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All the most impressive tech that a man could own, and Hardison still found himself struggling, occasionally, to get youtube videos to suck it up and load. He was struggling to start an Assassins Creed: Brotherhood LP when his phone started ringing, and honestly, at that point, he would have welcomed a national emergency to save him from his own frustrations.
Instead, it was Eliot’s number on his screen, and he prayed that a slippery corporation with an impressive firewall needed to be taken down. “ ‘Sup?”
“We need to talk, Hardison.” Eliot had many different ‘serious’ voices. There were levels to his intensity, ranging from ‘On an average person this would be a threatening look but from Eliot it just means he’s got a wedgie,’ to ‘I’m three seconds away from dismembering 98% of the room so you should step away from me.’ When he told Hardison that they needed to talk, his tone was somewhere around ‘Nate and Sophie aren’t speaking again.’
The thing was, Hardison couldn’t think of anything at the moment that was all that serious. After all, they’d just finished up the Reed Rockwell job, they were all taking a little bit of time off until Nate saw a good opportunity. Everyone was in that strange in between stage where they were equal parts comfortable and restless. Nothing ever went wrong then- and besides, Eliot wasn’t the kind of guy that often turned to Hardison and said that they needed to discuss something.
Hardison hadn’t even pissed Eliot off recently. “I didn’t take it, touch it, or eat it. Whatever it was.” It was a joke, but Hardison was using the joke to gauge Eliot’s mood. If he was pissed off, he’d hone in on the idea that Hardison had done something and was lying. If everything was really okay, he’d crack a joke about how he was sure Hardison had done everything he said he hadn’t.
Instead of either of those options, Eliot ignored the statement and continued. “It’s about Parker.” He cleared his throat. “Meet me at the bar in a half and hour.”
So he was worried, but he wasn’t making Hardison grab his coat and run, meaning that Parker wasn’t in danger. Hardison still grabbed his coat and started towards the door, anyway. It was Parker. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
The LP finished loading as Hardison’s front door slammed, forgotten.
Eliot had no idea how he was going to explain this all to Hardison. He wasn’t entirely sure he got all of it himself.
The problem started with Reed Rockwell, during all of Nate’s ridiculous risk-taking. Or, to be fair, the risk-taking and Reed Rockwell had nothing to do with it; the problem arose during one of the little side steps that they’d had to accomplish. No big drama to trip them up, no danger to their lives.
Just brochures.
Nate and Sophie needed a good motivational speech audience for them to steal, which meant they’d left Eliot with Parker. Parker was left with a bunch of brochures about Self-Actualization, and Loving Thyself, and Achieving true bliss…a bunch of positive thinking crap that, in hindsight, someone should have realized might be more distracting to Parker than was good for the job. She ended up tucking away brochures like some people tucked away take out menus, or like she usually tucked away new, crisp hundred dollar bills.
She wasn’t simply looking at brochures though. That Eliot could understand- she was still learning how to do the exact things that those motivational speeches claimed to be about, and the idea that she could be sat down and talked through learning to love yourself so that your partner could love you- Eliot understood that.
But it was how she was talking about the meetings that finally made Eliot speak up. “Why we, Parker?”
They were sitting in Nate’s apartment when he asked. The real work had been handed off to Sophie and Nate to wrap up- they’d switched Rockwell into where he needed to be, but Parker was still thumbing through all the brochures. Eliot didn’t even need to strain himself to catch a glimpse of the titles she was squirreling away, that Parker kept suggesting they go to since they had nothing to do but wait.
At first, Eliot thought she was saying we meaning the whole squad. It went with out saying that Nate could do with a little help in the loving thyself department, and that Sophie probably needed some help learning to accept who she is on the inside. Maybe Parker had even meant Hardison, specifically, and was just happened to be talking over the earpieces.
When they’d taken out their earpieces, though, and Hardison had gotten up to use the bathroom, she still kept saying we. And then it hit Eliot: Parker meant him. She thought that he needed to go to a motivational speaker with her.
Absurd, of course, because not only didn’t he need any motivational help, but he couldn’t figure out for the life of hi why Parker wanted his company. So, when she didn’t respond right away- distracted- Eliot asked again. “Parker, why do you keep saying we?”
Before Hardison came back into the room, Parker answered. Eliot stared at her for a long moment, mouth opened in disbelief as he tried to find the words to argue with her. He gave up when the words refused to surface, clamping his jaw shut tightly.
Parker saw his confusion, and tried to explain further. Hardison came back from the bathroom, however, and so Eliot changed the topic. He definitely wasn’t ready to have the conversation with Hardison right there, especially since he wasn’t one hundred percent sure he wanted to have the conversation at all.
It was his fault, he knew, for asking in the first place. He could have let the strange speech quirk drop. He hadn’t, though, and now he was stuck with Parker’s explanation haunting him until he did something about it.
Parker didn’t get what Eliot’s problem was, frankly. The ‘we,’ she thought, was obvious. Clear cut.
For maybe the briefest instant, Parker feared that, for Eliot, what they’d become wasn’t obvious. Maybe, somehow, even though he usually was a few steps ahead of her, he hadn’t noticed how the three of them had become something new. Or, worse than that- and all the more likely, considering that she wasn’t always the best at reading people- perhaps she was wrong.
After all, it wouldn’t be the first time with Eliot or Hardison that her signals had gotten crossed. She’d given up on keeping track of all the times that she’d been certain they were talking about one thing, and then it turned out they were talking about another. That they wanted to do one thing and that was literally the exact opposite of what they were trying to tell her.
That fear rose and fell in a matter of moments, with a brisk shake of Parker’s head. That was crazy talk, even for her. There was no way in the world that Eliot felt nothing. Not when she felt so much. Not when she was so rarely sure of how she felt, but now knew exactly where she stood on this.
Oh sure, she didn’t know how to handle it. What to do next, whether it was something that she should be feeling…but she knew that she felt it, and that was better than a lot of moments in her life.
No, Eliot had to feel what she felt. He had to have better words for it. Otherwise he would have shot her down- gently- when she explained about the brochures. He wouldn’t leave her hanging. He was direct, sure of himself, honest with her. She knew him well enough to know this, to know that she was right, and that she wasn’t alone in how she felt.
It was Eliot who was being weird this time.
When Hardison got to the bar, it was clear that Eliot had been sitting there for some time. Hardison was fifteen minutes early.
Hardison sat on the stool beside him. There was already a beer waiting for him on the counter, so he held onto the pint and braced himself. “So what’s going on?”
He couldn’t help but notice how Eliot’s beer was mostly set dressing, in spite of the fact that Eliot raised it to his lips a couple of times. The man was distracted from drinking it, starting to take a sip and then changing his mind, placing the glass back on the counter top.
“It’s Parker, right? You said something was up with our girl.” There was a weird twitch in Eliot’s face, one that did nothing to ease the nervous pounding of Hardison’s heart. “Is something wrong? Is she into some trouble? Because I told her crazy ass not to go stealing those safety deposit boxes, at least not so soon after the-”
“What?” Eliot blinked at him in befuddlement, wrinkling his brow. Once he realized that he was never going to know or care what Hardison was referring to, he shook his head and started again. “No. It’s about you and Parker.” It was Hardison’s turn to twitch.
There was a lot of bad things that could happen next, wasn’t there? Hardison was pretty sure Parker was into him, she’d said as much a few times now, but the two of them weren’t an item. They didn’t have any labels besides being friends, and he wasn’t about to press Parker into making them one. He was more than willing to wait it out, hope for the best, watch her grow and figure out precisely what she was feeling, and what she wanted. He’d step back if she asked him to- or he got the feeling that she needed him to, since he was well aware that she was still learning to communicate that kind of thing- but that didn’t mean the thought of stepping off didn’t hurt like hell to consider.
What if she’d told Eliot that she was into someone else? Had Eliot seen her with someone else? Had she said she wasn’t interested anymore? A half dozen different scenarios raced through Hardison’s head in those few seconds before Eliot elaborated, and by the narrowed eyed and hesitant look on Eliot’s face, his reaction to each scenario had been clearly visible.
“She doesn’t think it’s just you and her anymore.”
That phrased didn’t match any of the Worst Case Scenarios that Hardison had come up with. “Huh? Come again?”
Whenever Eliot was frustrated, either with the crew, the need to use words, or both, he gestured with his hands. It was all either sharp pointing gestures like kitchen knives or choking motions with fingers curled like claws, but Hardison understood the sight well. Now, as he spoke, Eliot was switching between the two, avoiding looking in Hardison’s direction.
The dialog did come more easily while he did this, even if the gestures did nothing to help Hardison understand it. “She’s got this idea in her head, this fucking crazy idea, that me and her need to sit through those damn motivational speeches about relationships and emotions and shit. That somehow that’ll help things-”
“You and her?” Hardison’s voice did not crack. It didn’t squeal like a tire on ‘you’. He had more emotional control than that, and wasn’t in the business of putting his vulnerability all out there in a bar, even to Eliot.
Eliot glared at Hardison for merely echoing him instead of adding something to the conversation. “Yeah, that’s what I said, isn’t it?”
“So, she, uh…” Hardison rolled his shoulders, stretched his neck. He tried to speak the next few words evenly, nonchalantly, as if it were all good in Hardison-ville. Everything was aces. “She wants to do the relationship thing with you, is that what you’re telling me?” He choked on air, and took a large gulp from his beer. He could totally handle this.
Eliot shook his head no and tried again. “You’re missing what I’m saying, man, you’ve gotta listen to me. That’s not- no.” He practically hissed his words, aggravated. Which was strange- almost funny-, considering what he’d just come to Hardison with. Eliot was annoyed with Hardison while telling Hardison that Parker, apparently, was more interested in Eliot than she was Hardison.
Maybe somewhere down the line, Hardison could find it in himself to laugh about it. “So I’m missing, what, exactly? That you and her-”
“No, that ain’t what I’m saying. Damn it, Hardison, listen to me-”
“I hear what you’re saying, Eliot, and that sounds a hell of a lot like-”
“The three of us.” Hardison’s mouth shut of it’s own accord, because he’d officially hit the point in which nothing in the world made sense. “She thinks this thing between you and her is…that it involves all three of us. As a thing. Together. Not without you.” Eliot looked almost deflated for having forced the words out, a strange mix of relieved but still concerned. The words, as clear as he could make them, were on the table, laying alongside their beers for them both to stare out, flabbergasted.
Hardison drank the rest of his beer in one fell swoop, taking a huge breath immediately afterward. “Shit.”
“Yeah,” Eliot sighed, passing over his beer. “My thoughts exactly.”
What Parker wanted was complicated. The last thing that any of the crew needed was more complication. With all the ways that their jobs could go south, all the ways that they had to struggle to deal with the fall out…it was too much. Nate and Sophie were trouble enough for ten years, and that was before factoring in Parker’s problems, or Eliot’s past, or Hardison’s overcompensation.
One of the reasons that Eliot was always so glad to see Parker and Hardison working out whatever they were working out was because it wasn’t half as complicated as everything else in their lives. They were good for each other. Simple. Sweet.
Attempting to turn what they had into something they had with Eliot…that was more. And they could do without More.
Eliot knew he should have gone to talk to Parker first, should have sat her down and figured things out before going to Hardison about it, but something had stopped him. He knew perfectly well what it was- it was the same reason that he had frozen momentarily when Hardison started to panic that maybe Parker wanted Eliot instead of him.
He couldn’t stand to see them distressed. And he couldn’t bear to be the person that made them feel that way. Eliot didn’t want to see the way Parker’s frown would tug at her face if he tried to explained that this was a no go.
And that? That was his complication, underneath all the other ones. Because protecting the crew was his job, but Parker and Hardison were already above and beyond the call of duty for him.They’d burrowed some place deep and the strangest part of it all was that he didn’t want them gone.
Was that why Parker thought that the three of them were headed towards being an item? Eliot tried to keep his feelings about the pair from being too obvious, but maybe she’d seen glimpses of it and confused his concern and friendship for feelings more…complicated?
Eliot knew the answer to that question by his third beer. By his next, he was almost ready to admit the answer to himself, and maybe even to Hardison, if he was willing to press his luck. If Hardison finally managed to drag his gaze up to look Eliot in the eye again, maybe Eliot would tell him that Parker wasn’t exactly wrong, but she wasn’t exactly right, either, and that Eliot was making this just as complicated as she was. The only difference was, he could simply feel this way, and never let it go further than that.
Telling Hardison that could also make Hardison run away- although Eliot was starting to think that might be better than this bizarre, tension-filled holding pattern that they were stuck in.
Eliot opened his mouth to speak. He knew, for a brief second, exactly what he’d tell Hardison if the words actually managed to escape.
No, Eliot hadn’t done complicated before. He’d always been a one on one kind of man, had spent the last few years just casually dating and then amicably floating apart. Before that, he’d been in love, and fucked it up, and it shouldn’t have gone done like that, because it should have been simple.
Yeah, if he was brave enough to be honest, Eliot was almost as clueless about how this was supposed to work as Parker and Hardison.
He would tell Hardison that sometimes it was rough getting to sleep if he wasn’t sure the two of them were safe, and maybe that meant something. He would sit at the bar and tell Hardison that maybe Parker wasn’t the one that’s confused- maybe it was them, him and Hardison, because the three of them have had a strangely comfortable routine going on for too long for it to be just nothing.
He’d tell Hardison that yeah, when Nate pulls his shit, Eliot has always been far more scared for Hardison and Parker than for himself, and that wasn’t just because he knows he’s a survivor. He’d tell Hardison how he roots for Parker and Hardison harder than anyone else on the damn planet, because he needs them to be happy.
Not wants them to be happy, but needs them to be, for his own sanity.
If the words finally escaped, he’d look Hardison in the eye and tell him that he wasn’t sure when, exactly, all that had become true, but he didn’t think it mattered anymore.
He didn’t get a chance to test his bravery, though, because the door to the bar opened, and the chimes cut into their tense silence. The door closed and then suddenly there was Parker, pulling up a stool to sit between them.
Automatically, Hardison passed her the bowl of peanuts.
She spoke around a mouthful of peanuts, looking back and forth between them. “This is about the brochures, isn’t it?”
The boys were awkward, which was weird, because as far as Parker knew, Eliot was never awkward. Hardison, he got awkward, stammering and stumbling over words whenever he wasn’t quite sure what Parker was getting at. She kind of liked it, even, knowing that even Hardison didn’t have all the emotional stuff together. It made her feel less stupid about the people things.
Both of the boys being awkward like this was new. When they stared at her like she was crazy, usually it was because they didn’t understand the fun of free fall, not because…well, because of whatever was making them stare at her now. This felt different, this felt like the kind of staring that could get under her skin if she let it linger.
So Parker made the decision not to let it. “This is about the brochures, isn’t it?”
Eliot spoke first, his voice deceptively low and even, like he was trying to hold back from snapping. The usual. “Tell him what you told me.”
“You mean about how we needed to go to the talk about letting in ‘good’ love and leaving negativity behind?” Parker guessed.
Eliot glared, but he was just glaring forward, not at Parker. He was frustrated, not angry. “No, Parker. The other bit. Why I had to be part of…” He gestured sharply towards both Parker and Hardison. “This.”
“Oh.” Parker pressed her lips together tightly. It should have been obvious. At least, it was obvious to her, and Eliot was always the one four or five steps ahead in relationship conversations. He was like a second Sophie in that way, constantly walking the rest of the crew through how to handle life. “We’re a team, right?”
“The crew?” Hardison interjected.
She shook her head, pulling the bowl of peanuts into her lap as if it could shield her. “No, the three of us are a team. It’s different than the crew…” She was picking through the peanuts, searching for a way to explain it to them. She finally settled on a the words, popping a peanut into her mouth. “Okay, so Nate and Sophie have their, and that feels…the way it feels. Good and bad. And Hardison and I have our thing, and it feels a lot like how I think Nate and Sophie feel about each other? But different, you know,” She rolled her eyes, “without the drinking problem and the ‘I don’t even know her real name’ issues.” She scooped up a handful of peanuts and then let them rain back into the bowl.
“But…it’s a little like that with me and Eliot too, and I don’t think that’s wrong? And I mean, obviously, you two have your thing-”
“Obviously?” Hardison and Eliot managed to interrupt her in tandem, looking more thrown off than she’d ever seen them.
Hardison glanced over at Eliot for a moment, and then Parker, and then Eliot again. And then Parker once more for good measure. “We don’t have a- there’s not a-”
“You know Hardison and I aren’t doing anything, right?” Eliot finished. “We’re not sleeping together.” Hardison’s jaw was dropped, presumably at the fact that Eliot was so forward about it.
Parker snorted, poking at the peanuts. “Of course.” There was a tangible flood of relief from both men. “You wouldn’t do that without me, and half the time when you guys have your little moments you guys kind of flail until Eliot grumbles and changes the topic. But I just thought, you know…with all three of us having ‘our things’ that we were in all of this together.”
She paused, chewing her lip and looking back and forth between them with narrowed, cautious eyes. Actually talking out loud about their relationship caused her original fears to come back in full force. If they were going to tell her how ridiculous she sounded, now was the time. “We are, aren’t we?”
There was silence instead of agreement or disgust.
She wasn’t sure that was any better.
We were in all of this together. We are, aren’t we?
Well, shit, there wasn’t much Hardison could possibly say in response to that, was there? Or, rather, there was an answer, a very simple one, that came to mind immediately, before any of Hardison’s usual backpedaling and re-explanations.
Of course we are.
That those words were so natural was almost as freaky as the rest of the conversation. There was little hesitation in his mind, not once Parker laid all her points on the table. It wasn’t even that Hardison was uncomfortable, because he wasn’t.
He still heard how Parker wanted Eliot, and of course that made him nervous- why wouldn’t it? Eliot was…Eliot Spencer was Eliot Spencer. He spent a good chunk of the day in awe of the man, how he moved, how he looked at the world, how fearless he was…and damn if Eliot wasn’t handsome. Of course Hardison got nervous when he saw the girl of his dreams wanting someone like Eliot.
But, well, she had a point…she wasn’t the only one looking, even if Hardison hated putting words to it. And Parker had noticed that there was a spark between him and Eliot, that maybe Eliot was looking at him and Parker too, and if Parker could see that, it had to be pretty obvious, wasn’t it?
Hardison and Eliot slowly turned to look at each other, and the mutual stare was a silent discussion. It was a simultaneous consideration of Parker’s explanation, of her assumptions. Eliot raised his eyebrows as if to challenge Hardison to argue against it- and suddenly Hardison could think of little else but what on god’s green earth was on Eliot’s mind right then. Hardison wasn’t even sure what Eliot wanted him to say- he knew what Parker wanted to hear. Needed to hear.
The look on Eliot’s face though, the way that Eliot tilted his head back slightly as if he was marveling at the entire spectacle that was their lives in that very moment…
The three of them had jumped from buildings and battles mobsters and stolen diamonds and conned geniuses. This conversation was bigger and more dangerous than any of that, though, and the next few answers to the next few questions would have even greater rewards.
Hardison licked his lips before shrugging in Eliot’s direction. He knew what he felt about Parker- that wasn’t in question. Had never been in question. He certainly wasn’t blind or stupid about Eliot anymore either.
He knew Eliot had his back. Had Parker’s.
And Hardison also knew that he looked forward to dinners with the two of them in the same way that he looked forward to watching late night movies with Parker. That when he thought of downtime, it was Parker making him log out after a raid, and Eliot shouting at the both of them that lunch would be done in twenty minutes.
Did he want what Parker wanted? He wasn’t sure. Did Eliot want it? Eliot sure as hell wasn’t saying no, and he’d always made it clear when he wanted to shut down a line of thought before it got too crazy.
What Hardison did know was that this was Parker and Eliot, and when he thought about tomorrow, or the day after, or the year after, it was impossible to imagine anything without both of them. It was funny how he hadn’t noticed one third of that equation until now.
He raised his eyebrow back at Eliot. After all, it wasn’t as if Parker was asking that the three of them jump into bed tonight (suddenly the idea of what that entailed was guaranteed to keep Hardison up for a long time tonight). They still had a ways to go and figure it all out. Hardison was willing to try, though. Had to.
He raised his glass, in spite of it being empty. “Hell yeah we are.”
Parker smiled, and Eliot still looked curious. But Eliot raised his glass, and Parker followed shortly after by raising the bowl of peanuts.
“To the team,” Eliot said, and his voice was thick in a way that Hardison had never heard before. It wasn’t a bad sound.
“The team,” Hardison and Parker echoed.
Then, Hardison had to ask. “So, what speeches did you think Eliot needed, huh?”
Eliot’s groan made both of them laugh.
END