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Parker spots them first, coming around the corner of the house of mirrors. Before he’s close enough that she can make out the blood on his face and the limp in his step, she can see that Eliot is leaning on Molly and that’s enough to make her feet start running before her brain tells them to. Hardison’s shoes slap the pavement behind her.
“Molly!” Connell’s calling out.
“Dad!” The little girl looks up at Eliot, torn between letting go of her savior and running to her father but in a few seconds Parker is there, slipping under Eliot’s shoulder and taking his weight while Molly runs into her father’s arms.
“Dude,” Hardison mutters, ducking to look into Eliot’s face. “We goin’ straight to the hospital.”
“Job ain’t done,” Eliot grits out.
Parker catches Hardison’s eyes, shakes her head minutely, readjusts her grip on Eliot. Hardison sees, but Eliot doesn’t. He’s squinting like the light through the low clouds is hurting his eyes, his breath coming short and ragged under her touch, wincing away from her palm against his cracked ribs. Hardison backs off, reluctant, throwing a look over his shoulder as he goes back to deal with Daria and the stolen chip.
In the back of Lucille, Eliot sits hunched while Parker tapes his fingers, but he stops short of letting anyone else clean the blood off his face.
Back at Nate’s they get him into the bathroom before he orders them all out. He lasts five minutes alone before he cracks the door and asks for help. Parker’s help, specifically, to everyone’s surprise but hers. She’d found the good scissors as soon as they arrived, been carrying them around waiting for him to ask, and she’s heading for the bathroom while the rest of them are still looking at each other. She’d known those jeans were a lost cause from the moment she saw how he couldn’t bend his knee even halfway. She cuts them off, boxers too — easier to get them off that way without getting too close to anything she shouldn’t touch — and he says nothing, leaning heavily on the counter while she works, silent and efficient. She sits on the floor while he showers, wondering if she’d be able to get him up again if he fell, but from the shadow she sees pacing outside the door, she’d have help.
“You still there, Parker?” she hears after the water shuts off.
“Yes.”
“Meds kicked in. Water helped. Feeling better, I got it from here.”
Hardison would argue, she can hear his arguments inside her head. “Okay.” She hangs Nate’s nicest, softest robe on the hook right next to the shower and turns to go. “I’ll be out there.”
An hour later they’re down in the bar waiting for Thorne when Eliot shows up in the doorway. Hardison lifts his chin and Parker turns to watch. He’s still holding his shoulders wrong and his eyes are narrowed but not angry-narrowed, he’s scanning the room for threats but his eyes aren’t tracking right. Nate and Sophie are at the bar, openly watching him too, but it’s towards the booth she’s sharing with Hardison that he eventually directs his halting steps, lowering himself gingerly down beside her.
He’s just in time; Geoffrey Thorne walks in the door to collect his magic chip and under cover of watching him talk with Nate and Sophie Parker gets to watch Eliot. He hadn't looked this bad after getting hit by a car and falling in the water, or even after whatever-really-happened in the warehouse with Moreau’s guys.
She bets he’s never going to want to go to a carnival again, bummer.
Eliot’s phone rings and he winces as he shifts, trying to reach for his pocket with his worse-injured arm, so Parker slides it out and hands it over. He mumbles a ‘Thanks’ before answering the call. They can hear Molly’s high, excited voice without trying, and Eliot flinches slightly, holding the phone further from his ear.
‘Eliot? Is that you? Are you okay? You left so fast I was worried you were - are you at the hospital? Are you hurt bad? Are you going to be all right?’
He talks to her for a minute, Parker exchanging a glance with Hardison; the strain in his voice from sounding normal is obvious to them, but Molly doesn’t seem to notice. Parker’s been thinking about it lately, how things she never notices or understands about other people are so obvious to her about these two.
“Sounds like Molly and her dad are doing okay,” Hardison says after Eliot hangs up.
“Making up for lost time,” Eliot says, looking down at his hands, and Parker nods, sees Hardison do the same. That’s something else she’s been thinking about. How each of them has something they’re always dealing with, something from the past, and whenever a job reminds them of that thing, it’s like they put their own pain into the situation and make the whole thing hurt even more.
“Hey man, you really should have let us get you to a hospital,” Hardison says, voice light and eyes worried.
“I hired a nurse.”
Parker's barely had time to think, No you didn't, before she walks in the door. “I don't think she's registered,” Hardison mumbles as Eliot limps out the door, Nurse Gail on his arm.
Parker stares after him, confused but not in the normal way, more like the way that feels like an unreachable itch. There are plenty of things she doesn’t understand, normal-people-things, sex for instance, but there are also a few things she understands so well that they feel like gravity. And this? Eliot leaving with a woman who’s definitely not a registered nurse when he’s got no range of motion in his right arm and his left eye is swollen almost shut? It makes her feel like she blinked and suddenly her feet were on the ceiling.
Eliot knows how to take care of himself. Eliot is lying to them.
“Lying?” Hardison gets up, following her across the room. He waves goodbye to Nate and Sophie and then runs a few steps to catch up with her on the sidewalk outside. “How’d you mean lying, he didn’t say anything. You mean about her being a nurse? Babe that wasn’t a lie, that was…”
“I know what a euphemism is, Hardison,” she says impatiently, scanning the street. There, at the end of the block. Nurse Gail or whoever getting into a taxi. She can just make out the shaggy hair of the other person in the back seat. The cab slides forward into traffic, taking a right at the end of the street, the direction of Eliot's house.
“Parker,” Hardison says, slow and quiet like he’s trying to work something out. “Is it possible you’re kinda jealous that he’s letting one of his girlfriends take care of him instead of us?”
“Girlfriend?” Parker’s laugh is too high and too loud. “She wasn’t his girlfriend, did you see how she scanned the bar when she came in? She’d never seen him before, she was looking for her client. He hired her, Hardison, it was so obvious!”
“Oh-kayyy. Well, he did actually tell us that himself, you know, that he hired her…”
“Yes, and that’s my point.” She spins to face him, peering into his face in the dark. “Unless it’s someone we met on a job, we never meet the people he has sex with. He’s never brought anyone to the bar, not once!”
“You know you’re right.” Hardison’s worried eyes shift over her shoulder, in the direction the cab disappeared. “And you know what else, from stuff he’s said, I don’t think he usually takes them back to his own house, either. Man’s damn paranoid, and with good reason.”
“Exactly.” Parker draws a breath, nervous energy making her bounce on the balls of her feet, fingers twitching like she’s so close to grasping at something important. “You know how we talked about how we, we, we all have our own thing, to let off steam, right? If a job goes bad I jump off a building, you play fantasy video games, Eliot hooks up. It’s like we have to remember that our, our, our bodies can do other things.”
Eliot reminding himself that his body could be used for pleasure, not just violence, that makes sense to her. She knows it makes sense to Hardison, too, even if he gets blushy and stammery whenever they talk about it.
“I just…” she trails off, searching for words the way she’d search for handholds along an unfamiliar ascent. “I don’t think this is that. I don’t think he hired her for him, I think he hired her for us.”
Hardison blinks, comprehension dawning in his face. “So we wouldn’t worry. So we’d think hey, he’s not gonna be alone, he’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, or else so we’d think he wasn’t as badly injured as he is, if he’s feeling good enough for a bounce in the hay. What?” She squints at him. “Did I say that right?”
“So close, babe. So close.” Hardison’s grin dims down quickly and he asks, “So what do you want us to do?”
“I want to go to his house and check on him.”
“You know we all agreed to respect each other’s privacy at home, except for Nate’s.”
“Oh so we’re committing crimes by caring about each other now?”
“When you put it like that…” Hardison puts one arm around her shoulder and squeezes her tight for just a second. “All right. Let’s go steal….Eliot’s recovery, I guess.”