Archive of Our Own ^beta

Parker is the mastermind, so of course she has to plan them, too. Just like she would a heist.

The problem is that planning people is much more complicated than planning how to rob an art museum.

It hadn’t really been like this early on in her relationship with Hardison and Eliot. Maybe that was because she and Hardison had already been established, and they’d already talked about what they wanted from Eliot. It had been one of the very first things they talked about, actually. Now that they had each other, had their pretzels, they needed to make sure neither of them would get jealous of how they interacted with Eliot. Of course, then Parker had told him that she wanted them both. Wanted to hide them behind her own internal Steranko that no one except them had the biometrics to. And Hardison had agreed.

The heist when they stole Eliot had been a joint one. The two of them together, opening up Eliot with fingerprints and retina scans and the spinning of a combination. Eliot wouldn’t have anything as simple as a key. He was unpickable unless you took the time to examine him closely, which Parker is very good at.

Her and Hardison had different rules than her and Eliot—no, not rules. Guidelines. That was more accurate. They had different guidelines. Because she and Hardison only wanted each other and Eliot, at least for the most part, and Eliot wanted them for all the things other than hookups but could still go out with other people if he wanted. They were partners, “life, crime, all of that,” just like Hardison said. The three of them were part of each other. They all just fit together perfectly. After that plane ride back from DC, when Hardison had been in between them and Eliot had been trying not to bleed all over the seats and Parker had put her head on Hardison’s shoulder and her hand over Eliot’s, they slotted into place like puzzle pieces and stayed that way.

Sophie and Harry are different.

Sophie has always been the hardest member of the team for Parker to understand, even way back when Nate had first put them together. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her, although admittedly at first she hadn’t liked any of them, but their brains just seemed to work on two completely different tracks. Sophie was subtle and worked a lot on vocal inflection and human social conditioning and other things that made about as much sense to Parker as jellyfish did. They didn’t… Nothing about them seemed to line up.

Now it wasn’t a matter of understanding or not understanding Sophie. Parker understands Sophie just fine. It’s the things Sophie says that can be confusing.

Like when she says they need to have a capital-T Talk about the future of their relationship without Breanna in the room as soon as Hardison gets back into town.

(Hardison “came back into town” faster than he was supposed to. Eliot called him the day after Parker explained how important they all were to each other, fighting off panic he clearly hated to say—“You’ve gotta get back here. It’s getting worse. I need you here with us, man.”

Which was Eliot’s way of saying that he needed to make sure Hardison was safe because his brain was wigging out about him dying in an alleyway somewhere because Eliot wasn’t there to get gutshot for him, and also his way of saying that the thoughts of that with Sophie and Harry were getting stronger. Parker’s gotten really good at translating for Eliot, just like he’s gotten better at translating for her. Most of the time, anyway.)

Harry is the one responsible for making sure Breanna isn’t there to walk in on them, apparently by sending her and Becky out to try to find a birthday gift for Nana that could represent a little bit of Breanna’s life in New Orleans. He’s good at that. It’s one of the things Parker uncomplicatedly likes about him; Breanna is his little sister just like she’s Parker and Hardison’s.

He also looks like he’s about to spontaneously combust where he’s sitting on the couch next to Sophie, his hands folded in his lap the way Parker is perched on Hardison’s.

“I brought the bowl, even though it’s empty,” Parker says helpfully while Eliot takes his place and completes their little circle.

Sophie nods, putting her hand on Harry’s knee to make him relax a little. It’s funny, because Harry is technically older than Parker, but he’s really just a little baby criminal. Sophie’s like a big goose showing a duckling the world. Even for this, Parker knows she has practice—none of them ever talk about what she and Nate and Sterling used to do, and they didn’t even when Nate was alive, but now she’s already said that she got her experience in the 80s. Which makes perfect sense, because there’s no way Nate would’ve ever been bold enough to do something with Sterling on his own and not die about it.

“First thing I’ve gotta ask about is exclusivity,” Eliot says, voice low. “‘Cause that was one of the first things we talked about—me, Hardison, and Parker, I mean.”

“And what did you say when you talked about it?” Sophie asks.

“We’re us,” Parker says. Shrugs. “Nothing else matters. We’re like pigeons.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Harry says beseechingly.

“Pigeons mate for life,” Parker says. She shrugs again, because it seems obvious to her. Plenty of other animals mate for life, she knows, but pigeons are the ones on the run from the law. The brewpub had bird-deterrent spikes on the outside, installed before they bought the building, and the pigeons nested on them anyway. Parker liked that. She also liked how some pigeons always knew to find their way home. Parker could go anywhere in the world, anywhere at all, and she’d know how to find her way back to Hardison. “If they want to flirt with other people then they can, but it matters who they roost with.”

For some reason, that doesn’t seem to help Harry understand what she means. “Are we trail mix or are we pigeons?”

“What she means is that technically, all of us are free to go after whoever we want to go after,” Hardison says, squeezing Parker affectionately. “But we’re still the ones committed to each other. We used to say we’d share graves, until we had the robot bodies idea.”

“Except only Eliot would go out with other people,” Parker says. “Hardison and I never wanted to.”

Eliot looks slightly put off by that, but only until Parker nudges him with her foot. He used to think they resented that about him. Resented that sometimes he’d meet a pretty stranger in a bar and take her home, or meet back up with one of the old friends he didn’t mind hanging out with like Paul and wind up with their hands down each other’s pants when it was something they didn’t have any interest in. But that didn’t matter. Eliot was still theirs, no matter where he went or who he went with.

He came home to them. Like pigeons.

“So I could keep Jack, then,” Sophie muses. She taps one immaculately-manicured nail against her chin. “I’ll tell him the score, of course. That there are a few people who I’m involved with very closely, very intimately, and I won’t be breaking it off with them just to be with him. But he’s still more than welcome to join me.”

“You…” Eliot pauses. He looks at Sophie deeply. Intently. “You’re not picking him over us?”

“Did you pick your marshal over Parker and Hardison when you were seeing her?” Sophie asks rhetorically in reply.

“That’s not what I mean,” Eliot says. He leans forward, bracing his hands on his knees. “I meant… You’re trying to find someone, and you found him. I thought we’d be the ones holding you back.”

“He means between you and Harry, you’re the one he wasn’t sure about,” Parker says. Which makes sense. She had been sure about it, because Sophie’s been on this team for a long time, and even when she was retired she was still one of them. Just like Nate had never been able to completely turn it off, Sophie couldn’t, either. Sophie is theirs theirs theirs and has been since they saw her in that theater and watched Nate turn into spiky, alcoholic putty. But Eliot always thought Sophie was normal compared to the rest of them, and Jack from Gillon was normal in a way that made Parker’s skin feel like it was going to crawl off.

“I got that, Parker,” Sophie says. She meets Eliot’s gaze. “I find that the wonderful thing about being a thief is that you don’t have to choose pearls over rubies. You can just take them all. Especially when you’ve loved those pearls from afar for a long, long time.”

“Okay,” Harry says quietly. He seems to have gotten himself slightly straightened out listening to that. “I should say, uh—I can’t do that.”

“Can’t do what?” Hardison asks, stretching out with Parker still in his lap so he can tap their shoes together. Parker suddenly remembers the few months they spent where they were the only team members they could talk to freely. She doesn’t like to think about that time at all, because that version of Parker was sad and miserable and missed Hardison more than anything. But they probably think about it, don’t they? It made them friends.

(Now that the danger of someone finding out he was still with them is gone, it also makes her happy to imagine Harry fumbling with his mail and trying to insist to his coworkers that he didn’t send kink and fetish gear magazines to himself on purpose. They should do that kind of thing to Harry more often. She liked Sophie’s initiative with the shock collar.)

“I…” He rolls his shoulders in, looking at each of them in turn before settling on Parker. Of course they do. He’s never known any other mastermind. Almost pleading, he says, “I can’t do that. If you want me, you have everything. All of me. I’m sorry.”

“Mr. Wilson.” Sophie catches his face in her hand, turning it gently to face her. He stays looking at Parker until it’s physically painful to strain his eyes in that direction. “What made you think we didn’t want all of you?”

“Um.” He swallows. “I. Uh. It was more—if it’s the team, then it’s no one else for me.”

“Me too,” Parker says. It’s probably different for him, because Harry tried it with other people and it didn’t work. She knew not to try until she had Hardison and then Eliot because it not working was a forgone conclusion. But it’s the team for her, too. Them and no one else. It’s just that her definition of who qualifies as her team (and there’s a difference between her team and her team, because the latter has Nate and Breanna and sometimes even more depending on who’s in town) has expanded again. “It’s us forever.”

“Same, girl,” Hardison says. He kisses Parker’s cheek and she presses into him. She likes it when Hardison sits on her—or when Eliot does, or when it’s a weighted cushion, she’s not picky as long as it’s heavy—but she forgets how nice it is to climb on him when he’s not there, even if he complains about his back the whole time.

“I suppose that brings us to sexual encounters,” Sophie says briskly. She’s still holding Harry’s face even as he starts sputtering.

“We’re all clean,” Eliot says, getting right down to business. To Parker, Eliot is just ever so slightly too obsessive about making sure he gets checked for fluid-transmitted diseases all the time, but Hardison says he’s exactly the right amount of obsessive for someone who spends a good portion of his life getting other people’s blood in the various wounds they’ve inflicted on him. Even when he stopped seeing other people in the months before he understood what he wanted from the two of them, he still needed to be rigorous. “Nobody I do anything with goes untested. Too dangerous with what I do. You test, and you keep it under wraps, or I don’t get involved.”

"Very reasonable," Sophie says. "I think we can follow that, can't we, Mr. Wilson?"

Harry nods, still looking slightly dazed. He's avoiding eye contact with Sophie, Eliot, and Hardison, instead looking toward the ceiling. "Yeah. Sure. Easy."

“You guys can do whatever you want,” Parker says to rescue him from being the center of attention, leaning back into Hardison.

It hadn’t been much of a surprise for Hardison that sex didn’t particularly matter to her in a relationship. It had been for Eliot, who had walked in on them getting down to business (as Hardison put it) several times before he was welcomed into their fold. But that was just because everything was fun when she did it with Hardison. And she didn’t mind having sex. It was fun when they did it. It just… wasn’t very important, that’s all. She hadn’t even realized some people thought it was until she had to be around Nate and Sophie all the time. It was just an activity; when done with Hardison and/or Eliot, it ranked as better than low-quality chocolate but not as good as jumping off buildings on her internal scale. When done with someone else, it didn’t even enter the scale at all.

Hardison noses her jaw. Keeping his voice low and private, he asks, “You sure?”

She leans into the touch. That’s his way of saying he might take advantage of the option being open in a way he hasn’t since they first got together with Eliot. But of course she’s sure. She doesn’t say most things unless she’s sure. “Very sure.”

Sophie finally lets go of Harry’s face. “So we’re to be trusted to handle things between ourselves, then?”

Parker nods. That’s how they’ve always done things. Why would it be different now?

“And what are we to each other, exactly?” Sophie pushes. “Are we partners, all of us in equal standing?”

“We’re a team,” Parker says. Obviously. Sophie knows that, doesn’t she?

“That’s not an answer to that question,” Sophie says.

“Yes it is,” Parker insists. “We’re a team. You’re my team.” She looks to Eliot for help because Hardison is too close to look at. He’ll know how to tell them.

“That means the answer is mostly yes,” Eliot explains for her. “The team is the relationship that comes first. We’re all equals, for the most part, including Breanna. Even if we’re not all…”

“Drop the country boy act,” Hardison says when Eliot fails to elaborate, rolling his eyes. “What he means is even if we’re—the people in this here room being we, I mean. Even if we're not all having sex with each other, we’re equals.”

“But you and Parker and Eliot are all together more,” Harry points out.

“If you want to think about it that way,” Eliot semi-agrees.

“Not more, just different,” Parker corrects at the same time. There’s not anything about the team that’s more or less. There was for a little bit, admittedly; first with Nate, when she didn’t care about any of them except for their potential to make her money, and then with Harry, because she had her team and it was good especially now that Sophie wanted a reunion tour and Harry wasn’t hers yet. But now everything is level. There’s not…

Other people differentiate, Parker has learned. They rank people higher or lower based on friendship or romance or sexual desire. She doesn’t. She’s loved Hardison just the same since she realized he was home. She’s loved Eliot just the same since she realized he would protect her without question. And that was before everything. When she realized she loved them differently it was just… It’s just oil painted in different shades on the same piece of canvas, that’s all.

“I…” Harry takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. “Alright.”

Sophie nods. She looks more satisfied with that than Harry does. Parker doesn’t understand why he doesn’t. Maybe she needs to line everything from the trail mix up again and prove she likes eating all of them even if she would do it in a particular order. (Pretzels, peanut butter pretzels, dried cherries, banana chips, peanuts. She wouldn’t eat the bowl. Or the ziplock bag, if it was in a ziplock bag.)

“You don’t gotta worry,” Hardison says, voice low. “None of you are playing second fiddle here.”

Good. Hardison always knows how to tell people what they need to hear. Harry looks more convinced already.

Problem solved, right?

Masterminds always check on their team, and being in the vents and ceiling all the time means Parker hears everything.

“Sophie,” she hears Eliot say about a week later, waving her over to the bar. He probably knows Parker’s up above his head, and if Sophie somehow doesn’t then she hasn’t learned anything in all their time together. “We haven’t had a chance to talk.”

“Because you’ve been avoiding me, but go on,” Sophie says promptly. Technically true, but Eliot’s been avoiding everyone except for Hardison because he’s trying to soak up all the time with him before he has to leave again. 

(His flight took off this morning. Parker had seriously considered stowing away in the cargo hold. She settled for just calling Hurley and telling him to make sure Hardison didn’t die in Tbilisi. Or Monaco. Or Birmingham.)

Eliot sighs. “Pour you a drink?”

Sophie raises an eyebrow and sits down. Where Parker’s positioned, she can see her face, just not Eliot’s. She does that thing where they read each other’s minds, and Eliot pours her Nate’s favorite drink. Parker recognizes it from here.

“Long time ago,” Eliot starts, and Parker appreciates how he’s talking loud enough that she can hear without making Sophie feel like the moment is any less intimate, “you said to Nate that you wouldn’t get involved with a murderer.”

Sophie traces her finger around the rim of her glass. “Indeed I did,” she says measuredly. “I didn’t know you heard that.”

“It was a big cave,” Eliot says. “Echoey.” He lifts his own glass. “Heard what Nate said to you afterward, too.”

Sophie’s lips tighten until they’re stark white. “I recall.”

“So,” Eliot says in one big exhale.

“So.” Sophie leans forward, bracing herself on her forearms. Her eyes glitter. Parker likes Sophie’s eyes. They have secret emotional X-ray vision. “Well more than a year ago now, I told you that you were redeemed—”

“And I told you, you’re wrong,” Eliot counters. Now he does drop to a near-whisper. Parker tilts to hear him better. “It ain’t just about the blood on my hands, Sophie. It’s about whose blood, and when, and how. You know that—”

“Will you let me finish, please?” Sophie’s tone is the same one she’d use on Nate, the one he would pretend aggravated him but could cut through his bullshit like butter. Eliot backs down without hesitation. She softens her voice again. “Thank you. I told you that you were redeemed. You said you weren’t. Back and forth, as always. You said you liked being useful.” She smiles. “Forgive me, Eliot, but that’s obvious to anyone who has ever looked at you. Now, how exactly are you useful to Parker and Hardison?”

Eliot is as tense as a wire. “Anything they need, I’ll be for them. Because I love them.”

“Do you love me?” Sophie asks openly.

She must know the answer. Everyone loves Sophie. Even people who haven’t met her. Not just the Leverage International crews—the people who knew her reputation as the greatest grifter still in the game from before they received their invitations and the people who fell in with them and learned about the great Sophie Devereaux alike—but the marks who don’t know they’re going to trip over themselves to hand her everything. But sometimes knowing the answer with Eliot isn’t the same as actually getting him to say it. That’s a game Hardison likes to play, too.

“If you have to ask, I’m not doing it right,” Eliot says, voice thicker than Parker was expecting. He leans over the bar until he’s nearly obscuring Sophie’s face from Parker’s view. “But I think you knew the answer to that question already. And you also know it doesn’t matter. How I feel’s irrelevant. You’ve got your rules. Your code. And I don’t fall into it. I know that.”

“Mm.” Sophie’s voice is hushed. She hasn’t had a drop from her cup yet. Maybe it was poured for Nate’s ghost the whole time. “A long time ago, I met a man named Eliot Spencer. He’d killed people. He didn’t like it, but he’d done it, and he never wanted to do it again. But when someone very special asked him to, he did. I know if the same person would have asked, he would have done it again. He very nearly did without him asking.” She leans in just like he did. “There’s only one thing in the world that could get Eliot Spencer to become a killer again, and it’s the people in this building. That doesn’t sound like a murderer to me.”

He stays silent. Frozen. Just staring at her. Then, finally, he says, “You also said you can’t actually mix love with the potential of a big score.”

“You seem to remember an awful lot of the things I say,” Sophie says. “Are you listening when I tell you what they mean? Because I’m happy to remind you that I was speaking about money gambled on smoke and mirrors and whatever else passes for currency these days. Money is not our score, and hasn’t been for a long time. If I ever said anything about love and what we do, I will have been a hypocrite since the day Nate Ford stepped back into my life.”

“I think we’re all hypocrites on this team,” Eliot says, but he already knows that isn’t exactly a winning defense.

“Maybe,” Sophie acknowledges. “But that hasn’t stopped us yet. We tell each other little white lies all the time. Not that long ago you said we’d all be equal partners.”

That genuinely throws Eliot. Parker frowns. That wasn’t a lie. Should she jump down there now and tell Sophie that? She thought she already knew.

“I wasn’t—that wasn’t a lie,” Eliot says. “Like I said, Soph—if you have to ask if I love you, I ain’t doing it right.” He nudges their glasses aside and takes her hands. "I’ve been with them longer, but I’ve been with the team longest.”

Parker’s not sure what Sophie can see on Eliot’s face, but whatever it is, it makes her nod.

Parker retreats back into one of the vents that Harry paid to have installed specially for her. She doesn’t know if he’s ignorant to the enormous sums of cash the rest of them have acquired through various means (Parker’s own total accumulated value hasn’t been below thirty-two million dollars since 2008) or if it just makes him feel good to pay for stuff for them even though he really doesn’t have to. It’s nice of him either way.

It’s hard to read people, especially for Parker, but she’s glad they’re all mostly fluent in Eliot by now.

Breanna is their little sister. Just because she was Hardison’s for the longest doesn’t mean she’s not the rest of theirs. Still, because she was Hardison’s first and then kinda-sorta Parker’s for a long time before she joined the team, Parker doesn’t expect her to be in cahoots with Harry.

Then again, maybe she should. They’re in cahoots a lot, after all. This time is just particularly noteworthy because Breanna uses a client she allegedly found as an excuse to get Sophie across town with her, leaving Harry with Parker and Eliot. It’s immediately identifiable as a ruse because Breanna shoots a thumbs up to Harry behind Sophie’s back (which surely she’s aware of, because she’s Sophie Devereaux), and Parker turns to Harry with her arms crossed because she expected better than turning Breanna against her.

Harry’s eyes flicker back and forth between them as his ears turn red. “Uh.”

“Is there really a client?” Eliot asks first, raising an eyebrow.

“Breanna said it was legit,” Harry defends. “I just thought it’d make a good excuse to talk to you.”

“About what?” Parker asks, fingers twitching with the desire to wrap around rope. She was planning on doing something upside-down today. Maybe hanging from the ceiling to watch one of those movies Hardison hates but she loves with the exploding cars.

He opens his hands. “I… don’t think this is working.”

Parker stiffens. He wants to leave? She can’t let him leave. People have already tried taking him away twice and she can’t let that happen. There’s nothing she can think of that’s changed to push him away. Maybe it’s Becky? Parker can convince Becky. Sure, she doesn’t think Harry’s actually ever told her about what they do, so dropping the relationship thing on her might be a bit of a shock, but they’ll work around that!

“Why not?” She asks cautiously. “Nothing’s changed.”

“That’s the problem for me,” he says. He sits down heavily at the counter. “I know what I said before, about being okay with this because it would just be like before except now we knew we were, uh, ‘eating trail mix.’ But I don’t think that’s actually what I want.”

Parker tries to think of something that would be better than this and comes up blank. “Then what do you want?”

“I want it to feel like we’re partners,” Harry says. “I know you and Hardison go on dates. You’re part of each other’s lives. It doesn’t have to be exactly that with me, but I think I need something.” He hesitates before he starts verbally fumbling around for what he’s trying to say. “If that’s—if that something isn’t—if none of you can—”

Eliot pens him against the counter and kisses him, which is good.

“I got it,” Eliot says, pulling back a bit so they’re only nose to nose instead of mouth to mouth. Harry looks completely thunderstruck. “How about I cater a date for you and Sophie tonight, huh?”

Harry swallows. He doesn’t seem to realize his hands are holding Eliot’s biceps for balance on the stool. Or that he’s shaking. “Is Sophie going to be okay with that?”

“Harry,” Eliot says patiently as he smooths down the front of his suit jacket for him, “she’s going to be thrilled. Good on you for telling us before it went too far. Now we can fix it.”

Harry’s grip on his arms tightens. “I thought maybe it was just me,” he confesses. “You’ve known Sophie for however long, and I just showed up.”

“That’s not how it works,” Parker says. She really wants to hang from the ceiling. She can practically hear her harness and rigging calling to her. But she doesn’t want Harry to think she doesn’t like him just because she’s not going to kiss him like Eliot will. “You’re not less important. Pigeons, remember? You still come back to us. That’s what’s important.”

“He’s saying he doesn’t want to just be pigeons,” Eliot says, looking annoyed with himself for even letting the metaphor come out of his mouth. “It’s not like Sophie and Jack, or me and the marshal.  He’s not just a member of one of our crews like Hurley or Quinn. He’s with us, we’ve gotta make him feel like he’s with us. That matters.”

Harry nods with clear relief, slumping into Eliot. Parker’s not sure how he could’ve thought they didn’t like him. She turned down another job for him so he could stay with them forever, and that was well over a year ago. But if Harry wants reassurance…

She narrows her eyes at the two of them, twisting and clicking. Swapping Eliot for Hardison, for Sophie, for her. Sophie and maybe Hardison would kiss him. Parker won’t, but she can do something more fun.

“Do you need your hands for the next forty-five minutes?” She asks Harry, opening her bag. All her ceiling stuff is up in the rafters, but she has rope.

“I don’t think so?” Harry says.

Parker cocks her head. “Can I borrow them?”

He blinks. “...Sure.”

“I’ll call Sophie,” Eliot says, stepping away and letting Parker take his place. Harry’s a little reluctant to let go, but he looks at Parker with more curiosity than apprehension, which is good, because it means he’s open to having fun!

“That’s… different,” Harry notices as she takes out a length of rope. Parker’s pleased. They’ve been working on Harry’s powers of observation. Of course, this one is a different color, so it’s pretty obvious, but Parker could tell the difference between all of them with her eyes closed and only the lightest of touches.

“I use synthetics for climbing,” she says, acknowledging that he’s right with a slight inclination of her head. She moves his hands so his palms are pressed together and loops the rope around his wrists. Her preferred rigging rope is lightweight, specially made, waterproof, and mostly used by alpine climbers outside of the criminals who have taken a liking to it. It’s also very expensive, but worth it. Every cat burglar worth anything needs to know how to find good rope. “This is hemp.”

She does a column tie. Harry tries to whistle and fails. “You’re really fast at this. I thought you said this would take forty-five minutes?”

Parker winds it around his thumbs, then his flattened fingers. “I can do this version in three,” she says, quickly pulling it through and between, then using the leftover loop from the initial column knot to square the whole thing off. “Or less. That’s just how long I want you to sit with it.”

Harry looks down at his now perfectly tied hands. His hands are the closest to Sophie’s, soft and easy to manipulate. Hardison’s are soft, too, but his fingertips have calluses, and Eliot’s hands are nothing but scar tissue and callus. Breanna’s are always decorated with bandaids from construction incidents. Parker’s are still the strongest. “Sit with it?”

“That’s how long Hardison can handle it before he starts to get itchy under his skin,” Parker says with a shrug. “It’s how I keep people safe.”

Harry keeps looking at the rope. They’re not exactly tied to anything, just together. “...It is?”

“When you jump off a building, you rig,” Parker says. Hardison needed it explained. Eliot just… understood. She wraps another piece of rope around her arm to demonstrate, even if she’s not going to tie it. “It keeps you safe. The tying—even if you’re not hanging, it holds you together.”

Harry nods slowly. He tugs on the ropes a bit. There’s enough give to be comfortable, but not enough for him to actually move his wrists or palms apart. “That makes sense.”

She could say more. What made Hardison understand was when she explained that for a long time the only thing she could trust was her equipment. A solid rope would be the only thing standing between her and certain death—just the way she liked it, of course. She didn’t have people. She had her rigging. Her harness, her ropes, her gloves, her lockpicks. And she still trusted those things to take care of her people just like they took care of her. They helped her hold onto them in ways her hands and her body weren’t capable of. She could explain all of that, but Harry looks like he might actually already understand.

“This is my way of doing what Eliot did.” That part she’s willing to say, just to make sure he gets it. She’s not going to kiss him like Eliot did or Sophie would, but to her this is the same.

“Okay,” he says. He takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry I don’t want things to stay the same. I know you liked that it was.”

Parker rolls her eyes. “I like having you and Sophie for me more than I like having things stay the same.” She pats his bound hands. “This way is better.”

It takes him fifty minutes to get itchy like Hardison does, and Parker undoes the tie in a quick movement before Sophie and Breanna get back. They can do more ties later, if he wants. That’s just the easiest, simplest, and safest-for-Harry-who-doesn’t-know-what-he’s-doing one she knows.

She ends up watching his date with Sophie from the vents, eating the same thing they are out of the little package Eliot sent her up with. She likes the part where Sophie teases him, using words to open his guts up while he turns red and stammers that he hasn’t told Becky about this, really, he would’ve said something to the rest of them if he had, and how would he even do it anyway if he wanted to? It’s funny. 

Parker needs to know Becky better before she can consider her to be another bowl, but maybe that’s where all this is going.

Eliot gets hurt all the time. He gets seriously hurt less often these days, but still more than any of them would like. They know how to deal with it; patch his wounds, get him to a thoroughly vetted hospital if necessary, and all but force him to be on bed rest until he physically can’t take it anymore. It’s what all of them but Harry and Breanna have been doing on and off for over a decade, and by now the two of them know the drill just as well.

When Parker gets hurt, she hides.

It’s been a survival mechanism since the first time she ran away from a foster home. Archie said it was a good habit. After all, an injured thief was one that was more likely to get caught, and any thief that got caught wasn’t worth his time.

There have been some exceptions, of course. Injuries so severe there was no way to hide them. When she tore her ACL, for example. But for minor injuries, she hides. She just… doesn’t hide by herself anymore, that’s all.

Hardison’s back in town, and she knows he’s got half a mind to tell her that he knows she got caught in the crossfire on purpose just to keep him around. The wound is just severe enough that he doesn’t dare actually accuse her for a joke. He keeps one arm around her, avoiding the wound on her left side, while Eliot presses in from the other direction with his fingers on one hand laced with hers and his other across on Hardison’s hip.

Normally when she’s in this position, she doesn’t feel this… twitchy. Having Eliot and Hardison both with her is enough to keep her brain from running off into the walls. But right now it’s like there’s something tingling under her skin, and moving (not that she’s supposed to be moving much, but flicking her fingers is fine, right?) isn’t getting it out.

It’s dark. It’s just the three of them, in their bed. It’s dark, so they’re hidden. That should be Parker’s safest place. It has been for years, through a lot of different locations and a lot of different beds. But her body isn’t acting like it.

“Hey, baby. What’s the matter?” Hardison asks after the sixth or seventh time she shifts position, pushing her face up into his chest. She remembers when he was all gangly, with muscles that weren’t good for anything except typing on a computer and holding her. Now he’s solid, even if he uses it for the same thing. He says it’s so he can hold her and Eliot both.

“I don’t know,” she says, accidentally kneeing Eliot in the thigh. Her brain is running in circles. What if it was Eliot that got shot, higher up than she did? What if Hardison got caught instead of her? What if she hadn’t been fast enough down the hall and they’d followed her trail to Breanna in the food truck? She presses her hand flat to Eliot’s chest to feel his heartbeat and reassure herself that he’s safe, then does the same to Hardison. “I…”

Oh. It’s just the three of them, in their bed. That’s the problem.

Parker exhales slowly. Shifts a little in place. Her phone is out of reach. None of them are wearing earpieces anymore. So she’ll need to ask Hardison and Eliot to get the rest of her team for her. At least Breanna is downstairs, so it’ll be easy to get to her, even if she wants her up here yesterday.

“Get Bre,” she directs Hardison, and he doesn’t ask any followup questions before he takes his own phone out and shoots her a text saying she needs to come upstairs. Parker looks at Eliot. “Get Sophie and Harry.”

“...You sure?” Eliot asks. Hardison doesn’t have to. Parker understands why, though. When she hides when she’s hurt, that’s always included from them, even if it hasn’t been this serious before while Breanna and Harry have been with them. But Bre, at least, knows she gets hurt, and so does Sophie. As far as they’re concerned, Harry thinks she’s impenetrable.

She nods. “Now.”

He raises his eyebrows and calls them both in quick succession, quietly apologizing for waking them up. Breanna’s already coming up the stairs, one arm up to block her eyes.

“Everybody decent?” She calls from the doorway, flipping the light on. She’s wearing one of Hardison’s old shirts as pajamas, a superhero logo splashed across her chest. Parker appreciates the touch to color-code her bonnet to her lavender socks. The bulky sweatpants she’s wearing have a myriad of extra pockets sewn into them. “Gonna defile my innocent eyes?”

“Breanna,” Parker says, and her voice is more wobbly than she was expecting it to. Probably the painkillers. She’s even less willing to take them than Eliot is most days for this exact reason. Breanna drops her arm and looks at Parker with concern. She points at the cushions on the floor from when she sat on it while Eliot was patching her up, but she can’t make the words come out to tell her she needs her to be in her line of sight.

“She’s saying she wants you to stay,” Eliot says.

“Figured.” Breanna holds up her tablet. “Cool if I just watch anime on the floor?”

“Long as it’s not trash,” Hardison says.

“Sword Art Online,” Breanna says, then cackles when Hardison’s head jerks back. “I’m playing, I’m playing. It’s G-Witch. You watch it yet?”

“Original Gundam only in this house,” Hardison says, but his voice is warm with affection. 

She flops down onto the cushions, grabbing one of her earbuds when it falls out of her ear from the force. Parker relaxes a little. Breanna didn’t even get a scratch today. It’s not like other jobs where she’s been in real danger, like from Kyle Fury or when she fell through the ceiling at the pool hall, and she was Parker’s sister then, too, but…

Those times, Parker wasn’t hurt. She knew she could still protect her in time. If she’s injured, she needs Breanna to be there so she can protect her. Just like Hardison and Eliot.

Sophie and Harry arrive at the same time about twenty minutes later, which makes Hardison raise his eyebrows while Sophie smiles mysteriously and waves him away. Maybe it wouldn’t be quite as suspicious if Sophie wasn’t clearly wearing something of Harry’s that she picked up off the floor.

“This is a very big bed,” Harry observes, fidgeting a little.

Parker nods because at some point after she said Breanna’s name she stopped being able to talk the right way. She alternates between flicking her hands and rubbing her fingertips on the underside of chain for the key necklace around Hardison’s neck. 

Eliot doesn’t seem to be having a similar problem. “Hardison moves around too much in his sleep.”

Hardison scoffs. “I move around a normal amount. Not my fault you wake up at the drop of a hat.”

“Saved us when those three Norwegian assassins came after us, didn’t it?” Eliot shoots back.

“No, Harry’s right,” Sophie says. She sits down next to Hardison’s hip. “Even for three people, this is an enormous bed.”

Hardison checks to make sure Breanna’s earbuds are still in. “Well, our girl’s gotta have a lot of room to play, you know what I’m saying?”

“I’m turning the light off now,” Harry loudly announces before doing exactly that. Breanna conspicuously turns the volume on her tablet up louder the second before the switch flips and rolls onto her stomach so she’s less likely to see any of them out of the corner of her eye.

“Plenty of room,” Hardison says, even though it’s definitely going to be cramped. The bed’s large, but five adults is still pushing the limit of what it can take, especially because none of them are exactly small. 

Parker doesn’t care. Her heart and her brain are finally slowing down. Breanna’s there on the floor. They can all get to her, all protect her. She’s still between Hardison and Eliot, although now they fully lay down instead of leaning against the headboard. Harry and Sophie have to break apart—Harry just tucks himself behind Eliot and hugs onto him from behind, but Sophie has to climb over to lay down next to Hardison.

It’s far from the first time they’ve shared rooms in various configurations, even disregarding the established relationship between Parker, Hardison, and Eliot. Parker and Sophie bunked together on the road loads of times. More recently, Parker has shared hotel rooms with Breanna on a fair few occasions. Eliot and Harry have only done it once or twice, but they still have. The only thing new is everyone except Breanna piling on the same bed. Parker wishes Breanna would come up, honestly, but there really isn’t going to be room for that.

Parker doesn’t start to drift off until everyone else’s breathing evens out. Harry and Sophie slip easily back into sleep despite their journey here, and despite Hardison’s efforts to stay up with her he doesn’t last much longer. Breanna passes out with her tablet still playing, the light splashed across her face. Eliot’s the last to fall asleep, although she’s sure he’d like her to think he was the first.

She pictures what they’d look like from the vents, because she’d really like to be up there watching over everybody. In the dark, they’d look like one organism, especially if Breanna moved closer and was absorbed into their collective mass.

Nate once used the phrase “the beast with two backs” as a metaphor for sex. Parker looked it up later because it sounded really stupid and found out it was from Shakespeare, which made her a little surprised Sophie hadn’t been the one to say it. Even though it sounded stupid, she kind of liked it. The idea of having someone be so part of you that you turned into one person. That was how she, Hardison, and Eliot were. Now they're a beast with five hearts. Six, if Breanna comes closer.

She can still feel Hardison and Eliot’s heartbeats when she focuses. That plus Sophie, Harry, and Breanna’s breathing has to be enough for now. Her team, safe. With her. Where they should be.

Planning people is hard. At least she doesn’t have to do it alone.