scare her.

Hardison, he was going to freak out. And she couldn’t justify not telling him - she was pretty sure she had to tell him, and not just because they were still trying to figure out how Eliot would respond to Hardison like-liking him and her possibly getting there with time.

She forced herself to not think about that over dinner. Eliot would be searching her face, she knew, and it was important he found there only her reactions to the food he’d cooked for her. 

“Oh, I am so full,” Sophie said, a few moments after they were done eating.

“Eliot, buddy, you outdid yourself,” Hardison added.

Parker had an idea. “Um,” she said, and shifted in her seat, “I’m going to do something a little weird, okay?”

“Girl, what did we do wrong that you feel like you need to apologize for that?” Hardison asked.

She gave him a Look. “I was talking to Eliot.”

Eliot looked at her, and said: “I think I can take it.”

She jumped at him as if she was diving off a building, and hugged him with her arms and legs both. She was a little bit sorry for knocking the wind out of him, but then his body shifted, as if something melted away, and Eliot closed his arms around her, hesitating and certain at the same time.

They were going to be all right, she decided: they, the three of them, were going to be all right because whether or not Eliot like-liked either of them didn’t matter, just like it didn’t actually matter that Hardison like-liked him. She’d asked Hardison, whether it’d matter if Eliot did or didn’t like-like him; he’d looked at her as if the question made no sense at all. That was the way she felt about it, too, and now she was pretty sure that it was the way Eliot felt about them as well: that what label went on how they felt didn’t matter, so long as it was the three of them.

“Your food made me feel things!” she said, because Eliot would probably feel better if she said that out loud in words.

“Your food made Parker feel things!” Hardison repeated, and then got up and added himself to the hug. There was nothing tentative in the way his body felt, and whatever it was that had melted out of Eliot a moment before - well, more of it did. It made something in her melt a little, too - her eyes closed and she could feel her heart-rate dropping.

In fact, she decided, they could roll for research the entire game-session, and she wouldn’t care.

It looked like they would be rolling for research the entire game session. She got her tenth success, but what she found was a map-room so all it meant was that they’d be researching the maps in particular instead of the library in general.

“Oh, great,” Eliot said sourly. “More rolling for research. Can I hit something?”

“There might be something hittable on the way to Mount Sellamon,” Nate replied.

“Oh, you think you’re funny,” Hardison told him. He turned to Parker and Eliot. “Do you think he’s funny?”

“I don’t think he’s funny,” Parker said.

“Me neither,” Eliot agreed.

“Are you guys ganging up on me?” Nate asked.

“You say that like it’s new,” Sophie remarked.

Eliot was still looking unhappy, so Parker offered: “We could go steal the Sword from Tubin Castle.”

“No, we are not doing that,” Hardison said. She gave him what she thought was a Look but he continued: “Earl Tubin has a brass dragon on his payroll. That’s a job for our dragon.”

“He’s not ‘our’ dragon,” Eliot said immediately.

And they were back to that. “He’s the dragon we’re helping,” Parker said.

“Only because he thinks it’s okay to kill hundreds of people to get what he wants. If it isn’t over a thousand; he never did tell us how many sacrificial villages it would take.”

“Dude, he’s been away from his home for 500 years,” Hardison said. “He’s allowed to go a little crazy.”

“Oh, are you saying what he did is okay?” Eliot asked.

“No, but I’m saying it’s understandable. A human, maybe even an elf or a dwarf, would’ve adapted; but he’s a dragon, and they don’t adapt very well. Even steels.”

“So it’s a bit like blaming a wolf for eating sheep,” Nate remarked, his tone making it almost a question.

“When you put it like that it sounds terrible,” Hardison said.

“That’s because it is,” Eliot said. “A wolf’s an animal. Dragon’s smart enough to count as a person, I’m gonna treat it like a person. And that starts with holding him accountable. You don’t take pity on snakes, Hardison.”

There was something in the way Eliot said that. Parker frowned. 

Hardison must’ve heard it too, because he looked at Eliot as if he was something Hardison wanted to decypher and asked: “You really feel strongly about this, don’t you?”

Eliot’s return look was pretty damn angry.

“Look,” Parker said quickly, before Eliot would say something vicious and Hardison would get hurt and then Eliot would feel even worse, “we’re not taking pity on him. We’re helping him get home because that’s actually the best way to make the blood sacrifices stop.”

“No, you know what?” Hardison asked, and Parker shot him a Look because he was going to make it bad again. Hardison ignored her and continued: “I am a little bit sorry for him, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing, or letting him off the hook easy. People in bad situations make bad decisions. It’s a thing that happens. It doesn’t make them bad people. What does matter is how they feel about what they’re doing, and this dragon, man? This dragon jumped on the slim sliver of a chance of finding another way. Dragons are constitutionally conceited, man; do you have any idea how hard it is for a dragon to admit something other than himself might be better at something? I’m telling you, this dragon is a good egg.”

Oh. Oh. So that’s what was going on.

Eliot, though, was nearly spitting mad. “I don’t know how a smart man like you can be so dense!”

“Eliot!” Sophie snapped. 

Parker needed to stop this, needed to stop Sophie. Sophie didn’t get it; Parker didn’t know why she was so sure of it, but she knew: if allowed to continue, Sophie would just make Eliot feel worse, and that wasn’t going to help.

“Eliot,” Parker said, carefully. “Remember how you told me, about--” how to put it “--something else, that it can be a blessing and it can be a curse?”

The look Eliot gave her was a little strange, but it wasn’t hostile. All he said out loud was: “Yeah.”

“I think maybe this also applies to the way Hardison sees things,” she said.

They would freeze to death right next to him, Eliot had told her in that frozen cave, a year prior. Especially Hardison. The way Hardison saw things could be dangerous that way, but they needed it, the two of them, Eliot and her - needed it for the way it meant he never saw the curse in them. 

She didn’t look at Nate or at Sophie. She didn’t want to know how they were looking at her. It only mattered how Eliot did - and she couldn’t read his expression at all. There seemed to be too many emotions there, and - she thought - Eliot didn’t want any of them to show.

He pushed his chair away from the bar, and declared: “I need some air.”

“Did I screw it up?” she asked into the silence that lingered after Eliot had left through the back door that led to the alley. It was the second time Eliot had gotten up and left the game, the first one being after San Lorenzo.

“No, I don’t think you did,” Nate said.

“Um-uh,” Sophie said, a noise that sounded like an agreement.

Then there was silence again, until Hardison pulled himself straighter then asked: “Are we going to talk about the reason Eliot is taking this really personally?”

Nate gave him a sharp look.

“We figured it out too,” Parker said. That got her Nate’s look on her.

“Eliot was sure you’d hate him for it,” Sophie said. It sounded, Parker thought, as if Sophie had the same concern.

Parker just looked at her.

“Eliot is really, really stupid about some things,” Hardison said, and judging by his tone he’d heard the same thing in Sophie’s that Parker did. “He’s not that man anymore. Hell, I think he barely was that man even then - I mean, he up and left, and we all know how well that kind of a job pays. Means something else mattered to him more.”

“What he said,” Parker said.

Nate was still looking as if all the gears in his head were going full-tilt, and he still had that gaze trained on her. “If I asked you what he’d told you that about, things being either a blessing or a curse-- you’re not going to tell me, are you.”

“Nope,” she said, smacking her lips around the p sound to make it extra plosive. 

“Oh, well,” Nate said. It didn’t sound as if he were going to push.

Sophie looked at him exasperatedly anyway.

Nate shrugged, then got up and headed out through the door that led to the brewpub.

“He’s doing that on purpose, you know that,” Hardison told Sophie, waving his finger in Nate’s direction the way he sometimes did. “Why are you okay with that?”

“Who ever said I’m okay with that?” Sophie shot back.

“You’re helping him run the game,” Parker pointed out.

“I’m minimizing harm.”

Parker looked at Hardison. He looked back at her and shrugged. Yes, that was what she was thinking also - Sophie was probably telling the truth this time. Still--

“This is still gonna explode,” Hardison said.

“I know,” Sophie said. “That’s going to be your part to play.”

Parker looked at Hardison and found him looking back at her, with - she thought - an expression twin to her own. She turned her head back towards Sophie and said, “Ours,” a request for clarification.

“Yours,” Sophie agreed.

Parker looked at Hardison again, then tipped her chin down.

He nodded back.

Parker looked at the die with disgust. “Ugh, 3. Eliot, your turn.”

Eliot picked up the die and cast it. 

Parker gave the die a stink-eye: Eliot rolled much better than she had.

“18,” Eliot announced. “That’s my tenth, what do I get?”

Nate had what Sophie would call a “certain glint in his eye”. Whatever Eliot’s successful research roll netted them, it was going to be good. “The next map you unroll,” Nate said, “is of the demon realm of Sellamon. There is a mountain marked at the center of the map, and an entrance through Black Mountain marked at the very edge of it.”

The three of them looked at each other.

Hardison was the first to speak. “So good news, we know where Mount Sellamon is and how to get there, and I have an inkling it’s the sort of a place to always have a lightning storm.”

“Bad news,” Eliot picked up, “the nearest the collapsible portal can get us is outside the gates of Black Mountain. And then we’ll need to barter with demons, again.”

“Good news again,” Parker said, because the joke was practically required, “it’s the demons we know.”

Hardison frowned. “That sounded deep.” He turned to Nate. “Was that supposed to sound deep?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Nate said.

He was definitely lying. 

She, Hardison and Eliot exchanged looks again. This time, it was Eliot who spoke up. “You know, Nate,” he said conversationally, which on Eliot was the sort of a tone that meant you were about to be in trouble, “you may be spending too much time with Sophie.”

“I’m sorry?” Nate said, at the same time that Sophie demanded: “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Parker looked at Hardison, who looked at her. Both of them had to be thinking the same things: the odds that Nate counted on Parker zeroing in on the silly joke, the odds that this was deliberate - a warning, before the game inevitably blew up.

What was it that Sophie had said, all the way back in Boston? It hasn’t killed him yet. The demons you knew. Yeah, this was a deliberate warning.

Hardison and she got lucky: Eliot was too busy watching Nate and Sophie like a hawk, and missed out what passed between them. Eliot liked Nate and Sophie but he’d spent enough years looking at Nate as if he were a bomb with no trigger Eliot could see, and Sophie - Parker thought - quite deliberately made sure Eliot would never forget what she was and what she could do. Eliot could suspect them and still be fine, but if he realized that Parker and Hardison were also in on this - that would be bad. That would’ve been very, very bad.

Eliot was definitely giving Nate that old look again as he said: “Because outside of a con, you’re a terrible liar.”

“Man’s got a point,” Hardison said.

“Yeah, even I could tell you’re lying,” Parker added.

“Stop selling yourself short, Parker,” Sophie said.

Eliot glared at Sophie, so he probably agreed.

Parker really, really hoped that Nate was right, and this would be worth it.

Sophie looked as if she had swallowed a lemon. Or, well, Parker thought that’s what she looked like: she’d never seen anyone who’d actually swallowed a lemon. But Sophie looked as if she had a bitter-sour taste in her mouth, so that was probably the right idiom.

“Eliot, are you sure…?” Sophie asked.

“I’m fine,” Eliot said, voice clipped.

That was a lie - he wasn’t fine - but it wasn’t untrue: Eliot was sure that yes, he wanted to do this.

Parker wasn’t sure who she agreed with: Eliot, or Sophie.

“You’re all shot up!” Sophie protested.

“It’s just a couple of bullets,” Eliot said dismissively. “I can roll a die.”

Sophie shook her head. “Have it your way.”

Hardison looked as if he had swallowed a lemon, too. Maybe a couple of lemons, even. “Let’s move this to the couch,” he said. “This way Eliot doesn’t need to clamber up these stools.”

“I said--” Eliot began.

“We’re humoring the part where you won’t go to a hospital,” Hardison said, voice sharp, “so you can humor us on this. Okay?”

“Fine,” Eliot said, and started in the direction of the couch.

The word was ‘sympathised’: Parker sympathised with Eliot. Maybe even empathised: were it her she’d want to play, too, and she’d want to sit where they usually sat when playing. Thing was, it wasn’t just the bullets that messed Eliot up. Parker knew Eliot more than well enough to know that everything else about the day before had him messed up, too. And that, plus the way the game could have him rattled-- That was the part that made Sophie and Hardison uncomfortable. It made Parker wary, too, because she couldn’t quite see all the ways in which this could develop, and she didn’t like that feeling.

At all.

She didn’t want anyone catching on to how she felt, though, so as soon as they were all seated she cast her voice cheerfully, and hoped it didn’t sound too brittle as she said: “I think that was the last one.”

“That was the last one,” Eliot agreed.

“Okay,” she replied. “I vote we go back to the dragon and see if he’s done collecting everything.”

“Can we afford another day of research?” Hardison asked. “I have nine successes. I wanna get the tenth and see what that nets us. I only need 15, odds are I can do that in four rolls.”

If one ignored the obvious physical pain, Parker thought, Eliot’s expression said Geek has a point. “Fine,” she said. “One day.”

“And not an hour more,” Eliot added.

Hardison cast the die. When it stopped rolling, it showed the number 17. “Yeah, baby!” Hardison crowed. “Got it on the first try.”

Nate picked up the narration. “The next book you open seems to be an atlas. Rather than being an atlas of a land or a continent, though, it’s an atlas of some sort of a maze.”

“A maze,” Hardison repeated. “This maze?”

“Let me see,” Parker said. “I flip back to the first page.”

“The first few pages line up with parts that you’ve already mapped out,” Nate said. “It is, in fact, an atlas of the library’s interior.”

“Guys, you have got to give me time to go through this,” Hardison said, urgency in his voice. “We found this now, that means there’s something in here we need.”

“We are not staying here for however long it takes to get 10 more successes,” Eliot said.

Parker looked at Nate. “Can he just flip through real quick?” she asked.

“All right,” Nate said. “Roll for luck; your target number is 11.”

“You have three rolls,” Eliot told Hardison.

On the first roll, the die stopped on 5. On the second, it showed 9. On the third--

“13!” cried Hardison.

“As you flip through,” Nate said, “one doublet of pages catches your eye. It seems to be of the very center of the maze. Unlike other pages, this doublet is done in exquisite detail and colour. It is titled ‘The Prism’.”

“That sounds familiar,” Parker said.

“It does sound familiar,” Hardison agreed. “Let me get my notes. Let’s see - prism, prism…” For a long moment, there was only silence as Hardison scanned through his notes, finger running along the lines. Then his finger stopped. “Found it! It’s the Prism of Meiornyl, any spell performed in it gets a massive power boost.”

“How does that help us?” Parker asked.

“Portals take juice,” Hardison said. “The dragon’s, like, two orders of magnitude stronger than I’ll ever be, and he still hasn’t managed to power up a portal home in the several centuries he’s been here and a dozen-plus methods he’s tried. I think we should bring him here, so he can cast this spell from the prism.”

“No,” Eliot said, flatly.

“How would a dragon fit in here?” Parker asked.

“That’s your problem?” Eliot demanded.

“What’s yours?” she countered.

“It’s a dragon, and it ain’t no silver,” he said. “This place is a weapon, and we don’t know what it might do if we give it to him.”

“Okay, so you also know how to bring a dragon in here.”

“He’s a steel,” Hardison explained. “It’s one of the breeds of dragon that may be able to turn into a human form. If he can do it, though, I wonder why he hasn’t done it the second he met us; steels usually love their human forms.”

That was because Nate made the dragon a steel before he knew that steel dragons were what Hardison called canon. But that was besides the point. “I’m with Mike,” she said.

“Thank you,” Eliot responded.

“This place is Ours,” she told Hardison. “Even the demons who sold us the map didn’t know it would lead us here. Once we give the dragon the ingredients we collected, it doesn’t need us anymore.”

“And what happens if he tries to cast the portal and it doesn’t work?” Hardison demanded. “You think it’s just a coincidence we found this now?”

“If that happens, we tell him about the Prism then,” Parker said.

“The petals of the Ghost Rose need to be virgin. Virgin. That means they haven’t been used in any ritual. You wanna climb that damn mountain again? Even the demons thought we’re crazy for doing that. Oil of Leophare, that has to be virgin too. And that’s just what I remember off the top of my head, there were like two dozen items on that list.”

She hadn’t thought about that. Hardison had a point. Particularly as they’d already missed the six-day deadline, and any delays would mean missing the six-week. They could maybe re-acquire the ingredients in time for the 60-days deadline, but that was cutting it down to the wire, and Parker didn’t like that. She didn’t like that at all.

Eliot was staring at her. “You are not seriously considering this.”

“Eldaran’s right,” she said. Maybe now she was the one looking as if she had a lemon in her mouth. “We won’t manage to reacquire all the ingredients in time. And that’s assuming the dragon won’t try to eat us for the failure.”

“You say that, but you want to bring him in here?” Eliot asked. It fell short of a demand; his exhaustion was showing.

“If we want to save the village, we have to,” she said. “It’s our best shot.”

“It’s a dragon,” Eliot counted. “A. Dragon. It’s the very definition of ‘dangerous’.”

“What’s with the speciesism, man?” Hardison asked, because of course he’d take this side-track. “Would it kill you to remember the dragon is a ‘he’, not an ‘it’?”

“You’re the one who’s going to get us all killed!” Eliot snapped. “The dragon needs us for access to the library. The second he has this access--”

“He’s a steel, not a--” Hardison stopped and changed tracks. “Seriously, what is your problem?”

Hardison knew what Eliot’s problem was, and it wasn’t like him to deliberately corner Eliot into dealing with that. Maybe he lost sight of that, in his upset; Hardison could get like that. Either way, Parker’s heart rate picked up.

“He uses children,” Eliot said, very clearly. “He kills children. I don’t care what else he does, I don’t care what else he is. He’s the kind of scum who’ll chew up and spit out kids. Now you get it? You can’t trust me!”

The silence rang. There were no other words for it: the silence rang.

“What are y’all staring at me for?” Eliot asked.

“You didn’t say ‘it’, man,” Hardison said. Parker thought he looked a little grey. “You didn’t say we can’t trust ‘it’.”

“Fine so I called the dragon a ‘he’--”

“You didn’t say that either,” Hardison said.

Actually Eliot usually alternated between calling the dragon an ‘it’ and a ‘he’, but that was besides the point. We do the things that they can’t, Parker thought, and said: “You said ‘me’. You said we can’t trust you.”

A blessing or a curse, Parker thought, and in that moment she wasn’t sure which it was. Eliot got even paler than he was before. He tried to get up - or it seemed like it - but he was upset enough to forget that he was injured. He visibly flinched as he put weight on his injured leg, and hissed.

Hardison was definitely grey. Nate looked blank. Sophie pursed her lips, then fluidly pushed herself up. She put a hand on Nate’s shoulder as she walked past him, and he got up and followed her.

The entire time, Eliot was looking at the floor. His chest was rising and falling too fast.

“Are you going to leave also?” he demanded.

His throat was tight. Parker could hear that.

“Nah, man,” Hardison said, trying very hard for a warm sort of casual. “We told you--”

Eliot cut him off. “Dammit, Hardison!”

Parker’s chest was getting tight, too. “He’s right, though,” she told Eliot, willing her voice stable. “We told you: we go through things together. This thing included.”

“There’s no ‘together’,” Eliot said, and Parker wasn’t prepared for the way those words hit her, wasn’t prepared for Eliot so much as thinking let alone actually saying those words. “There can be no ‘together’, not after I just--”

Eliot stopped mid-sentence. He was still breathing as if he’d just sprinted.

Into the silence, Hardison said: “You know, if Nate were here, he’d point out the part where you can’t say it. So I will.”

What? Parker shot Hardison a Look, but he just met her eyes stubbornly. “Alec--” she said, because she wasn’t sure at all that this was the right idea.

“It needs to be said,” Hardison said, very clearly, as if speaking was difficult. “Okay? I need to say it. Just-- Just give me a minute.”

It needs to be said and I need to say it were very different things and the focus here was on Eliot, should be on what was right for Eliot, but either way, Parker knew she couldn’t stop Hardison.

“What needs to be said?” Eliot asked.

He didn’t know that they knew, Parker realized. He didn’t realize-- Maybe he’d been so upset at the time that he hadn’t realized what Chapman had said, hadn’t realized the significance of it or maybe hadn’t remembered that the team could all hear that. Either way, though - either way Eliot was trying to not have this conversation because he thought he had a chance of achieving that, because he didn’t realize they knew.

Maybe Hardison was right. Maybe Eliot needed to hear it from them, because he’d thought - Don’t ask me that, Parker - he’d thought it would be the end of everything, if they knew.

While she was thinking, the boys kept talking.

“What you just said, except out of character,” Hardison replied to Eliot.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, man,” Eliot said.

“Really?” Parker asked. “Then why can’t there be a ‘we’, if you didn’t…?” She hesitated, unsure if that was the right moment, the right way to shine a light on this thing.

“You can’t say it either,” Eliot said lowly, viciously. It was a tone of voice she’d never heard from him before, and it made her skin crawl. “Do I need to spell out for you what that means?”

And then Hardison did it.

“You killed children,” he said. Now his breath was too fast, too. “There, I said it. My head is spinning and I think I’m going to throw up in a minute, but I said it: you killed children. And we didn’t need you to tell us that. We--” He doubled over and, like they always told you on an airplane to do ‘in case of emergency’, stuck his head between his knees.

They could use that lemon, Parker thought, but the thought was distant. It was automatic; it didn’t help, in the here and now. 

They couldn’t tell Eliot that Chapman had let the secret out, Parker thought. That thought was a little bit odd, too: it felt as if Sophie were in her head, explaining things, telling Parker what to look for in Eliot’s body language. Maybe the thing that Sophie said would happen had happened, and Parker had had Sophie explain these things to her enough times that she’d internalized it. But that didn’t matter, in the moment: what mattered was that if Eliot knew that he’d feel even more exposed than he already did, and then he’d try to leave again.

They couldn’t let Eliot leave this time. Parker knew that with absolute certainty.

“We figured it out,” she said, because letting the silence hang was a bad idea also. “It had to be something you’d think we’d super-hate you for. Not a lot of options. We knew it had to be kids.”

There, she’d said it also. Barely, but said it.

“How can you even be looking at me?” Eliot asked and it was raw, so raw. It was vulnerable, and Eliot shouldn’t be this vulnerable, that was just wrong--

“Because you can’t even say it, Eliot,” Hardison said, words muffled by the way his head was still between his knees. He straightened up before he continued: “Because you hate yourself for it. You know it was wrong, and--”

“That doesn’t change a damn thing,” Eliot cut him off. “You try looking their families in the eye and telling them, telling them that--” His breath caught and didn’t release. His squeezed his eyes shut. A second later, Parker could see tears leaking through his eyelashes.

Fuck. He was crying. Parker wasn’t good with crying. She didn’t--

“I’m getting you tissues,” Hardison declared. Gingerly, he got to his feet. “I ain’t leaving, I’m just getting you some tissues. All right?” He tried to put a hand on Eliot’s uninjured knee as he brushed past him, but Eliot slapped his hand away, unerringly precise even with his eyes still scrunched shut. 

The slap was harsh, Eliot’s full strength instead of the play-violence he usually used with Hardison.

“All right,” Hardison said, as if that didn’t sting at all. “Still bringing you tissues, though.”

It took long for Hardison to return. Too long. Parker counted one second after the other until it turned into a minute, until it turned into almost two, and that entire time she didn’t dare to move at all, didn’t dare to even twitch because Eliot would be able to tell and she didn’t know what the right thing to do was, here. She really wasn’t good with crying.

When Hardison returned, Parker realized why it’d taken that long.

“There,” Hardison declared as he placed the stuff down on the coffee table. “Tissues and chocolate.”

Eliot opened his eyes, sort of. He grabbed the tissues but ignored the chocolate. He really needed the tissues, too - he was crying pretty hard, and his nose was running. He probably needed the chocolate, too, but chocolate was a nice thing and right in that moment, Eliot hated himself a lot.

It felt so helpless, sitting like this with Eliot and knowing that he felt alone anyway. And Parker hated feeling helpless, hated--

Maybe she did know what to say, to make Eliot feel less alone.

“I killed my foster parents,” she said, conversationally. “Gas explosion. I was nine.”

Hardison stared at her, but had enough sense to not say anything.

“Not the same thing,” Eliot said. He was looking at the floor.

“No,” she agreed, “but I know what it feels like - the knowledge that you can do this to someone else and no one can stop you.” It was one of the things that made Eliot and her different than the others - carrying this knowledge in their bones. 

“And both of us know you hate that feeling, man,” Hardison added, backing up her play, but maybe--

“Oh, so you--” Eliot started angrily, and Parker knew that she was right, and Hardison had pushed too hard, or maybe in the wrong direction.

“Hardison, stop,” she said, silencing him and cutting Eliot off. “It isn’t helping.” Both men stayed silent while Parker figured out what to say that maybe would help. “It’s not about forgiveness, and it’s not about atonement.” That much she had to make absolutely clear. “You’re right,” she told Eliot, “you can’t undo what you did. But you can make different choices moving forward, and you are. You did just yesterday morning. The you we know,” she continued, “is the you you are now, the you you’ve been for the past few years. Not who you were for Damien Moreau. Not who you were,” because that was when things began to go wrong for Eliot, “in service.”

“Do you remember the hockey job?” Hardison asked and yeah, they were on the same page here. 

“What does that have to do with anything?” Eliot asked. He sounded tired, so tired. This conversation couldn’t go on for much longer - Eliot was too exhausted. Being injured was tiring, and so was having emotions this big.

“You were wearing your earwig when you cornered Marco by the car, man,” Hardison said. “We all heard what you told him, about what you’d done for your team, because of your team, because they were your team. And I - we - remember you when we just met, going on and on and on about how you ‘don’t do team’. But we’re your team now, man.”

The words hit her like a gut-punch. In that moment she realized what Sophie had meant, when she’d said Yours and the word sounded loaded, so loaded. Eliot was theirs. Eliot would do for them what he would’ve done for any team he’d ever belonged to before. He knew that, had to have known that, and - Parker thought - it had to terrify him even more than it terrified her, and for good reason. Eliot was exactly as vulnerable, as fragile as he looked in the here and now, and in the here and now he looked as if he were made out of fine-bone china.

Part of the reason Eliot was fighting so hard - Sophie’s voice inside her head told her, with gentleness that wasn’t gentle at all - wasn’t just because he thought he deserved to be hated; it was because on some level he believed that if they knew what they could ask of him, they would.

“If you want me on your team,” Eliot said, and he was still looking at the floor, “you’re not the Alec Hardison I thought I knew.”

That was exactly the serve Parker needed. “No,” she said, resolutely. “That makes him exactly the Alec Hardison you know. That we know. That’s exactly it.”

Blessing or a curse, and right now what Hardison was was a blessing. Parker just needed to get Eliot to believe in that.

“Smartest man you know, remember that part?” Hardison said. He bent forward again, but this time not to put his head between his knees. Instead, he put his head near Eliot’s, so near that Eliot would be able to feel his breath. “I’m not going to tell you how I feel, because I think you’ll break my face if I say it. But I am going to point out, again, that Parker and I figured what you did ages ago, and we’re still here. I’d even say it again if I need to.”

“Don’t,” Eliot said.

What Hardison did seemed to be working, so Parker joined in. She got up and crouched on the floor so that her head was near to Eliot’s and Hardison’s.

“Alec is our team,” she said. “Okay? It’s not about forgiveness,” that wasn’t theirs to give and it wouldn’t help besides, “it’s not-- put all of that aside. Alec is our team,” she repeated, because that was the key, the key to getting Eliot to stop being afraid of what it meant to belong. “Can you believe that?”

Eliot moved his head. At first it looked like he was going to shake it no and Parker’s heart already begun breaking, but then he nodded instead. He was shaking, now, big visible shakes that didn’t quite look like the way people usually shook when they were afraid. This was something different.

The tissue box fell from his hand. She and Hardison both didn’t move.

“Please have the chocolate, man,” Hardison said.

“I’ll just throw it up,” Eliot said. It sounded as if he only just got the words out.

Hardison looked at her. He wasn’t quite as grey as he was before, but he did look a little bit panicky. Parker didn’t know how to tell him that it wasn’t dangerous, anymore; that they’d made it, they made it past the point where Eliot might’ve run away. They were fine now, even if it really didn’t look that way.

Maybe the best way to say it was to just say it. “Okay,” she said. “It’s okay. We have time.” She gave those words a second to sink in and then repeated: “We have time.”

Chapter Text

He almost pulled the plug on the game. He almost did. It finally occurred to him that Nate had rigged the game, and Eliot almost pulled the plug on it because of that. Nate had probably not come up with the children-and-dragon plot to fuck with Eliot; no, that probably started out of Nate’s own issues surrounding the matter of kids. But after the way things had gone down back in Boston, the night they returned from San Lorenzo - that was probably the turning point after which Nate started tailoring the game around Eliot, and Eliot’s demons.

Eliot really wanted to stop the game over that. For about five minutes. Then he remembered that Sophie was in with Nate on the whole thing, and Sophie had tried to keep him from playing, that night the day after DC. Nate couldn’t have planned for them to find the Prism, to face the dilemma of bringing the dragon into the library, when Eliot should have been in bed, on morphine, because he had three GSWs. That part was all on Eliot; and if not for that part, well - Eliot probably wouldn’t have been as torn up.

There was also that this was not Eliot’s first time on that particular train, and he knew episodes like that took more than a day to recover from. It was best to not do anything one might regret later until that was done wearing off, and there was a non-zero chance that he’d regret calling the game off when there were only one or two more sessions left on it. Hardison’s kicked face would be insufferable, for one.

So Eliot only almost called the game off, and judging from the way Nate was eyeing him, the guy knew exactly how close a call that was.

“We take the collapsible portal to the point just outside the dragon’s wards,” Parker said.

“The dragon seems to have adjusted his wards,” Nate replied. “You appear by the concealed tunnel’s entrance.”

“You have returned,” Nate said in the dragon’s voice once they reached the lair.

“We did promise,” Hardison said.

“Have you acquired everything?” Nate asked.

“Have you?” Hardison countered.

“Of course I have.”

Yeah, playing a conceited, asshole dragon fit Nate just fine.

“So have we,” Parker replied. “We also found something else. A Prism of Meiornyl.”

“That will greatly enhance the odds of the spell performing as required.”

“You’ll need to change into a human form, though,” Parker said. “Or we can’t take you there.”

Eliot really hoped that the dragon really could turn into a human. He figured that he probably could; there wasn’t much trauma for Nate to mine by making this a problem.

“Before your eyes, the dragon’s massive body shrinks and shifts, until only a man remains, standing on top of his hoard. He seems ordinary enough, except his hair and eyes are both steel-grey,” Nate said, giving them the narration. A hand gesture indicated that he wasn’t done yet. Then he said, in a voice somewhere between his usual voice - well, any of them - and the one he used for the dragon, “Your trust is acknowledged, and appreciated.”

Of-fucking-course he looked straight at Eliot as he said that.

Getting the dragon to the Prism went uneventfully, other than the dragon still being an asshole.

“Ready to return home?” Parker asked.

“Happily,” Nate replied in the dragon’s voice, then continued in his own: “The dragon steps into the sphere. Merely setting up the spell takes up most of an hour; the casting takes considerable time, too. Eventually, though, the glittering rainbows pull back from the center of the sphere. At first, the clear space is so small you’re not even sure it’s really there. Ever so slowly it grows, and you realize that must be the portal. It grows and grows, until there is barely room enough left in the Prism for the dragon to stand. The dragon turns his head to look at you.” Nate switched voices. “I am most grateful.”

“Tomorrow we find out if he lied,” Eliot said conversationally. “We need to go back to the village.”

“We will,” Parker replied.

“The dragon didn’t lie,” Nate told them. “The day comes and goes, and the children go on behaving as children do; no one dies. The village is safe.”

It was a nice morale. It was just a pity that life didn’t work this way. Eliot almost said that out loud, but Hardison was looking at him as if he knew exactly how Eliot felt. Parker’s words echoed in Eliot’s head, This also applies to the way Hardison sees things and Alec is our team. Then an image, fuzzy, a memory he hadn’t thought of in a while. Their first job after taking down Dubenich the first time, that hospital doctor, the one who was so protective of their client, staring at the truck full of cash and saying, The world doesn’t work this way. Eliot hadn’t heard what Nate had said to her in reply.

He actually managed to miss their party returning to the damned library. He only tuned back in at Hardison asking Parker why they’d done that - which was the stupidest thing he’d heard Hardison say in a while.

“Because we haven’t found the loom yet,” Parker said, stating the obvious.

“Girl, it’s going to take us a year to search this place. At least.”

“I think I know how to find it. I go through the library atlas, back to back. I read the entire thing, I don’t skip a page. I don’t care if it takes me a month; we’re no longer on a deadline.”

Parker hated rolling for research. There was no missing that part. Apparently she really, really wanted to find this fairytale loom. Luckily, though, it didn’t take a month of game-time to find the Artifact Archive in the atlas, despite Nate setting the target number at 15; it only took a week. Then, with all three of their characters searching that corner of the library, it wasn’t long before Nate announced:

“Hidden in the very back of the twelfth room you search and covered with burlap, eventually you find the loom.”

Hardison let out a whoop of joy; Parker was even louder. Eliot didn’t bother to hold back the smile that sprung up at their enthuthiasm, or to refrain from the round of hugs and backslaps. He already knew: the loom and the characters were fictional, but the emotions were real. He could be an idiot sometimes, but he wasn’t idiot enough to pass up genuine joy.

“We made it, guys,” Parker said. “We made it.”

“Congratulations,” Nate said.

Hardison wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Parker was blinking. And Eliot was clearly still banged up from the last couple of weeks, because seriously--

“Well, it’s a good thing I restocked the tissues,” Sophie said.

“I’m going to tell Amy to bring a round of beer back here, because this definitely calls for a toast,” Hardison declared. He put a hand on Eliot’s shoulder on his way to the door, and Eliot satisfied himself with glaring instead of slapping Hardison’s hand away. “Eliot, you okay, man?”

Annoyingly, he actually needed to swallow before he could say: “Yeah. Yeah, I think I am.”

“‘Yes’? You said ‘Yes’ to the man?” Hardison demanded. “Nate, are you out of your damn mind?”

“We are running the White Rabbit,” Nate said, as if those were the magic words the would make everything fine, instead of those words being a sign of everything that was wrong about Nate taking this case on.

“The White… What?” Hardison sputtered. “No, Nate. No. That’s not what we do.”

“That’s what I said,” Eliot said. He’d just returned from the kitchen with two bowls of popcorn. He put them on the table, then sat down with the team. “We wreck the bad guys; we don’t turn one kind of guy into another kind of guy.” It felt as if they’d just got thrown back in time to the year before Nate’s arrest, when he’d exchanged adrenaline for alcohol. And just like then, Eliot was sure, this was going to end badly.

“Wait, what is the White Rabbit?” Parker asked.

“It’s the ungriftable grift,” Hardison said, “it’s impossible.”

“Yeah, but we do impossible,” Parker countered.

“No, Parker, not like this.” Hardison was talking with his hands again. “For this, you have to get inside the mark-- like, inside the head, inside their dreams.”

“Can’t be done,” Eliot muttered.

“That’s not true,” Nate said. “There’s a grifter sitting right here among us who has successfully pulled off the White Rabbit. Sophie?”

Because of course she had. And of course Parker had gotten them talking about the pragmatics, when the grift being ungriftable wasn’t even the fucking problem here; Nate’s sense of entitlement was. But talking about the pragmatics, plus Sophie, got at least Parker hooked in, and where Parker went Hardison would follow.

Eliot made one last plea. “This guy hasn’t broken any laws, all right? He’s not skimming; he’s not mobbed-up. Why are you thinking of doing this?”

“Look, we’re not God, Nate,” Hardison said. The unexpected support got to Eliot; pretending otherwise was just not fucking safe. “Why do we get to choose what kind of a person he gets to be?”

“Guys, if you think about it, every job that we do, every single job, we’re kind of playing God,” Nate said.

Not the same thing, Nate, Eliot thought. He’d say it out loud if he needed to.

“We’re not doing it for payback,” Nate continued, the speed of his words picking up as if he was making this up on the fly. “We help people. We save people. And I think this guy can be saved. I think this town can be saved.” 

Eliot’s palms flattened against the table. The best grifter at the table wasn’t Sophie, he thought: it was Nate. Nate had never learned to not con his team, and he was so good at it that none of them left. And even if the thing about saving the town wasn’t enough to make Eliot at least reconsider, there was still the fact that Nate had managed to talk everyone else around; and if the entire team was in on it, Eliot wasn’t going to walk out. That just wasn’t his job.

He just hoped they could all live with themselves after.

And then it turned out the whole thing, Dodgson’s whole thing, was about Patience Mortell. Patience Mortell, who’d been his best friend, who was dead, and you didn’t need to be Sophie to figure out that the word guilt fit in there. Eliot didn’t need to work out the whole story to know that much, and he also didn’t need to be there to watch Nate and Sophie pore all over it as if it were a broken pocket watch.

Hardison followed Eliot outside.

“So, it turns out that Dodgson--”

“Blames himself for Patience’s death. Yeah, I figured that out,” Eliot added in response to the look on Hardison’s face. “You needed Sophie to tell you that?”

“Actually, Sophie needed Nate to tell her that. And also, you’re being mean,” Hardison said. He raised his hands up to the sides in a gesture that was probably supposed to be pacifying, or some shit. “I’m not going to walk out, but I thought you should know that.”

Was he being mean? He was too tired to be sure. Too tired, and too rattled; he hated that he couldn’t trust himself. “Go away, Hardison.”

“Just told you, I’m not gonna do that.”

Maybe he could run Hardison off; he probably could, if he tried. Problem was, he’d feel like shit after. “Fine. But I’m driving.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m not hanging out here until they,” Eliot waved in the direction of the warehouse, “are done with whatever it is they think needs doing tonight. I’m going back to the hotel, and I’m going to sleep. This damn con will still be there tomorrow.” He left the word unfortunately unsaid. “Now, you wanna sit on me, you’re gonna have to come with.”

The longer it took Hardison to think about it, the more Eliot thought that Hardison would change his mind and turn right around. Instead, when Hardison spoke, he said: “You know what, you’re right. Last I heard, Sophie was saying something to Parker about a makeover; that’s probably going to take the entire night. Nate’s never going to leave this warehouse so long as they’re here, plus the security I installed on this place is second only to a Steranko, so there’s no need for either of us to sit on them also. One change in plan, though: I’m driving.”

“The hell you are.”

“Eliot, you were just genuinely mean to me and then decided to turn around and leave before everyone else is done for the day. Night. Now, be level with me, bro: would you let you drive?”

Dammit. When did Hardison learn to think like that? Parker was the one hanging out with Sophie on her downtime. Then again, Hardison was dating Parker, had been for over half a year. He probably had to up his game, to make that work: keeping up with Parker required the mental ability to take really tight turns at really high speeds. 

Here and now, though, it meant he was glaring shit at Hardison in the dark and trying to gauge whether Hardison would give if Eliot lied well enough. Ultimately, though, Eliot growled: “Fine. But I pick the music.”

He woke up to Parker sitting cross-legged on the tiny hotel-room desk, eating fortune cookies. 

Eliot stared at her, then turned around in bed and dramatically put his pillow over his head. 

“You know, people do that to smother other people,” she said through a full mouth. “How do you breathe in there?”

“Go away, Parker.”

“Want some fortune cookies?”

“I mean it!”

“Or what, you’ll throw a knife at me?” Parker asked. The tone of her voice made it clear how ludicrous she found that idea.

“Maybe,” he said, trying to make the threat credible.

She didn’t dignify that with an answer.

Eventually, he gave up. Trying to outstubborn Parker was a bit like trying to outstubborn a sniper, a real sniper, the kind who would lie in wait for two weeks without moving from his perch: you could do it, maybe, if you were really committed, but odds were you’d start doubting your commitment along the way and once you started doing that, you lost already. So Eliot took the pillow off, turned back around and sat up so he could glare properly at Parker, who - of course - didn’t even blink. “What do you want?” he growled.

“Why did you agree to take this case?”

“What?”

She didn’t repeat the question. She just kept waiting, and kept eating her damned fortune cookies. He was probably lucky that she was so locked on target - the target being him - that she didn’t read the little notes out loud, just piled them next to her on the desk.

“I mean, you hate this con,” she said. “Obviously. So why did you agree to take it?”

“What was I supposed to do, say ‘No, I’m going to tank this job’? Risk all of you being out here without me?”

“That wouldn’t have happened,” she replied without blinking and without hesitation.

“Which part?”

“Us going without you.” She cracked another cookie open, pulled the note out and put both halves in her mouth. “Wouldn’t have happened.”

“Ew, Parker.”

She swallowed the half-chewed cookie as if it were a mouse and she were a boa constrictor. “If you’d had stayed on the ‘no’, Hardison and I would’ve backed you up.”

He stared at her.

“Didn’t occur to you, did it,” she added. It wasn’t a question; it sounded more like a confirmation of something she already thought she knew.

He didn’t have any good answers, here. “What do you want, Parker?”

“Got it.”

“Great.” He laid back down, turned on his side and pulled the blanket all the way up to his armpits. “Turn the light off on your way out, would you?”

She did. But he didn’t fall back asleep anyway.

Second day back from Oxford, OR, Parker and Hardison were both still around at last call. That was pretty normal for Hardison; they’d come a long way since the days he’d skip the job to play video games, and was present for closing shift as often as not. Parker, though - she wasn’t involved with the day-to-day management of the brewpub, and she didn’t have a habit of waiting up for Hardison; they’d had the place more than long enough for Eliot to know that.

So he wasn’t entirely surprised that, when he finally stepped out of the kitchen, both of them were waiting on him. Eliot took one good look at their body language - Parker leaning against the wall, Hardison with his hands in his pants pockets - and headed for the back; it didn’t seem like this was going to be the sort of conversation he’d want to have on the street, or with the shift staff overhearing. He didn’t look back, just listened for Parker’s and Hardison’s footsteps following him. 

He only turned around after he heard the door close behind them. “What?” he demanded.

“We were thinking about the Dodgson case,” Hardison said.

Eliot turned around and started in the direction of the back door.

“We didn’t play God,” Parker called after him.

Eliot stopped in place, but didn’t turn around. “How do you figure that?”

“Because we gave him a choice. A choice he wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

He still didn’t move. “Yeah? How do you figure that?”

“He was having panic attacks, man,” Hardison said. “Now I never had one myself so I can’t know for certain, but from the outside they look pretty nasty. DE was giving him panic attacks, so he needed to get rid of it.”

“Not ‘wanted’; ‘needed’,” Parker said, drawing the word-choice out and putting emphasis on it. “Keeping the company wasn’t an option; it was literally making him sick.”

“Guilt was making him sick,” Eliot corrected her automatically.

“And his doctor managed to miss that for three whole years,” Hardison said. “And since he didn’t know what was broken, he couldn’t fix it.”

“Oh, I think he knew what was broken, all right.” Eliot turned around because he wanted to see their faces, but he didn’t step away from where he was, halfway to the door. “It ever occur to you that maybe he just didn’t want that life, anymore?”

Parker still had her default expression on. Hardison had some reaction, though. “You drove the guy around for a week, Eliot. You spent more time with him than any of us,” he said. “He looked happy to you?”

Eliot gave him the look that kind of a question deserved. “More like his doctor should’ve added depression to his diagnosis.” More like the attempt to get rid of the company was an act of symbolic suicide, taking an axe to the foundation of Dodgson’s identity. Eliot knew that, but that didn’t make what they had done something else than what it was. “He still didn’t ask for an intervention.”

“He was drowning, man,” Hardison said. “And if you say you wouldn’t jump in after a drowning man, you’d be lying to my face.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t,” Eliot said; he didn’t bother checking the viciousness in his voice, “if he jumped in.”

“You would’ve.” The way Parker said that was deceptively plain. “You were right there trying to fix Nate with the rest of us.”

“Actually, you were first in line,” Hardison added. “Reached out to him before it occurred to any of us to try.”

That-- could be true, actually. Eliot remembered trying to talk to Nate, all the way back, that first time in Chicago, and goodness knew Parker and Hardison weren’t the kind of people to do that sort of a thing, back then.

They were now, though. They were doing it to him.

“You said, if I stood my ground against this job…” Eliot said quietly, letting the sentence trail.

It was Hardison who replied. “We would’ve backed you up.”

Eliot knew exactly how humorless his smile was. “Aren’t you glad I didn’t, then?”

Hardison raised his finger the way he was prone to do. “If I need to choose between you and a job?”

“You’re more important than the job,” Parker added. “Any job.”

“You said it yourself, the guy would’ve ended up in a ditch somewhere or eating lead, if we didn’t get involved.”

“Now who thinks we’re God?” Hardison demanded.

“Just because we can help doesn’t mean we have to,” Parker said. “Once we got involved, we had a responsibility to see it through. But we didn’t have to step in.”

“And yet you’re trying to tell me how taking this case wasn’t a bad thing.”

“Are there winning options here? Or are you just determined to make yourself feel bad, man?” Hardison asked.

“I learned that from you,” Parker said abruptly, changing tack.

“Learned what?” Eliot asked.

“That we can only move forward. That just because we can’t go back, doesn’t make what we can do worthless.”

That was what she’d told Dodgson up on that roof, the words that convinced him to not sell the company, to reopen R&D, to reclaim his life. 

Eliot closed his eyes, breathed very evenly. “Now that,” he told her, “was a sucker punch.”

“You’re my friend,” she said. “And I need you.”

That got Eliot to look at her. Those were the exact words she’d said to Hardison, when she was trying to talk him out of a panic attack, that time he got buried in a coffin, six feet under and covered in dirt: You’re my friend, and I need you.

She met his eyes calmly. So, for that matter, did Hardison. They both of them had the looks of people who knew exactly what they were doing. 

With a little bit of luck, one of them actually did.

Eliot closed his eyes, blew out a long breath, then opened them again. “All right,” he said. “All right.”

Their next job was wonderfully simple, in comparison: just a crooked weapons dealer turned winery owner, who was getting his workers killed. Eliot was picking grapes off the vine under an asshole with a very punchable face for a week, and it felt like a vacation. Plus, the person from the team he interacted with the most on the job was Parker. She was the easiest person in the team to work with: methodical, well-organized, and direct in communication. Bee Meadow Winery was just the thing, after the month Eliot had.

The toy job, that was a bit more of a mixed bag. Jobs with kids got to the entire team; the only one of them they didn’t know had Issues about that was Sophie and it was, actually - and contrary to her reputation - dead easy to drive Sophie to distraction by messing with the rest of the team. They got lucky, though: the job had less of a kid component than one would think given toys. The closest any of them got to actual kids was Eliot playing a single father, and most of his interaction was with the other mothers on the playground. The mothers were cool.

Then Nate dropped the black book bomb on them.

Ironically, going for the black book meant they had that much more free time. Most of the work was Hardison’s work, anyway; he was taken up with that, and then Sophie was full-time directing her little theater group. They weren’t going to take on any jobs with just the three of them. 

Some of Eliot’s time was taken up wargaming with Nate and Parker; a lot of what was left he spent training. That still left him with more free time than he was used to, though, and he spent all of it in the brewpub, riding herd on the kitchen staff. Parker was at the brewpub even more often than he was, albeit running the floor: someone needed to take up the duties Hardison had far less time for while he was busy hacking a goddamned Steranko.

It was a good month. War was coming, that was true, but war Eliot knew how to deal with; the brewpub was running like clockwork. Put the two things together, and it was practically soothing.

“Totally,” Parker agreed, one night after last call, when he mentioned that to her. “Everything has a purpose.”

His small smile was mostly involuntary, and also mostly not really amused. “They don’t get it.”

“Mm.” Parker shook her head a little. “Hardison sort of does.”

He gave her a dubious look.

“Well, he gets that it works for us. And he gets why it works. Like, sure, it’s not the way it works for him, but - he gets it.”

“If you say so,” Eliot said, raising his hands to the sides.

She shoved his shoulder, just hard enough.

By the time the front floor crew were turning over the chairs and mopping the place, the kitchen was already spotless. Eliot sent his crew home and picked up a mop; the day was rainy even on the Portland scale, and mud abounded no matter how many times they mopped up during opening hours.

Parker looked at him, then sent home everyone else they had working closing shift: it would take forever for people to return home in that weather, and she and Eliot could manage what work was left.

They were almost done when Hardison emerged from the back, bleary-eyed. “You planning to drive in this rain?”

“No, I’m going to take the tube. Of course I’m going to drive in this rain!”

Hardison didn’t rise up to Eliot’s bait; apparently, he was that tired. Instead, he said: “I checked the weather radar. Give it 30 minutes, worst of this storm’s gonna pass. It’s still gonna be rainy, but at least you’ll be able to see more than 10 feet ahead. Come on back and have a hot cocoa or something.”

Eliot almost said something about that, but Parker perked up. “Ooh, hot chocolate,” she said. “With marshmallows?”

“Teeny-tiny ones,” Hardison acknowledged.

“All right, fine,” Eliot said, “I’ll make us hot chocolate.”

“You don’t have to make the hot chocolate, man,” Hardison said.

“You use pre-mixed power, man. Shut the hell up.” Hardison and Parker exchanged a look, so Eliot added: “Both of you.”

Fifteen minutes later found them in the back of the brewpub. Hardison had a kitchenette installed in that place, but Eliot refused to cook on any stove that wasn’t natural gas, so he kept a field stove in one of the cupboards. Presently the stove was set up on the coffee table by the couch, and the hot chocolate was almost ready. 

The rain was still going on strong, the sound of it falling on pavements and dumpsters a background roar. Eliot was, maybe, a little bit relieved that he didn’t need to drive in the downpour.

“Hot choc’s ready,” he called out softly. Parker was sitting to his right, but Hardison was still sitting at the bar, working. At Eliot’s call he closed the laptop cover with a click, came over and settled down on Eliot’s left. He and Parker had been doing that for a while, now, bracketing him like that, as if they were trying to keep him there. It was completely unnecessary; not bad, exactly, but decidedly distracting. Eliot would’ve gotten them to stop, except he didn’t know how to do that without talking about it.

He wasn’t going to talk about it.

Parker pulled her knees up and curled up with her back against his side. Eliot transferred his mug to his left and put his right arm over her shoulders, because that was the only way to make that comfortable. Who knew why she chose to curl up against him and not against her boyfriend? Parker was like that, though, and mostly it wasn’t worth it to try and think through her reasons. In the meantime he had a ball of warmth tucked into his side, and that wasn’t an uncomfortable feeling.

Most of the times he touched people he was committing violence against them. It made him treasure all of the other times.

He was, maybe, hoping that the rain would take a little longer to calm down.

“This is nice,” Hardison commented.

“Yeah,” Parker agreed lazily.

A few minutes later, Eliot commented, “30 minutes, huh?”

“Hey, meteorology’s not an exact science, man,” Hardison protested. Well, sort of: his tone was too mild to really be called a “protest”. 

“Did you even check the radar?”

“Hell yeah.”

“Because I’m not sleeping on this couch, man.”

“You can always drive in the rain later,” Parker said. She sounded a little bit more awake than the last time she spoke. “Right now it’s nice.”

“Yeah,” Eliot agreed after a moment. “Yeah, it is.”

“Oh good, then we agree,” Hardison said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, man,” Hardison said. “It’s just that you make it real hard to find out what you like. You know that, right?”

Something about the way Hardison said that was - wrong. Didn’t belong. “When people know what you like,” Eliot told him, “they’re gonna try and give it to you. And before you ask why that’s a bad thing, I want you to think good and hard about what we’re doing.”

“But it’s us,” Parker pointed out.

“It’s habit, Parker. I don’t even think about this crap.” The time it took him to say that was enough time to think about what she just said, put it next to Hardison’s question, and ask: “All right. What’s really going on?”

There followed several seconds of silence, long enough that Eliot wondered if they were going to lie. Then Parker said, in a different tone of voice: “I told you it wasn’t going to work.”

“You did,” Hardison agreed.

“Told you it would make it worse.”

“You did that, too.”

“Guys!” Eliot said. He removed his arm from around Parker and put his mug on the table. Parker and Hardison did the same with theirs. “What the hell is going on?”

“Yeah, that’s a little bit complicated,” Hardison said.

“I don’t like complicated.”

“Yeah, I don’t either. Well--” Hardison added hurriedly, correctly interpreting the expression on Eliot’s face as Are you fucking shitting me. “When it comes to this stuff, I don’t like ‘complicated’.”

“And what is ‘this’ stuff?”

“You’re gonna have to just do it,” Parker said.

Eliot turned around to look at her. 

“I was talking to Hardison,” she added.

“Yeah, I got that,” Eliot said through gritted teeth, then turned back to Hardison. “Well?”

“All right, so - first of all, I’d kind of appreciate it if you didn’t punch me in the face,” Hardison began.

Eliot gave him the kind of a look a statement like that deserved.

Then he remembered the last time Hardison had used that figure of speech. They were sitting on this couch then, too; that was probably why he remembered it at all.

“Second of all,” Hardison began, but Parker continued.

“You can say ‘no’,” she said. “Actually you should totally say ‘no’, because if you say ‘yes’ when you mean ‘no’ we’re going to find out, and everyone’s going to get hurt. And that includes not just you but also Alec and me, so we need you to really think about that.”

“You’re not making any sense,” he told her.

“Remember,” Hardison said; he sounded nervous. “No punching me in the face.”

“What the hell--” Eliot began, but then Hardison put his face very near Eliot’s, and Eliot stopped in place. 

Hardison put his lips against Eliot’s. He had to be applying lip balm when Eliot wasn’t paying attention because his lips weren’t chapped at all, but the only flavour on them was faint, and menthol. If Eliot let his lips part to breathe Hardison in, he also tasted of cocoa and of however many hours had passed since he last brushed his teeth.

“It’s not the two of us and then you,” Parker said as soon as Hardison pulled back, before Eliot could ask What the hell again, before he had to hear what his voice would sound like after this little stunt. “It’s all three of us. Whatever you say, however we go on from here, that’s not going to change.”

“We had a lot of time to talk about it, man,” Hardison said. His voice was soft, and his pupils very wide. “And we’re very, very clear that we want you in our lives. But what exactly that means, that’s totally up to you.”

Eliot almost turned his head to look at Parker, then remembered the way she’d been curled into him until he broke it off. The past few months came rushing at him, every little thing that Parker and Hardison started doing differently, everything he couldn’t make sense of so he shrugged and accepted because the core things, the important things, those hadn’t changed.

Or so he thought.

Their little joint speech about his right to say no made a lot more sense now, but it was still ridiculous. They were his team; they had to know what that meant. That he wasn’t going to turn away, wasn’t going to risk-- to risk everything. To turn away right now would mean taking that risk, no matter what they promised. That just wasn’t how people worked.

That’s not how the world works. He could still see that doctor’s face. This wasn’t the same thing, though. This was--

If you say ‘yes’ when you mean ‘no’ we’re going to find out, and everyone’s going to get hurt. Could he lie to them? Could he make it convincing enough? Probably not. Both of them would hear the wrong note eventually, and Parker wasn’t wrong - then, everyone would get hurt.

No, he didn’t have the easy way out, here. He couldn’t just roll with the punches, perform to expectations. He had to come up with something honest.

And if he was honest--

He grabbed Alec’s face with both his hands, moved so that he planted his knees of either side of his thighs, was practically sitting in his lap and kissed him, kissed him with lips and tongue and teeth.

Because if he was honest with himself, the only reason he hadn’t wanted this all along was because those two had been obvious from the start, and it hadn’t occurred to him that this was a possibility, too.

When he finally pulled apart, he realized that he still didn’t believe it, not all the way down.

“Hey, man.” Hardison lifted a gentle hand to his face, almost-but-didn’t-quite touched his cheek. “Are you going to have a panic attack on us, man? No offense to your manliness. You just kind of look like it.”

It was completely stupid, having a panic attack over a damn kiss, except it wasn’t, not even one bit. Because if this went wrong, if this went any kind of wrong, Eliot didn’t know that he could survive it. Didn’t know that he’d want to.

“Eliot. Hey.” Parker put her palm between his shoulder blades. “I need you to take a deep breath for me, okay?”

And it wasn’t stupid that that worked, either, even if he hated a little bit that it did. 

He sucked in a deep breath, counted to four then let it out. It was easier to keep breathing, after that.

“So I don’t know whether to believe the part where you just kissed me, or the part where you flipped your shit about it,” Hardison said.

Eliot glared at him.

“He’s still sitting in your lap,” Parker pointed out. “And he hasn’t punched you.”

“Yeah, I could still use some words, here.”

Eliot closed his eyes, took another steadying breath, and grit out: “Dammit, Hardison.”

“I think that means--” Parker started, but then Hardison put his still-hovering hand on Eliot’s shoulder, and she stopped.

One more breath. He was beginning to get some moisture back in his mouth, finally.

Parker shifted, reached back towards the table. The next moment she pushed Eliot’s mug into his hand. “Here; this’ll help,” she told him. Next she handed Hardison his mug, and finally she picked up hers. The entire time, her right hand didn’t move from the center of his back.

“I think I’m okay now,” he told her.

“Maybe I like touching you,” she replied. She met his eyes when he looked at her, and added: “There’s not a lot of people I like to touch. It’s nice.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “It is.”

The next day Sophie’s theater group moved into the Dolan Theater’s basement, and that was the end of Parker’s and his free time. They needed to make a way from the theater’s basement to the Shanghai tunnels and from there to the Highpoint Tower’s elevator shaft. That was hard physical labour, which he and Parker were best suited for.

Kitchens were noisy places; Parker and he didn’t need to talk much to work well together. Having spent that much time in the brewpub’s kitchen, working with only her felt like a fast of silence in comparison. Speech became utilitarian, keeping each other safe during the demolition and keeping Nate out of their hair by updating him on the comm. 

Hardison was on the comm, too. That way he was always home when the two of them took a break so they could get their minimal amount of sleep. Going to Hardison’s meant no risk of Sophie or Nate wandering through; Hardison’s completely ridiculous bathtub was a bonus, for all that he pretended to be horrified at the ice that Eliot filled it with.

Or at least, Eliot was pretty sure that he was only pretending. He was too tired and too off-kilter to tell for sure.

He hadn’t had a relationship intended to last more than three months in a long, long time. He’d never had a relationship that involved spending that much time with the person - in this case persons - he was involved with. He hadn’t had a relationship in which he was more-or-less honest about his life since Aimee, and she’d been his high school sweetheart. 

Wanting what Parker and Hardison were offering, that was easy; it was too easy, terrifyingly easy, the kind of ‘easy’ that meant it’d be easier to cut his own hand off than to stop wanting what he now did. Wanting it that hard made it possible to keep trying, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t fucking it up in the time it took to get from “trying” to “succeeding.” He was sending mixed signals, and he knew it.

The first week of the new routine, Eliot spent about one in three nights at his own place. Then he spent three consecutive nights there because the way he was driving Hardison up the wall was driving him up the wall, and he needed to break that goddamned cycle. The fourth night, Parker got in his car when they left the theater and - when he tried to glare her out - gave him the sort of a look that said if she left the car she’d just break into his place later.

“I talked to Hardison,” she said ten minutes into the drive. “He gets it better now.”

“You and Hardison have a good thing,” he told her. “Putting me in the middle, maybe that’s not such a good idea.”

“Is that what you want?”

That she could even think that sent a spike of fear through him. “Dammit, Parker, that’s not--”

“Then why did you say that?” she asked plainly.

She wasn’t hurt. She wasn’t about to quit, either. He couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice as he demanded: “What do you want me to say?”

“The truth.”

Of course that’s what she’d want. This was Parker. He should’ve known that. “The truth is, I’m going to be like this for a while.”

“Okay.” She said that very plainly, too. After a beat, she added: “And Hardison waited three years for me. He can do this, too.”

He bit back on saying Not the same thing, Parker. She’d just ask him to explain how it wasn’t the same thing, and if he did that he’d just feel crazier than he already did. That wasn’t a good feeling, and he was in no hurry to make it worse. And besides--

And besides, the reminder did make him feel better. Holding on to that feeling was the best thing he could do, if he wanted this to work.

And he wanted it to.

The night they finished making the way, he let Hardison talk him into sushi. Eliot was pretty sure that Hardison had been sitting on that idea for several nights at that point, but had assumed - correctly - that Eliot would shut him down and cook something instead.

The thing about sushi was that there was only one place in Portland that made sushi Eliot actually liked, and Aki’s didn’t do either takeout or deliveries. Or rather, Aki’s didn’t usually do that: just about anywhere would if you offered them enough money, and given their financials “enough money” was little enough Hardison wouldn’t think twice about spending it, might not even think once. Eliot wasn’t entirely sure that money was real to Hardison, that he didn’t think it was just like the scoring system in one of his games. It was real to Eliot, though, and while he didn’t have anything in principle against takeout he didn’t like to do that.

Hardison had pitched the idea of sushi as celebratory, given they had - as of that night - finished all the prep for a job that Hardison, at least, had been working on for about a year. Eliot agreed for two reasons - or maybe one and a half, as one influenced the other considerably. The first reason was that he could tell how much Hardison wanted to order out, and decided he didn’t feel like arguing. The second reason was that while he pretty much always wanted to cook - it was a bad sign when he didn’t - he was also pretty fucking tired. It was entirely possible - likely, even - that that was why Hardison wanted to order out. 

That Eliot was tired influenced his willingness - or lack thereof - to get into an argument, which was why it counted only as half a reason; but it wasn’t the only or even the primary reason he didn’t want to argue, which was why he didn’t just fold it in and called it one reason for caving in and was done with it. No; the reason that Eliot looked at Hardison’s face and decided not to argue - well, that was two reasons also. The first was that he knew he was going to lose that fight: Eliot wasn’t much good at standing up to people he loved, and he knew that about himself. The second was that he had a fair idea of how much he’d been upsetting Hardison, and the idea of arguing about something pretty much guaranteed to make Hardison happy made Eliot feel sick.

So he had a fair list of reasons against arguing. He’d just forgotten that there were reasons for agreeing, too, right up until the first of those reasons hit him in the chest: Hardison’s genuine, huge smile. That right there made agreeing to Hardison’s idea worth it. 

They set the table while Parker - who was quicker - took her turn in the shower. By the time Eliot emerged from the bathroom their food was already there. The smell alone made Eliot realize that Hardison had been actually right: Eliot was in the habit of cooking for himself pretty much no matter what, but that was relief he felt at the realization that food was just there.

“Second thoughts?” Hardison asked; Eliot had kind of stopped at the end of the hallway.

“Kind of the opposite,” Eliot admitted. That won him the second Hardison smile for the night. Eliot’s caution of “Don’t let that get to your head,” was only half-hearted.

“Yeah, it’s a little too late for that,” Hardison said. “Now c’mon; I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.”

The job went without a hitch. That was rare: usually reality threw at least one spanner in the works and Nate had to adjust the plan on the fly. This time, though, the only unpredictable factor was Nate himself when it turned out that, true to form, he elected to not share part of his plan with them.

For once, Eliot was inclined to write that off.

“Will you marry me, Laura?”

“Yes,” Sophie replied in a whisper. “Yes.”

Hardison catcalled as Nate rose up from his knee and he and Sophie kissed. Parker was a little more sedate, with a “There you go.” Both of them were clapping. For his part, Eliot leaned back against the bar and tried to gently set aside the tangle of his emotions. This wasn’t the time to work through that; this was the time to dredge up a genuine - if closed-mouth - smile, and be happy for his teamma-- No.

Be happy for his friends.

This was going to take getting used to.

“I mean, just think about it,” Hardison said, “Leverage International,” talking about the plan for the harddrive that Parker and he apparently simultaneously came up with in the moments since Nate’s declaration, because Eliot knew for a fact they hadn’t coordinated any such plan before.

Coming up with the plan, that wasn’t Eliot’s job. It would be Parker’s, maybe; God knew that nothing good ever came out of letting Hardison be responsible for that. Hardison was maybe the only one of them whose job would not fundamentally change. With the knowledge that Nate had planned this since before they made camp in Portland, Eliot understood why Nate had him join that many client interviews in the past year-or-so. 

Eliot pushed himself up. “You know,” he said as he approached Nate and Sophie, “this was your crusade. Now it’s our war.” And it would be war, from now on, particularly if this Leverage International thing stuck. There was a difference between one team waging guerrilla, and an organized force with large-scale intel. With the black book, they really could change the world.

Sophie reached for his upper arm. “Promise me,” she said, and there were tears in her voice, “you’ll keep them safe.”

There was no question of whether Sophie knew of the change that had taken place over the past couple of months. “Till my dying day,” he promised, and his voice wasn’t much above a whisper, either.

“You know, Eliot,” Nate said, “I’d say ‘call if you need anything’, but you never-- never need anything.”

Sophie had known all along but Nate, Eliot was willing to wager, was only figuring it out that moment.

“Yeah, I did,” Eliot replied, because that was true. A whisper was all he could manage. He turned his head to look to the side, where Parker and Hardison still sat. Parker’s smile was twin to his, closed-mouth and soft. Hardison wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

This was Eliot’s world, now: these two.

He was all right with that.

Three months after that found them still in Portland, neck-deep in vetting any crew or individual who wanted a stab at one of the names off the black book. Hardison had been right: everyone wanted in with them, but the team’s agenda meant that not anyone would do.

“Ugh.” Hardison massaged his neck. “Why did I think this was a good idea, again?”

“Because it is,” Eliot said shortly.

“Otherwise it would take us a decade to clean house,” Parker elaborated. “Some of this intel would expire before we could use it.”

“Well, it’s still going to be years,” Hardison said. “You know what we need? We need a hobby. All work and no play is not good for any of us.”

“You brew beer,” Eliot said.

“Nah-uh. That’s not a hobby, that’s a side business.”

“To-may-to, to-mah-to.”

“You know what I miss?” Parker said suddenly. “I miss the game.”

Hardison’s face lit up. Then he frowned, and turned to look at Eliot, who didn’t need words to know what the question was.

“Just keep Nate off my back,” he said. “I’m not doing that again.”

“Done,” Parker said, simultaneously with Hardison’s “Which is very understandable.”

“You think Nate’ll agree?” Parker asked after a brief pause.

“Girl, everyone needs a hobby,” Hardison said. “And if he doesn’t realize it?”

“Sophie will,” Eliot said. “By now they probably both realized that retirement can get kind of boring.”

“Now Sophie, she’s got the theater thing,” Hardison added. “But Nate? Is probably driving her crazy.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure why he wanted to retire,” Parker admitted.

Eliot and Hardison looked at each other. Eliot shrugged.

“All right,” Hardison said. “I’ll set it up.”

Parker stared at the bar. “Is this all necessary?” she asked.

“I may have gone a little overboard,” Eliot admitted.

“Oh, no,” Hardison said, pulling the second syllable a little, “an abundance of delicious, delicious food. What will we do?”

“Eat until we’re sick, probably,” Parker said.

“That question was rhetorical,” Hardison replied.

“It’ll refrigerate well,” Eliot said. “Except the cookies. They don’t keep so well.”

“Nomming all the cookies is a priority, duly noted.”

“Is that even a word?” Eliot demanded.

“I like that word,” Parker said. “Ooh! Look at the time!”

They all moved towards the stools.

“Time to make Nate jealous,” Hardison said.

“Why would he be jealous?” Parker asked.

“Because he only gets to look at all this food.”

“All right.”

Hardison toggled the remote. The screen lit up, showing Nate and Sophie.

“You guys ready for a new campaign?” Nate asked.

“Oh yeah,” Parker replied.

“We most definitely are,” Hardison added.

They left Eliot the last word. He smiled, and said: “Bring it.”