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If Eliot had learned anything from working with the Leverage crew, it was that walking into a room where they were all laughing was never a good thing.
Add a six-year-old to the mix and that was even more the case.
In the months since gaining custody of his niece Rosalia, Eliot had turned into quite the family man. Except when they were in the middle of a job, he always picked her up from school himself, sometimes with one or both of his partners tagging along. Packing lunches was second nature to him now, and he had long ago abandoned cracking open a beer until it was well past his niece’s bedtime.
Parker and Hardison had done some growing up, too. Parker did her fair share of helping Rosie with her homework and had somehow avoided bringing her along to any heists so far. Hardison, at Eliot’s griping, had even started eating real vegetables and fruits to set an example for the little girl. Sure, Eliot mostly hid them in sauces and smoothies, but baby steps.
And Rosie was thriving. She was only verbal maybe half the time, but Parker, Hardison, and Eliot had been meaning to learn sign language anyway, to aid them during jobs, so the four of them had begun taking ASL classes. Rosie took to ASL like a duck to water, and they found that she had a lot to say. If she wasn’t signing or talking, she was using her new iPad to tap out sentences with the help of an AAC app Hardison had custom-built for her. Eliot didn’t understand how it worked, no matter how many times Hardison tried to teach him how to use it, but Rosie’s hands flew over the symbols on the interface, weaving complex sentences and concepts together in ways she’d never spoken with her mouth. Eliot was constantly in awe of her, though he figured the words “grift” and “Steranko” weren’t particularly necessary for a six-year-old to have available, but whatever.
After a few months of calling them Aunt Parker, Uncle Hardison, and Uncle Eliot, she had dropped the “aunt” and “uncle” and started referring to them as “my Hardison,” “my Eliot,” “my Parker,” regardless of whether she signed or typed or spoke about them. Always “my Eliot,” never just “Eliot”.
She had a killer sense of humor, too, and when he opened the front door of the house that Thursday evening and heard her bitten off giggle, accompanied by a snort from Hardison and a hurried shush when he closed the door, he grimaced.
“What’s goin’ on in there? Y’all better not be messin’ with Beate again,” Eliot warned as he toed off his shoes by the door.
He walked cautiously through the short hallway and into Rosie’s playroom and found Parker and Hardison looking entirely too casual--Hardison sat in Rosie’s rocking chair, never mind that it was much too small for him, and read a Mrs. Piggle Wiggle book upside down, and Parker was putting away a handful of blocks in a bin that was supposed to hold plastic food items. Rosie herself stood in the middle of the room, her iPad balanced in one hand and tapping at it with the other, biting her lip to keep from smiling. Eliot raised his eyebrows.
“Oh, you weren’t gettin’ in trouble at all, my mistake,” he said, and turned to leave. “Hardison, how’s that book?” he asked as he left.
“Hmm?” Hardison hummed, looking up like he’d been interrupted. “Oh, it’s--real good, man, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle is just so interesting I got distracted, sorry,” he called as Eliot took a few steps away.
Eliot took five carefully-even steps farther into the house like he was headed for the kitchen, then doubled back and burst into the room. Rosie shrieked and giggled, her eyes flicking to the wall the door was on, which Eliot hadn’t looked at in his cursory examination of the room. Hardison jumped when he rushed back in and dropped the book, then struck a pose that was as far from a casual posture as anything Eliot had ever seen. Parker whirled around, a poorly-hidden smile on her face that was only strained more when she too looked towards the wall.
Only then did Eliot notice the faint but unmistakable smell of permanent markers.
He groaned to himself and moved further into the room and turned to look at the wall. He immediately started laughing. The bookshelf had been shoved aside about a foot to make room for a huge drawing in a dozen colors of Sharpie and three distinct art styles. Markers were scattered on the floor below the drawing alongside a handful of architectural implements--rulers, a scale rule, triangles, even a couple of circle templates in different sizes.
A handful of hyper-realistic human heads--Parker’s handiwork, clearly--marched across the bottom edge of the drawing, with clumsy stick-figure bodies--Rosie. Behind them, with a degree of realism and accuracy that could only be achieved by Hardison with a scale rule in his hand, a princess castle towered over the figures. Puffy clouds and a yellow sun floated above it all, and the castle had been colored in in parts, big blocky patches of scribbles in a handful of colors. Green scribbled-on grass completed the scene, and Rosalia, Parker, Eliot, Hardison, Nate, and Sophie marched triumphantly on stick-figure legs towards the castle.
“It’s beautiful,” Eliot said in between bouts of laughter. Something about seeing Nate’s head perched precariously on a wobbly body smaller than the head itself lodged itself firmly in Eliot’s mind and he couldn’t stop laughing about it even after he looked away.
Rosie smiled and hopped excitedly on her toes. She tapped a couple more times on her tablet. “You can draw too,” the computerized voice said.
Eliot held his hands out to her, still snickering a little, and she carefully put down the iPad before launching herself into his arms. “Yeah? What should I draw? A dragon?” he asked after hauling her up to rest at his hip and smooching her loudly on the cheek, making her giggle.
“Beate ain’t up there yet,” Hardison pointed out, and Eliot made a face.
“I don’t know how to draw dogs, Hardison,” he said.
“Shoot, I don’t know how to draw princess castles, but look at that,” Hardison said, pointing at the drawing like he was thoroughly impressed with himself.
“I’d never drawn any of us,” Parker said with a shrug, sinking to sit on the floor with her legs crossed.
“You drew Nate for their wedding present,” Hardison said.
Parker shook her head. “That was Harlan Leverage the Third, and I was drawing from the original painting, not from Real Nate.”
Eliot nudged Rosalia. “Where’s Beate, anyway?”
Rosie thought for a second, then held up her hands. “SQUIRREL, DOG RUN-AROUND, TIRED, SLEEPY UPSTAIRS,” she signed, leaning back in his arms to peer and point up at the ceiling like she could see through it to point out where Beate had settled for a nap.
“I see,” he said. “Well, what about you, you wanna nap before dinner?”
She shook her head and squirmed until she slid out of his arms. She toe-walked to her tablet and tapped at it, pausing in the middle to think, her hands fluttering slightly above the screen. Eliot waited patiently for her to find the words she wanted to say.
Hardison got his attention while Rosie was typing. “ROSALIA, SCHOOL FRIENDS, PICK-ON TODAY,” he signed. “TEACHER SAID CALL-YOU BEFORE.”
Eliot sighed and nodded. Rosie’s teacher had called him. She’d come in after recess upset and no longer talking. Some prodding had revealed that an on-again-off-again friend of Rosie’s had made fun of her at recess for acting “weird.”
“Can we watch a movie?” Rosie asked through the voice on her iPad.
“Yeah, we can,” Eliot said. “Dinner first, though.”
“What you wanna watch?” Hardison asked. “I can set it up while you make dinner.”
“Oooh, campfire movie,” Parker said, referring to their new tradition of dragging all the cushions off the couches and chairs downstairs, adding all the blankets in the house, and eating dinner with a movie playing and Hardison’s planetarium lamp shining stars on the ceiling.
“Star Wars,” Rosie typed, then looked up at Eliot with pleading eyes.
Hardison grinned proudly. He was continuously elated that he had another nerd in the house.
“Star Wars it is,” Eliot confirmed. “And dinner?”
Rosie frowned, thinking hard. She shrugged after almost a minute.
Eliot held up a hand and ticked off choices on his fingers. “Chili, nachos, spaghetti, burgers, baked potatoes.”
Parker raised one finger high above her head. “Finger foods,” she added. “Fries, chicken nuggets, quesadillas, that kind of thing.”
Eliot amended himself. “Maybe French fry nachos?” he suggested.
Rosie’s eyes widened and she nodded vigorously.
“Sounds good,” Hardison agreed, and Parker nodded in agreement.
“Alright, one vegetable or one fruit, too,” Eliot warned, pointing to each of them in turn.
Hardison made a face. “An orange, if I must.”
“Carrot,” Rosie’s iPad voiced for her.
Parker thought for a moment. “Blueberries.”
Eliot nodded and set off towards the kitchen.
As Eliot cooked he heard Hardison humming as he puttered around, going up and down the stairs a few times and coming back up with a handful of DVDs, which he spilled onto the ground and very nearly cursed, but turned into an impassioned “mother--mother of pearl!” Eliot snorted and listened to him clumsily gather up the cases and then track down Rosie, who was helping Parker gather up blankets and pillows.
“Which Star Wars?” Hardison asked, and a moment later he sounded proud. “Episode four, nice choice.”
Fifteen minutes later, each of them sitting comfortably in the dark on the cushions with a steaming plate of French fry nachos and the vegetable or fruit of their choice, Hardison started the movie.
Rosie sat next to Parker, and in between bites of her dinner she sighed and rearranged herself, leaning into Parker’s side or playing with her hair or leaning heavily onto her back with her arms on either side of Parker’s head as she watched the movie. Eliot kept checking on her out of the corner of his eye, and after a while he felt Hardison’s warm hand rub his arm. He looked at Hardison, who waited until the ambient light from the projection screen was light enough for his hands to be seen by.
“YOU WORRY A-LOT,” Hardison signed, inclining his head towards Rosalia.
“MY JOB,” Eliot signed back, thumping his open hand to his chest a little too hard. Parker looked over and quirked an eyebrow silently. Eliot curled his hands into O’s and shook them back and forth slightly in the sign for “NOTHING.”
Parker shrugged minutely and patted Rosalia’s back. The six-year-old was laying with her head in Parker’s lap and even from here Eliot could see her eyes drifting closed and he sighed a little in relief. A moment later, though, her eyes opened and she stirred. She sat up and blinked at the screen, then looked around and crawled on hands and knees to Eliot. She settled next to him and picked up his hand, her small fingers fluttering over his palm and tapping his fingers.
“Did you eat your carrots, punkin?” he asked, leaning over so he wouldn’t have to speak up to be heard over the movie. She nodded, her eyes still on the screen.
Eliot sighed and settled in. Nothing much he could do for her right now except be there while she fidgeted.
“Green,” Parker said, pointing to a fabric swatch.
Eliot groaned and pulled the fabric swatch out of the pile. He set it next to the other items on the table.
“So our choices are:” he said, pointing to each pile as he listed them off, “navy and white, with tan accents, at the lighthouse venue; black and white, with red accents, at the piano lounge place; yellow and grey, at the fuckin… barn place; lavender and sage, at the gazebo thing; or… green.”
Parker nodded. “I like green the best.”
Hardison snickered. Eliot put his head in his hands.
“We can’t theme a wedding off just ‘green,’ Park,” Eliot said, his voice coming out strained. Every single time they’d tried to sit down and figure out their wedding it was the same thing. One of them always came up with some ridiculous idea--video game consoles at the reception, a ceremony in six languages, “green,” the ceremony at a venue they were actually robbing simultaneously--and Eliot, usually, had to be the voice of reason, had to put his foot down and say, “no, we’re not lifting a Mondrian just before getting into the ‘just married’ car.”
“You can plan a wedding off anything, El,” Hardison said. He picked up a small magazine clipping. “See? Here, cotton candy. Pinks, blues, carnival theme, photo booths. Boom,” he said, dropping the cutout and ‘exploding’ his hands out.
Eliot winced. “No carnivals,” he said, feeling his head ache faintly where he’d been smacked in the face by a carnival ride a couple years prior.
“I’m just sayin’,” Hardison said with a shrug. He hummed in thought, and his hands fluttered over the scattered cutouts and fabric swatches. “Maybe…”
Eliot and Parker watched him as he muttered to himself, comparing various items and replacing one or the other, until about two minutes later he fanned out two fabric swatches, three magazine cutouts, and a photo.
“Here. Emerald green,” he said, nodding at Parker, “with gold accents--khaki tuxes for us, El, or maybe just pants and vests. Emerald invitations with gold-embossed accents and lettering. Gold table settings, emerald centerpieces and all that at the reception, and…” He slid the photo across the workstation towards them. “Ivy-covered cottage backyard venue.”
Eliot blinked. “Holy shit,” he said, genuinely impressed.
Hardison grinned triumphantly and leaned back in his chair, folding his hands behind his head. “You never listen when I have stylistic ideas,” he said. “I could be a wedding planner real hard.”
Parker pursed her lips and pulled the various components towards her. Eliot watched, sure she would reject it outright and they’d be back at square one. He’d commit to emerald and gold in a heartbeat if it would help him shoot down his partners’ more… eccentric wedding ideas.
“I don’t like the centerpieces,” she said, putting everything down and shoving it back towards Hardison.
“Just an inspiration, babe,” Hardison said. “We can do whatever you want with the centerpieces.”
Parker got a worrying glint in her eyes, and Eliot shot a warning glance at Hardison.
“So, green and gold?” Eliot asked hurriedly, before Parker could voice her surely highly-illegal idea for decorating the dinner tables.
Parker hummed. “Green and gold,” she confirmed.
Eliot sighed in relief and got up. He crossed to the whiteboard hanging on the wall and crossed off “theme” and “colors” from their checklist.
“Alright, officiant,” he said, reading the next item on the list.
“Ooh, ooh,” Parker said, tapping the table excitedly. “Sophie knows Richard Belzer.”
Eliot groaned and thunked his head onto the whiteboard.
The guest list was fairly short.
They didn’t really have enough friends and family they trusted to have a wedding party and a decent-sized audience, so they did away with all but the flower girl and matron of honor, and forewent best men, groomsmen, and bridesmaids.
The audience consisted of: Hardison’s Nana; the four foster kids currently living with her; Seth and Laurel June, Eliot’s surviving siblings; Seth’s boyfriend Carson; Laurel June’s four-month-old son Alexander; Lina Heller, Laurel June’s boss and an old friend of Eliot’s; Maggie, with Sterling grudgingly admitted as her plus-one; Cody, Eliot’s protege and Rosalia’s occasional babysitter; Lieutenant Bonanno; and Tara. Hurley had been invited with lots of grumbling, and the Italian showed up without an invitation five minutes before the ceremony started.
Nate officiated, with wedding documents of dubious legality, wearing a suit that matched Eliot and Hardison’s in place of clerical garb. Religion had no place in this ceremony. Only Sophie joined them at the “altar” (really an antique rosewood table on which sat an arrangement of candles in their color scheme) as their joint matron of honor. She cried the entire time.
Rosie, wearing an emerald dress that matched Parker’s, but in a more conservative cut, strewed gold, feathery white, and emerald green fake flower petals on the short aisle laid with a white cloth. She only made it halfway down the aisle before she got self-conscious with so many eyes on her and dropped the basket, running into Eliot’s arms and hiding her face in his neck for the remainder of the ceremony. It wasn’t how they planned to do this, but they realized that it was perfect; the four of them were already a family. It only made sense that Rosie was here for this part.
The ceremony was relatively brief and had been scrubbed of all romantic undertones, replaced by statements of platonic and familial commitment. They wrote their own vows.
“Growing up, this wasn’t the life I imagined for myself,” Hardison read, chuckling through the tears he’d been holding back this whole time. “I pictured falling in love, getting married, and maybe having some kids, in that order. I skipped a step and did it all backwards, but I’m so happy right now I can’t even care. Normal is what works for you, and this, this right here--” he gestured to the loose circle they stood in at the head of the aisle and his voice broke, “--this works for me. I love you both, and Rosie, so much and I promise to show you again every day. I promise to be there for you when you need a shoulder to cry on or a virus wiped from your computer,” he joked, but his voice was so thick with tears he didn’t even chuckle at it himself. “Forever and ever,” he promised, folding up his piece of paper and sticking it back in his pocket, pulling out a handkerchief and rubbing at his eyes with it. Eliot reached over with his free hand and squeezed his upper arm soothingly, his own eyes a little misty.
Parker took a deep breath when Sophie handed her a piece of paper. “I’m not really into romance… at all,” she read, her voice a little wobbly but otherwise mostly flat. “I don’t like all this schmoopy stuff. But I do like you two. So, um,” she faltered, shifting a little on her feet and looking unsure of herself, “if you’re willing to put up with me, even if I never fall in love with you or anyone else, then I’m all in. Marriage, parenting, all of it. For as long as you’ll have me,” she finished, looking incredibly insecure as she gave the paper back to Sophie. Hardison smiled warmly at her.
It was Eliot’s turn. He shifted Rosie in his arms and pulled his own vows from his pocket. He cleared his throat and started to read.
“I’m not really good at talking about my feelings,” he said, and Hardison snorted. Eliot shot a glare at him and continued. “I didn’t have any for a long time. They started coming back when I learned to cook, but they only really got strong again when I joined this crew.” His hands were shaking, and he swallowed with difficulty before continuing. “We been through a lot together. We’ve taken down huge corporations and dictators, saved people, stopped terrorist attacks, gotten shot--” Nate laughed at this, “--busted Nate out of jail, opened a pub… And even though sometimes I think y’all’re gonna be the death of me, I know you have saved me. I don’t know who I would’ve been by now if it weren’t for you two. A-and I know I don’t say it much… I don’t know if I’ve ever said it in as many words, but… I love you.” Parker gasped softly and tears welled in her eyes, and Hardison bit his lip, dabbing at his own eyes with his hanky. Rosie, looking concerned, wiped at Eliot’s eyes for him and he paused to kiss her cheek in thanks. “An’ I promise to take care of you and keep you safe. ‘Til my dyin’ day.”
There was a moment of silence at the altar as Nate and Sophie both wiped at their eyes. Hardison cleared his throat and rubbed at the back of his head.
“Damn,” he whispered. Eliot laughed shakily, his nose running and eyes still watering a little.
Nate gestured to Sophie, who passed each of their rings to the person to their left. Parker slid a ring onto Eliot’s finger, Eliot (with difficulty; Rosie still clung to him) slid the ring onto Hardison’s finger, and Hardison onto Parker’s.
Nate cleared his throat. “And now, by the power vested in me by the Catholic Church--” he paused to laugh and their audience did, too, “--and the State of Oregon, I now pronounce you… husbands and wife. You may now… I don’t know, do whatever the hell you want.” He shrugged and they all laughed again while he stepped away from the altar with Sophie.
Eliot, grinning widely, stepped forward to meet Parker and Hardison and hugged them as best as he could, Rosie squished between the three of them and all of them laughing. Hardison kissed Parker’s cheek loudly, and then Eliot’s, prompting griping from both of them.
“I love you,” Hardison said.
Parker narrowed her eyes and punched Eliot in the arm suddenly. “You made me cry,” she said, sounding betrayed.
He grinned. “Sorry, darlin’.”
“Don’t do it again,” she warned.
He stuck out his free hand and she shook it. “I won’t,” he promised.
They didn’t have a honeymoon in any traditional sense. They took Rosalia to Disney World for a week and bought anything she (or each other) wanted. They left with two entire suitcases more than they’d arrived with, full of princess tiaras (none of those cheap plastic versions; they’d gone to the high-end souvenir shops and gotten her the real ones), costumes, stuffed animals, mugs, action figures, art, you name it.
They traveled under aliases, of course, but this time with Rosie trying out one of her own shiny new aliases, Rose Porter. They booked their hotel, a spacious suite with a full kitchen and a balcony overlooking the resort’s giraffe enclosure, under a different set of names, just to make sure their work wouldn’t follow them on vacation.
They couldn’t much stop themselves from working, though.
They didn’t run any actual jobs, just little tweaks. A tip to security about a parent seen discreetly abusing their kid. Comped spa services and a concierge telling a single parent with four kids about the resort’s daycare facilities. Would-be pickpockets suddenly finding themselves under a menacing glare as they went to lift an old woman’s purse. Free VIP park and attraction tickets to a young girl with Down Syndrome and her best friend on her birthday. Quietly defending a kid infodumping about Star Wars to an indifferent parent, with a little wink and a Leia pin taken off Hardison’s lanyard and passed to the kid.
Just little tweaks to the system, to make everything just a little more fair. And then Parker got antsy.
She somehow lifted one of the glass slippers from the exclusive suite inside the Cinderella Castle. One minute they were in line for “It’s A Small World” (Rosie loved it and went again and again; her guardians weren’t as enthusiastic) and the next Parker was missing and didn’t turn back up until they were back in line two rides later. They weren’t worried; the four of them, Rosie included, wore comms just in case they got separated, and they could hear Parker humming to herself.
She returned, breathless and visibly excited, and Eliot and Hardison immediately recognized it as the expression she wore after she stole something particularly interesting. Eliot just raised his eyebrows at her until she gave in and let them peek inside her bag. There it was, carefully wrapped in a plush hand towel. Rosie nearly shrieked in excitement, but Hardison dropped to his knees and whispered in her ear and she locked her lips with a pretend key. Parker held her hand out, cupped, and Rosie deposited the invisible key into it. Parker tucked the key into her pocket with a wink, and Rosie giggled at their little game. They did versions of it all the time, and it never failed to make Eliot smile.
“It’s not real glass or crystal,” Parker said with a little hint of disappointment in her voice. “It’s some kind of polycarbonate.”
“How’re you planning on getting that out of here?” Eliot asked, leaning in close.
Parker shrugged. “I thought maybe the Port of Catoosa?”
Hardison shook his head. “We don’t have anything to make a convincing rope burn.”
Parker hummed. “Guess we could always do an Alvarado Score.”
“You want to fake acute appendicitis?” Eliot asked, then dropped his voice. “What do you think you’re doin’, liftin’ something here without an exit strategy?”
Parker ignored his second question. “Would be more convincing if it weren’t a grownup.”
Eliot squinted at her until what she was suggesting caught up with him and he shook his head hard. “Not happenin’.”
“Hey, how you feel about playin’ pretend?” Hardison asked Rosie, who turned thoughtful.
A commotion arose across the way, cast members and security guards converging on the Cinderella Castle, and Eliot put his foot down once more. “No!”
And that was how they ended up escaping Disney World with a priceless cultural artifact in the back of an ambulance with a screaming six-year-old.
After their escape from Disney World and Eliot’s subsequent rant at his partners about using their kid as a thief before she could tie her shoes, Rosie’s life became mundane once again. She went to school, had playdates with her friends, read book after book, and took ASL classes. After one day seeing Eliot take down a drunk and disorderly sailor on leave outside the brew pub (giving Eliot a heart attack with her mere observation of the violence) she badgered him, Parker, and Hardison into karate lessons.
They finally gave in after two weeks of her coming home from school every day, throwing down her backpack, and running around the house jumping off furniture and karate chopping them when they least suspected it. It was another two weeks of intense research and vetting before a suitable dojo was found, and she returned from her first lesson grinning ear to ear.
Rosie started first grade that fall, and her new teacher sent her home at the end of the first week with a note asking Eliot, Parker, and Hardison to come in for a conference. Concerned, they showed up the following Monday after school, thinking Rosie’s classmates, most of whom had been in other classes the previous year, were picking on her. They were surprised, then, when Mr. Bennet recommended Rosie be put ahead a year. There were assessments to be taken, of course, and she would be younger than her new classmates, but, “think it over.”
They discussed it with Rosalia, who was already friends with some of the second graders, and couldn’t find any reason not to let her skip the first grade, so by the end of the second week of school she was enrolled in the second grade.
Later that year, about a month before the one year anniversary of Eliot gaining custody of Rosalia, they called her into the den down in the basement.
She came in cautiously; she’d only been in trouble a handful of times since coming to live with them, and never for any big reasons, but the abuse she endured in her first five years still haunted her.
Parker smiled encouragingly at her as she came down the stairs and motioned her over, then pulled her into her lap. Hardison was working on something on his computer, but when Eliot cleared his throat he wrapped it up and joined them on the couch.
“Rosie, how long you been livin’ with us, do you know?” Eliot asked.
“11 months,” Rosie whispered, still looking nervous.
Eliot smiled a little at her. “That’s right. An’ we love you very much,” he said, and when Rosie looked at the others, they nodded with warm smiles on their faces in agreement. Hardison held out a hand to Eliot, who took it and squeezed lightly.
Eliot took a deep breath. “We wanted to ask you... how you felt about us adoptin’ you.”
Rosie’s eyes went wide.
“We’d be your parents,” Hardison explained. “If you wanted us to be.”
Rosie started flapping her hands, and Eliot couldn’t tell if it was her happy flapping or nervous flapping. He worried at his lip with his teeth. “You don’t hafta say yes, punkin, it’s up to you.”
“No,” Rosie said, shaking her head, and Eliot’s heart fell. He looked at Parker, who looked crushed. “I want to.”
Eliot blinked and a slow smile spread across his face.
“You want us to adopt you?” Parker clarified, looking reserved until Rosie nodded, and then she squeezed her tight in a hug, prompting Rosie to shriek with laughter.
Hardison laughed and joined the hug, nearly bouncing in his happiness, and Eliot grinned. He couldn’t help the couple of tiny flaps of his hands as he watched his family. After a moment, he remembered the first time he’d seen her, almost exactly a year ago, cowering under the kitchen table at his father’s house the night before her father’s funeral. She’d come so far since then. And so had they.
The laughter died down and Hardison swept Rosie’s hair out of her eyes with gentle fingers.
“Now, you got some options,” Hardison said, ticking off the choices on his fingers. “You can take Eliot’s last name, and be Rosalia Spencer. You can take my last name, and be Rosalia Hardison.” He puffed out his chest a little, and Rosie smiled. “You can take Parker’s… uhh… name, and be Rosalia Parker. Or you can keep your last name and still be Rosalia Baker.”
Parker hummed. “Or you can pick all new names and be called whatever you want.”
Hardison nodded. “Or that, you can do that.”
Rosie shrugged.
“You don’t hafta tell us today,” Eliot said. “You can think about it.”
She nodded.
“Okay, we have one more piece of business,” Hardison said seriously, and Rosie looked at him, puzzled. “What… are we going to be for Halloween?”
Rosie giggled and Hardison went to his computer. The big screen on the wall came to life and he had prepared a slideshow of ideas.
“Now, see, we could do a group costume, like Neil Patrick Harris and his family. We could do some kinda Disney thing, or, see, a Star Wars thing. Personally, I like whoever suggested Star Wars.”
Eliot rolled his eyes and snorted. Parker leaned back into the couch.
“What else we got…? Alright, here we go. This one’s for Parker, we could be candy bars. And, hmm, yep. Lego people. That’d be fun. You think we could get Nate and Sophie to join in? ‘Cuz I saw a kickin’ Wizard of Oz one.”
Parker sat up and turned around quickly, her eyes shining. “The Incredibles.”
Hardison grinned. “There you go! Yeah, girl, that’s a good one.”
Rosie giggled, and Eliot put his arm around Parker. Rosie climbed into his lap and grinned at him, and he grinned back.
“Alright, so now for Disney options,” Hardison said, flicking the slide. “We got a lot of ‘em, so keep an open mind.”
Rosie settled in, running her fingers over the braided leather bracelets on Eliot’s wrist, and Eliot let his head fall backwards on the couch. He grinned up at the ceiling and let himself make a wish.