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It’s dark when Parker wakes up and realizes that her lovely sleep has been interrupted. Immediately, Parker is unhappy about this.
It’s not that she’s scared of the dark. Please—she took care of that years ago, as everyone already knows. That’s not a problem at all. It’s not exactly that she minds being woken up either, because there actually are times where she likes that. Now that she thinks about it, they all have their own kind of light that accompanies them. Isn’t that funny?
As an example, if she’s woken up to a blue-ish dimness, it’s most likely because she was disturbed by Eliot getting up for his early morning run. This always gets her an apology by way of 1) a ruffling of her bangs, 2) a forehead kiss, and 3) a promise that he won’t shower post-run until she’s gotten a good look at him while he’s flushed and sweaty. This, of course, is all excellent.
Or she could be woken up to a soft gray light, which means that she’s been roused from an afternoon nap by a Hardison cozying up to her back, a Hardison who tells her that it’s raining, “and you know what that means”—comfy clothes and hot chocolate and video games. They’ve been playing a lot of Skyrim lately at their side-by-side setup in the far corner of his office; she just joined the Thieves Guild, and Hardison, naturally, is going to wizard college, because he’s a huge dork. Which is great, obviously. Dork in wizard college is great. She loves watching his Dragonborn set things on fire with his bare hands, and he looks very handsome in his magic robes. It’s definitely what he was (Dragon)born to do.
And then, of course, there’s those times where she blinks her eyes open to a golden, buttery dawn, one where the three of them stay cuddled up in bed together until those first full fingers of sunshine start to filter through their curtains and make Eliot antsy, at which point he (mostly lovingly) bullies them out of bed with the promise of pancakes or waffles or French toast, whatever food mood strikes him that day. Parker can usually cajole the boys into some cartoons with breakfast as well, after which they cuddle up again—on the couch this time—and have a deliciously lazy morning to themselves, pajamas still on and feet still slippered and nowhere in the world for them to be.
So you see? It’s possible to be woken up to nice things. You’ll notice, though, that none of these nice things you can be woken up to involve a lack of light. Waking up to darkness means either Very Late or Too Early, lovely sleep interrupted, no sweaty Eliot or wizard Hardison or dessert-y breakfasts to brighten one’s mood—you get the picture. And that is why Parker’s unhappy.
Upon opening her eyes to the alarm clock sitting on the nightstand beside the bed, she sees that it’s 2:36 AM. Ah, yes—Too Early indeed. What the hell could’ve woken her up at 2:36? She’d collapsed into bed about four hours ago feeling dead tired, practically swaying on her feet after the day they’d had, and she hadn’t planned on getting up until at least another four hours from now. Nothing should’ve interrupted that.
But then she hears the whispering. And she feels the finger poking at her shoulder.
“Parker. Hey, Parker. Parker? Paaaaaarkerrrrr—”
Parker rolls her eyes, her face scrunching up in annoyance. “What, Hardison?” she hisses. Listen, she loves the man, but no one should be interrupting her lovely sleep right now, not even him.
“Sorry, sorry, I know you were sleeping. It’s just that I gotta get up for a sec, but… We’ve kinda got a situation here.”
Parker rolls onto her other side. As soon as she sees what’s happening in the other ⅔ of the bed, any unhappiness she’d had vanishes: The “situation” Hardison’s referring to is the fact that he has an Eliot clinging to him. Like, fully clinging, with a head tucked under his chin and a hand caught in his shirt and a leg thrown over his hips and everything. She can only just see him in the moonlight filtering through the curtains, but it’s enough to make her smile. That’s their big bad Eliot all cuddled up to his—well, his and her—boyfriend while he sleeps. It never ever gets any less adorable.
The longer she stares, though, and the more her eyes adjust to the scant light, the more she starts to notice things that just… aren’t right. Even through the darkness, she can see how tightly Eliot’s fisting Hardison’s shirt. She can also tell by watching the up-and-down of his back that Eliot’s breathing isn’t quite normal, a little too shallow and a little too fast. Worst of all, when she cranes around to get a fuller glimpse of his face, she finds his expression is pinched—his eyebrows are drawn close together, and his mouth’s a tight line like he just ate something sour.
Worry starts to creep in to fill the empty space where Parker’s unhappiness had been. She doesn’t take her eyes off Eliot. “Is he okay?” she whispers.
“I don’t know,” Hardison whispers back. “He just grabbed onto me like this earlier. Been asleep the whole time, and I didn’t wanna wake him up to ask.”
That’s a fair choice to make. Eliot gets pissy sometimes (or a lot of the time) when you interrupt his sleep, whether he looks upset during that sleep or not. Usually not worth it unless he’s clearly having a really bad nightmare. Speaking of which… It could still be one of those. His nightmares aren’t always the wake-up-thrashing-and-crying type. Sometimes his nightmares are sneaky, and you don’t know he’s had one until he accidentally rouses you in the middle of the night by being clingy like he is now, like he’s trying to blanket you to keep you safe. (Or like he’s trying to crawl into your skin for his own safety. (Or maybe a mix of both.))
Parker frowns. “You want me to take care of him?” she asks.
“If you don’t mind. I gotta grab some water—I feel like I’m dying. And I need another Advil.”
She nods. “Yeah, okay. I got him.”
“Cool.” Hardison clears his throat cautiously. “Eliot,” he says. “Hey, Eliot.”
Try as Hardison might to be gentle about it, Eliot jolts at the sound of his name. His expression manages to go even more pinched somehow too. And with his eyes still closed, he shakes his head into Hardison’s chest at the same time that he grips harder at his shirt, like he already knows what Hardison’s about to do. More worry goes flooding into Parker’s everything and her heart twists around itself. She puts a hand on Eliot’s waist that she hopes is reassuring.
“Hey, hey, it’s alright,” Hardison soothes, one broad hand stroking over Eliot’s back. “You’re alright, baby. Sorry I woke you up, but you’re kinda all wound in here and I gotta get up, okay? Just for a second, though,” he adds when Eliot makes a sound of protest. “Just need some water. And hey—Parker’s right here. She’s got you.”
“Yessir,” Parker says. “C’mere, cowboy.”
Eliot doesn’t move. Parker thinks she hears him take a shaky breath, but the sound is too quiet to be able to really tell. Still, just in case, she does the thing she always does when she knows Eliot’s rattled—she touches him under his clothes, getting her palm and fingers right against his skin. With the quickest of slips, her hand’s beneath the hem of his sleep shirt and pressed to his stomach, cradling him. She sweeps her thumb in a slow arc over that softest bit of him where she can feel him breathing, and her mouth presses to the back of his shoulder as she watches and waits.
Eliot breathes. In, out. In, out. In, out. In… out.
He finally lets go of Hardison’s shirt and rolls over into Parker’s arms.
Something pinches in the corners of Parker’s eyes at the way that Eliot immediately squeezes up against her and more or less copies the position he’d had with Hardison, his head tucking beneath her chin and an arm laying heavy across her ribs and his two legs sandwiching one of hers. With the way he’s turned around, her hand’s come to rest just above his ass instead of his waist. She scritches at the base of his spine and then wiggles her other arm under him too so she can hold him all the way. At that, Eliot exhales again, a fresh, heavy breath that definitely does shake at the tail end.
“Okay?” Hardison asks.
Parker looks up at him, and even in the poor lighting she can see him looking back and forth between her and Eliot, so she knows the question’s for both of them. She nods at the same time that Eliot nods too (and also clamps his knees tighter around her thigh).
“Yeah,” she says. “We’re good.”
“Okay,” Hardison says again. He leans toward the nightstand. “Cool if I flip the light on? So I don’t trip on my way to the door.”
There’s nothing for him to trip on because she and Eliot keep their room spotless, but Parker doesn’t say that because a little warm light sounds nice. Besides, it’ll help her keep a better eye on Eliot. She nods again, and the bedside lamp comes on low and soothing. The glow of it makes Parker feel a smidge more settled.
Hardison bends down and kisses the top of Eliot’s head before kissing Parker on the temple too. When he pulls back, he looks at the both of them again. Parker sees worry at the corners of his mouth.
“We’re good,” Parker reminds him. She slides her hand further up Eliot’s bare back to hold the left side of his ribs, and Eliot automatically relaxes against her with an audible sigh, thankfully. Always so obedient, her Eliot. Even when it’s just a reflex. “See?” she says.
Hardison looks at them for another few seconds. He nods. “Alright. I’ll be right back, though, yeah?”
“Mmhm. We’ll be here.”
“Good.” Briefly, Hardison rests a hand on Eliot’s shoulder, his thumb rubbing a few back-and-forth arcs over the fabric of his shirt. Then he’s out of the room.
Once it’s just the two of them, Parker redirects her attention to the man in her arms. Now that they’re alone and he’s all she has to focus on, she can feel the tension that rolls off of Eliot in palpable waves. It’s unclear if she should ask about it yet, though… If there was indeed a nightmare, it might need to wait until the morning. Eliot doesn’t always want to talk about them right away. Parker kinda sorta hates that part with all her guts because the waiting makes her antsy; she wants to press the question like she presses on Eliot’s bruises, desperate to get some kind of reaction out of him. Sitting in uncomfortable silence and not having any answers sucks. Over time, though, she’s learned that trying to force Eliot to talk can be like trying to force a lock—you just end up breaking something, and then no one’s happy. So she’ll just have to be patient and fiddle until something clicks into place. She can do that; she can wait. For Eliot, she can wait.
In the meantime, she attempts to distract herself with Eliot’s hair instead. It’s a poof of fluffy waves at the moment, the way it always gets when he leaves it be after a shower, just like he did this evening. She and Hardison have managed to convince him to leave it like this more often these days, and not just because it means he spends less time in the bathroom blow drying it straight—they both think it’s cuter this way. It makes him look extra pretty, and softer too. Parker reaches up with her hand that’s not under Eliot’s shirt and gets a strand around her finger, curling and uncurling and curling it again. If she presses her nose to his roots, she can smell the honey and vanilla of his shampoo. As soon as she does, some more of that settled feeling seeps into her bones.
This isn’t the first time she’s felt that. In fact, she’s come to rely pretty heavily on that connection, the way that the smell of Eliot’s hair slows everything down for her. A single whiff of it after an overstimulating outing or a bad dream of her own and she immediately feels her heart rate start to even out. It’s right up there with the coconutty scent of Hardison’s favorite hand cream. There’s actually been times where Hardison’s been playing with Eliot’s hair and she’s just stuck her face right in there so she can take a deep breath of both at once. Apart from jumping off a roof or hanging from the ceiling, it’s the only thing that always manages to make her brian go totally blank.
Granted, that blankness might have a little something to do with the huge—like, head-spinny huge—breath of air she takes when she does it. But she thinks it’s mostly because of the smells. She swears there’s something magical about them; one of these days, she’s gonna pilfer some of Hardison’s hand cream and some of Eliot’s shampoo and mix them together in a little bottle that she can keep tucked into her pocket for any time she might need it when her boys aren’t around. Obviously it’s better to smell it right on them, but sometimes you’ve gotta take what you can get, y’know?
As Parker’s plotting this, she suddenly feels something beneath the hand that she’s still got on Eliot’s ribs, something that sends a twang of anxiety through her. She presses her palm down harder, and when she confirms the sensation, her stomach sinks: Eliot’s shaking.
Eliot never shakes. Not unless he’s scared.
Alright, that’s it—Parker can’t wait anymore. She can’t just let Eliot be scared. She has to do something about this, or at least try to. Unable (and unwilling) to wait to come up with a more elegant opening, she simply says, “You’re shaking. What’s wrong?”
Eliot doesn’t respond. Parker counts the cycles of breath between them: One, two, three, four… By cycle eight, her stomach starts to feel oily with nerves. She tries to inhale the calm, exhale the negative, just like Sophie always reminds her to do before she has to be brave about something that scares her. It helps, of course, because Sophie always knows exactly the right thing to do. Helps enough, in fact, that she’s able to make her voice particularly gentle when she asks, “Does something hurt?”
Nothing.
Hmm. “You sure?” Parker says, because it’s rare that Eliot doesn’t have even something little that’s hurting. Just comes with the territory, he always tells her and Hardison (no matter how sad it always makes them both to hear it).
More nothing, though.
Okay. Parker tries again: “Are you hungry?” Feels ridiculous to ask, but it was the next thing that came to mind.
Even more nothing.
“Cold?” she ventures. There, more normal.
Even so: Nothing, nothing, nothing. Parker still pulls the covers up higher anyway. Whether he admits to it or not, Eliot’s almost always cold (it’s why he tends to layer his clothes, Parker’s learned), so it’s almost always safe to assume that he could be warmer. Carefully, she tucks the blankets in around him. Once she’s done with that, she rests her cheek against the top of his head.
If she’s honest with herself, she’s pretty sure she knows what it is that’s making Eliot shake, because it’s the thing that had been making her shake earlier before the three of them made it back to the safety of their own home. And if she’s right about this, she can’t leave that until the morning; she can’t just pretend like it’s not there and wait for Eliot to come to her. She needs to fix this now.
Inhale the calm, exhale the negative. Inhale the calm, exhale the negative. Parker presses her cheek more firmly against Eliot’s hair, and she fits her fingers around the curve of Eliot’s side for an extra-steady grip.
“Eliot,” she says, softly. “Did Hardison wake you up from a bad dream? About… the job today, maybe?”
At first, Parker thinks she’s just gonna keep getting nothing—Eliot remains stubbornly silent, and he doesn’t look up at her. But then he does nudge his face up to tuck it beneath her jaw, and when that happens, Eliot’s eyelashes brush against her skin. When they do, Parker feels dampness.
Her heart spirals out the back of her ribs and plummets to the floor beneath the bed. Bingo, she thinks miserably to herself. Well, at least she knows what to do now, seeing as she’s no stranger to Eliot’s bad dreams. It’s a simple four-step process: She’s just gotta coax it out of him, let him spill, remind him it's not real and everything’s okay, and then cuddle him into oblivion, of course. The nerves start to creep back in, edging out that settled feeling as they do, but she reminds herself that she has this whole thing down to muscle memory, and it’s something she knows she can fix. She’s so good at this, in fact, that she could do it in her sleep. (Get it? Sleep? Dreams? Hah.) So, with her heart full of determination, Parker squeezes Eliot closer.
“Wanna talk about it?” she asks him.
That’s the first part of the first step: The question. You have to let him consider the offer. It’s like how you need to hold your hand out first to a wild animal and give them some time to sniff around you to try and make them feel safer before you offer them food or pets. She needs to give Eliot the chance to sniff around the thought of it first, rather than demanding anything of him. As it turns out, though, there’s no sniffing to be done: Immediately, Eliot shakes his head into her neck.
Parker wrinkles her nose. That’s not the way this usually goes. Not these days, at least. It’s how it used to go in the early days of them being Them, back before she and Hardison had put in the time and the work to convince Eliot that he didn’t need to hide stuff from them anymore. But these days, it’s different. These days, Eliot trusts them.
Or he usually does.
“Really?” Parker asks.
Eliot nods again. “Yeah.”
Oh. When she finally hears Eliot’s voice, Parker’s heart drops further—even that single word trembles, in a way that Eliot’s words rarely ever do.
This is worse than she thought. On any other night, if he didn’t sound so fragile, she might keep trying to coax him and still let him come to her. If he was really stubborn about it, she might even let him get away with the no and go back to leaving him be until breakfast. But there’s no way that’s happening now, not a chance. If he sounds like this, she’s gonna need to guide this situation herself, and that means she’ll have to force Eliot’s hand. It’s not entirely fair, she knows, but sometimes you need to do what you need to do. Eliot would understand that. He’d do the same for her if the situation called for it.
With as much carefulness as she can manage, trying not to startle him with any sudden moves, Parker slips her hand away from Eliot’s ribs. Down, down, down she trails her touch over his back, passing slowly over familiar skin. She goes until she’s just above his tailbone, and once she’s there, she makes her move: Firmly enough that she knows Eliot will feel the pressure of the gesture, she palms the small of his back.
There’s a hitch in Eliot’s breathing. Up until this moment, his hand had been tight on Parker’s ribs. Now, his grip relaxes a fraction.
“Eliot,” Parker says again, and she doesn’t make herself be gentle anymore. Instead, she injects her voice with that firmness that Eliot always responds to so perfectly. “I want you to tell me what happened.”
Eliot hesitates… and his grip fully relaxes. His forehead presses harder into Parker’s neck, and he takes a deep breath. “It… Yeah,” he says. “It was about the job today.”
Parker swallows. Ah. Aha. The job today. That was… Well.
It had been a complete accident: They’d been making the final move on their mark’s secret warehouse, and just as they’d been about to grab the goods, this random group of three guys suddenly jumped her and Hardison while Hardison was on door-hack duty and she was watching his back. This had happened, of course, when Eliot had already been busy fighting off probably a dozen other goons. The extra men must’ve been called in as last-minute backup on a burner phone or something, because Eliot had done a building sweep not ten minutes earlier and hadn’t found any extra muscle, and Hardison hadn’t gotten a ping from any of their guy’s pre-tapped devices that he was making outside contact. That element of surprise meant there’d been a bit of a tussle before Parker could gather her wits and get the situation in hand.
Now, the job turned out fine in the end. It always does. Just prior to that end, had it admittedly gotten a little bumpy? Sure. Hardison might’ve twisted his ankle and gotten a little stabbed, and she might’ve had a guy hold her up by the throat for a few seconds before she could fish her taser out of her jacket pocket. Not ideal. But the “fine in the end” part is the part that Parker would rather focus on. It’s really the only thing that matters, right? No one died or even got gravely injured, so they’ll be okay. Hardison will just need to take it easy on his foot and keep his stitches clean and dry, and if she goes out anywhere, she’ll wear a turtleneck or one of Hardison’s scarves. It’s no biggie. They’re fine. (That’s what she keeps telling herself, at least: They’re fine.)
Apparently Eliot doesn’t agree, though. Something’s still bothering him. Time for Step 2, then, since she’s coaxed the truth out of him: Let him spill. Get him to word vomit it all up and exorcise those bad thoughts and feelings. Once again, she has a feeling she might know what some of them are, if her own thoughts and feelings are any indication, but it’s better if Eliot says them first. Just listen, she reminds herself. That’s what he needs right now.
As a kind of reward to him for getting through the first step of the process, Parker lifts her hand off the small of Eliot’s back so she can tickle her fingertips over it in the kind of light, easy circles that she knows he likes. Her heart lifts when he presses into the touch.
“What was it about the job?” she asks him.
“What do you think?” he says. He scoots in closer to her. “You and Hardison got hurt.”
Mmm. Parker hums in acknowledgement. “We did. Would’ve been worse if you hadn’t been there, though,” she points out. “Good thing we had you to take care of most of the bad guys.”
“But you still got hurt. I should’ve done something. I should’ve stopped it.”
There’s a raw pain in Eliot’s voice when he says that that immediately goes right to Parker’s ribs, both because of how quick it comes on and because it’s a pain she hasn’t heard in a while.
Eliot doesn’t always get like this; a good chunk of the time, he’s still the same kind of gruffly-caring-but-practical that he used to be if someone got hurt on a job. Case in point, Nate had been grazed by a stray bullet about a month ago and Eliot hadn’t gotten nearly this upset. He’d been worried, yeah, but once he’d patched Nate up he’d seemed settled. Those tight lines had disappeared from around his eyes when he’d clapped Nate on the back and sent him home with instructions to Sophie to keep his arm covered in clean gauze and to make sure he got some food, rest, and painkillers. And when the three of them had gone home and unwound with pizza and beers and a movie and cuddles like they always do after a job, it was like bing bang boom, everything was alright—Eliot was back to his usual charming self, bickering with Hardison over how the movie’s plot was unfolding and stealing handfuls of popcorn from her Special Parker Popcorn Bowl that no one was technically allowed to touch (unless you were Eliot or Hardison and you made up for your ignoring of the rule with a kiss).
That’s not what Eliot had been like tonight, though, so really, maybe Parker should’ve anticipated this. Tonight, Eliot had been near-silent and very broody. At first, Parker had chalked that up to, y’know, him fighting a dozen guys earlier in the span of about two minutes. He’d made it out of it alive, obviously, because he’s Eliot Spencer and he always does. But before he’d emerged victorious, she’d caught a few glimpses of him getting his ass kicked a bit, in between her watching Hardison’s back and then trying to fight their own attackers off. She’d known he was gonna be sore and aching, and sure enough, he’d gone through three ice packs during the movie, one each for his jaw and his ribs and his right knuckles. And she’s sure that was only the worst of it, just the really painful bits that he couldn’t stand not to dull until he could take better care of them tomorrow. All that hurt will certainly make a man near-silent and very broody.
But it wasn’t just the near-silence and brooding, Parker had noticed. There’d been those lines around his eyes, the same ones he’d had before he got Nate patched up. He’d also made sure she and Hardison had over-full plates for dinner, ones that were loaded up with extra slices of pizza and heaping piles of salad, plus an extra beer apiece (well, an extra beer for her, and an extra orange soda for Hardison). And he’d been so clingy too, from the minute they’d piled into the van to head out and then even more so once they’d gotten home. Like, even clingier than usual, and that’s saying something, because Eliot’s a cling monster on even the most normal of days.
Tonight, though? He’d shadowed her and Hardison’s every movement so closely that it was like he was half ghost, half sad puppy. The whole time they’d showered and dressed and prepped for the movie, he’d been right there, hovering so near that Parker had sworn she could feel his breath on the back of her neck. While they’d watched their movie, he’d situated himself right between them too, keeping them both as glued to him as possible. Hardison had ended up with Eliot’s legs slung over both his thighs, pinning him right where he sat, and Parker had gotten herself an arm wrapped tight around her middle to hold her in position (which she’d very much enjoyed).
But maybe the real kicker had been the way that every so often, Eliot would turn and press his face to her cheek, or he’d take Hardison’s hand and hold the back of it to his mouth, and then he’d just… pause there. Eyes closed, breathing slow. It was like he just needed a second. Needed something to ground him. For that reason, Parker had done her best to reciprocate—every time Eliot turned toward her, she’d lean into the touch and rub her cheek against him. Without taking her eyes off the movie, she’d reach up and cup his jaw to keep him in place too. Whenever she did that, she could feel Eliot’s exhale strong and relieved against her skin, and that had made her feel better.
Parker’s heart skips. She wishes she felt better now. She wishes Eliot felt better now. He’s still shaking beneath her hands, and she hasn’t even gotten him to fully spill everything yet. There’s more in there, she can tell; she can hear it in the way the silence shivers between them like an animal cowering in a corner, like it’s trying to hide from something. Eliot might not like it, but she’ll need to get him to keep going. The only way out is through, as they say, so through they must go.
Briefly, Parker breaks her circle-scratching to tuck Eliot’s hair behind his ear. Eliot stiffens as soon as her hand leaves his back, so she returns it smoothly, picking back up with the repetitive motion. Eliot relaxes again when she does.
“What would you have done?” she asks him. Purposefully evenly, so he knows it’s purely a question. There’d been a time before where she’d asked the same thing and she hadn’t overthought her tone, and that had… not ended great, to say the least.
Eliot shifts in her grip. “Something,” he says after a pause. “I dunno. I just—” He pauses again. “I had Hardison’s blood all over the front of my shirt by the time I got him back to the van, Park,” he says. His voice has shifted to quiet now, quiet and small. “You’ve got a handprint on your neck.”
Even though she’d already recalled them herself, hearing their injuries listed aloud makes Parker feel like she’s been covered in slime. She hates that she can still see the red on Eliot’s shirt from where Hardison’s injured arm had been pressed to his chest as he was carried back to Lucille’s waiting trunk. She hates that she can still remember how she’d scrubbed at that sticky-tacky chest in the shower once they got home, sending pink water swirling down the drain. She especially hates that if she thinks hard enough about it—and she really doesn’t want to think hard enough about it, but she can’t help it now that Eliot’s brought it up—she can still feel those fingers gripping around her throat, pressing hard enough that they’d left a bruise that was glowing a livid red by the time she’d stepped out of the shower after Eliot and caught a glimpse of herself in the half-steamy mirror.
Okay, so maybe they’re not exactly “fine.” Maybe things had actually gone kinda bad today and they’re all a little worse for wear about it. She won’t say that, though, because she thinks she’s gotten Eliot to spill enough by now, which means it’s time for Step 3: Remind him everything’s okay (even if she doesn’t 100% feel like it herself). Parker does her best to banish her own discomfort, attempting to mentally wave away those memories that Eliot had conjured for her by literally giving her head a rattle. By the time she settles back onto her pillow, most of them have managed to fly off. She nibbles on her lower lip for a second before she opens her mouth.
“Listen—I know we got hurt,” she says. “But this kinda stuff happens sometimes. Me and Hardison both know that. Sometimes things don’t go a hundred percent right; it’s just part of the job.”
“It’s part of my job,” Eliot immediately replies. “Not part of yours.”
Ahh. Hm. That sits in the air between them. Eliot’s hand has found Parker’s waist now and his grip is tight again, almost crushingly so. She doesn’t tell him to stop. Instead, she counts a few of his up-and-downs of his back. He’s been breathing normally this whole time, which is good, but he’s shaking even harder now; Parker increases the pressure of her nails, to make sure he can really feel them. For several long seconds, neither of them say anything.
Parker’s the one who ends up speaking first: “I mean, sometimes we do stuff that’s not usually in our job descriptions. I’ve kinda become part grifter, right? And sometimes Hardison asks you to do computer stuff. So, y’know… Sometimes mine and Hardison’s jobs for the day might include a little fighting.”
“But that’s not the way it works,” Eliot says, and there’s that Spencer stubbornness, that absolute refusal to give in when he’s got his mind set on something. “The whole point of me is to make sure none of y’all have to worry about defending yourselves. Especially you two.”
Oooookay. Parker’s eyebrows scrunch up and she blows her bangs off her forehead. Normally she likes that Spencer stubbornness—finds it attractive, even—but this is a decidedly inconvenient time for it as it’s making her feel like she’s running out of ideas. Things usually go quicker and/or easier than this, meaning she doesn’t have to cast about for as many proofs and reassurances. She does have a few more in the tank, but they’re also the only few she’s got left, so they better work, goddammit. Here goes nothing.
“I mean, you can’t be everywhere, can you?” she says. “And I thought that was the reason you taught me and Hardison how to fight anyway, so that we could take care of things if we had to. Plus,” she adds, because she feels like she’s on a roll, “this isn’t the first time this has happened. We’ve gotten hurt on jobs before.”
Eliot sighs. “I know,” he says, sounding very unhappy about being in possession of this knowledge. “I usually have a better handle on stuff, though. And you guys getting hurt, it—” He tips his face down to press his forehead into Parker’s collarbone. “It sucks every time. But this time was really bad. And it means something extra these days now that we’re… y’know.”
Parker considers this. It’s true that Eliot usually has any given situation perfectly in hand. He’s definitely not wrong about this time being really bad either—Hardison had needed six stitches total, and she’s never had a hand on her throat. It’s not the worst they’ve ever seen, but it’s certainly not normal. Normally if either of them walk away with anything it’s just a bruise or two, maybe a single scrape. Today was a decidedly different level of ouch.
It’s doubly true too that this kinda stuff means something extra these days. It had always unsettled her to see anything happen to Eliot or Hardison, but now it makes her downright queasy. When Eliot had stepped out of the ring of downed goons he’d left on the floor of the warehouse earlier, Parker had watched with a frantic anxiety bubbling in her chest as he’d pressed a crimson-knuckled hand to his ribs and taken a few slow, wheezing breaths. And then when Hardison was in Lucille afterward getting stitched up, she’d clutched at his free forearm so tightly that even he—woozy and fuzzy as he was with the ever-potent combo of blood loss and the onset of painkillers—had slurred for her to be a little gentler, please. She’d never liked seeing her boys get hurt, but now they’re her Boys. And no one hurts her Boys.
So, alright: She gets it, why Eliot’s upset. The situation slipped out of his control, something it hardly ever does, and after that happened, her and Hardison both got pretty beat up, and that’s hard because they’re not just his people, but his People. She can see how he’s connecting all those dots and feeling stubbornly responsible for what went down. She can understand too why the fear from this afternoon hasn’t left him, because it’s the same reason it hasn’t fully left her either: This is the first time in the months they’ve been Them that a job has gone this south. Something like that’ll linger.
Still, she doesn’t like him feeling bad about it. She knows it wasn’t for lack of trying or anything, and she doesn’t hold it against him. It’s important to her that he knows this. So she palms the small of Eliot’s back again, and she nuzzles her face into the crown of his head, and she says, “We’re alright.”
“I know,” Eliot replies.
“We’re all safe,” she reminds him.
“I know,” he repeats.
“The whole point of you isn’t just to make sure we never have to throw a punch ourselves. You take care of the worst of it, and then we can handle the rest. You did your job.”
To that, Eliot says nothing.
Shit. Parker doesn’t just feel like she’s running out of ideas now, she is out of ideas, and that’s not good. Where the hell is Hardison? He always knows exactly how to handle this kind of stuff, certainly with more finesse than she does. How goddamn long does it take to get a glass of water and some Advil—
“Hey there, party people!”
A breath gusts out of Parker. Thank god—she’s got backup. When she looks toward the door and watches Hardison shuffle into the room, she flashes him a grateful smile.
“Hey,” she says. “Did you get your stuff?”
“Yes ma’am I did. Why are you still up, though? Y’all didn’t go back to bed?”
“No. We’ve been talking.”
“What are we talking about?”
Parker tightrope-walks her fingers along the notches of Eliot’s spine. “Eliot’s mad that he’s not psychic and didn’t know a couple more guys would jump us.”
“Am not,” Eliot snaps.
“Are too!” she fires back.
“Aww, c’mon,” Hardison jumps in. “We only had to fight three dudes. If you hadn’t been there taking care of the others already it would’ve been way worse.”
“That’s what I said!”
“It doesn’t have to be worse.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Hardison waves Eliot off. “It’s just a hazard of the job, babe.”
Eliot’s grip on Parker’s hip is still tight. Parker pauses the finger-walking to tap thoughtfully on his middle-most vertebra.
“That’s the other thing,” she says after a few beats. “Eliot feels bad that he couldn’t get hurt instead of us. Or for us, maybe.”
Another admission that earns the room’s silence. Hardison hovers by the bed for a second before he peels back the covers. There’s some wsh-wshing of fabric, and then Parker can tell that Hardison’s gotten himself tucked up against Eliot’s back by the way that Eliot’s front gets squished even closer to her. Hardison’s arm drapes over Eliot’s side, his hand coming to rest on Parker’s stomach, and Parker puts her own hand over top of his to close that loop between the three of them and knit them together.
Hardison exhales. “Eliot,” he murmurs. “You’re alright. You took care of us, just like you always do.”
Eliot’s fingernails bite bluntly into Parker’s skin. “But the other guys—”
“Screw the other guys, man. Parker’s right, you’re not a damn psychic. It’s not your fault. Need I remind you that you were already in the middle of, like, a dozen other dudes? You were just a liiiiiittle bit preoccupied.” Hardison chuckles. “It was pretty hot, actually. You remember when we watched Oldboy? You were like that scene in the hallway. Just mowing people down left and right, really giving ’em the what-for. Just messing those fools up—”
“Hardison,” Eliot growls.
“Oh, what? A guy can’t admire his boyfriend mid-fight? Jeez.”
“Not the point,” Eliot reminds him.
“Hardison’s right, though,” Parker adds, because he is, and also because maybe some teasing will bring some warmth between them. Sometimes a little tag-team jokey-joking with Hardison is just what the doctor ordered. “You always look pretty when you fight, but you were especially pretty today. You got really sweaty and that made your hair wavy, and you looked super intense like ‘grrrrrr I’m gonna grind all your bones into dust,’ and then there was that thing where that one guy tried to kick you and you grabbed his leg and swung him around by it, and that made your muscles look really good under your shirt—”
This time, Eliot doesn’t even grace Parker with her name—his second growl is completely wordless, just a sound of utter defeat as he bonks his head against her chest like he’s knocking it against a wall. Parker snorts, grinning down at the top of Eliot’s head before she looks over to Hardison and catches him grinning too. He’s also holding up a hand for her that she immediately high-fives.
“I’m gonna kill both of you,” Eliot says.
“No, you’re not,” Parker replies sweetly, petting a hand over Eliot’s hair. “You love us.”
“And sometimes y’all really make me wonder why.”
“Psh.” Hardison tightens the arm he’s got around them both, squashing them even closer together. “It’s because we’re amazing. And funny, and charming—”
“And geniuses—”
“Definitely geniuses—”
“And Hardison gives amazing back rubs, and I can give you perfect French braids—”
“And I know how to get your fancy foreign sports channels for free, and Parker steals you lots of nice jewelry—”
“And we’re both really good at kissing you and bossing you around, and everyone knows how much you love that—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, alright, I get it,” Eliot cuts in. He huffs. “Maybe you’re alright,” he concedes. “Maybe. Don’t go pushing your luck, though.”
Parker looks over at Hardison again in time to catch a massive eye-roll.
“Wow. So generous,” Hardison says. “Isn’t he generous, Parker?”
“Soooooo generous,” Parker agrees.
“Soooooo generous. You’re lucky we think you’re maybe alright too and we’re willing to put up with your emotional constipation.”
“Hey, I am not emotionally constipated.”
“Uh-huh! Sure! Say it, then,” Hardison challenges him. “Tell me, Eliot. I neeeeed to hear these words.”
The room falls quiet again. It’s a different kind of quiet from what it was before, though—it’s less tense, less afraid. It doesn’t feel like a frightened animal cowering in a corner. That warmth has found its way between them finally; it’s Parker’s favorite thing in the whole world, and she’s glad to have it back.
But the quiet stretches out long enough that Parker half-wonders if Eliot’s managed to fall back asleep. She’s just about to jostle him awake again when Eliot lets out a short, quick breath. When she hears that, she waits.
“I love you guys,” Eliot whispers.
Another shot straight to Parker’s ribs, but in a much sweeter way this time, and with a pleasant weightiness too. Sometimes she wonders if she’ll ever get used to hearing Eliot say those words. Hardison too, for that matter. She kinda hopes she never does. It feels too good this way.
With her sternum aching, Parker squeezes Eliot tight. She feels dampness on her skin again where Eliot’s lashes brush her throat; surreptitiously, she wipes the wetness away before it can trickle down his cheek, cradling his jaw and stroking a thumb in a crescent beneath his eye when she’s done.
“We love you too,” she whispers back.
“We do,” Hardison says. “And you really did—you took care of us today.” Hardison’s voice gentles when he says that. “You’ve got nothing to worry about, alright? No need to feel bad, no need to be sorry. You did your job and you did it good.”
Eliot exhales once more, but slower this time, easier. Like he’s let something go.
“Okay,” he says. “If you say so.”
“As a matter of fact, I do.”
Parker looks down at Eliot, and even though the angle’s not great, she’s pretty sure she sees a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
“Okay.” Eliot pushes himself up, turning to look at Hardison. “How’s your arm feeling?”
“Eh,” Hardison says. “Kinda throbby. It’s not so bad if I’m not moving it around, though.”
“That’s good. And your ankle?”
“Better. I took another Advil when I got up. Plus I had some gummy frogs.”
Eliot snorts. “And the gummy frogs help?”
“The gummy frogs help.”
Now that Parker can see Eliot’s face better, she can see when he does his own eye-roll. “Uh-huh. Sure.” He pauses, his expression going back to serious. “Glad it’s not as bad anymore,” he adds, quieter. “Glad you’re okay.”
“I am,” Hardison tells him, drawing an X over his chest. “Promise.”
“Good.”
There’s a second of hesitation, and then Eliot leans in, face tipping up toward Hardison’s. With a smoothness so smooth you’d think they’d planned it, Hardison meets him halfway for the kiss, one hand coming up to cup Eliot’s cheek.
It’s the simplest of connections, and one that Parker’s seen probably a hundred times by now, but it still takes her breath away. Eliot always goes so sweet and unguarded when he’s kissed, all of him softening and submitting to the gesture with a sense of surrender so immediate and relieved that it makes Parker’s fingers tingle. It’s a perfect match for the way that Hardison always kisses you like it’s something he can do to protect you, every bit of his being focused on making sure your own is held in safety; he’s there to shelter Eliot when he drops his guard and lets himself go. Add to that the yellow-y lamplight giving them an angelic glow, and the quiet giving Parker room to hear the way that Eliot mms muted and high and pleasantly surprised when Hardison’s fingers push back into his hair? It’s almost too much to bear. Parker’s lungs sting with how beautiful they both are, and how big her feelings are for the both of them.
Eliot’s the one to pull away first. After he presses one more kiss to the corner of Hardison’s mouth, he sinks back down and looks at Parker.
“And what about you, sweetheart?” he asks her (rather breathlessly, which Parker really likes). “How’s your shoulder? And your jaw? And—” Eliot’s words cut off as he trails his fingertips over Parker’s throat, like he can’t stand to acknowledge the injury out loud more than once.
Parker tips her chin up to give Eliot more room to touch, and when he does, she takes a moment to appreciate the tenderness of his cautious caress. “They’re okay,” she eventually answers, honestly. “Sore, but less sore than earlier.”
Hardison drifts his own fingertips over her cheek. “You want any Advil too?”
“Nah. I’m not letting either of you out of bed. And,” she goes on, a lightbulb suddenly going off over her head, “I know something else that might help…” She looks back at Eliot, pursing her lips and batting her lashes at him.
Eliot tries and fails to smother a look of delight. “You want me to—”
“Kiss it better, yes.”
Eliot shakes his head, but he still leans up to press slow kisses to Parker’s shoulder and her jaw and, finally, to her neck. Over that last spot, his lips are like moth wings, so light and fluttery that they make her stomach fizz. Again she tips her chin up while he’s there, wordlessly asking for more, and again Eliot obeys, dotting those kisses over what feels like the whole of her neck, until she’s certain she’s absolutely covered.
When he’s apparently satisfied with his work and he starts to move away, Parker doesn’t let Eliot go far—she catches him with a hand on the back of his neck, and she dips in to give him a kiss of her own, one to match Hardison’s. Just like he did before, Eliot goes down as easy as anything, falling in step with her lead with another one of those mms and a mouth that’s happily pliant against her own. She treats him to everything she can muster up at this wee hour of the morning: a nip to his lower lip, enough tongue to make his mouth feel full, and a grip on his chin that tiptoes the line between holding him there and keeping him, because she knows how much he likes blurring that boundary. When she pulls back, she sprinkles those tiny pecks over his cheeks like she also knows he likes, and then she takes a moment to admire his ditzy, dreamy expression, pretty lips parted and eyes only half-open.
“Alright?” she asks him, even though she already knows the answer.
All Eliot does is crumple back against her chest. Parker cackles in victory.
“Damn,” Hardison says from beside her, sounding winded. “You got him good.”
“Uh-huh. So did you. He looks like he’s dizzy. It’s cute.”
“‘Him’ can hear you,” Eliot replies in a weak grumble.
“Oh, so he does speak,” Hardison says. “Hey, answer this question for me then: Where’s my magic band-aid kisses?”
“You didn’t ask for any.”
“I’m asking now.”
Eliot releases an extended sigh before he pushes himself back up again. “Alright—gimme your arm.”
Hardison offers it, and after Eliot pushes up the sleeve of Hardison’s T-shirt to reveal the bandage he’d put on in the van earlier, he gives it a lingering kiss.
“There,” Eliot says. “That feel better?”
“Yeah, thanks. And don’t forget about my ankle too—”
“I ain’t crawling down there to kiss your foot,” Eliot huffs as he flops back onto Parker. “I’ll get it tomorrow.”
“Now, hold on,” Hardison says, holding up a hand. “That don’t seem fair. Parker got all her kisses, so why don’t I get mine?”
“’Cause I’m comfy, babe, and I wanna go back to sleep—”
“Ohhhh, you’re comfy. And you’re sleepy. Too comfy and sleepy to give Hardison both the kisses he deserves.” Hardison tuts. “Ain’t that a shame. Won’t anyone think of poor Alec?”
“I told you, I’ll do it tomorrow. Smart-Alec,” Eliot mutters under his breath. “And hey,” he adds, louder and gruffer now, “do you hear me complaining that I didn’t get any magic band-aid kisses either? I got all kinds of beat up today! No one here’s kissing all my stuff.”
Ahh, ah-ah-ah—that won’t work. Parker taps on the end of Eliot’s nose. “You didn’t even give us a chance to ask,” she points out. “Do you want magic band-aid kisses, Eliot?”
Immediately, Eliot stills. Parker likes to think that she wouldn’t need to be able to see him to know that he’s blushing, because she likes to imagine that she can hear the softest of sizzles as his cheeks heat. This is a thing Eliot does—he whines about how he never gets something, and then when you actually offer it to him, he gets all shy. Parker still doesn’t quite understand why he does that. Shouldn’t it be a happy thing to get something you want? Eliot makes it seem like it’s something embarrassing.
“Eliot,” Parker says, making her voice firm again. “Tell me if that’s what you want.”
A beat of silence. Then, barely louder than a breath: “Yeah.”
“Okay. Where’d they get you?” she asks, because she wants to hear him say it himself.
Another beat of silence. Eliot’s hand is at Parker’s waist again, fingers fiddling with the elastic band of the boxers she stole from Hardison’s drawer of the dresser after she got out of the shower.
“They… One guy cracked me across the jaw.”
“Left or right?”
“Listen, it’s—” Eliot’s protest stops as soon as Parker pinches his arm. “Right,” he says.
“Okay.” Parker tips Eliot’s face up so she can kiss the right side of his jaw. “There we go. Where else?”
“A, uh… Another guy got me in the ribs.”
Hardison ducks beneath the blankets, and a second later, Parker hears a very distinctive mmmmwah. “Got it,” he says, voice muffled beneath the sheets.
“Anywhere else?” Parker asks.
A pause. Parker wonders if Eliot’s trying to decide whether to continue; with the hope that it’ll tip the scales toward “yes, go on,” she kisses his forehead and whispers, “You’re doing good, cowboy. Keep going,” and to her relief, Eliot lets out a breath at the same time that he tucks his head back beneath her chin.
“They…” Eliot clears his throat. “My knuckles got busted up pretty bad. Right hand. And someone socked me in the shoulder on the left side…”
To Parker’s delight, Eliot keeps going like this, his voice growing more and more comfortable and confident as she and Hardison give him his kisses, doing their best to leech that pain away with their touch alone. After a point, Parker’s even smiling as she touches her lips to sore spots and developing bruises. It makes her happy that she gets to take care of Eliot like this, and she’s proud of her and Hardison’s teamwork to bring all of them back together. They’re such a good unit, the three of them; they all fit just right. It gives her the same satisfaction she feels when she cracks a particularly tricky safe. There’s always a solution to whatever they need—it just takes a certain knack to figure it out. And when you find that solution, when you feel that final click and the door swings wide and reveals the treasure within, it’s a rush like no other.
As the kisses go on, Eliot seemingly starts to run out of spots—his words get further and further apart until Parker wonders if there’s any left. After one more magic band-aid to the bruising bridge of his nose, she looks down at him.
“That all?” she asks.
Eliot hums, rumbly and content. “Mmm. Think that’s everything.” He pauses. “But now that you mention it… There was another guy who kicked me in the nuts too.”
Eliot’s expression is perfectly placid and innocent as Hardison pops back up from beneath the blankets like a meerkat. More specifically, a very irritated meerkat.
“Did he really?” Hardison asks, his voice dripping with disbelief.
“Yeah, man,” Eliot replies. “Are you calling me a liar?”
“I ain’t calling you a truther. And I am calling you a thirsty meathead.”
Eliot looks up to give Parker a wink that makes something in her chest flap its wings rather frantically. “Guilty as charged.”
“Imagine how tired I am,” Hardison says, looking up at the ceiling. When he looks back at Eliot, he points a finger at him. “I’ll take your word for it,” he goes on, “but if my ankle’s gotta wait until the morning, your nuts can too. They’ll live.”
“Fine,” Eliot says. “You promise you’ll kiss ’em, though?”
“Nasty and childish,” Hardison mutters.
“What was that?”
“Yes, I promise.”
Eliot snickers; Parker can feel his smile against her collarbone. She curls a stray strand of that wavy hair behind his ear.
“Must be feeling better if you’re teasing Hardison about sex stuff, huh?” she says.
Parker catches the barest glimpse of Eliot’s expression melting into something sweeter before he hides it in her chest.
“Maybe,” he mumbles. He pauses. “Thanks,” he adds, softer. “For… Y’know.”
Hardison presses himself up against Eliot’s back again and hooks his chin over Eliot’s shoulder. “Of course,” he says. “Anything for our Eliot.”
For a few seconds, Parker can’t feel Eliot’s breath against her. When it starts up again, it’s very, very even.
“Y—” Even just that consonant comes out rough. Eliot clears his throat. “Yours?” he says.
With how delicate and hopeful the word is in Eliot’s mouth, you’d think it was the first time he’d asked for the confirmation. (It’s not.) Parker’s pretty sure she understands why he always sounds like that when he says it: Up until the last few years, she’d never belonged with anyone in her whole life. It makes it feel like a bit of a miracle, then, that the five of them—and, more specifically, the three of them in this bed—found their way to each other, and that they stayed together too, for that matter. She’s still getting used to the fact that she’s got people she belongs with. Eliot’s actually got a pre-Them family, obviously, but with the way he works, she also knows there’s some distance there. So for him to have familiar people he gets to be around every day? She has to imagine that’s as much of a gift to him as it is to her.
But Parker’s also pretty sure it’s not just about the with—she thinks there’s something in the to too. Over the months that the three of them have been together now, Parker’s noticed how, like they just did with the band-aid kisses, she and Hardison have shifted into a position of fussing over Eliot whenever they can in a way they never did before. One of the (many) perks of someone finally being your boyfriend: You can smudge the blood off their split lip and adjust their let’s-go-steal-a-moon-or-whatever-other-insane-thing-Nate’s-decided-on con-stume whenever you please.
It’s a comfort, being able to do this kinda stuff; it used to hurt Parker sometimes, watching Eliot clean himself up and fix his own con-stumes. With the way that he always relaxes beneath their care, she wonders if that was something that used to hurt him sometimes too. Consistently, he loses the tension in his shoulders whenever Hardison dabs his face clean, and he lets out a small sigh when Parker smooths out the collar of his shirt. And see, that’s what makes her think it’s about the to too. Maybe Eliot wants to belong to someone because he wants in return the thing that he’s always giving out himself—he wants someone to have his back. Or, more generally, he wants someone to have him. Someone who he knows will call him theirs, who’ll treat him like they’re responsible for him.
Has Eliot ever actually had that before? Parker’s never considered the question. She knows he’s had sex with a lot of people, but it never seemed to go beyond that, not in the years they’ve known each other, at least. Unless Eliot was able to hide someone(s) from them, which is possible, she supposes. Eliot’s very good at keeping secrets. But if this was something he’d had before, would he be so consistently bowled over by it whenever she or Hardison offer it up? Plus, would they even be in the equation if he had? Wouldn’t he have just stayed with whoever had given it to him first? If this really is new for him…
A feeling swells in Parker’s chest that zooms blurrily back and forth between possessive and protective. She simply has no choice but to immediately gather Eliot even closer to her body. If this really is new for him, then by god, she’s gonna make sure he gets it as much as he can. And Hardison will too, she knows it. In fact, when she looks at Hardison over the top of Eliot’s head, she sees a fierceness in his eyes that’s just as intense as that feeling in her chest. She knows that they’re both thinking the same thing: Just as much as they’re Eliot’s to keep safe, he’s theirs to keep safe too. To keep safe, to hold; to love. Until the end of time and then some. They’ll always have him, and he’ll always belong right here, right with and to the two of them.
Parker leans down so her lips brush Eliot’s hair. “Yes,” she promises him. “You’re all ours. Forever.”
“Mmhm,” Hardison agrees. “Forever and for always.”
Eliot lets out a shivery exhale and slumps against Parker like someone cut his strings loose. He nestles his face into her chest too, and the tips of his fingers dip beneath the hem of her shirt to find her waist for a third time now. The touch—and the realization—sends a thrill through her. That’s right where Eliot’s hand belongs, she thinks. Right there on her waist. It feels good there; it feels right.
“Th’nks,” Eliot says again, slurring this time.
Parker hears Hardison chuckle, and she can’t help smiling herself—when Eliot goes down, he really goes down hard. Nothing knocks him out quite like some affection.
“You’re good, E,” Hardison says. “Don’t gotta thank us. We love you—didn’t you hear that earlier?”
“Yeah,” Parker agrees, “we love you. Love you love you, actually,” she clarifies, because she wants Eliot to feel it twice as much.
Eliot makes a soft, needy sound in the back of his throat. “Love you love you too,” he returns in a mumble.
Parker hums in approval and sprinkles a few kisses over the top of Eliot’s head. Then she looks back over at Hardison, smiling wider when she finds he’s already looking at her too. “Love you love you too,” she says.
Hardison grins. “Love you love you, mama. And love you love you, Eliot.”
Another soft, needy sound, this one even softer and needier. “Love you love you, Hardison,” Eliot replies. His voice is just a whisper now, light and thready.
Good. Very good. With that done—and feeling pleased with all the love built up between them—Parker wriggles down further into the sheets and takes one more whiff of Eliot’s yummy hair before letting out a big breath.
“Okay,” she says. “Bedtime?”
“Bedtime,” Eliot and Hardison echo.
“Good. Get some sleep then—we had a long day. Everyone needs their rest.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Hardison says with a chuckle, and Eliot makes a sleepy sound of agreement.
Parker nods. “That’s my boys.” Under the sheets, she sticks a leg under Eliot’s so she can fish around for one of Hardison’s feet with her own. When she finds it, she locks their ankles together as best she can. She kisses Eliot’s hairline too. “Love you love you,” she whispers again, right against Eliot’s forehead, just because she wants to say it. She can, so she will.
“Mmm,” Eliot hums, followed by a yawn. “Love you love you too.”
Parker hums back. Then she has to say “Love you love you, Hardison” again, of course, because she can’t just leave this new tradition incomplete.
“Love you love you, P. And love you love you, pretty boy.”
Stillness from Eliot. Parker wonders if he’s trying to pretend like he’s asleep. If he is, he’s certainly not fooling her. She pokes him in the jaw where she knows he’s bruised.
“C’moooooon, Eliot,” she sing-songs, grinning when he groans. “You have to say it back!”
“Dammit, Parker,” he says, “we just did this. Are we really doin’ it again—”
“Yes,” she and Hardison say at the same time. On her own, Parker also adds: “I’m making this a thing, and when someone says it, you have to say it too. So say it back!”
Eliot lets out another groan, more prolonged this time. Eventually the sound trails off, though, and when it does, he says, “Love you love you, Hardison.” Through gritted teeth, admittedly, but Parker will take it.
But apparently Hardison won’t, because he says “Nuh-uh, sir, say it good,” to which Eliot responds by—in the blink of an eye—pushing himself up so he’s got the leverage to push Hardison down into the bed. Promptly, he dips in to give Hardison a line of kisses that looks searing: He goes up along one side of Hardison’s throat and all the way around his jaw with a generous pause at his mouth in the middle, moaning lowly the whole time. There’s a flash of white teeth in the lamplight against the edge of Hardison’s jaw before Eliot moves on to suck at his earlobe, and then, for his grand finale, Eliot whispers “Love you love you, darlin’” in his most gravelly voice. A pause, followed by a brief nuzzle into Hardison’s cheek. Then Eliot pulls back to look at him with a smarmy smirk.
“That good?” he asks.
Hardison’s wide-eyed and open-mouthed and completely frozen. Parker feels about the same. Something hot and sparkly is skittering over her ribcage.
Eliot’s smirk grows. “Must’ve been really good if it shut you up, huh?”
The stillness breaks when Hardison opens and closes his mouth a few times like a beached fish. “That—” Hardison clears his voice, but when he says “Now that ain’t fair,” his voice still comes out exactly as squeaky as it had before.
Eliot snorts. “No one said anything about fair.” He chucks Hardison under the chin, closing his mouth. “Careful—you’ll catch flies like that.”
Some kind of unintelligible-but-clearly-annoyed sound escapes Hardison, and in the next second he’s got a hand in Eliot’s hair and he’s tugging. He must not have been too gentle about it because Eliot doesn’t just moan, he moans, a punched-out, eyes shut kind of sound. Now it’s Hardison’s turn to smirk.
“What was that about not saying anything about fair?” he says.
“Asshole,” Eliot replies, but there’s still the edges of that moan coloring his voice.
Parker’s watching all of this with that sparkly heat racing even faster over her ribs. She reaches up for Eliot’s face because she needs to touch him, she just can’t stand not to, and when Eliot immediately turns in toward her palm, lips brushing the heel of her hand, she squirms against the mattress, overwhelmed.
“Hey,” she says, and even she can hear how breathless she is. “Can I have some of that?”
Eliot laughs. “Thought we were supposed to be calling it a night.”
“Well, that’s what happens when you date two people. You’ve gotta keep things even.”
Hardison makes a sound of agreement. “The woman’s right, Eliot. Don’t leave her out.”
Eliot shakes his head, but there’s amusement and fondness at the corners of his eyes and his mouth when he shifts back to Parker, his hands coming to rest on the mattress just above either of her shoulders. He hovers over her, just looking at her for a second. Parker squirms again beneath his gaze. She reaches up for his face once more and pulls him down closer, but when their lips are a hair’s breadth away, she stops him.
“Wait,” she says as she comes to a sudden decision. “Just— Not as sexy, okay? It’s still time for bed. I don’t want sex.” That kiss-kiss earlier was really nice—even though it was mostly meant as a treat for him, it’s also always a treat for her to kiss Eliot—but she really is ready to wind down at this point.
The right corner of Eliot’s mouth hikes up higher than the left. “Never heard that one before,” he says, light and teasing. But he bumps his nose against hers in that way that says he understands, that he’ll follow her lead, so Parker finally lets him lean down closer and close the distance between them.
Sure enough, he listens—he picks back up with that wing-y lightness over her skin, lips trailing over her neck and her face until she’s buzzing with the fluttery feeling of it. The barely-there scratch of his stubble is a pleasant zing as well, and when he pauses at the end to mouth so very delicately at the corner of her jaw, Parker can’t help but shiver. By the time they separate, she feels like she’s floating a good inch or so off the bed. She opens her eyes to an Eliot who’s staring at her once more, and when she beams at him, he beams right back.
“That good?” he asks, to her this time.
“Mmmmmm,” Parker sighs. That heat in her ribs has been banked to just a pleasant warmth, and she’s so fuzzy and tingly that she has to wiggle her feet about it. “Good. Perfect.”
“Good,” Eliot says. He leans down and presses one more kiss to her forehead. “Perfect.”
Hardison, meanwhile, groans. “Goddamn,” he says, a punched-out sound of his own. “Can we pencil some more of this in for tomorrow? You two are too good. And I want some more for myself.”
Parker feels around in the sheets for one of Hardison’s hands this time, squeezing his fingers tight when she finds them. “That sounds like a good idea. Eliot will have some new bruises to play with, after all.”
“Well,” Eliot says in a reedy voice before promptly toppling back to the mattress.
“Mmhm. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea.” Parker pats Eliot’s back decisively. “Alright, boys: Block off your calendars tomorrow. From nine to, oh… three, let’s say. Be generous with it.”
“At that point, why don’t we just take the whole day?” Eliot mumbles into his pillow.
“Even better! Yes, let’s block off the whole day. Hardison, cancel all my meetings.”
“On it.”
“Good. Now we really need some sleep. No more distractions.”
“That was your fault—”
“‘That was your fault,’” Parker fires back, followed by a raspberry blown in Eliot’s direction. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I mean… You were the one who didn’t say the thing when you were supposed to, E. So I think it was actually your fault. That’s how this whole thing got started.”
“I’m going to sleep,” Eliot announces loudly. “Love you love you, Hardison, love you love you, Parker, there, hope everyone’s happy. Good night.”
“Awww, thank you, Eliot,” Hardison says. “Love you love you too. And I love you love you, Parker—”
“I’m going to bed! Good night!” Eliot says, still loudly.
Parker smushes a finger against the corner of Eliot’s lips since that’s all she can reach with his current position. “Shhhh,” she shushes him. “It’s sleepy time. Not so loud. And I still have to say my thing—I can’t just leave you and Hardison hanging.”
Eliot rolls his face off his pillow just enough to squint one eye at her. His glare is approaching murderous, but he also doesn’t stop her. In one quick breath, Parker says, “LoveyouloveyouHardisonloveyouloveyouEliotokaygoodnight.”
Eliot disappears back into his pillow and raises a thumb up. “Thanks, good night,” he mumbles.
“Meanie,” Parker says, sticking her tongue out at him this time. “And hey, get back over here. Hardison got his Passed-Out Eliot Cuddles tonight—don’t I get mine?”
No glare now—without any hesitation, Eliot scoots right back over to fit himself to her side and lay his head on her chest. Always so obedient, her Eliot. When he drapes his arm back over her ribs, she strokes his bicep in approval.
“There,” she says. “Thank you.”
“Mmhm.” Eliot yawns again. “Is it bedtime now? Finally?”
“Bedtime now,” Parker says, “finally. Rest up, my angels—busy day tomorrow. Lots of smooching to be done.”
There comes tired laughs from both the boys, followed by quiet. After he turns off the bedside lamp, Hardison leans around to sneak a kiss to Eliot’s cheek, and then he kisses Parker’s forehead too before he settles back down, getting himself pressed up against Eliot once more. Hardison’s hand finds Parker again, coming to rest on her shoulder this time. She turns her head to press her lips to his knuckles, and she smiles when Hardison brushes those knuckles so, so softly over her cheek.
“Night night, y’all,” Hardison says.
Eliot makes a vague sound that trails off into his biggest yawn yet.
“Night night,” Parker says. And now that the moment’s been sealed, she closes her eyes in blissful anticipation of going back to her lovely sleep with her boys cuddled up to her, exactly the way they all should be.
Of course, it can’t be more than fifteen seconds before Hardison’s hand moves off her shoulder and trails over her chest. She’s prepared to complain about him moving around after they already said night night when Hardison’s hand disappears entirely. Parker opens her eyes. It takes some time for her to re-adjust to the dark, but when she does, she sees—and hears, because Eliot makes an annoyed grunt at the disturbance—that he’s getting his hand under Eliot’s top arm. She watches as Hardison’s hand slides its way up from Eliot’s ribs to cup the left side of his chest. Once it’s there, it stops.
Oh. That seems nice. Parker moves one of her own hands to rest over Hardison’s, and she presses down on it a little so that Eliot knows she’s there too. Eliot takes a breath and arches into their touch, and then, in what feels like a blink, he’s completely out. Parker can tell by the way he slouches against her and makes a sound like a sleepy puppy, soft and warm and small. That’s good; she’s glad. Makes her happy when her boys get their rest.
Speaking of which, she turns to look at Hardison again. Even in the dark she can tell that he’s looking down at their boyfriend with an overwhelming amount of affection. She wishes she had a free hand to cup his cheek with, but she doesn’t dare take an arm off Eliot now that he’s down for the count, so she just does her best to set her Eyeball Love Beams to Extra Strong instead. It must work, because Hardison looks up at her.
“He’s good, isn’t he?” he whispers, glancing back down at Eliot for a moment.
Parker looks back down at Eliot too. His lips are pursed from where the side of his face is smushed into her chest, and it’s so adorable that it seems a little unfair.
“Yeah,” she says. “He’s really good.” She returns her gaze to Hardison. “So are you. Thanks for helping me with him. And…” Her chin wobbles as she lets herself remember that afternoon one last time for the night. “I’m really glad you’re okay. I was scared earlier.”
Hardison makes a sympathetic sound and leans in to press their foreheads together. “Hey, give yourself some credit—seems like you already had him most of the way there by the time I showed up. And I know,” he murmurs. “I’m glad you’re okay too.” Then he chuckles and nudges her cheek with his nose. “Hey—we kicked butt, though, didn’t we? I got a couple good punches in, and you’re a menace with that taser. Not saying I want it to happen again, obviously, but we turned out alright. We’re okay.”
That wobble in Parker’s chin disappears. She supposes he’s right—she didn’t do too bad with Eliot. And for the first time that night, she really believes those words: They’re okay. Hardison’s really good at that, at making something feel certain. When he says something encouraging, or when he makes you a promise, you just can’t not trust it. It’s like he uses the words to cast some kind of special spell. See? This is exactly why he’s a perfect fit for wizard college—he’s got magic on the computer and off it.
Carefully, so as not to disturb Eliot, Parker stretches over to kiss Hardison beside his eye. “Yeah,” she says. “We’re okay.”
“Mmmmhm.” After one more press of their foreheads together, Hardison lays back down on his pillow, letting out a contented sigh as he does so. “Get some sleep, mama,” he tells her. “You deserve it.”
Parker lays back down as well. “Yeah. You too, mister.”
“Mmm. Night night, baby.”
“Night night.”
With those last words spoken, the room falls into its final quiet. There’s some mild rustling as Hardison presumably shifts into a more comfortable position; Eliot makes another sleepy puppy sound. Parker, meanwhile, abruptly feels about a thousand pounds heavier. All of a sudden, the weight of the day seems to soak into her every pore, making her feel incapable of doing anything other than closing her eyes. So she does just that: She closes her eyes, and she waits for sleep to claim her.
Well, okay—maybe she can do one more thing: It takes almost all of her strength and attention, but with some effort, she does manage to press both her hand and Hardison’s even closer to Eliot’s chest, really making sure they’ve got him held. Because she realizes now that when she’d slipped her hand beneath his shirt after he’d woken up, she’d been wrong—Eliot’s stomach isn’t the softest bit of him (although his stomach is very soft). This is where he’s softest, right here. This spot right beneath her and Hardison’s hands. Eliot used to try to act like it wasn’t, and Parker used to believe him sometimes right at the very start. But she knows better now. She’s known better for a long time.
Long enough, in fact, that she can’t believe she goofed it up earlier. It was the heat of the moment, she supposes; maybe that can be forgiven. Otherwise there’s not much of an excuse, because there’s really no way of mistaking it. Like, c’mon—how can you look at the way he got tonight and not know that Eliot’s all mushy right at the heart of him? He’s like a burnt marshmallow: On the outside he’s crispy and occasionally on fire (or maybe more than occasionally), but once you crack past that it’s nothing but gooey-sticky sweetness.
Ugh. A s’more sounds really good. Parker sighs; maybe she can convince the boys to take a quick smooch break tomorrow to roast some marshmallows over the stove. In the name of keeping their energy up and all that, obviously.
If she wants to have any of that energy in the first place, though, she supposes she should finally go to sleep. Given the way her body immediately goes even heavier at the thought, that shouldn’t be too hard to achieve. Something tells her she’ll be out as soon as she gives her brain the opportunity to let go.
With the very last dregs of her energy, Parker turns her face to the side so her chin can brush the top of Hardison’s head where it’s inclined on his pillow toward the cloud of Eliot’s hair. Everything’s right with the world: She’s got her boys, they’ve got their warmth, and her lovely sleep will come for her very soon. And they’re okay.
They’re all gonna be okay.