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There’s something in Parker that recognises what Hardison and Eliot are, behind the con.
Not the con they’re currently pulling together — a heist at a Ren Faire — but a con they don’t know themselves.
Parker spins. She scales down long elevator shafts; launches herself at zip-lines between skyscraper roofs.
She’s the Mastermind, now, laying out plans and convincing bad guys and stepping ever further across the line with Nate’s confidence and Sophie’s grift. Parker sits with clients with Hardison’s conversational flow-charts in her head, Eliot present at her side like the knife she got from him for Christmas.
She lies awake at night, not thinking about vents or Vermeers but about how on Earth she’s going to keep on doing this. But it feels right, and it feels right to have the both of them on either side when Parker finally drops off.
She trusts her gut.
They travel further and further. She introduces Hardison to her favourite spots to people-watch in Venice; Eliot introduces her to restaurants she’d never noticed whilst plotting heists in Amsterdam.
Portland’s home, though. Home to the rafters and Hardison’s robots and playing cards and cooking and craft beer and her own clothes and Old Nate.
Parker walks the block, sometimes, and thinks about falling together and then falling for together — being together, a three.
She sees things others don’t — thinks harder, tries better to understand because she really doesn’t, most of the time.
And she thinks about how she became herself so quickly, when given the chance all those years ago. She feels very old, sometimes. And very, very young.
She figures it out after Breanna — Hardison’s sister — gives her a copy of Percy Jackson and the Olympians after she teaches her how to pick a lock.
There’s a glossary in the back of all the different gods, and Parker gets stuck on the Moirai — the Fates. And oddly frustrated, because this isn’t how it happened and... Oh.
It doesn’t change Parker, knowing. Another part of the puzzle is sorted, put in her stride, and it just reinforces what she already knows. She puts it in her back pocket with her nylon wire and her instincts.
It doesn’t quite fit in her, but it’s like how Alice White doesn’t fit in her. She pulls Clotho over her like a veil more often than not, like the very tapestry they’ve been making together since Greece.
“You think about it differently to me,” Eliot says, on a job. He doesn’t say wrong, because even though (of course) he’d already figured it out, he’s good like that. “I can’t think that way. Not the way I’ve always been.”
“Which Fate were you?” Parker asks, curious. There’s two more possibilities, she thinks, as they walk down the corridor of the shady insurance building.
Eliot looks away. “Don’t you remember?” he asks, and then he puts his earpiece back in.
There’s a difference, feeling and remembering. She forgets about the whole thing for a while. Then they taste wedding cakes for a con and Parker guesses one of the ingredients wrong — cardamom.
She doesn’t get why until Eliot tells her about her and Hardison’s wedding cake in Sweden, decades ago.
...Parker really, really tries to get Hardison to figure it out.
(“Let him decide,” Eliot says, and it’s with a heaviness that Parker’s not entirely sure is warranted but understands anyway, because it’s Eliot.)
She lends him the book from Breanna. She steals reliefs of the Fates from museums and leaves them in his bedside drawer. She wants to talk about it with him, this old con, this never-ending job.
Parker wants to talk about it with Hardison because he’s him. But there’s more important things to talk about — easier things, too. Like Leverage International, with her new teams in South Korea and England and Italy.
Clotho’s the youngest of the Fates, with a distaff in her hand. Parker’s the Mastermind and prefers a knife. They both stand over creation; hers is of baby thieves and fixers and hackers and hitters and grifters by trade. She’s happy she’s not called that anymore — Parker doesn’t like the idea of being a legend.
“Who are Nate and Sophie?” she asks, one night, when they’re snuggled up in bed critiquing action movies. “Have they always been around?”
Eliot swallows. “Yeah,” he says. “They have.” He doesn’t say anything else.
Parker lets it go, but she still wonders. Eliot draws it out, and Hardison cuts the thread.